Crockpot’s Non-cooking Blog

Well Peter was right. The damage due to the storm was very Katrina like in my area.  I got off lucky compared to a lot of my neighbors. I was without power from Friday till Sunday night around 10:50PM. ( HATE HATE HATE not having lights at night! Thank God the temperature was cool after the blow.)  Personal losses were 5 shingles off the roof, my chimney needs some decorative wood replaced, and I had one crossbeam support broken on my fence.

I replaced the shingles myself quickly, but I'll need someone who knows what they are doing to replace the boards on the chimney. Plus, I don't wanna go up on the roof again, sucker is way steeper than I remember.

The neighbors around me range from shingle damage to multiple trees in their houses. One house lost its chimney, lots of cut up trees for the county service to pick up in yards all over. Some are so think with newly cut tree limbs that it's hard to drive down the street.  It is AMAZING how many trees were just blown over, plus almost as many were snapped in half.  Fences are strewn all over the place. I'll never see my garbage can again. I think its a miracle that no body was killed in the storm.

Next door neighbor said he had just paid off a roof replacement on some investment house and two hours later he has a tree right through it.  He was there when the storm hit and said it was crazy. Katrina did a whole lot of damage to our area and it took 4-5 hours do to it. This storm did equivalent (if localized) damage and he said it passed in under 5 minutes.

Well the county building inspector's office sent someone to check out my 'holes' and he reported to me that the front yard holes are caused, most likely by crawdads or some other burrowing animal reaching all the way through the ground to the drainage pipes under my yard that drain into the stream behind my yard. This hole then becomes a place where all the rain drains and just starts pulling all the area around it into the stream. His suggestion, fill in the holes with a lot of dirt and it should eventually stabilize.

Back yard problem is different. He believes that the construction company that built my home and the rest of the neighborhood used fill dirt to raise the level of the houses and that they buried some unburned refuse behind the house. Stuff like tree stumps and trees that didn't burn.  This stuff has completely decayed in the 7-9 years it's been there and now there is a pocket where that stuff used to be. Rainwater drains in and causes the ground to weaken as it leaks into the space left by the decaying material and I end up with a large pocket waiting to collapse. His suggestion, fill in the area with a lot of dirt and do it again for the next couple of years as it settles until it stabilizes.

I'm a bit worried about this advice, and his conclusions but he could very well be right. The area's that are sunken in the back yard do look very symmetric. Almost like a 10x15x3 foot box collapsed back there. However, just putting dirt on the affected area and hoping for the best seems a bit,...optimistic.  I'll probably try his suggestion and if the problem resurfaces ask for advice from a different source.

Addendum: Weather is REALLY harsh today. I think 3 tornadoes were spotted in the area. This new building makes it easy to watch the wind and rain come whistling in.  The powers that be had everyone move to the interior of the building for around 20 minutes, and now I hear one of those tornadoes might have been close to my house.  I really hope no damage was done because I won't be getting home till late today.  The tornado siren going off sent many people home to check on things and one of my friends that lives around 1.5 miles from me, has called me to tell me that nearly all the roads home had trees down on them and power is out everywhere.  His description makes me want to got home to check on things pretty badly right now. He said and I quote, "I haven't seen anything like this since Katrina."  Folks we didn't get messed up like the coast did but that description for this area means things are badly messed up. Probably take a week at least to clean up and fix up everything. 

Sigh, I bet my holes have gotten bigger again.

Haven't updated in a long time now, sorry to both of my readers. I've been lazy.  What's been happening to me since the last update? Well let's see.

I've got a girlfriend, my work has moved from one of the worst part of town to downtown (whoot!) and my back yard has decided to leave me.

Nikki and I are having fun when we can get together, but long distance relationships suck. We basically only get to hang out together on the weekends.

My work moving was a blessing and a curse. The old building sucked much ass and the new one is sweet but honestly we got moved around a month too early. There is still work going on outside the building. Some of the windows weren't even installed when we started putting people in here.  We've been here a month now and things are starting to get back to normal.  Now I gotta pretend to know how to do my work again.

