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
--
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632