Weekend in a nutshell: Not awful, but not terrific either, and rather more Russ Field than either of us would have preferred. Archon was marginal; we will probably pull out of that one altogether next year. More later.

Amusing conversation on the way home:

Me: (re upcoming ICC trip) "OMG, it's October up there!"
Russ: "It's October here too."
Me: "Yeah, but up there it means something. Down here, October is still summer."
Russ: "Not last week, it wasn't."
Me: "Yes, it was. Last week I could go out in shorts, and that's summer."
Russ: "Last week you were willing to leave the house voluntarily. That's not summer."

Hey, droewyn, any chance you guys could pick up some real cider-mill cider for me over the next week or so?

Muslim children gassed at mosque.

What DailyKos will tell you that the local paper doesn't bother to mention is this: During the week preceding the attack, the newspaper (and many others across the state) distributed, as "advertising supplements," copies of an anti-Muslim hate film on DVD.

The people who produced and paid for that DVD are, at the very least, morally responsible for the terrorist attack; they were blatantly trolling for people who could be pushed into doing such things, and they found some. IMO, they should be prosecuted using the precedent that was established with Operation Rescue -- and the person or persons who carried out the attack should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Patriot Act. And no story about this incident should be complete without mention of Timothy McVeigh, who also targeted children in his terrorist attack.

But you know that's not going to happen, because they're OUR terrorists.

Ceiling Cat has been extracted! Russ finally got hold of the owners, who came over and coaxed kitty to come to Mama; they were very relieved. Apparently the cat sneaked in on Saturday, during the interval between branch removal and patching the holes. New places to explore! Oops...

Movie-trailer parodists are having a field day with Sarah Palin:

The Palin Presidency -- ushering in Armageddon. (YouTube version)
(Unfortunately, the end of "Karmina Burana" is now indelibly associated in my brain with Carlton's "Big Ad," which diminishes the effect somewhat.)

Star Wars Parody

Governor Gump
(I couldn't watch this all the way thru; it was too painful. But then, I thought the original book and movie were shit, too.)

When Palin Attacks

Lipstick on a Pig
Gee, McCain used the same phrase? You'd never guess that from the coverage.

White Fang
This one doesn't even need to use her image.

The Bride of McCain

And my personal favorite -- Head of Skate (YouTube version)

Enjoy!

I've done a minor purge of my friendslist. I doubt most of the people affected will notice, because they don't post very often and/or don't interact with me to speak of. Nonetheless, if you notice yourself in this group and don't want to be, speak up and I'll cheerfully add you back.

Frustration #1: Our next-door neighbors' house alarm has been going off several times a day for the past few days. They only set it when they're not at home. When it goes off, it shrieks for about 10 minutes before cutting off -- and then sometimes it goes off again after only a few minutes. The really annoying thing is, this is a phone-home alarm, and normally the alarm company would have figured out by now that something is wrong... but we still have no landline service anywhere on this block! No landline, no phone-home. Grrrrr...

Frustration #2: Russ' plumbing repair gave way this afternoon. Fortunately, it did so (1) after I was out of the shower, and (2) while Russ was standing in the room. So he ran out and cut the main water valve off again, and we only had a little water in the bedroom, and mostly on things that wouldn't be damaged.

Frustration #3: In the course of trying to re-repair the plumbing, Russ has had to make FOUR separate trips to Lowe's / Home Depot / Ace Hardware, either to find the piece he was looking for or (in the latest case) because somebody did a fucked-up job cutting and threading a piece of pipe.

Frustration #4: Today was supposed to be devoted to getting stuff out of the house and into the storage bays. Guess how much of that is going to get done?

And one piece of semi-good news to balance all that: Home Depot had contractor booths in their parking lot, and Russ talked to a roofer, who is supposed to call us Monday and set up an appointment to give us an estimate. Russ wants to have several estimates in hand by the time the insurance company gets back to us with a settlement offer, and I don't blame him.

We can haz Ceiling Cat. Unfortunately, that's no joke; apparently one of the neighborhood cats got into our attic before the holes in the roof were patched, and we had no idea he was up there for about a week! He's too shy to come to Russ, and setting up the live-trap hasn't worked either -- he's been managing to eat the gooshyfood without springing the trigger. Russ has gone to the house of the people whose cat we think he is, but they never seem to be home. We can hear him moving around in the middle of the night, but I think he must be spending most of the day asleep. Any suggestions for encouraging him to come out of there? I'm getting worried about him.

