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Wildcard Weekend waiting

I will make it short and sweet for the weekend, as I am still recovering from the flu or whatever. I wish that the Houston Texans would have had a bye this weekend. But they were beaten by Indianapolis, so the AFC South champs ends up playing a wild card team, Cincinnati. The Texans should win. But they should have beaten the Colts, and they didn’t. So, once again it is time to wait and see. Wait for 3:30 p.m. Central on Saturday and see what happens when the 10-6 Bengals visit the 12-4 Texans at Reliant. Wait, wait, wait. Patience my ass …

Here is the TV “Game Center” for the playoff games. Everybody have fun. Yeah, I know that is impossible. Why do you think I said it?

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Texans weathering Christmas Day with wind, snow, dust and frozen cow pies

There is an old saying down here in Texas. Some say it is a “tired” and “worn out” saying. Nonetheless it goes like this:

“If you don’t like the weather in Texas, just wait five minutes and it will change.” I don’t know who first said that or of where the person spoke. It doesn’t really matter. What no one has said, or at least to me, today, is “Just because a saying is trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” Well, hell!

Golden? Why not black, as in Black Gold, Texas Tea? This is where the U.S. Oil Industry was born, boy!
Golden? Why not black, as in Black Gold, Texas Tea? This is where the U.S. Oil Industry was born, boy!

 

Christmas Day 2012 in Texas sure offered up a heapin’ helpin’ of some radically differing weather. Where I live, the rain came down pretty bountifully and I could hear the thunder as well as I could see the trees a’ whipping to and fro. Apparently some parts of the “Golden Triangle” where I live got really pounded. For instance, this store in a strip shopping center in Vidor, about 8 miles east of Beaumont:

wind damage
Vidor, Texas, got a wind storm up its booty instead of lumps of coal in its Christmas stocking!

 

This is the result of so-called “straight-line winds.” That is not a tornado but it can hit with the force of a hurricane gust and do just about as much damage.

I took a trip to the Jack Brooks Federal Building in Beaumont to check my mail and stuff. Lo and behold, the building had been without power since around noon on Christmas Day.

But even with the damage from wind, there was more crazy weather in store for rest of Texas like this dust storm  causing I-27 north of Lubbock to be shut down for awhile. Next thing you know we’ll be like the Okies of old, throwing every belonging on a flatbed pickup truck and heading to Californie!

The there were those “lucky” North Texas folks around Denton and the D-FW Metroplex who were snowed upon with that magical “White Christmas Snow” which freezes everything in time and is immediately followed by none other than Bing Crosby crooning: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the one I used to know.  Come on sing-along-Bing, you knew White Christmas snows? Personally?  I’ve never experienced one of those magical White Christmas Snows but I would bet you dollars to a white-frosted doughnut that the snow is just like the rest of the snows. Sometimes it gets-a-deep, sometimes it gets-a-dusting.

I don’t know if that is the complete Texas weather picture on Christmas Day 2012. I suppose out in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert some freezing cow pies may have rained down. Or perhaps even the proverbial cats and dogs fell down with the animals no doubt colder ‘n hell and most assuredly pissed off having to make an entrance in such an abrupt manner.

That’s Texas for you. Old Santy and his reindeer really have to keep on their toes in the Lone Star State. If the weather won’t get  you, the guns will.

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The good news is the world hasn’t ended. The bad news is the world hasn’t ended.

It’s not the end of the world, at least not yet, and President Obama has given me Monday off in addition to Tuesday. So that is, at least, some good news.

I wrote a little here on this blog until the battery on my MiFi went dead. Then I spent the next hour and a half talking to Verizon techs who will gladly send me a battery with a 90-day warranty for $10 or a new battery for $40. Well, I finally figured out I could get four batteries in a year for that one new battery. Of course, it will likely cause lost hours to get it, just as it did today.

Upon finally figuring out how to set up a wireless network with my iPhone, I am back on the old Internets. However, about half of my post  had vanished. I had written today about the irresponsibility of the GOP Congress in pushing us over the “fiscal cliff” and how the Texas lawmakers and Gov. Good Hair must be ecstatic about the NRA’s big announcement today. By golly, ol’ Wayne LaPierre LePew of the NRA wants more guns in the schools. I think back in the good ol’ days of the Cold War they called that MAD, that stands for Mutually Assured Destruction. Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out. Oh Pierre LaPew also thinks we need to get rid of violent TV, movies and music.That’s the kind of macho folks we got running out state into the ground. As for LaPierre, that’s about the stupidest thing that I ever heard and certainly the most tactless flow of words I’ve heard from a lobbyist, what with those little kids getting buried every day this week up in Connecticut. Sir, have you no shame? I guess not.

