Month: September 2005

well, the media continues to try to work everyone up into a frenzy. *sigh* it’s now supposed to be a cat 3, and the eye should hit near the texas/louisiana border. winds in houston shouldn’t be over 65mph or so. i am going to be leaving my house and heading to either the hotel or the data center. i’m undecided at this point. should be a pleasant drive down a mostly open 59n. i kind of wanted to stay at my house just in case some windows broke or something so i could move stuff, but i guess i’ll just come back later and see if anything happened.

dave and i left the house so i could check in to the hotel (for work). the hotel was full and most hotel services were unavailable. lemaster (co-worker) showed up at the same time. we all decided to go searching for a place to eat. we drove around for about an hour…no success. although the roads were very light on traffic so getting around was very easy. the only things we found open: jingi (sp?), berryhill (no food left…just the bar, i guess), brasil (coffee house), baskin-robbins (?!), and a few convenience stores (all with no gas). closed: katz’s (“never closes”), two house of pies, chaco’s, ihops, chuy’s, all grocery stores, etc. it’s crazy that everything is already closed. this is going to make for a long weekend. oh well. i ended up coming back to the house and leaving dave at the hotel.
i didn’t see any traffic backed up on or connected to 59s (610, beltway 8), but people are still evacuating and stuff’s all backed up. i just heard on the tv that someone’s grandmother died in their car on i-10 because the emergency personnel couldn’t get to them or do anything. lots of people are stranded in cars without gas, and there is no gas in waller county, which most of the main evacuation routes go through.
it’s still my opinion that we have created a culture of fear in our country, and this is a good example of an outcropping of it. people are still streaming out of all parts of houston, even areas where they really shouldn’t have to, even if a cat 5 was in fact going to hit houston straight on (which it doesn’t appear it is…but the media seems to try as hard as it can to keep everyone amped up and scared about how horrible things might be).

dave finally showed up. turns out he’d been by earlier and figured i was at work so he didn’t ring the doorbell.
we went out around noon to find a place to eat. most gas stations were out of gas and many were closed, plus most places to eat were closed and the few that were open almost all had really long lines. we saw 59s south of beltway8 was backed up…and it isn’t even supposed to be an evacuation route. we ended up eating at a sandwich king, which was good and had a very short line, but they were low on food and actually closed before we left. they had a tv on, and it was showing how bad 59s was backed up. obviously the true evacuation routes are insanely backed up. jack and sue called from i-10 to say they’d jumped to the east-bound lanes after they saw a gas truck going west down it, and evidently a lot of people started jumping over to it. they’ve opened up all lanes on 45 and i10 to outbound traffic. i just heard on the tv they’ve decided they aren’t going to do that with 290. so the folk on 290 are just screwed i guess. lots of people are running out of gas, cars overheating or breaking down, etc. people seem to be handling things pretty well so far, but i think the culture of fear and paranoia that the media creates isn’t really helping the situation much.
i’ll probably be going in to work at some point this evening. i’m not sure yet if i’ll stay at the hotel or if i’ll come back to my house.
dave is currently on my couch snoring…

well, the radio show was last night. afterward, i met a few folk at a bw3 in midtown. they had already put plywood up and were closing at 10:45pm. came back to sw houston, no backed-up traffic on 59 where i was. i could see bw8 north was backed up at 59. around 2am dave from the radio show called me and said he’d broken down at 610 and i-10, and wanted to know if he could stay with me. i said that’d be cool, but he needed to get towed, then catch a cab. he called around 7:30am saying he’d gotten a cab, but i’ve still not seen him. i stayed up until around 5am trying to clean the place up some, but still no hurricane planning. the direction of rita has continued to shift toward the east, and evidently they now think it’s going to be a cat 3 when it hits. the roads appear to be totally insane. jack and sue called from richmond around 8:30am. they’d been “evacuating” for about 5 hours. i got out of bed around 10am, and i called them at 10:30am and they were still in richmond. i used google maps to help them take some backroads toward i-10 since all i-10 lanes are going to be made westbound.

the company i work for is closing at 5pm today and won’t officially reopen until 7am monday. i am designated essential personnel and have agreed to be available throughout the events, assuming i don’t leave to go toward the coast so i can experience a hurricane in its full glory. so i’ll be in or around houston or the gulf coast region the whole time.
i have not made any storm preparations — no extra food, water, plywood, nothing. the only thing i’m planning on doing is making sure the gas tanks on my car and motorcycle are full. plus i have to go do the radio show tonight.

