Within 2 weeks of my last post, Hurricane Ike hit Houston, TX, where I live, leaving my community without electrical power for 2 weeks... Power returned 2 days ago.
And I reiterate... Hurricanes are good. Here are some things I learned during these last 2 weeks:
- When you have to dress for work by flashlight, the LED glow may not help you match clothes well.
- When you have to cook outside in the back yard, plan an extra 20 minutes to reduce the fire to good coals
- A propane camp stove can boil water just as easy for coffee as an electric range, perhaps even faster.
- Air-conditioning makes bad neighbors; when you have to sit on the porch or in the driveway, and everyone else is doing the same, you get to know each other while the kids are playing on the street, riding bikes and laughing with each other... instead of holed up by themselves in front of a video game or the one-eyed-brain-sucker.
- The sweltering heat of a still night is in direct proportion to the loudness of a neighbor's portable generator or the sounds of gecko's peeping for one another.
- People show their true colors after 3 days without power; they either share or hoard, rarely in-between... My personal favorite is when you help a neighbor for hours with a fallen tree across their driveway down at the end of the cul-de-sac, but when you consider putting the fallen limbs from the old widow across the street down at an unused spot of concrete on the far end of the culdesac so her lawn doesn't die, he comes out and cusses you out with a string of racial slurs about trashing up the front of his house (btw, you couldn't even see from his house where these extra limbs went, because they were on the backside of his huge pile of tree/limbs and improperly bagged trash).
- frozen deer sausage can be used to keep other items cool in the ice box
- eat the nonfrozen items from the ice box first while the deer sausage thaws
- barbeque the deer sausage when it thaws
- a man cannot eat cooked deer sausage for 3 consecutive meals without biological consequences.
- frozen fish sticks do not keep
- ice becomes water; good for drinks, bad for breads
- you can use the same bath water twice
- you can flush the pot with used bath water
- a natural gas water heater is wonderful
- an electric stove/oven sucks
- Biblical Christianity looks like a neighbor allowing you to run an extension cord from across the street while your side of the street waits an additional week for power because Centerpoint did not trim their right-of-ways.
- Apparently ice machines and gasoline stations require a Police presence during a natural disaster
- some people are selfish pigs who don't play fairly
- Most people are wonderful, compassionate, and generous