Once again, I am not against guns. I just have a super dislike for stupidity. Meanwhile, the world is still as it is: Full of beauty and hope and a good number of stupid people in high places.

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Listen to those old rustlin’ pines and don’t even try to fence me in

It’s been a chilly one today, especially with that north wind gusting. Before I left for work this morning my lights went out. After I got to work I saw on the Entergy Texas Web site that about 1,000 customers in my vicinity were out of power. I guess I have to remind people who don’t know me that I live on the Upper Texas Coast. This isn’t New England or Cut Bank, Mont. The temp was about 45 when I left for work with the wind blowing for a pretty good chill.

But the cold itself isn’t the worst of this ordeal. I got the ol’ achy-breaky joint syndrome. I suffer from arthritis, all over, and it seems to pour out of every one of my joints. Some folks don’t believe that the weather affects your body. Well, actually, it does.

Maybe if I just bundled up and went out and faced down the demon it wouldn’t be so bad. I’m not a cold-weather guy, but living in the city for so long I forget just how refreshing it can be out in the countryside at night. Looking up at those endless stars while watching your breath float away for a few seconds before it finally escapes is not magic but it seems so if you clear your mind of all those worthwhile scientific notions you didn’t come out in to the woods to enjoy.

It used to seem like magic, listening to the pines rustle like you were alone with the world, even though you might’ve got your best girlfriend to come along. Just remembering those endless East Texas pine forests make me want to hum that old Cole Porter tune, later recorded and made a hit by my favorite cowboy, Roy Rogers …

  “Oh give me land, give me land under starry skies above/Don’t fence me in/Let me ride through the wide open country that I love/Don’t fence me in …

  “I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences/And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses/And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences/Don’t fence me in.”

Picture it out there: Just you, or you and your gal, or you and your gal and your horse, or you and your horse, or just your gal and your horse … Wait a minute now. Don’t fence me in.

 

 

 

 

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Lufkin VA back open and bed bug-less, delivered here in a wave of HST nostalgia

Some good news for veterans who use the Lufkin (Texas) VA clinic just appeared on my mojo wire. Actually, it came by e-mail which sometimes seems to bring mojo of one sort of another. Hunter S. Thompson actually used the term “mojo wire” in his classic “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.” My estimation of who knows Hunter S. and who is reading this blog is not imaginable. So Thompson, whose style of work as a writer was called “gonzo journalism,” was probably the first gonzo journalist. All of those young writers — Me? Guilty — whose instinct was to fight the “system” emulated Thompson. In the end, only Hunter S. was Hunter S. His ashes shot from a cannon on a 153-foot tower shaped in a double-thumbed fist holding a peyote button, and all. Forgive me, I was cast adrift on a wave of nostalgia.

Perhaps it isn’t appropriate to make a blog post about a VA clinic reopening with references to a drug-addled maniac. But Hunter was an Air Force veteran, where he began his writing career as a sports reporter. I think that means something or other here.

My point is that a news release from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to me this afternoon announcing the Charles Wilson — of “Charlie Wilson’s War” or “Good Time Charlie Wilson” fame — VA Clinic in Lufkin is reopening after a good debugging.

 ” … a veteran came in to the clinic seeking medical assistance for a rash, the press release said. Clinic staff found bed bugs on his clothing and wheelchair. While the patient refused help and left, the staff immediately took action.”

The clinic reopened today after exterminators “extensively fumigated the building” and found no more bed bugs.

This dispatch raises several questions. One is, why did the patient refuse help? Was it because they planned to fumigate him? A Wikipedia article on bed bugs said the insects were a big problem on U.S. military bases during World War II.

Initially, the problem was solved by fumigation, using Zyklon Discoids that released hydrogen cyanide gas, a rather dangerous procedure. Eventually, DDT was found as a “safe” alternative, said the Wikipedia article.

I am not insinuating that the VA would use the WWII method on the bed bug-ridden vet who sought treatment and touched off warning bells. Some vets just don’t have the patience one needs at times to travel the road to VA assistance. “It’s socialized medicine,” said a VA employee awhile back. And so it is. But it is all many of us veterans have.

A VA microbiologist/control specialist noted that bed bugs have become a problem again due to increased travel and reduced usage in pesticides, said the press release. DDT? Remember running behind the mosquito trucks in the smoke as a kid?

Bed bugs were pretty commonplace when I was a kid and gradually they were gone and now they are back and they are pissed!

Oh well, if you are a veteran and have been bitten by bed bugs or think you have, here is a good article from a reputable source (The Mayo Clinic.) Make mine with mayo on the side … I’m sorry I don’t know what gets into me. And after reading the Mayo article, if you need help, then get it!