The Politics of Ike

hello. bored silly here. and your name is?

dealing with an ever sporadic wireless internet connection at the hotel. i am now wondering if i can find a reliable connection that i can buy a month of. while i first thought i'd need to require that it be national / regional so that i could still use it at home for the remainder of the month, but now i'll gladly buy a month just for the rest of my time here. i've no clue where to look, tho. the sporadic an unreliable connection at the hotel just pisses me off and leaves me in a bad mood. i do not want to continue the hassle.

ike stories in the houston chronicle are pretty lame. they rely far too much on info to come to them. of course, coverage of my east side is little to none. so most of it is news i can't use.

it has been an endless source of depressing news, though. seems that under deregulation (like our utilities), customers are responsible for repairs so our bills will be increasing for years to come. and then there is the news that centerpoint has my area down for power restoration by thursday 9/25. i would be mildly excited except for the fact that it is not a guarantee. if there's a line break affecting me and 6 of my neighbors, well we don't get restored until they work on restoration affecting that few folks. this is what i spend a lot of time not thinking about because doing so just angers me.

things have been getting slowly tougher and tougher, mentally. i am nearing the point of needing to pay bills again, and some of them are in my desktop computer, which hooks up normally to the internet via cable and router at home. the computer is here with me, but there is no cable internet, only wireless. so bill-paying is going to be hit and miss this month until i get all of them written down on old-fashioned paper. this is one more reason to get started on my Rolodex of Life project...one no-tech place for all the important info.

so the politics of power turns out to be electricity, not oil. down here, anyway. i am finding so few reasons to continue to be here lately. so many reasons to move away. of course we can't until retirement. sucks balls. i read that centerpoint made 9.6 billion in 2007 and netted 1.5 billion. we are all seeing first hand down here the effects of not investing in infrastructure on centerpoint's part, and now those numbers show they can afford it. it's all for the shareholder now. no wonder businesses and governments go south. no re-investment. shareholders need to suck it up and be quiet for a while. and companies need leaders who can tell them to sit quiety.

well, glad to get that out. thanks for listening to my hissy rant.