Getting Loose

Ike Strike--13

The electricity came back on about 4 p.m. today. I was shocked when I came home and saw a light burning. I couldn’t believe it. But I was thrilled.

My wife has gone to Kansas City to be with our granddaughter, so I am batching it.

We came through the hurricane fairly OK. No damage to any of our houses. Two trees fell which each damaged a fence: but that was it. We are so fortunate.

After the electricity went out, the hurricane winds blew with incredible gusts that night. The next morning when everything pretty much calmed down and people began going out to see what was what, it was so hot and humid. The next night it was hard to sleep it was so hot and humid. We had no electricity, no water, no land phone, cell phone wasn’t working. It was like being on a camp out in some primitive location.

We had filled two bathtubs full of water and the drain did not hold on one of them, and the water was gone the next morning. (Note to self—next time use the rubber plugs in the drain and do not rely on the mechanical, built in stoppers).

At 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, God provided a rain for us, and we went out in the back yard and took a shower. It was strange feeling so cold, when we had been so hot and humid. But I was so thankful: even shampooed my hair.

For those who cared to show up, we had two services of worship on Sunday morning. Yes it was very humid and warm, and there was no electricity. But we had the sanctuary all decked out in candles. The atmosphere was charming and magical. We went through an abbreviated service for the liturgical people at 9. And a brief service for the non-traditional people at 11. By Sunday at noon, the water came back on magically, for which I was very thankful. You can’t imagine how important water is until you don’t have it. I will never take that for granted again.

And then on Sunday evening, the Lord provided a cooler than usual, and a sooner than usual, cool front that dramatically dropped the temperature and the humidity. It has been and is wonderful. Like being up north in Iowa. Livable. Like camping out. I don’t know how many times I thanked God for water and the cool weather. It has been amazing.

And now I have land phone and electricity. Wow. Am I blessed or what?

This whole experience has allowed neighbors to get to know each other. We’ve all come through a common attack upon our lives and property. It was far better than some neighbor night out.

The church still has no electricity or phone. We are hamstrung there, but hopefully that will get resolved.

Ike Strike--5

Coming in all sweaty from the track, I was mesmerized by the images coming out of Galveston. I am familiar with the Seawall Boulevard Drive. The helicopter flying overhead from KHOU showed that there was no longer any beach left by the seawall.

72 Hours

It was initially my fault, I admit it.

In transferring power from one house account to another, I had to pick a termination date.

Rather than deal with a real, live human being, I attempted to do it on-line. After all, that’s more efficient for the company, right? That’s where the world is going, isn’t it? Let’s give old fashioned service a swift kick in the posterior.

I picked the date to turn off power at the house where we are living to be the last possible date that the Internet program would allow. Trouble is, we were still living in the house. And August 1^st rolled around, and out came the Center Point Energy truck (I thought to read the gas meter) and the dude cut off the electricity. (Yeah, as their mission statement says, "Center Point Energy is always there" IF it happens to be on a Monday through Friday).

At first I could not fathom what had happened. It was about 5 in the afternoon, and I knew it seemed quiet, but I did not know what had happened. I turned to look at a clock, and the LED face was blank. I looked at another LED clock, the face was blank. It dawned on me what had happened. It was August 1^st and I had neglected to tell them to keep the power on.

I called Center Point Energy and explained. They are the people who take care of the lines and the hookups and the terminations.

Well they sure were sorry to hear my story but there was nothing they could do or were gonna do till they heard from my service provider un Reliant Energy.  (Look at their ethics statement--committed to doing the right thing--what a scream!)

So I call them up and after several attempts finally got to a resolution team member that had about as much empathy as a stone wall. I explained my plight, food in the freezer, triple digit heat, no fans. Well, . . . I might as well have talked to my dog. Their attitude was loud and clear: "NOT THEIR PROBLEM!" NEXT?

I was shocked. I said, "I have overpaid my account for several months. I have a surplus in my account!"

NOT OUR PROBLEM!

I was incredulous.

They said we don’t work on the weekends. And the implication was, just be glad Monday wasn’t a holiday to boot. They were going to do nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. The null set. What part of NO did I not understand? NOT . . . THEIR . . . PROBLEM!

On top of that, they were going to start charging more than 3¢/kilowatt hour higher once the service got restored and charge me $42 because I wanted it cut back on expeditiously.

I screamed, "But I was your customer just a half hour ago, and on my account is the house to which the service is being transferred to!"

