I’ve just been promoted to web-master for my department. Ha. Nevermind that I don’t know anything, beyond tinkering with my blog template when I’m bored. As far as I can tell, my job responsibilities are pretty much the same, with the addition of fixing the links on the website every once in awhile. So now I am being paid $11/hour, to sit at my desk and hit f5 on the National Hurricane Center website every now and again.
Looks like Rita is a CAT 5 now, closely mimicking her older sister Katrina. Since Houston isn’t a giant bowl below sea level, conditions shouldn’t be quite so horrible as in NOLA - but you only have to look at what Katrina did to coastal Mississsippi, where towns were wiped off the face of the earth leaving no trace, to realize what a storm like that could do.
Oh, and we’ve got another two months of hurricane fun left in the season. Don’t drink all the champagne just yet.
I can’t imagine how the NOLA people that were evacuated to Houston must be feeling right now. Some of these people have only just begun to resettle, and now they have to pick up and leave again. And I can understand their reluctance to leave, especially the people that were housed at the Superdome:
At Reliant, Carmelita Speed, 25, clutched a box of tissue and periodically dabbed at tears. She reluctantly was going to the plane and Arkansas.”I hope and pray it isn’t like the Superdome,” Speed said, describing how for days there she “slept on the ground, or on cardboard.” (CNN).
Try to fathom losing everything you own, and on top of that, the city you called home for most of your life. And not only that, but existing in a strange kind of limbo afterwards, where you’re not quite refugee but don’t have a place to go or anyone to rely upon except the government that’s already proven to be rather unreliable. And trust them not to seal you alive again in a dark, festering cave with no food or water, but plenty of convicted felons. I can’t imagine many of them are in a balanced state of mind right now.
Probably especially distressing to Katrina victims are the more ultra-insane righteous conservatives arguing that God was punishing the people of New Orleans for being sinners. Now I’m wondering if they’ll start claiming that Texas is being punished for taking in those “filthy sodomizers.” I also wonder if these people have noticed that both of these hurricanes seem to be bent on walloping all of our oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Surely God couldn’t be punishing the oil industry? Next week, when they report giant earthquakes in Saudi Arabia, I’m going to laugh and laugh and laugh, as I bike to work.
Another interesting thing: when I was hard at work performing my new webmastery duties this morning, I came across this article on Wikipedia. I had thought that people were joking when they said that we’ve tried shooting ice cubes into the eyes of hurricanes to stop them. Apparently I was wrong. Now that’s the kind of job I want when I grow up! It even has a cool and edgy name: Project STORMFURY. Ha ha, that is an idea I would have come up with when I was ten. How that gives me so much hope for the future, when we will probably start launching nukes into the sky to stop this hurricane menace.
