No hurricane, but without water anyway

We’ve been without water at home since Monday morning (4 days). No – we weren’t hit by hurricane Katrina – we just have something blocking the line from the cistern to the house – or the pump has crapped out. Since we live out in the country and there aren’t very many people around who work on this kind of thing any more in the area, we’ve just had to make due until someone can come out. Today, hopefully, the guys who can fix it can actually figure out what it wrong. Steve’s at home to help.

There is an inherent problem with the set up…we have no way to blow blockages out of the line, no way to drain the cistern, now ay to replace the pump without calling someone to come out to our place and fix it. I don’t like that. We need to come up with a more self-sufficient way of dealing with these problems. What’s the point of living somewhere like this if you can’t easily fix things yourself? Well..there is more to it than that, but I think it is clear we need to improve our ability to deal with these kinds of problems on our own. We also need to make sure this stuff will work if the electricity is out. We need solar-powered pumps and we don’t at the moment.

So it is kind of weird to not be able to take a shower at home. I’ve been able to stop by Todd & Amy’s or my dad’s place before I go home to grab a quick shower. It is actually kind of nice because it gives me a reason to stop by and chat for a little while. I don’t do that enough.

This hurricane has really fucked things up. I am really surprised how out of control things are in New Orleans. This is unlike any post-hurricane period I’ve ever seen. I mean if it had simply blown in and the flooding hadn’t occurred it might be different, but I have been really shocked to read how people are stranded with dead bodies nearby. I am also surprised that cholera and typhoid have not broken out yet because of that.

This web article was interesting to read about a Web firm in downtown New Orleans that is still hunkered down trying to keep their servers running.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9164073/

The manager’s blog is even more interesting, though because they have tons of photos of what is going on. Incidentally, they have photos of the only white people I’ve seen in footage of New Orleans in days. http://mgno.com/

I wonder if the media are just not showing white people and just being typical. I wonder if there are white people looting too if they just aren’t showing it.

They have a somewhat different take on who the government types are dealing with the situation there, too which is apparently pretty awful. Sounds really bad.

I hope they can get this under control. I wish they’d just have sent the military in from the beginning to keep everything under control. Or do you think the fact that there weren’t a high number of white people stranded in the city that they considered it important? Am I being too critical?

Anyway – I will say that I think if we didn’t have the majority of out military – ESPECIALLY the National Guard (who is supposed to be at home to handle disasters like this) – in Iraq we’d have been able to keep it under control. But that is just my opinion.