NOT THEIR PROBLEM . . . NEXT?

I swear the people they put on the front lines to interface with the customers have ice in their veins. I could have walked into their office and keeled over dead, and they would have ignored me and taken the next call from the next idiot who just doesn’t seem to understand the rules by which the power companies play.

I can’t help but wonder if this is all the result of deregulation.

I said, "What if my house was burning down? Would you send out a crew to cut the lines?"

Maybe . . . maybe not. NOT THEIR PROBLEM. Just what part of NO did I not get? They were not going to lift a finger to help me. They were not even going to lift a little finger to help me. They had no sympathy for my plight. They would just as soon I interface with an automated call system which would have sent me around in endless loops. Really, I think a machine might have had more compassion for my plight than what I received from either Center Point Energy or un Reliant Energy. They never heard of 24/7 with respect to helping out the customer in his or her hour of need. Theirs is a 40 hour work week, unless of course, there is a major hazard to life. But a Joe Simpleton like me? Pfffffft. They can afford to blow me off. I don’t matter. I’m a nothing. A nobody. If I get mad, there are other power companies out there; go cry on THEIR shoulders. We’ll never miss your business!

And they are right. I used to think that Reliant Energy cared. I used to know some great people who worked for them. But it is a very different, cold world where the bottom line is not service, but the almighty dollar.

Cutting on the Power

We are in the process of moving.  Now it is not going to be a "clean" move in the sense that we have a moving date and are going to leave one location permanently and get to the other location at a specific point of time.  No, it is going to be much messier than that.  We are probably going to do this over a matter of months.  Our goal is to get finally to the new location by November or earlier.

But one of the difficult things is trying to get utilities transferred over to begin at the new location.  I had written the utility company asking for a particular date, and they agreed, but here it is a week later and there still is no juice at the new location. 

It has taken 3 separate phone calls, and hopefully on the last phone call, I got it worked out, but to get to the right person who could make it happen, I had to talk to four different people.  What made it so frustrating was that at one point in one of the earlier phone calls, we got cut off and I had nowhere to go but to start back at ground zero.

We'll see how it goes . . .

L.A. Cont.

Another thing we got to see in L.A. was Beverly Hills. I thought the homes would be bigger and more spaced apart, but I was wrong. 

Also got to see the front of the house where they filmed the front exterior to the old Brady Bunch TV series.

We got to see the Grauman Chinese Theater and went to see Redbelt in a genuine THX theater. Unfortunately, Houston has none that I know of. The sound in a THX theater is incredible, and most other chains, looking at the bottom line install a bunch of woofers to blow you out of your seat during intense parts, but THX has a lot more of the discrete sound and separation that is amazing.

We saw Hollywood & Vine, and ate at Aroma's for a tasty lunch. However, the conversation of neighboring tables sent my eyes a rolling. I suppose there was someone quasi famous sitting next to us, but I am so clueless nowadays with who is on the inside or outside of the movie business that I heard one effete snob opine, "When Obama is elected . . ." I wanted to stand up and puke at his audacity. Of course he was wearing his Foster Grant's with his mobile out taking a call about every 8 minutes or so. It was amusing and disgusting to me. Those people are so out of touch with the rest of the world.

Now, don't get me wrong. Obama might indeed be elected, that is not the issue, it was his "moral certainty" tone in which he expressed it.

Contrast that scenario with another one I had in San Diego a couple of days later. I attended a National Boy Scout meeting for the muckety mucks of the movement. I was attending a lunch at the Hyatt Regency there and in walks this guy, thinner and taller than me, and asks if a particular seat next to me was taken (I had wrestled with sitting next to a federal judge, but fought that temptation and sat at another table).  I said, "No, come join us."

Well we got into a conversation and he wanted to know what I did with the Boy Scouts, and I humbly replied that I was on the Board of Directors for the Sam Houston Area Council.

I asked where did he live, and found out it was in San Antonio.  So I posited that perhaps he was on the local council's board?

Well, as a matter of fact , no . . . he was on the National Council.

The National Council? Are you kidding me? How did you rate that?

Well, he said he was on a plane ride and happened to be seated next to the former president of the Boy Scouts. The got into a conversation, and lo and behold, much to his surprise, the President called him a couple of weeks later and invited him to come join the national board. And he mentioned AT&T a couple of times.

I said, "Wow . . . that's quite a deal. You keep saying AT&T . . . do you work for them?

Well, as a matter of fact he did.

I asked him what he did.

He said that he was the chairman of the board.

