I have, and probably always will be, a red-headed stepchild when it comes to my professional situation.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it means I am handed around by managers who are essentially Luddites and are intimidated by technology. I am not a person, I am merely a tool used to fix something. I'm sort of a sock puppet that is placed back in the drawer and doesn't see the light of day until something once again breaks.

I came up with a quote during my cough syrup haze...

"It's a fine line we walk, you and I...fixing stupid things without making them feel stupid."

It's true. Do that in my line of work, and you're canned by upper management.


Well, now I have been handed off by all the Luddites to the main IT department. So I am now *actually* answering to my peers instead of someone who has no clue about my job.

Before, I was accused of being idle if I sat at my desk all day. What they couldn't work their minds around was that I fixed machines and servers REMOTELY. They wanted to see me get in the car and drive 3 or 4 hours to B.F. Egypt, and then fix it, get done around 6 at night, and drive home and never see my family.

Not so anymore. Our supervisor told us: "Do your job, I don't like structure and schedules. Just do your job." Roger that, thankee ma'am.

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I bought the first season of the series 'Lost'. I AM HOOKED!! ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY ADDICTED! If you've never seen it, start at the beginning...it's simply brilliant.

In other news, looting cops are being busted all around, and apparently people are realizing that Katrina did, in fact, damage Mississippi. New Orleans is flooded and will have to be stripped down and rebuilt. Mississippi is better off, you see. It destroyed our coastline to the point of there being nice, clean foundations for building homes and businesses. Emptiness is eerie in those situations, where you look left, then right, and all you see in an entire subdivision are concrete foundations from where houses used to be. Occasionally a doll stuck in some branches...someone forgotten couple's wedding picture. I have a hard time leaving those images at work.

It makes me flash back to a tornado that came through my area 18 years ago. We were walking in the woods, and I found someone's marriage liscense, their pictures, and their childrens' birth certificates. I tracked them down, knocked on their door, and silently handed the grown lady a bag full of pictures and books with their names on them. Me being 9 at the time somehow made it not feel as bad as it does now.

Oh well.

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I'm burning cd's to replace all my scratched/stolen cd's of favourite artists and then I'm heading home. Will I see Serenity tonight? Doubt it. :(
Maybe some other day this weekend.

On a side note. What do you do to a woman who abandons three children in your house, waits until they've been with you 5 years, and then moves in with you along with her two 'other' children? What do you do when she starts claiming your kids as hers when it comes time to receive some small financial benefit? What do you do when she lives there for free, makes messes, gobbles up water, electricity, and gas, and when she IS home only sleeps? What do you do when you leave her there asleep all day while her two small children roam your house unsupervised, like little animals, drinking toilet water that had urine in it?

What do you do when she brings home two cats with no consultation with you, the owner of your home? What do you do when she says she'll take care of them, but every day when you come home, they're outside in a cage, starving, and are soaking in their own fetid urine and feces they've wallowed in until it's a frothy slurry?

I grow more weary with each passing day. I wish I had a bottle of diazepam but alas I do not. Once again, oh well.

Well, it's come and gone. Kasabian and Oasis were simply magnificient. It's been 12 years since I had decided that I was going to see Oasis one day...and the day's passed now. Too sleepy to say much, but if you are in a position to go see an Oasis show while they're over here, by all means do so.

Boiling water is hot. Did you know that? I did..or so I thought. See, I left my deep freezer filled up to the edge with ice in the vain hopes that my frozen crap would stay good when the electricty was of third-world class. It didn't. So now I have a frozen 3'x3' block of red bloody ice and chicken parts.

Beer is the only friggin way to tolerate this, I swear.

I'm going to see Oasis, Kasabian, and Jet tomorrow night. So I probably won't post any tomorrow. Not that anyone is reading this anyway.

Satisfaction in life is derived from knowing that your 10 year old son doesn't like 50-Cent, eminem, or God forbid, Linkin Park. No, your kid likes what you like.

