A Poem For Ike

Dear Ike,
It is YOU I don't like.
You are not welcome here,
so please don't come near!

So Ike, please, please, please don't come here!! Our state can not handle you right now. We don't want to see anyone else get hit with this storm, but we can't take it at this time. It is starting to look like Ike may be taking a turn towards Texas, which I hate to see happen, but I'd hate to see it come here worse.

So, we got our power back last night!! I have been doing those things that couldn't be done on the generator, like washing clothes. My next door neighbor plugged their washing machine into their gas generator to wash clothes and burned up the motor in their washing machine! Also, Lesley was able to reserve a few hotel rooms in Mississippi if we should need to escape from Ike, so we are feeling good to have a plan. I don't know if Walter will leave with me, but that is a decision he'll have to make if Ike is headed here.

This link is to the "Friends of George" website. I read about his $1 cookbook on a friend's blog and went to read about George. I bought the cookbook as soon as I read the story and I hope that you will too! http://www.friendsofgeorge.com/cookbook_order.html

Walter & I got out the pool equipment and vacuumed leaves and dirt from the bottom of the pool and ran an extension cord to reconnect the pool pump yesterday. As soon as the pool was starting to not look as green, the storm came and we haven't been able to get the chemicals right yet. I'm hoping we can get it right and will have a little more time to enjoy it before it gets too cold.

Tonight Walter & I are going to the Texas Roadhouse and YES, I go there mostly for the bread and butter!!! We usually have steak at Hilltop on steak night so we don't venture off to other steak restaurants often, but Hilltop is not opened yet and well, I want some bread!!! The Texas Roadhouse is in Baton Rouge so it's about a 30 minute trip over there, but it will be worth it!!

We still have those boys here and i'm not sure if their families will be looking for them now that their power is back on - well, at least I know that Bryce's is back on. I don't mind them staying longer, but wouldn't you at least want to see your kid after a week? We aren't sure when their school will reopen. I don't think power is back in that area yet, so we'll just have to wait and see. I work in a different parish and we go back to work tomorrow and the kids come back on Tuesday.

Questions & Comments:

Tam asked me what i'm reading. At this time, it wont be one of the 70 unread books on her bookcase, but some books that I bought to use with my kids at school. The main one i've been reading is called "Individualized Supports For Students With Problem Behaviors." Probably nothing exciting to the general population, but I am really working with changing some of these behaviors to help the kids fit in, excel in school, and stay out of trouble!!

I had a couple of comments from people saying they would love to vent about their families on their blogs sometimes, but can't because their family reads their blog. None of my family knows about my blog and I hope they never run across it! I don't vent about them much, but it is nice to be able to vent once in awhile. My brother has a blog that he didn't think anyone would run across and he was "outted" by Walter's nephew accidentally. I'm not sure if i've mentioned on my blog that my brother, Kenny, and Walter's nephew, Tommy, have been best friends for 20 years. They both live in Georgia now and Kenny had posted a story on his blog about seeing Tommy's apartment on fire on the 6 o'clock news one night! Tommy thought the blog was a good way to show everyone the story and to let them know about the fire, so he sent a link to all of his family, including us! I read the story about the fire and then decided to scroll through the rest of the blog and found this:

(From 2003) Considering the wife and I spent a total of just 41 hours in Louisiana this weekend for our Bizarre Family Pre-Christmas Christmas celebration, it was an eventful time. The highlights:
• The adoptive mother of my niece - who my middle sister gave up for adoption 21 years ago and rediscovered a couple of years back - came to dinner. Now I know why my niece always figured she was adopted. “Mom” is a troll, and clearly shares no genes with my niece, who is a really beautiful girl (if you look past the heavy Baton Rouge makeup and trashy style).
• My oldest nephew (second child of the middle sister) was working Saturday, so he came by Friday night with his girlfriend.
• My second-oldest nephew (first child of my oldest sister) brought his girlfriend along as well. They are both 18, neither finished high school, both work fast-food jobs and they live together not far from my oldest sister in Texas. I'd not met the girlfriend before, and was quite prepared to disapprove. Would you believe I came away liking and respecting her? She”s pushing the nephew back toward school and seems to give him the structure his life had lacked for a long time.
• The third-oldest nephew (second child of my oldest sister) is working on a hip-hop career, sports a new bottom-lip piercing and chain smokes with the approval of his mom. He's 16. But he's “off the dope” as my sister says, is making good grades and wants to be a landscape architect. The bright hope of the family.
• My youngest nephew (the third child of my middle sister) is going into 6th grade next year and just got accepted at Jimmy Swaggart's Christian school. And this is seen as a good thing … Public eduction in Louisiana is so bad, you see, that kids are better off with a Swaggart education than an East Baton Rouge Parish Schools one.
• I found out Saturday morning that my stepfather had invited his 30-year-old adopted son (my adopted step-brother, I suppose) down from North Louisiana for our Pre-Christmas Christmas dinner. He had no where else to go, I was told, because his younger brother (biological and also adopted by my stepfather) doesn't want him around because the older brother has recently gotten married to his (the older brother's) first wife's cousin. The younger brother is still friends with that first wife, and thus does not want his older brother - or the wife's cousin, I suppose - around at Christmas. The beat-down Oldsmobuick carrying my adopted step-brother, his cousin-in-law-turned-second-wife and four little redneck kids of varying heritage pulled up right as we were walking in the house Saturday. Taking in the Redneck spectacle on a security-camera monitor (a leftover from the Baton Rouge serial killer days) - my long-lost niece asked “Does the little kid have a mullet??”
• My parents were talking about finding the Paris Hilton sex video on the Internet … but the video they described was not the Paris Hilton video. I was scared to learn more about what they were actually watching, and why.
• My crazy aunt (the wife of my mother's oldest brother) showed up right as we were leaving Saturday night. Actually, her car appeared on the security monitor as we were beginning to leave, which greatly hastened our exit. This is the woman, you see, who two years ago crashed our close-family gift exchange and was so horrified to not have presents to give us that she excused herself ("I need to run out to the car"), snuck off to Walgreen”s, bought a few sets of cheap Christmas dinnerware and two hours later came back with makeshift gifts for all of us. No, none of us had presents for her.
• Somehow in all the excitement, I came down with Pink Eye.
I blame the kid with the mullet.

Now, this scene describes a family Christmas get-together at my house!!! I was pretty preturbed after reading this, although I do see the humor in it, but it taught me to be careful what I say on my blog, because you never know who may run across it! He's never posted anything about his family again either!