The back yard is just strange.  Around a 10'x15' section of ground is now a foot lower than the rest of the yard.  While getting ready to cut my grass for the first time, I stepped in what can only be called a sink hole.  The ground was hollow in a roughly 3'x4'x3'deep hole. I dug it out, and filled it with a huge amount of topsoil I bought from Lowe's, but on reflection this was stupid. The problem isn't going to go away from just filling in the dirt. I need to find the real problem and fix it, so I've called the county building inspector to send someone around to give me an idea where to start to fix this problem. I'll update after I've had a talk with the inspector.

Does anyone really get any work done in the afternoon before a big holiday weekend?

Do kids actually DO Halloween anymore? I live in a pretty substantial neighborhood on a corner, and only had 8 kids show up to Trick-or-Treat.  They started late around 7 o'clock and the last one was around 7:45.  'Old Man mode' back in my day there would have been 30+ kids hitting the equivalent to my house.  So what do kids DO for Halloween now-a-days?

Well it finally got here. My 20'th High School reunion.  More people didn't show up than did, as you'd expect but it looks like not many of us are dead yet at least.  I only went to my high school for junior and senior year (thanks Dad) and I was the hated principal's son (thanks Dad) so I wasn't as close to my classmates as they were to each other but it was fun to see some of the old gang.

There were some surprises, one of the women had SEVEN kids, one at a time, no twins or triplets or anything like that. You GO girl! A couple of us were still single, and most had more fat and less hair.

The old stories were flying around hot and heavy, who dated who, who did some things maybe they shouldn't have, things like that.  The dance was fun. Us old timers can still do that at least....Ok I was sore the next day so sue me.

Basically a fun time was had by all.

If you are interested here's the flickr link to the photo's I took. Like usual I took my camera and promptly forgot it in the car. By the time I retrieved it the dance had started and the lights and been turned down low, so many of my photos came out too dark or fuzzy to keep. Even those that weren't too bad still had red-eye in them.  But I try to enjoy them anyway.

PS: For having 7 kids Leslie looked GREAT! Hell for having no kids she would'a looked great. Color me IMPRESSED!

I've just finished the first season of Cardcaptor Sakura and I must say, I gotta start watching crap anime again, the desire to buy the good stuff is gonna break me. I'm buying all of this series even though I haven't seen all of it. It's that good.  It's really too bad that this is sub only. With no dub my nieces won't be able to watch this until they are probably too old to want to watch it. I'm defiantly not the audience this series was made for but I still love it. It's so cute! 

Ten year old Sakura Kinomoto is living a pretty normal life with a loving family minus her mother who died when she was three. Sakura is well adjusted, well liked by her classmates, athletic and scared to death of any mention of ghosts.  She bickers with her older brother who picks on her all the time but is right there instantly if she ever gets in trouble.  She adores her father who is a major part of her life even though he's often busy with his work as an archeology professor. She has really good friends including Tomoyo Daidouji who's favorite thing in the whole world is making Sakura dress up in costumes and she has a HUGE puppy-love crush on her brother's best friend Yukito Tsukishiro.

All the people close to Sakura are caring and kind which you expect to see from a show like this and which I appreciate a lot. If only the world actually worked this way.  Well the story would be rather boring without some conflict so enter the Clow Cards. A mysterious book Sakura finds in her fathers basement library contains dozens of magical cards that are released when the book is opened and it is now Sakura's duty to capture the cards or a catastrophe will occur. 

Sakura is given a powerful rival in the form of Syaoran Li a cardcaptor from Hong Kong.  Syaoran and Sakura seem to be rivals in everything they do but as the series goes on they start helping each other capture cards more than fighting with each other over who gets the cards. They actually make very good partners and as Syaoran learns to trust Sakura their teamwork gets better and better.  There is probably something to Sakura's brother's immediate dislike of Li, "He's the one that will take Sakura away from me" he says. Hey, they're only 10 but stranger things could happen.

Sakura gets stronger as she captures the cards and she displays a lot of courage as she has to battle some of the more dangerous cards.  The cards basically make this series a 'monster of the week' series, but it's really more of a 'slice of life' series with the card getting captured just being something that happened that week too.

This all sounds like sweetness and light and it is but there is a story evolving here. A rather complex story as well. Adults will like the cuteness of it all, but there is enough going on behind the scenes to keep them interested too.

Rating: Excellent!  This is probably the mac-daddy of Magical Girl series and it delivers. Did I mention it's CUTE!

