bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

One Book Too Many?

The Texas Board of Education is run by crazy right wingers.  I get that.  But in reading articles like this one about the latest in Texas wingnuttery there’s always some paragraph that essentially says, “As goes Texas, so goes the nation”:

The standards, which also will be used to develop state tests, are used by textbook publishers who develop materials nationwide. Texas is one of the nation’s largest textbook markets.

I get that Texas is a fatass market, but so what.  I guess it’s more profitable for publishers to publish only one variation of a textbook, but we’re talking about books, not nuclear reactors.  States that don’t jibe with Texas’ wingnuttery (I wish mine was one of them) should simply demand publishers come out with saner versions of textbooks.  Publishers publish books.  That’s all they do.  What’s one more damn book?  College textbook publishers seem plenty lucrative and you don’t see (The) Ohio State University dictating which textbooks all other colleges have to use.  Of course states not following Texas’ lead would be playing right into that demon spawn Obama’s grand plan …

A Few Days In Texas

Texas Wilds

Talked to my sister yesterday (first time in probably a year).  She lives in nowhere, NE Texas.  Way, way out–probably not a zoning law for hundreds if not thousands of miles.  Anyway, she told me a fine story:

Three years ago a pedophile in the area freed his half dozen or so lions shortly before he reported to prison [I assume he was a proprietor of one of those private wildlife parks  popular in Texas--some even allow hunting]. I think it was like 3 lionesses, 3-4 lions.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  A friend of my sister was disturbed by an outside cat of hers who frantically wanted to get into the house.  She went to the front door to tell the cat she was crazy and couldn’t come in.  But she was struck by the cat’s mania and when she stepped outside she saw a lion walk out from behind her pick-up.  The pick-up is apparently quite big and raised high off the ground, and the lion stood above the truck bed.  She ran inside to get a pellet gun (b/c it was the only gun she had and no, she didn’t let the outside cat in).  By the time she got back outside the lion had taken off running.  She also used to have 30+ chickens and now has only has 7.

Local police and animal control officials declined her pleas to track down the lion.  They told her to shoot it herself.

Stealing Home (Again)

I have a variation of the poster above on our office wall (btw, the copyright belongs to Rachel Robinson).  My daughter gave it to me as an xmas present last year, since she knows I’m into photography–and it’s such a great picture.  But in the months I’ve had this poster hanging on the wall I’ve come to infuse it with metaphorical meaning.  We are Jackie Robinson.  Not JACKIE ROBINSON, just Jackie Robinson the ballplayer stealing home when that picture was taken.

It’s all on the up-and-up, though, just like with Jackie.  Maybe a little ballsy, plenty lucky, but all between the lines.  There’s no rule against stealing home.

We prepped for our big moment by taking a first time home buyer’s class at the Preservation Resource Center taught by James Perry, now a candidate for Mayor of New Orleans.   (Yes, I wholeheartedly support his candidacy).  The class met for a couple Saturdays, if I remember correctly, and we ate it up.  We’d been sharing an apartment with my wife’s mother for the past 7 years.  We craved having our own home, and we didn’t want to mess with apartments anymore.  I became obsessed with our pursuit of a hosue.  I scoured online listings, cruised neighborhoods at all hours (and in different weather conditions, if it occurred to me–you know, does the water collect? do people hang out on the corner?).  I called our agent several times a day–every day–on her cell phone.  She was kind of ruthless, too, so she only encouraged me.

I distinctly recall slowly rolling down Marigny Street in Gentilly, my then-8-year-old daughter writing in a little notepad addresses and phone numbers I called out, eventually telling me she was tired of writing.

We bought our house in May 2005 with nothing down.  A fixed rate loan with a non-predatory lender.  We were extremely fortunate to find our house–a block and a half from St. Charles Ave., a block and a half from secondline and Mardi Gras Indian parades, but also a few blocks away from some pretty murderous streets.  We hadn’t looked at any other houses in Central City.  We’d been looking almost exclusively in Gentilly.  Every single house we looked at in Gentilly flooded, including a house on Pauger Street we had under contract.

And how we loved that house.  Four bedrooms, a big backyard, an attached garage.  Walking distance to the college G taught at.  We were going fix it up (in our alternative reality, the rehab work probably would have been completed just in time for the city to flood).  New hardwood floors, a modernized kitchen, the whole deal.  But the owner flaked and tried to jack the price after we already had it under contract, breaking the contract, and after a contentious negotiation we dropped out, feeling depressed, like we’d never be able to find that kind of house again given our mortgage limit.

