This week in history

It seems like there are a lot of milestones this week:

Today is the 3^rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Oh and by the way, Bush administration, you know people are still trying to recover down there. It looks like they have to rely on celebrities and television shows at this point. At least there are a few people still trying to help out with the recovery. And hey, Gustav, how about you just leave them alone?

August 26 was the 88^th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. When you say something happened "a lifetime ago" it's usually to convey that something is really far in the past, but 88 years is literally a lifetime for some people and it seems crazy that women have only had the right to vote for that long. Thanks, suffragettes.

August 28 was the 45^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream Speech, and Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination on that day. Quite fitting...

Today is Michael Jackson's 50^th birthday. The man is 50 years old, people. How is that possible? Incidentally, Madonna, Prince, and Ice-T all also turn 50 this year.

It's also John McCain's 72^nd birthday (making him 2 years older than Reagan was when he became the oldest president) He decided to celebrate by selecting this nightmare as his running mate. I can't even discuss this right now...

Vote Obama people. I can not stress this point strongly enough.

Come on, these are all crowd pleasers...

So yesterday, for no apparent reason, I purchased the following items on iTunes:

It's Tricky-Run DMC
Check the Rhime-A Tribe Called Quest
The Weight-The Band
Carry On Wayward Son-Kansas
Don't Fear the Reaper-Blue Oyster Cult
East Bound and Down-Jerry Reed
The Gambler-Kenny Rodgers
Red Right Hand-Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Bizarre Love Triangle-New Order
Technique-New Order (whole album)
Nevermind-Nirvana (whole album)

And I added a bunch of tracks from my CD's that I've been meaing to get to since my library ate them including: Operation Ivy, Life's Rich Pageant-REM, She's So Unusual-Cyndi Lauper, and some local stuff from those sweet boys from Gruel.

Random, I know, but generally quite catchy.

What did I ever do to you, Mother Nature?

Ok, so I mentioned that Mother Nature got a little het up about something a while back and decided to smite my house with lightning. But, I picked up the pieces, replaced the electronics, and I thought she was over it. I thought we had all healed from the horrible lightning incident and I planned to resume with the blog now that my computer had recovered and I was back from vacation. Then that bitch Fay showed up and derailed the plan a bit.

If you don't reside in Florida or parts of Alabama, you might not be aware of the absolute madness that has been occurring due to Tropical Storm Fay and her copious amounts of rain. Basically, it started seriously raining in Tallahassee at about lunchtime on Friday, and it didn't stop at all until Saturday night. It rained really hard for well over 24 hours...and it just didn't stop. The storm was huge and it was only moving like 3 miles an hour, so it basically sat on top of us dumping endless amounts of rain. In Tallahassee, it rained something like 20 inches over the weekend. Oh, God, the rain. And, it's still coming. It poured Sunday morning, and afternoon. It let up slightly, then alternated between light to no rain to random heavy downpours. Big thunderstorm on Monday afternoon and evening, and another one this evening.

So, the point of that story this: the reason I haven't updated the blog is that there was approximately 3 and 1/2 feet of water under my house. First off, the backyard looks like a lake. Here's basically what the yard looked like last Friday:

And by Saturday afternoon we had something more like this:

So, with the ground that saturated and the rain still pouring down, the water had nowhere to go but up under my house. The house is up off the ground a few feet and there is an access panel in my hallway that you can lift off to get to the air conditioning ducts and what not that are under there. Here is a photo of my father sitting in the hole:

The part under the access panel is the lowest ground under the house, and so that is where all the water accumulated. That is standing water under his feet. As you can see from the photo, the water level is about a foot under his feet. To let you know how deep the water was, when I stand in that hole, only my head is above floor level. It's about a four and 1/2 foot deep hole there. Lot's of water

Anyway, over the weekend there was scrambling about and trying to locate a sump pump, running hoses through the living room and kitchen, having no air-conditioning for 2 days in FL in August (it was not damaged by the water, thankfully, and worked fine once we made sure it was dried out) and generally being both freaked out and deeply annoyed.

Anyway, all is well now. It rained again today, and water is still running under the house, but my newly purchased sump pump is moving it right back out. (By the way, a sump pump is not something I ever envisioned needing to own in my life. Mine looks kind of like this.) And the lake in the backyard has mostly receded. I hope that Mother Nature and I have achieved Détente. The only problem is a fellow named Gustav...

Howdy, strangers

So, I’ve wandered away from the blog again. But, this time I have an excuse other than my short attention span and natural tendency toward procrastination. During the horrible lightning incident, my cable modem got destroyed. Also, my hard drive died. This could have been a result of the horrible lightning incident or it could have just been coincidentally bad timing (the computer was having issues already). At any rate, the accursed machine was off getting fixed for TWO WEEKS (don’t even get me started on why that took so long, I am totally getting a mac very soon). Then, the morning after I got the computer back, I went on vacation for a week and then I had to go out of town for work. After that (which brings us to this past weekend) I was in fact a lazy procrastinator with no excuse. But, now I have returned and will add some relevant data soon. Hooray!

Hey, I'm back

But more on that later...