TheBanyanTree: Drying Grass Moon

[Dale M. Parish]

Gulf States-- well, they're "Energy" now-- after a 22 minute "music on hold" wait, says that 957 other customers are also without power, and they hope to get it restored by midnight.  Good enough.  It rained today!!!  Cooled things down, and the house isn't hot, so I can go to bed early.  Glad I ate something in town before I headed home.  Not much snack food here at the house that can be easily prepared without building a fire either in the fireplace or the camp stove.  

Normally, when I go to bed early, it's to read, or to work on this MacBook, but with no power, while this MacBook has power, there's no network connection, so all I can do is what's on this disk.  I'd just replaced the battery recently, and it tells me that I have five hours of battery life remaining, but I'll be asleep long before that's used up, I hope.  Can't even get to the storage down stairs, much less the Internet.  When I got in, the UPS was already dead, so no telling how long it was out before I got here.  I can figure that out tomorrow when I reset the clock radio without the backup battery.  The other one is preset for 0530, but has a funny, higher-pitch-than-normal battery sound.  Reckon I'll hear it.  

Since our dog died last month, I no longer have his bladder alarm to get me up.  Miss the little feller, but after a year of insulin shots twice daily, other systems started failing, and the vet didn't give him any hope of recovery.  I still have to carve him a head stone out of some of a big chunk of limestone, but I want her to pick the limestone piece.

Not sure when this will become tree fruit-- since I can't mail it tonight, I'm half likely to forget it until I find it on some distant square corner of the disk and can't remember when I wrote it. 

Seems we've become reliant upon portable battery operated devices.  I went to the Princess phone-- I bought it about 30 years ago and it's the last one working here-- like it because even if the power is out, it still has a lighted dial and dialtone when all the cordless and electronic phones do not.  However, Entergy's 1-800-OUTAGE number tells me that there is no account associated with the POTS number here and for me to key into the phone my account number.  I don't think they give a lot of consideration to how you're going to find an account number in the dark.  I presume that I'd changed my account number over to the cell phone number, so dial 1-800-OUTAGE from the cell phone.  Energy's smart computer assisted answering system informs me that there are multiple accounts associated with the cell phone number and to key in the account number of the account for which I want to report the outage.  Or press 3 to wait for assistance.  So I pressed 3 and waited the 22 minutes it took for them to assist me.  During which, I amused myself by creating blank databases in HanDBase, to which I must migrate all the databases on my SmartPhone because the product I'd chosen some years ago-- SmartList by DataViz-- is no longer published or supported.  I had thought that I'd extract them from the phone tonight and convert them for later import as HanDBase files, but alas, it's not to be.  

Cindy's in Shreveport tonight.  Her daughter was flying in from Haiti with the rest of the church group after an emotional mission to the orphanage in Les Cayes that they support.  One of the younger children in the orphanage was seriously ill and they couldn't find medical treatment for her, so had finally located the girl's mother in the mountains to have a release signed that would permit the church to bring the girl back to the US for emergency surgery, but the girl died before they could get all the clearances approved.  Morale was at a low when they left and Cindy was going to Shreveport to meet them at the airport-- left early yesterday morning to go up to visit her Dad and then drive to Shreveport to meet the plane mid-day today.

I had just sat down in the refinery cafeteria for lunch when she called to say that something was wrong with the plane-- the missionary group had landed in Miami but couldn't fly back to Shreveport and might fly to Dallas instead.  She was going to hang loose at her Dad's goat farm, which is between Dallas and Shreveport and see if she could pick up some of the kids in Dallas if they couldn't get a flight back to Shreveport.  After I said goodbye, I glanced up at the big screen TV in the cafeteria just in time to hear the news commentator say that thousands were stranded in the airport because of the hailstorm, and then she moved on to the next news story.  I could only assume that she was taliking about the Miami airport-- didn't know.  Before I finished eating my okra and tomatoes, I glanced up at the TV to see the ticker line at the bottom of the news screen scroll off the screen saying that the airport had been hit by 3/4" hail and many planes were grounded... and again, I missed which airport. Only after I got back to my office could I log into the news and find that it was Denver whose airport was hit by hail.

Then Cindy called to say she was stopping in Marshall waiting for news of the ETA in Dallas to see if she could haul missionaries and luggage back to Shereveport from Dallas.  What happened, tho, is that none of them could rent a 15 passenger van it would take-- all of the young-adult missionaries were under 25, without credit cards with a high enough limit to cover a car rental deposit-- and they ended up having to take a flight back to Shreveport.  Sometimes, you just can't win.  

Hugs,
Dale
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632