More Ike Aftermath

You may know that I am a property manager for a preservation company.  You may even know that I am responsible for the preservation of roughly 800 bank owned houses.  What you may not know is that every single one of them is in the Houston area, with many on the battered Galveston Island.

I’m not looking for sympathy - this is my job, after all.  And I didn’t lose anything because of the hurricane.  In fact, it has been pretty silent for me at work lately because of many factors:  cell phone outages (FEMA actually took over the cell towers last weekend, and reception is still lukewarm at best), gasoline lines/shortages/price gouging, and my hardy crew of contractors attending to their own properties (as they should) despite the widespread lack of power and water.

I have had some crews working through all of this, getting things done that I certainly did not expect to get done as quickly as they have.  And I have had others call me pleading for patience with their assigned work, which I of course assured them.  They all want to work, but in some cases it is just not possible.  And I totally understand that.

And then this afternoon, it happened.  The phone at my desk started ringing.  Over and over and over.

Normalcy is beginning to return.  Listing agents are starting to tour their properties, calling me with laundry lists of problems that need to get rectified… NOW.  Again, I understand and bravely accept that challenge.

Wanna see the challenge?  Take a look at the pictures assembled here. One word comes to mind…

Wow.

Never doubt the resiliency of people, particularly Texans.  And that is why I am going to end this entry with a quote from one resident of the island who rode out Ike in a church.  This was his reply to a question regarding divine intervention, after explaining that he had not set foot in a church for 40 years:

I drink beer and chase women, gamble, cuss.  You can’t call that religion. I’m either too good, the devil won’t have me, or I’m so bad the Good Lord won’t take me. That’s a good toss-up.

From The Files Of…

… you would not believe me if I told you.

There will be a new post in the morning that details things I should not say, yet need to be said.  Because, dammit, this story is so blog-worthy.

I just need one more night to figure out how to write this without it being used as evidence if a trial were to ensue.  Interested?

Thought so.

Love to all, as usual.

Cheesy? Yup. Creepy? A Little. Home? Of course.

The thing they leave out is that the ice cream truck in our neighborhood plays King Missile’s “The Boy Who Ate Lasagna and Could Jump Over a Church”. But they also scoop out Haagan Dazs, so it kind of evens out.

A Day Late, A JPEG Short

Screw it.

I was going to have pictures on here to complete my Snakes On A Passport story, but I am so out of practice on this whole “blogging with images” thing… So I guess you are just going to have to follow some embedded links.

This is a link to a picture of a venomous diamondback rattlesnake.

And this is a link to a picture of a non-venomous diamond backed water snake.

I am guessing that I ran over the latter of the two, but try telling that to the kid next door as he loses a limb.

It ain’t easy.

And, yes, I am back to blogging again. Welcome to the Man Room (AKA the garage).

Snakes On A Passport

(Yes, I must give credit to Dawn for the title.  Read on.)

It had been a long day.  The requisite hours at work and multiple errands, followed by a leisurely drive through our neighborhood right at dusk.

At the end of our street, we saw moms walking with their kids and people walking their dogs.  Normalcy.  And that is why I questioned what it was I saw in the road - or thought I saw in the road.

While I was turning the car around, Dawn looked at me with a question mark over her head.

“I think I saw a snake”, I explained.  I did not got into any further detail for fear of looking like an idiot when our headlights illuminated a large twig or a rope.

But, sure as shit, when I pulled over next to the pond 50 yards from our house, there was a snake in the road.  It was not moving, so I assumed it was dead.  But I was also looking at it from about 8 feet away in dusk, so I turned the Passport around again to shine it with the headlights.

And then it started moving.

All five feet of it.

Since our neighborhood has all sorts of end-of-the-day foot traffic from the fitness minded, my first instinct was to run over it.  Then Dawn said, “Run it over!”  So I did.  The tires yelped “ka-thunk”, PETA planned a protest, and backyard ministers winced.  But I was just looking out for the neighbors and their pets, so even my eco-friendly mind was nonplussed.  However, I wanted to make sure the job got done so I quickly turned around…

… and saw nothing.

Not even a hint that the five foot long behemoth had even been there.