so does anyone else want to go down to the coast with me to properly welcome hurricane rita to Texas? the projected path right now has its eye hitting matagorda bay…pretty much right where indianola used to be. (look up the history of indianola.) c’mon, you know you want to go with me!

ah, the happy-go-lucky fun friday post…
earlier, i said i would put up a copy of the drawing/note i left (i.e., hid) in one of the xmas ornament boxes tamara came by and picked up. here it is:
View image
it might require a bit of explaining. you see, a few years ago i told tamara i’d been thinking about what i would do if i were in a car wreck and was dying…i’d want to make some kind of final statement. but being broken and dying, the only ability i’d have to write would be by using my own blood as ink. so, after thinking about it, i had decided what i’d write is that i loved her. a final note to let her know. she said it was one of the most romantic things anyone had ever said to her. (we sort of had an angelina jolie / billy bob thornton thing going on in some ways.) so that was my inspiration for this image. the text was somewhat spur of the moment, although i’ve thought for months about what kind of final statement(s) i’d like to make to tamara (given that this might as well be the equivalent of one of us dying). sometimes it was angry, sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful…but what’s on that paper is what came out in the end.
so whether or not she appreciates it, or even sees it, it is now on public display for anyone who may stumble across it.

as enjoyable as it is to always put sad, negative, and/or depressing things on here that prove to friends, family, and potential future dates that i’m not nearly mentally stable enough, i’ve decided to buck the trend and post something that i think is really nifty.
it’s the retro phone handset courtesy of thinkgeek.
i really like old phones, and i think it’d be hilarious to walk around using one of these. especially with hands free so the cord is just dangling loose. and you thought the people with the wireless earpieces got looks like they were crazy? of course, back in the day i actually took an old handset and walked around on campus at a&m like i was talking to someone on it… okay, i’m not sure this is helping prove my mental stability. i guess maybe i’ll just go back to the standard material…

remember that time i said i was perusing match.com and ran across a photo in someone’s profile where it looked like tamara was taking their picture in the mirror? well, i’ve gotten a negatory on it being tamara from several people. anyway, i include it here for informational purposes:
View image
i still think it looks a lot like tamara. or maybe what tamara looks like in my mind. i wonder who this person is?
and now re-use of material from an as-of-yet unsent email:
to be honest, i’m still in a fragile place as far as my life goes. sometimes i feel like i’m moving on, sometimes i feel like my life is going nowhere and i don’t know how i can move on. much of my sense of self was tied to my role of being married, of being and having a companion, and that void is difficult for me to deal with at times. the most important role of my life is gone and i’ve got nothing good to show for it, just memories and things to be sold or thrown away. and the great unknown of a future that may lead me absolutely nowhere. i try to hope for a better future, but sometimes i just get overwhelmed by the loss i’ve experienced, by my failings, by life. i want to move on, but sometimes i’m so fixated on my loss, my failure, i can’t see past it. i hope for a better future. i pray for happiness. i’m just not sure how or where it will come. i’m seeking focus, purpose, meaning, but it seems to be something transient, vaporous, that eludes my grasp even as i think i have taken hold of it, even in that very moment.
it seems like i need to find peace with myself before trying to find solace in others, but at the same time me focusing on myself is most likely not the best way to get past the stuff i am dealing with.

i’m not sure what’s gotten me on this kick the last couple of days, but i’ve been really getting internally annoyed thinking about the prosperity, “name it, claim it”, health and wealth strand of xianity. i keep wanting to grab a white tshirt and write something on it along the lines of “jesus christ did not die on the cross so you could get lots of cash”. i mean, i’m not going to claim that i’ve got a lock on xian theology by any stretch of the imagination, and there are plenty of areas where i think my actions fail to meet the things i think jesus taught (i do try to never be a hypocrite though). but how in the world can people come away from the new testament, from the actions of jesus toward the rich and the religiously pious of his day, with the idea that jesus wanted his followers to be wealthy and get anything they have the faith to ask for? how did that health and wealth thing work out for the apostles and the first century xians? it boggles my mind.
in other news, i bought a number of xian/religious books at a couple of half-price books stores this weekend. i was originally looking for some of the new books that have been coming out the last few years about/by gen-x’ers and the general dislike of organized religion, xianity in postmodernism, that sort of thing. i only found a couple, but i wound up buying a bunch of other stuff from the “religion” section. i’ll list ’em all in the extended entry.
i also bought some dvds this weekend. i think i’m going to make a page of all the dvds i own, which isn’t all that many. at least not compared to a number of my friends, or my collection of cds (which i’ve been collecting since 1990 or so). i’ll put that together some other time. then everyone can see what incredible taste in movies i have. 😉

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