Just finished up Ikki Tousen and I must say this is a horribly bad show.....But I couldn't stop watching because the makers just didn't care how stupid it was, they were by god gonna give their viewers some serious fanservice.  As usual per anime tropes the women in this show are supposed to be 15-18 but look more like 25 year old airbrushed playboy models. 25 year old airbrushed playboy models that fight in skirts so short you can see everything if they even take a step much less fighting using superhuman attacks that should kill anyone in one blow but instead simply tear their clothes to shreds.  I'm not kidding here it's just a show to give an excuse to strip the women nekked as often as they possibility can. I really enjoyed it. But it is incredibly stupid.

If you are looking for something to entertain your mind find something else this is entertaining a region much lower on the anatomy.

Rating: Good Worth Watching or Horrible beware your girlfriend will laugh at you for watching this.

Human Crossing is the latest series I've viewed from Netflix. HC is a series of non-related slice of life stories. I didn't think it would be my cup of tea because I usually watch anime series hoping for a complex story or at least some interesting storytelling that has a nice beginning, middle and most importantly an end, something I find woefully missing from much of the American TV experience which seems more interested in dragging out a group of characters or situations until everyone is so tired of it that it just fades away. Human Crossing has simple stories but complex characters. And almost all the stories were interesting to me. 

The younger crowd probably won't find these stories to their taste but to my more mature personage these were excellent stories showing people dealing with their lives and their loved ones.  It was really wonderful to watch as a top boxing champ comes to forgive his mother for an accident that shaped his life, or an overworking Dad realizing he's just like his overworking father.  The stories definitely have a Japanese feel to them but even so family is family where ever you go and these stories can basically be summed up with two words, "tearfully joyful".

If you want to see something wholesome and family oriented but not for kids this is a really good series.

Rating: Good. And if you are in the right mood it's excellent.

BigJim has a post about what happened to him and his wife two years ago yesterday. It brought back some of my memories about Katrina.  For me Katrina was just a nuisance and a really bad weather day at first. 

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This guy only had one tree but it did a HELL of a lot of damage.

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They had to deal with no electricity and trees in or on their houses. I just had three days of incredible August heat and no electricity.  But before I felt too bad for anyone around my neck of the woods I had to worry about Jim. I had gotten a call from him during the storm and for a long time there, I wasn't even sure he and Shelly had survived.  I'll always give him hell for not evacuating. He had lots of friends up here in Jackson BEGGING him to come up and after Katrina I'm sure he'll never even think about riding out a hurricane again.  After talking to him a couple days after I still had no electricity so all I knew about the damage was from phone calls and the radio. From those details I knew it was 'bad'. Really bad. Then when I went to work a couple of 12 hour volunteer shifts for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MS FEMA basically) I got my first look at TV pictures and realized it was far worse than I imagined. I was finally able to see the pictures that everyone else in the country had seen. It was amazingly bad.

Two or maybe three weeks after the storm I went down to help Jim 'clean out his house'.  When you hear that phrase you have something in mind about a mop and a duster. This was NOTHING like that! The cleanest room in his house looked like this.

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When we finally finished his house was nothing but a frame and studs. EVERYTHING had to come out.

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And Jim was one of the lucky ones. I felt I had misjudged the damage done from hearing stories and radio compared to when I finally saw it on television, and I did, but the devastation actually done leaves even the television viewer with an incomplete impression. The destruction was EVERYWHERE for as far as you could see for HUNDREDS of miles. As we were closing in on Jim's home I saw a house on top of another house.

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I saw debris fields EVERYWHERE.

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And every house, EVERY HOUSE, had spray paint on them letting people know "We're OK!"

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Jim ended up like a lot of people and just had to leave the coast. He lived here in Jackson for awhile, then Shreveport, now he's living in Texas. Lot's of people that have a lot less mobility than Jim are still stuck down there living in trailers two years later. New Orleans is hurting, so is the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Jim is just now getting to the point where he'll post about Katrina and it doesn't completely stress him out. That storm left a lot of destruction behind and even more emotional pain.  Drop by Jim's rundown of the storm and let him know you're glad he made it if you're a friend of his. He's got links to some of his photos from that time you can see on Flikr. You can see my photos of the coast here.