My kid took my Ramones cd's and AC/DC cd's on the road with him and rocked out. It's wonderful, man. He even got his own guitar now. He wants to go with his dad to see the Drive-by Truckers (Go to their site!), but there's that problem of being ten and not being able to get into bars just yet.

Anyway, music is good people. New York Dolls, Blondie, the Ramones, Oasis, the Beatles, hell, the Carter Family. Listen to some. It'll cure your ills and make life seem a little more bearable. If Osama bin-Laden would listen to some honest punk rock or bluegrass, I think he'd turn his ways around.

More photos of dead people in New Orleans, la la la etc. I'm getting sick of hurricane season. I can only hope that next year this crap will not be as bad.

Well, I guess it's time to start something else. My Diaryland.com diary being gone, I was rather inspired by RSF's cyber-dissident guide about blogging where it's not exactly legal to do so. Me, being the fat American oaf I am, am not fully taking advantage of this medium.

This is, of course, not to say that I have an interesting life. I don't, actually. But occasionally weird, creepy, or downright cool things happen. Things that deserve their own space, or pictures that deserve to be shown to the world. That being said, I am a Katrina survivor. Three weeks without electricity, two days without water, and fighting crowds for 6 hours at a time to get a trickle of gasoline. Sitting in lines at the local home improvement store in the vain hopes of getting a generator to run a fan or a TV to see what exactly the hell was happing around me.

I got the generator, but when I finally cranked up the TV, the only station available to me at the time was showing something that wasn't exactly informative. Yep. Katie Couric trading makeup tips with someone. "Ok," I thought to myself, "maybe later they'll show us where to get some supplies." I cranked it up again, spending gasoline, mind you, and it was LIVE WITH REGIS AND KELLY. I was ready to shoot someone.

The voices in the dark streets, the whispers in my front yard of God-knows-who. I didn't know if we were going to live through it. And then, a week into it, Popeye's chicken opened. It was mild and not spicy, but I could not be choosy. After a week of Vienna sausages and hot bottled water, I didn't complain at all. The next day, we began another round of canned slop with lukewarm water.

I had my first cold beer since the storm last week, and it was everything I had hopes for. Enough talk, on to the pictures.



My front yard could be confused with a lake. I stood out on the porch during the worst part. The tornado sirens were buzzing all through the city. Paranoid freaks like me will recall that one day this could also signify an air-raid warning, but we'll just worry about the TWELVE (12) tornadoes that touched down in my county. Notice the floating debris and the sticks jammed into the ground. Those sticks were driven a foot and a half in the ground!

This is my back yard afterwards. Note that the trees are touching my house, but aren't on TOP of my house. I was actually QUITE fortunate, considering what my parents and neighbours looked like.

This is what my parents' old van looked like. They didn't use it much, so it only had the bare minimum insurance. We used it to go on vacations and to football games in the fall months. Obviously, it won't be doing much of anything anymore.

All in all, I am glad we're alive. The response from the government was slow, but nowhere as near as bad as some Louisiana government officals would lead the world to believe. New Orleans is a cesspool of feces, bodies, and filth due to stupidity, plain and simple. To end, I am going to post a few pictures from the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

I have no idea why this is here, considering it's on the side of the highway and all.

This boat was found all fouled up. It was found in waters where a boat in similar conditions was hauled up and found to have a group of 12 Vietnamese fishermen aboard. Apparently they died huddled together on their boat, the 0nly home a lot of these guys ever really know. It's really sad to think about. This may actually be the boat, but since I didn't check my facts, I won't say. So be sad and unsure of it, just like I am. :(

I like this picture of what's left of the famed Beavoir home, which at one point was the "White House" of the Confederacy and home of its only president, Jefferson Davis. The sign is hilarious and reflects the dark sense of humour these coastal people have developed over the years. They painted this while there were coffins lying on the ground. The storm surge forced them out of their tombs and left them strewn about.