Okay, so I have been crap. Oh well... Anyway, photos added to the Month 2 gallery and I have added a slideshow for the photos taken just after Ike.

Next batch of photos will be... MONTH 3!!! Yikes!

Nora - Month TWO!

The Day After Ike

Bissy has power. And internet. Gas never stopped working. Tap water is safe. Ahhhhh.

And Verizon is a wonderful cellphone company to be with. One month's free service for those Ike hit "to thank our customers and show them we care even if we can't physically be there."

Came inland just East of Galveston Bay, south of Houston on Friday night. We started to get the wind in the afternoon and it got steadily got worse over night. We finally lost power at a little after 4am.

Our area had minor damage, none serious structural damage, and no broken windows in our house or any in the complex that we know of.

Anne is out of town, but her house has power and she was kind enough to let us stay here tonight... Nora was getting fussy.

Updates and photos when I can get power at home.

The exterminators came out today, represented by a contrite, white-haired man with a be-casted broken ankle using a walker (because of his build and age, perhaps crutches were not an option), who has had a recent spate of rough-ish luck (wife needed heart surgery, but the operation went well, and she is out of the ICU as of a day ago).

I brought him down some of the critters I'd "saved" on our bathroom floor to keep him from having to hike upstairs. After much examination, he wasn't sure if we had ourselves termites or ants, because although he thought the bodies were termite-like, the wings were far too short. I offered to fetch him some more samples on tape and paper, and he accepted. When I came back downstairs, he had decided.

What I thought were "swarmers" are actually "breeder" Pharoah ants. The good news is that this type of ant is easy to control, and the breeders of the species don't bite. The bad news is that they are breeders. (They are SO into breeding that they don't even care about food or water.)

He will come back to spray the side of our home they probably entered on, and he left behind a spray and some traps that he said work really well. Blobby-daddy will be arriving home a few hours earlier than expected, so he will take care of that.

I will go clean up the danged mess I made when I berzerked on the bugs. Camila will be very pleased.

EWWWWbles. Last night, I found a whole scad of winged grossibles in the master bathroom. Apparently, when we have heavy rain, these subset of the termite population seek dry shelter. I'm supposed to be reassured that these aren't the termites that actually eat wood. Regardless, they do crawl around and give me the willies.

Cammie won't eat them, even if they are juicy and, despite their wings, prefer to run around on the ground. Silly cat.

The management company for our townhomes called the exterminators 12 days ago (internets say the presence of these "swarmers" indicates a colony of actual damage-causing termites are trying to breach the perimeter somewhere), but no word. So I called them this morning and said we have them again.

EWWWWWWWW!

I had thought all this was behind us, but nope... more complications this week.

Background: We have(had) AT&T for the home line but we only wanted local service... but they have been charging us for long distance for months (we should have been paying closer attention to the bills). I also have AT&T for my home office line. I had a complete nightmare trying to get my line moved over from my parents place when we first moved in. It actually took over a month for AT&T to get it moved properly and another month for me to fight the charges they were trying to impose on me cause they were idiots... see below for recap of previous posts...

• Appointments completed early?? NAHHHH...
• Phone nightmare..
• Another AT&T screwup
• Service Industry Woes...
• Could it be... another AT&T Screw-up?
• Could the end be in sight?
• WOooooooo HOOOooooo DAaaaaa
• AT&T...
• As Mat Cauthon would say...

Update: We decided to move to Comcast digital phone service as it would give us an overall break on costs since cable, internet and home phone would be under single bill. The install was scheduled for 5-8pm on Monday. Guy arrived around 5:30 and left a little before 8pm. Complications? You bet! Having two lines wired into a single jack threw him for a loop and that took ages to figure out. Finally he got it working so but I lost the ability to pick up both phone lines on my office phone and the doorbell, which runs through the home line, no longer works. No huge deal on either one. I saw that the digital phone box thing could deal with two lines and I tried to schedule to get my office line on same box (saving HP money) but the work order had not been closed so could not do that... yet. When we were sitting down to relax a little before I went to class last night we started to see that channels we had no longer worked. I called them and the guy I dealt with was an idiot. He managed to completely turn off all our cable boxes for over twenty minutes. It took me calling back and getting someone else to help, and finally we had everything working again.