Minor frustration: our A/C developed a problem a few days ago. Fortunately, it hasn't been obnoxiously hot. We had someone out from the company who installed it to take a look and give us an estimate; now Russ wants to get a second estimate from one of Blair's friends who works for a HVAC company.

I've been taking advantage of having to box up all my mystery books from the bookcase in the bedroom; they hadn't been entered into LibraryThing yet, and I'm doing so as I box them. While doing so, I found the "Series Coverage" link on the Statistics page. This is cool -- it lists the books you have that belong to a given series, and then if you click on the series title, it takes you to the page for that series and shows you all the books in it, with the ones you own checkmarked! The series information is assembled from the "Common Knowledge" page for each book, and I was able to add several books for a couple of obscure series that I happen to be fond of.

As long as we're having to make major changes in the house, I'm considering getting rid of my old king waterbed frame. We're not using it as a waterbed -- we have a queen-size mattress and box-spring in it. It's far too big for the room, and the drawer storage hasn't been doing us much good, and I don't care about the headboard lights because I rarely read in bed any more; the only thing that's really useful about it is the bookcase headboard, and that could be replaced with a queen-sized one. It's still in decent shape, even though it's about 15 years old -- and none of it is particleboard, so it didn't take significant water damage. If anyone local is interested, we still have the waterbed mattress and liner that go with it, and you can have it for hauling it off.

Subprime Mortgages 101, xkcd-style.

I'm impressed. It lays the whole thing out in such a simple and straightforward way that anyone who's literate ought to be able to follow it.

Snagged from bkwrrm_tx: ( The Controversial Survey )

Baytown teacher brags of eating free MREs in her undamaged house.

Yeah, I'll bet her blog has been taken down. Is this what we want teaching our children?

While I was at Bagels this afternoon, Russ and his chainsaw* spent a couple of hours driving around the neighborhood in the BHV, salvaging downed pecan wood in conveniently-sized chunks. We now have most of a vanload of wood which will, after about 6 months of drying, be eminently suitable for use with the smoker in the back yard.

This reminds me of the way one of the Nashville SF Club's rituals got started. Some 15 years ago, there was a really bad ice storm in Nashville; when it was over, Dan (who lives on several acres of mostly-wooded land) had a lot of downed branches, and a few trees that couldn't stand the strain, to deal with. Rather than waste the wood, he decided to have a series of Firewood Parties -- his back yard is screened from the road and has a concrete pad about 6' square that used to hold a clothespole. Those parties continue to happen even now, any weekend when the weather is suitable and there's not a con; people bring food and drink, and everyone just sits around the bonfire and talks. When I moved down here, I donated my lawn chairs and cheap grill to the effort. And if I'm in Nashville on a Saturday night, I always check ahead with Dan to see if there's going to be a party; the last one I went to was about a year ago, when I was up there for ICC. It's nice to have long-running traditions, whether they're with your blood-family or your chosen-family!

ETA: And lemonade for you -- we will be having the Giant Washed Shirt Sale, probably at FenCon and anything that's left after that on the website. There was some shirt stock in the bedroom that got wet and/or contaminated with insulation, and these are having to be washed and dried. Being no longer pristine, they'll be sold at a significant discount, but with no guarantee of a particular design or size being available.

* There was no way I could find to word that sentence without having an attack of the Misplaced Modifier. This is the least-clunky version I was able to come up with.

I found this via mazzie, and it seems very on-point even though there are a couple of things I'd have phrased differently.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 09/13/2008 Guest Contribution

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

By Tim Wise

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office -- since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s -- while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do -- like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor -- and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college -- you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

----------------------------- -----------------

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull.

I would say rather that white privilege is one of the primary roots of the problem. There are others, but certainly white privilege and racism in general are up there.

Our power came back up last night -- and when it did, our cablemodem lit up too, indicating that our connectivity either never went out or came back before the power did. Our landline, OTOH, is still down (along with everyone else on our block -- we know exactly where the problem is, and have reported it in detail several times), and AT&T is telling us that it may not be fixed until sometime next month. Y'know, I remember when telephone service was considered an "essential utility" like electricity and water, and subject to the same regulations. I guess that's no longer the case... and in that event, we may be rethinking our landline service.

Russ is talking with the insurance adjuster as I type this. She seems to be both competent and friendly; I have high hopes that we may be able to get a quick start on repairing the damage. Her voice, in both accent and timbre, reminds me a lot of my Cousin Beverly -- and she's taller than Russ, in flats!