I said, "You are the chairman of the Board of AT & T?" hardly believing my ears.

And replied that he was the very man.

I found out the next day that he was heading up the national celebration of the BSA for the year of 2010. I sought him out that day as well, and congratulated him on incredible service he was giving to the Boy Scouts. Now to me there is all the difference in the world between the humility of Randall Stephenson and the sycophants that populate so much of the Burbank/Hollywood area.

Going Up in Smoke

My Dad was a pack rat. But I did not know that until after his physical body died. I had gone over to my mother’s house to help sort through things and clean out a few things, and it was incredible to me the amount of stuff he had saved. He still had resumés that he had made up from back in college when he was first applying for a job. There must have been at least 50 of them. As I discovered them, I thought, "Why? What’s the point of saving so many of these?"

I could immediately begin to understand my own pack rattish ways. I have probably four boxes and a trunk that possess a lot about my life in the past. Over the years, I have gone through them at intervals, condensed boxes, thrown away stuff, and yet there is still some stuff I just cannot seem to bear to part with. Like old letters from my mother. She was very good about writing me while I was in college. I always swore that I would do that for my own children, but it never happened.

All of this is to get to last Saturday. Our middle son had to finally come to grips with boxes and boxes of his stuff that he was stored and kept since high school—something like 10 years ago. A lot of it was trash to be sure. Things that were just basically worthless, but there were other things, that I know he would have rather sifted through and relived and treasured one more time. The problem is that we are moving to smaller digs, and where his stuff has been stored, that house is being sold. He did not want to pay for storage, so he finally had to figure out what was the most valuable stuff that he wanted to save. I know it caused him an immense amount of pain and grief to have to finally do this, and I hurt for him every moment of the way. It was shocking to me to participate, and yet, I could not not be there for him. I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes and watching so many memories go up in smoke (we had a big fire out back). I know that in a lot of unconscious ways, some of that stuff was firmly linked to a happier time in his life when our family was whole and intact and life seemed simpler.

Yet, I know that this is probably what is going to happen to my "stuff" someday. My boys will sort through it all and wonder, "Why did Daddy save all of this? Who did he think was going to read it? Who even cares?" Most likely, when my time comes, my own boys will be very busy with their own lives, and will have to grudgingly take some of their precious time to see who wants what, and I suspect that personal mementoes and effects that meant something to me, will have little if any meaning to them. Even still, I will have to admit that this particular posting has been very difficult for me to write. I pondered about it, wondered about it, resenting the passage of time in some ways.

Don't Tell Mama

One image that I still cannot get out of my mind was the time that our two youngest sons and I spent on a Tuesday night last week at Don’t Tell Mama in New Amsterdam. There was a piano player there, by the name of Tracy Stark who had to be one of the most phenomenal piano players I have ever heard. She rarely looked at the keys. She could sight read anything. She had tons of tunes stored in her head. It was like that the piano was an extension of her soul. I was shocked, astonished, amazed. There were several open mike singers that evening, and all of them were helped because of the amazing talents of that woman. We were treated to a whole panoply of styles from wickedly funny to cutting edge mea culpa recognition for crimes of the past (performed by son # 3 no less). You should have been there.

The Neon Lights Are Bright on Broadway

Our son who lives in New Amsterdam lives in a 5^th floor walk-up. I can’t tell you how many times I went up and down those stairs. (It does help to build up your quadriceps, tho). He has a very nicely furnished tiny space decked out in granite and bamboo. It is very conveniently located near Broadway and the Port Authority (which is a bus stop from the airport). All the time we were there, he was busy working and auditioning. I didn’t get to see as much of him as I thought I would, however, I did get to hear him sing a couple of "open mike" songs at Don’t Tell Mama. I could surely tell improvement in his voice from the last time I had heard him. He is so eager to make his mark. I could never do what he does, but he seems happy and secure and is hopeful about breaking into the business before too terribly long. I wish him well.

New Amsterdam

   I'm getting ready to fly out of Tejas tomorrow to New Amsterdam.  I was trying to remember the last time I was there (other than as a layover on a plane) and I think it was over 40 years ago.  Funny, though.  I haven't missed it all that much.  I live in a big enough city as it is.  I've got all the traffic congestion and smog that you could possibly want, and some pretty decent culture to boot.  I go primarily to visit two of our sons and spend some time bonding and hanging out and seeing perhaps some of the sites I have not seen in over four decades.  I'm pretty much packed.  It will be interesting.