WHY oh why can these things just not be easy for once????

I get home from my trip to Tallahassee for work last night. The cab drops me off outside just before 9pm, and as soon as I get out of the cab with my bags, the first thing I see is Sherri and Julia (you may remember Julia as one of our flowergirls at the wedding... if you made it to the wedding that is!). Sherri shouts out 'Wooo our Mr Mike is home!' It was very nice to be greeted home that way.

Anyway, Angel had been working out with them and had just gone home, but instead of using the gate into the patio area, she had taken the long way. Reason? Well, it seems that a small salamander had been climbing the gate the other day and somehow his two left feet had been squashed in the gate. And I mean completely crushed. Poor guy (or girl... not sure) had been there for two days but was still alive and alert. Angel had not wanted to go near him as all three of the girls were very upset about it, and could not bring themselves to do anything. Angel said 'If you cut him off he will bleed out' but I still was dispatched to do something.

That something ended up being a delicate surgical operation using my leatherman to scrape his crushed appendages off the gate without killing the poor fellow. He (or she) was a little live wire after one had been freed, but with the use of an old boarding pass I managed to pry him/her off and I put him/her (would be easier to use It I guess, oh well) under the bushes inside our patio area. Good news is that he/she/it was able to hobble away, so I hope it does ok!

Ok, you may wonder what the photo has to do with that story. Well to be honest... nothing. I just heard the fire trucks approach earlier (turns out there were 6 or 7 of them) and I went up to take a photo. Turns out the Antiques place at the corner is on fire... Looks like an electrical fire!

... and in with the new... furniture layout that is.

I had been thinking abour rearranging the office for a while, and Angel had also suggested it. Well, yesterday late afternoon and evening that is exactly what I did. Cleaned the office, and the closet, moved all the DVD shelving into the closet (and the DVD's into my shoe closet) then rearranged the furniture! Below are the before and after pics! Does not really show it perfectly, but there is a lot more room in the room now!

BEFORE		AFTER

NOOOOO... IT IS SLY GREHAN!!!

So, the compressor in our fridge thinks it is a drum set, and a bad one, with no rhythm at all... basically it makes clunking noises on an irregular basis. Home warranty sent one company out to check it out and the guy cleaned it, but that did not help, so they sent out a second company (without telling me they were going to) for a second opinion. After me telling them repeatedly that someone had already come out I found out that they were coming for a second opinion.

Anway, the idiots at the second company (Gulf Coast Service Center) have completely screwed my name up. Instead of either Mike Geehan or Angelique Lee Siy they combined the two, misspelling everything to come up with the fictional SLY GREHAN, Bane of Fridges up and down the Gulf Coast!

Oh and they can't get their shit in order and tell me a correct day. On Friday it is Tuesday and today it is Wednesday... let us see what tomorrow will bring!

Ok, so not your usual combination, but keep reading and it should make more sense!!

Apart from playing golf this weekend, and struggling with the home warranty people about our Air Conditioning (upstairs unit is not working, and so we cannot even sleep in our own bed!) we surprised my mum by my brother flying in for the weekend. Angel picked him up from the airport as I was out at golf, and then we went over to surprise my mum, then take her out to dinner. On Sunday Angel and I hosted both sets of parents and my brother and made a good ol' fry up. Seems to have gone down well as there was next to no food left, and what was left was nearly all taken by Kieran as a snack (but I think that was just a sausage that was left).

I then unpacked then repacked my bags as I am back down in Mexico this week. Flight was delayed by over an hour and a half but we still managed to get to the hotel, change (or at least I changed) and then we all headed to the site. Upon returning to the hotel we went round the corner to the Hard Rock Cafe (sure not your authentic Mexican Cuisine, but I wanted a burger, nothing else!). Richard ordered a house salad with Shrimp and a side order of Onion Rings. What he got was a house salad with the shrimp on the side and with an onion sliced into rings (or at least part of an onion... you know, the setup they tend to put on burgers?!?). He said 'No, I ordered fried onion rings, the appetizer!'. The waiter then went away and came back with more onion, sliced the same way, but fried! God the cooks must have been wondering what type of fool they had in there tonight!