A funny bit from yesterday: our Post Office branch is operating out of a "Post Office on Wheels" van in the parking lot. While I was waiting in line, a woman pulled up in a Mini Cooper, with a large dog (lab mix) in the passenger seat. She went in to check her post-box... and the dog immediately got over into the driver's seat, and sat there as though ready to drive away! A number of people got quite a laugh out of it.

I'm hopelessly behind, and am engaging the services of Mr. Mark Allread. If there's anything you especially want me to see, please link to it in the comments.

I know there was something else I was going to say, but now I've forgotten what it was. Eh bien, it'll come back eventually.

ETA: And of course I remembered as soon as I posted this. I'll be making the posts that had our phone #s in them non-public later today, so don't be surprised when they disappear.

We still don't have power; this is being posted from the nearby Baymont Hotel, which got its power back this afternoon. We also still don't have a landline, and if it doesn't come back up tomorrow Russ is going to call and bitch; it's obvious where the problem is -- the telephone wire just down the street from us got burned thru by a broken high-tension wire during the storm. Our cellphone service, OTOH, has remained up and fairly reliable throughout, although sometimes calls go straight to voicemail without the phone ever ringing.

We have partial power via the generator. Russ was able to fix the broken water pipes, so now we have running water and flushing toilets and SHOWERS, yay! We have hot food, and can run the dishwasher and the microwave -- although not at the same time. :-)

On Sunday night, we got a tip that there were restaurants open out on the west side of town. We tried out a place called Hunan Chef, in the same shopping center with Home Depot on the Katy Freeway (Bingle exit). This is the best Chinese buffet I've had since I moved here. Most of them are seafood-heavy; this had a much better mix of ingredients. The spicy pork in ginger sauce was especially good. If you're out that way and looking for a place to eat, I recommend it highly.

The damage to the house is fairly severe, but not as bad as it could have been. The roof has one big hole and two smaller ones, all of which punched thru the ceiling as well. Four roof beams and one ceiling joist are shattered. The two back bedrooms (aka our bedroom and the computer room) and the back bath all have water damage to the ceilings, and several inner walls will probably have to be stripped and re-plastered as well. The wood parquet floor in the bedroom half of the house is almost certainly a total loss. The tree destroyed a wooden shelf unit in the computer room, and dumped everything that was on it onto the floor; I've spent several hours cleaning and drying software CDs. The bookcase under the bedroom window got fairly well drenched; we managed to get most of the books off it before it got too bad, but Russ lost about 1/3 of his autographed Terry Pratchett books. I lost a few mystery books, but nothing that can't be replaced -- and some that I'm not going to bother replacing. We'll probably lose a few pieces of furniture that were particleboard-based, but not many; by and large we avoid buying particleboard, and this is one of the reasons why.

Blair has been an absolute trouper thru all this. She was in charge of emptying the water-catching containers during the hurricane itself while Russ and I were manning the mops and buckets, and she's called in a succession of friends to help with the temporary repairs and the initial cleanup. I don't know how we'd have managed without her.

As bad as it is, I keep thinking about all the ways that it could have been even worse...
- If we hadn't been there to do damage control, the whole house would have been flooded.
- The tree came down on a section of the attic where nothing was being stored.
- The tree hit almost directly on the wall between the two rooms, which kept it from coming all the way into the house. I don't think the outer walls took any damage, and none of the windows broke.
- Russ realized immediately that the water lines were broken (because he was feeling warm water) and he ran out to cut off the main water valve, so all we had to deal with was the rain.
- There's a gas pipe running in parallel with those water pipes... and it's bent, but not broken.
- No water got into either Russ' main business computer or the server. (My computer is at the other end of the house, in what used to be the dining room.)

We've spoken to the insurance adjuster, who is supposed to be coming out on Saturday. We've also rented a couple of 10x10' storage cubes (found someone near us who was offering a half-price "hurricane special" for September and October), so that we'll have a place to store the contents of the damaged rooms while they're being repaired. It's going to take a long time for things to be anywhere near back to normal, but for the moment we have the situation mostly under control.

ETA: Just for contrast...

Allstate insurance auto-called all their policyholders on Friday to provide the contact number for filing emergency claims. That claims office was staffed early Saturday morning, and the "all agents are busy" message took your number and gave you an estimate of how soon someone would call you back.

The FEMA emergency-claims number refers you to their website and then disconnects your call.

The rain has reached us, but we still have power for the moment. So far, it's just a storm, not as bad as many a summer thunderstorm; however, the eye is still at least an hour offshore. According to the TV coverage, Galveston and Alvin are both in bad shape. The wind is gusting up to 50 MPH, and the direction is shifting randomly. Woops, I think I just heard the first transformer go! Gonna post this while I can.