The first Sunday of Jazz Fest in 2005 we toured a Central City house that was coming on the market the next day, when there would be an open house.  Barbara, our agent, had tipped us.  We made a bid on the house that night, which was accepted, before the open house ever opened.  Ruthless.

So that’s how we stole our house the first time.

The second time was a few months later when the federal levees failed.  Eighty percent of the city flooded, including all those houses we walked through in the preceding months, many way out of our range, stunning homes that I would shake my head over.  All devastated.  My wife’s mother owned one of those homes.  She’d bought her house on Elysian Fields a few months after us.  I’d just finished moving the last of her things from the apartment to her new house (after painting most of the house’s interior).  She spent three nights in it before it flooded.  She spent the next five days at Charity Hospital, where she worked, waiting to be evacuated.  As far as my mother-in-law goes, things are looking up for her.  As Biden would say, literally:

The water stopped a few blocks from our house.  As far as I could tell we didn’t lose a single shingle.  The crappy aluminum shed in the backyard stood as before.  The neighbor’s dilapidated house must’ve been held together by all the vines that had entombed a back-of-the-house addition gone bad.  In a city where “lucky” came to be defined as “We were lucky, we only took on a few inches of water” or “A tree in the backyard fell on the house and left a hole in the roof and in the dining room, but we were lucky,” we were the luckiest of the lucky.

Fast forward 4 years.  The country’s economy is in a shambles following the popping of the real estate bubble and rampant lunacy in the banking industry.  Foreclosures are endemic in some areas.  Lots of trash talk about folks who took out loans they had no business taking out.  No money down?  The height of irresponsibility!

We had our house appraised last month.  Its value has jumped about 50% in 4 years.  We signed our refi papers yesterday, also securing a payout to zero out our credit cards.

Safe!

What We Do When In Limbo: Mess With Texas

We’ve been staying at my brother’s and wife’s home in Willis, TX since arriving early Sunday evening. The three of us and our three cats. The youngest cat settled down next to The Girl in the back seat with relative ease, while the oldest cat emptied her bowels the first hour and intermittently groaned, and the other old cat drooled on my lap when he wasn’t drooling on GB’s lap. Cat hair floated around the car like we were on some game show where we had to grab as much of the swirling cat hair around us for a free trip to …

What do we do when we evacuate to Willis, TX? Today I bought a couple t-shirts, a pair of shoes, socks, and underwear. GB bought pants and underwear. The Girl got a nightgown, a pair of shoes, and socks. The bookstore where we used to go isn’t there anymore. We ate Subway for lunch. Visited my father in Huntsville. He gave us a tour of town, including a drive-by the gigantic prison complex where Texas inmates are put to death. We also visited an historical recreation of Sam Houston’s home. Houston was out of step with the rest of Southern senators and voted in support of the Missouri Compromise and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. “His refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy led to his ouster as governor [of Texas] in March 1861.” His slave’s name was Joshua.

We complain about the traffic. We complain about a subdivision called “The French Quarter,” a gated community a mile away on Lake Conroe, about 50 miles north of Houston. We enjoy reading the latest about John McCain’s VP selection. In fact, at the dinner table GB and I were laughing about Sarah Palin’s answer to a question about the Pledge of Allegiance [h/t YRHT]. The Girl asked what we were laughing about. I told her that when Palin was asked if she was offended by the words “under god” in the Pledge she said absolutely not, that if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it was good enough for her. Before I could explain that the words “under god” were inserted in 1954, 11-year-old The Girl said, “The founding fathers didn’t say that …” and proceeded to explain that she doesn’t say the words “under god” when she recites the Pledge because she doesn’t believe them.

So we complain about not being able to go home. We complain about the guy who stole our camping stove out of our crappy backyard shed, because if we had that camp stove we may have elected to stay and we’d be home now. We listen to the Hot 8.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll go see the Houston Zoo’s stunning meerkat exhibit. Here’s what I think Houston’s good for: shopping (esp. Ikea), the Pepper Tree vegan restaurant, museums/etc., and meerkats.

We’re going back Thursday regardless. We’ll run barriers, do it guerilla-style, whatever, but we’re getting the hellouttahere. Friday morning we start to pick-up–whatever we may have to pick-up.

July 4th in Texas