And that is when Dawn turned to me and asked - ok, told - me to roll up my window.  Suddenly, life lessons from her childhood were reinforcing themselves into her mind.  Namely, how her dad had always told her to NEVER run over a snake because it will strike the vehicle and latch on for dear life.  It was then that I knew I was driving around a lethal weapon in my undercarriage, and I am not talking about Taco Bell flatulence.

She told me it was some sort of diamondback.  Hell, I saw the skin markings myself, but I also saw no rattle on the end.  So for all I know it could have been Randy Johnson.  Or Doug Davis.  (I was praying for Doug Davis.)

Visions of forked tongues through air conditioning vents and scaly creatures roaming the floor boards filled my head - not mention creeping the shit out of me.  What were we going to do?  We felt trapped in our own Honda, afraid to exit for fear of bites.  Irrational as it may seem now, it was the gospel then.

So I did the only thing that I could think of at the time.  I drove down another street in our neighborhood that two of my co-workers live on.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe I thought either of them might see a lifeless body hanging from underneath the car (hissing the words “I know what you did last summer”).  Or perhaps they could run interference for us, amusing the death-grip snake while Dawn and I ran our happy asses home.  “Hey, look, snake!  Free cats!”

But, alas, neither of them were outside so it was time to formulate Plan B.

Plan B turned out to be running our car through the automated carwash (using the cycle with undercarriage wash) and hoping that the snake would either sink its lifeless body into the drainage area (best case scenario) or slink away laughingly due to all the suds and water.

Neither of those happened, but the Passport looks freaking awesome!

It was kind of scary when the car was covered in foam, making a peek through the windows impossible, and the blowers of the wash turned on giving the entire scene a cheap, B-movie horror flick feel, complete with cheesy soundtrack…

By then, I had exhausted all our options.  We had to get home, no question.

After parking in the driveway (there was NO WAY that I was pulling this transporter of death into the garage), I talked Dawn into exiting first.  My thought process was that I could make it to help quicker since I was behind the wheel, while she would have to climb over my poison-stricken body, kicking me to the side while “Every Rose Has Its Thorns” played in her head, should something wicked happen to me.

But once we were safely inside, I returned to the car with a flashlight.  I figured that if anything happened, I could always play cop and ask the snake for its license and insurance.  However, after sweeping the underside of the Passport with the beam, I determined that there was no danger present.  I then told the little kid from next door that he could get out from under the car - and give me back my flashlight.

Look for a follow-up to this entry Thursday night…

Just Another Day At The Office

It was the perfect storm, and it all started with a motorcycle.

From my fourth floor workspace, accidents are common viewing. Usually fender-benders, though there was the recent excitement of the Jeep that rolled over and the personified relief felt as co-workers watched the driver walk away from the wreckage unscathed. The thing about the motorcycle was that it snuck up on everyone, a grim foreshadowing of what was to come.

There were no squealing tires, no loud clap of metal on metal, only distant sirens that came all too near. A firetruck. An ambulance. At least two cop cars, shutting down northbound traffic on the service road of what I sardonically call “The NAFTA Highway”. Slowly, some of my co-workers worked their way toward the ample thigh-to-ceiling windows. A few even went to the office of one of the vice presidents of my company for a better look. I could see out those windows from where I sat, speaking on the phone to a vendor in Houston, probably about an overdue lawn cut. As I watched my peers gather around the glass, I chuckled to myself because of the reason I was in that office once: to move that VP’s iTunes library to an external drive that she brought from home so that her music would quit slowing down her company issued laptop.

She had Abba… and The Shins. That made me giggle, perhaps because I have both, as well.

“They’re giving him CPR”, someone said, loud enough for my corner of the office to hear. I still refused to budge, ass firmly planted in my comfortable chair. As a man of almost forty, I had seen my fair share of accidents and been subjected to the brake lights of drivers ahead of me who could not help but look. And, yes, I always looked, too - but only because I was already slowed to a crawl thanks to those in the lead. At least, that is what I told myself.

This time, however, I would not succumb to temptation. The main reason I abstained was because I did not want to see, although being at work had a lot to do with it, too. Hell, I always feel behind after a thirty minute team meeting. How could I possibly justify gawking at EMTs trying to save a man who was in an accident that I didn’t even see?

