Strange things people do: have a few (lot?) vodka tonics and have a philosophical conversation with a 4 year old.
When trying to explain to Nicholas (4, see below) that Mother Nature is also the ocean, and not just the forest….he said something very profound: “Do you know what’s not nature? Nature trails!”
I’ll be damned. The kid was right! Every nature trail I’ve ever been on was cut by man…manufactured to some degree. Especially when I was 4 and “nature trails” were at some school function (outdoor learning center I believe?). It was great. He knew where real nature was. Out at the land his family owns in the country. Where Nature’s nature trails are.
I have to say the 4 year-old’s logic impressed me.
(*note: the next morning I found about 8 slices of lime in my glass….and I only added lime when I made a new drink…so this may have had some affect on how impressed I was!
OK…..so now I’m officially a EVACUEE!!!!
I just got back from my vacation. Every year for close to a decade now my a group of my skydiving friends have rented a beach house in September (I may write later on how to have a killer vacation like this for a great price). Anyway, we rent a beach house with a big group of friends and go spend a full week off of work to have a good time among friends. In years past we have gone to Port Aransas (highly recommended by the way), but for the last two years we have gone to Galveston. We have anywhere from 7or 8 to as many as 15 or twenty people during the week.
This time we only had 7 people at a great house right on the beach. We ate like kings, drank like fish, and in general had a great time. I’m sad to say that our trip was cut short when some brat named Rita decided she wanted to ruin my vacation and take a swim in the Gulf! Sigh.
Poor me!!!! I only got to spend 5 days instead of 8 on the beach with good friends!
Poor me, I also don’t think I have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting one of those $2000 debit cards from FEMA. 
On a serious note, I have to say that Galveston had their stuff together when it came to how to handle the situation. I don’t know if it’s the fact that the city was wiped off the face of the map with a hurricane in 1910, or because of the Katrina disaster (or a combination of the two) but they were all over this thing like a fat kid on a cupcake. On Monday, before Rita was even a Hurricane east of the Keys, they announced that schools would be out at noon Tuesday, and most business announced they would be closed by Tuesdat afternoon. Once the storm was a hurricane the evacuation schedule was rolled out (Wed’s voluntary, and Thurs mandatory) and taken seriously. The only people we saw out where we were (about 10 miles down the sand bar from Galveston) on Tuesday were home owners coming back to board up their homes and prepare for the strom. Last night it was like a ghost town all around us.
As I left this morning (Wednesday, remember the storm should arrive late Friday), the city was pretty well boarded up. Most stores were closed and covered in plywood. You could see the mandatory evacuation in progress as large groups of busses and ambulances came south on I-10 from Houston to pick people up. Nursing homes, hospitals, etc. were all said to be evacuated today. Per the home owner and leasing company, we had to evacuate today as well. They wanted us out yesterday, but time would not permit.
I will be interested to see if how the evaluation of Galveston juxtaposed to the evacuation of New Orleans is politicized. I’m sure that it will be. But I have to say that from what I saw, the local government and the people of the area were primarily responsible for the early and strong reaction for the storm.
So I guess officially I am an evacuee now.
I think that I am going to post a lot more about this trip, but will leave this post as is for now.
Pics of the trip : Gallery
As I was walking out of the gym yesterday I noticed a large table near the door that had free sample bags of Beef Jerky. Jerky is a snack that I enjoy, so I thought I would grab a bag and try them out. After all, I like to keep my protein intake up after I work out, and Jerky would be a great snack that would serve that purpose well.
So I open the bag up and reach inside. I was surprised at what I found in the bag. It was not jerky in the traditional sense by any means. It was….for lack of a better term… a bag of jerky chips. They looked almost like deep fried pepperoni slices (bag says they are oven roasted by the way). They smelled like jerky, tasted like jerky, but were paper thin and crispy slices of dried cow.
Now don’t get me wrong. The chips didn’t taste bad, but there is just something odd about eating jerky chips. As far as rating their taste, I would say they ranked a 6 out of 10. Jerky is supposed to be thick, and hard to chew. To me, a good strip of jerky is something that you gnaw on and enjoy the flavor of the smoked meat for several moments. It is nothing like the slice of pepperoni on your cold left over pizza.
I would conclude that the chips weren’t exactly bad, they were just weird. I wouldn’t buy them on purpose and will make sure that I check to make sure I’m getting jerky and not meat chips the next time I pick up jerky at the store.
As you may have noticed, I have started playing with my web page and working on growing it and making it better and better. I am pretty new to all of this and I have a lot to learn, so please be patient with me as the site will be under pretty constant construction for a while. I will try to have a list of all updates on the home page Zlew.new , in the bottom left corner of the tool bar.
I have a million ideas of things that I would like to have the page do, and at this point I’m not sure what will come to fruition and what will never be. Here are a few things that I’m considering.
Gallery- I’m working with Blake to find a good gallery to post all of the pictures and events on the site instead of just using embedded pics in a html page. This is on the top of my list for things to figure out.
Guest book- I’d like to add a guest book so people can leave comments etc.
I’m thinking about adding sections that I can rant and ramble about things I’m interested in. Maybe a section on fitness, skydiving, photography…. Stuff like that.
Grand Daddy, Pie in the Sky: My ultimate dream would be to have a section of the page that is updated every few days with fun things to check out that are work safe. You know, all of the funny pics, video’s, stories, news, links to WebPages etc. that you can find at various places like www.collegehumor.com. I’d love to have a place where working stiffs like me can go to check out some fun stuff a few times a week and have a relatively work safe page to do it on.
We’ll see how it all turns out. I have a lot of reading and learning to do. A lot of consulting to do with Blake. I’ll try to post and update on the blog more also.
Z