There is a wing of cublicles on my floor that bisects offices on the northeast and southeast side of the buiding. My desk faces the northeast corner, where all the excitement below was happening. But the people in that middle wing of cubicles had the best - or worst - view of what happened next. And if it were not for the motorcyclist, they never would have seen it.

I heard a loud, collective gasp followed by a few shrieks. I looked toward the twenty or so gathered around the east windows, just in time to witness one female passing out and falling backward while shrieks turned into screams of horror, their lives forever changed because they just had to watch the drama involving the motorcylce.

—–

All involved - the EMTs, the cops, the firemen - heard the sound at the same time. What the Hell was THAT?

—–

On top of the bridge above - known in highway vernacular as a “flyover” - two people wailed and clung to each other. The question clung in their throats, never to be answered satisfactorily… Why?

—–

Two of my co-workers saw most of the fatality. They saw the car pull over to the shoulder of the flyover and the young man get out. However, the drama of the CPR below drew their attention back downward. The next time they looked toward the car, they saw the man hanging over the side, with his arms now gripped by another man who had parked his truck on the bridge. Whether the young man wiggled his way free, or the good samaritan lost his grip, or some combination of both, we will never know.

He was soon free - free of whatever burden had so affected him that he felt the only way out was to end his life. His body turned in midair, slowly, just like a movie stunt. Over and over.

And then he landed on his head, hitting the pavement of the service road below, just yards away from life saving techniques being practiced.

Word traveled around the office quickly and I ended my phone call, unable to concentrate. Upper management walked the aisles of the office urging people to get back to work until they realized that the CEO was in the middle of those east-facing windows, among those affected by the jump. They still tried to restore normalcy, or some semblance of it, because there was about 90 minutes left in the workday.

But there really couldn’t be normalcy once the sheets came out: one over the jumper, one over the guy on the motorcycle - someone who never knew that his last breathing day would become a footnote to a different death.

“Kimchi” Sounds Like A Dennis Miller Pop Culture Reference

Imagine Dennis Miller saying something like “The room was so odorous, it was as if Pol Pot had been feasting for hours on bulgogi and kimchi.” (Insert his silly giggle here.)

But kimchi, in fact, it is a Korean side dish. And, in typical Dawn fashion, she was craving Korean food a few weeks ago and she implored me to try it out.

“You have to try bulgogi!”

So I did. And somehow lived to tell about it.

The bulgogi (definition here) itself wasn’t that bad. However, like a lot of ethnic foods that come from not-so-clean countries, there was the hint of dirt in the taste. For the record, I feel the same way about tortillas in Mexico - like they were cooked on a griddle that had been coated with street grime or was used to dry the sweat off of clothes after a long day in the fields. I could tolerate this beef dish, though, even though I found it greatly overrated.

Then I moved on to the side dish. The devil. The kimchi.

I put a bite in my mouth and immediately blanched as I attempted to chew it. There was no way I was going to make this food go down, at least not without it coming right back up. So I did the polite thing… I lowered my head right above my plate and spit that shit out. Then I took a long pull on my diet soda and headed straight for the bathroom just in case.

While gone, a woman sitting near us with her husband asked Dawn if it was the kimchi that did me in. She was disappointed because now there was no way her husband was going to try his. But I feel pretty proud because I saved that guy.

If you haven’t checked out the link with the definition of kimchi above, let me just say that it is a cabbage-based side. Unfortunately, the only cabbage I ever eat is when it is turned into cole slaw. In fact, many times I have walked into my mom’s house wondering who has been farting up a storm only to realize that she boiled cabbage - perhaps as many as two days ago. And to make matters worse, the cabbage used in kimchi is fermented. Take a moment to digest that.

(Ironically enough, if I had swallowed it, I would have digested it in a nanosecond. Forget “a moment”.)

So this has been a public service announcement denouncing fermented meals. And, yes, that includes yogurt. Gross.

I hope that the guy at the restaurant is not the last person I help in this regard.

Yay, dirt!

Note To Self

Self,

Please make time - somehow - to sit down an write about all the things you have been meaning to write about.  For example, and in no particular order:
-  Your confrontation with kimchi

-  Treasure hunts on the curb

-  How to furnish a room for free

-  And lots of other things that I have jotted down somewhere

Forever yours (whether you like it or not),

Me

 

In Your Garage

It didn’t take long after we moved into the house to realize that we live in Garage Sale Central. Every weekend we see signs in our neighborhood haphazardly taped onto street signs promoting, well, crap. Or treasures. It depends on how you look at things.

So it has become a ritual of ours to browse on every Saturday morning. After all, there is no shortage of driveways to invade.

In the past few weeks we have garnered the following: an armoire entertainment center ($47), the coolest coffee table EVER ($40), some hardback books (25 cents each), some TV trays (five bucks), and a kick-ass backpack for hiking ($10 - and well worth it). We also got some lawn tools because, as someone once said, you ain’t lived until you’ve bought a hoe ($1).

And every time we are garage hopping, I am reminded of a great bit by stand-up comic Jake Johannsen…

There is always this old woman standing there, with her can of Diet 7-Up equipped with a bendy straw, looking at something marked 25 cents while saying, “I wouldn’t pay more than a dime for that.” To which Jake replies, “Lady - it’s a freaking quarter.”

So here are some garage sale-related quick hits:

• Enough with the computer monitors, already. I swear that every single garage sale has at least one bulky monitor for sale, and most have several. Perhaps it is because we are so close to Dell headquarters…
• Pricing is so subjective. We stopped at one sale because Dawn saw a ceramic pink flamingo - about a foot tall - that she thought would look kitschy in our backyard. The price on it? Twelve-fucking-fifty. So she bought a cast iron kettle for a buck instead. Go figure.
• A lot of people use garage sales to meet people, especially the transplants (like us). Sad. Whatever happened to bars?
• Most of the books at these sales are books that I have already read. John Grisham, “Sex For (Or With) Dummies”, etc.
• One woman was hosting her sale for charity. Now that’s the spirit. (And thanks for inadvertantly making me feel guilty for not buying anything. Bitch.)

And now, if you have an hour to kill, watch this video aptly titled “This’ll Take About An Hour” to see the stand-up brilliance of Jake Johannsen. Ranks right up there with Stephen Wright, Dmitiri Martin, and the late Mitch Hedberg. Indulge me.

And Now We Return To Our Scheduled Programming (20 Year Version)

So you read about my high school years (if you did, indeed, read the last entry). And now they are about to happen all over again in a sense.

Yes, this is the year of my 20th Reunion.

Twenty percent of me looks forward to it, and the other 80 percent of my body dreads it. I know that I shouldn’t feel the need to “live up to expectations” when stuck in a large room with approximately half of my 400 classmates. But the pressure is still there, as silly as that is. After all, I know from my 10 year reunion that anyone I give a crap about doesn’t give a crap about “status”.

The odd thing is that I only have contact with two of those people all these years later: my friend Scott (I was president of the computer club in middle school and he was VP) and Cherry (a fellow “gifted and talented” student who is apparantly kicking ass in musicals in New York). Scott found me (or was it vice versa?) back when I had a MySpace page and Cherry found me on Facebook. In fact, I got to hang out with Scott last year on a trip to Austin when Dawn, Katy, and I attended a dinner party at his place. (We inadvertantly brought out the Burleson in him, and I don’t know if his significant other - a female, quit the speculating - will ever forgive us.)

And now that we live in the Austin area, about a half mile from Scott’s Dell workplace, we have yet to get together with him. Truth be told, that is probably a reflection of the way the dinner party went. Some people grow up, others grow down. I was so serious during my formative years that I belong to the latter category.

And Dawn? Well, she can just be shockingly honest, political corectness be damned. I doubt she has ever changed.

So the other day we were talking about the upcoming reunion because of emails I have been receiving. Since we grew up on bordering towns, and within one graduating class of one another, we knew a lot of the same people. And that led to the following conversation about a cheerleader from my school.

Me: She is a “butter” girl.

Dawn: A “butter” girl? What does that mean?

Me: Well, she had a great body… but her face…

It might help to read the above aloud, a common denominator of most of my jokes. In other words, most of the time you have to be there.