A Serpent's Story

Welcome, oh new followers, to Orangehouse, may your time continue to be wasted. Dan and Aunt Peepee, and Nicole, peace and amusement to you. Since I have added the "Followers" feature to the blog, there has been a slow and steady stream of tiny new icons appearing as if by magic, and so it nearly is. I am cyber Micky Mouse wielding the Google magician's hat and reading from his esoteric book of blogging secrets. I neither know nor care how it works. Let's hope I don't unleash an proverbial army of walking brooms, or if I do, that they will at least clean my garage.

I have several thoughts tonight. I will set them apart with bold type for your ease of viewing and to erect mental delineations with which to help you digest my otherwise unintelligible communications. (If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm in a weird mood tonight.)

Stories from Houston

Mom stayed with us for twelve days after her Houston house lost power in Hurricane Ike. She and her three cats temporarily moved into the boys room while they "camped" in sleeping bags in the living room. It was a pleasant and easy visit, thanks Mom. She heard from both a neighbor and my stepmother on Thursday: the power was finally back on! So today she packed up and went home. When she got home everything was fine, except for one strange visitor.

When I was with her the day before Ike made landfall, we secured a supply of emergency water by filling up the bathtub and lots of pots and pans. When she got home, there was a snake in the bathtub, swimming around, presumably waiting for a stray water buffalo to get too close to the edge. I have illustrated this for those of you with a lack of imagination. I may have taken a few artistic liberties.

I don't know how it got there. Could it have come up from the drain? This seems unlikely, especially since there was a rubber stopper over the drain. Could it have been in the house and found the bathtub in an attempt to find moisture or to wash its hands? This too seems unlikely. I suspect telekinesis was involved, but I can't prove it just yet.

So Mom got one of those arm extenders for short people to get cans of chili-mac off of the top shelf. She put on a face shield in case it was a poison spitting viper and then picked it up and took it out to the storm drain where it began a new life in the sewers of Houston feeding off of raw humidity.

Two blocks away is my father's house. He and my stepmother also left Houston to stay with my brother Chris and his family out in the Texas hill country - a beautiful part of the world, by the way. They received a scary call from a neighbor that someone had tried to break into their house. So they drove home earlier this week, even though there was still no electricity. I have not been able to reach them since I got their message, telling me of the situation. When I call their cell, service is still unavailable. And when I call the land line, something else that I can't remember happens. I am considering smoke signals.

Stories From The Boys
In the evenings, the boys and I have a prayer routine. I ask them what they are thankful for this day, and they spend a short while praying and telling God thanks for the little blessings of their days. It's really quite cute and can offer insight into their minds that I often find priceless. Tonight, Jono prayed something like this: "Dear Lord, thank you that Gahma had a snake in her bathtub, even though it wasn't poisonous, and she probably was glad it wasn't poisonous, but it was cool anyway. Amen." There you go.

CocoTitans

Walter and Romulo sit together in the lab and determine the future of global cocotech. West meets East. Ties are required.



You may be wondering how I have posted a photograph, not a dumb sketch. It's on account of how I learned how to take pictures with my phone and email them to myself. I have nothing else to say about this.

Journey Into New Media

You may have noticed that I have not posted any photographs in a while. I seem to have lost the cable that connects my camera to the computer. I tried jamming the SD memory card into my USB port, but it didn't seem to work.

So while I continue to look for it, I have decided to illustrate my posts with Microsoft Paint.


Here's me dreaming of how nice it would be to find my camera's download cable.

What do you think? Should I start illustrating instead of posting photographs?

And by the way, who are you Fogghorn? You are a mystery to me. Do I know you?

Guests for our Engineers with a Mission Meeting

Tonight at the engineering building we had our second meeting of the year for the student organization that I sponsor, Engineers with a Mission. We had over 40 students and a hand full of "old people" like yours truly. We had a guest speaker all the way from Indonesia, which is like, really far away. His name was Romulo Arancon, and he is the Executive Director of the Asian And Pacific Coconut Community. No kidding.

The APCC is a consortium of 15 nations, from India to Papua New Guinea to Vanuatu, that represents the interests of coconut farmers, especially the small farmer that has perhaps 100 coconut trees on a couple of acres. And just like the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Romulo told us of lots and lots of commercial uses for coconut-based products. Coconut meat (copra) can be used as food or animal feed, of course, and coconut oil can be made into biodiesel, and the husks can be woven into mats and sold as erosion preventing devices, and the shells can be pressed into particle boards and roofing tiles. And this is just the tip of the cocotech iceberg, baby.

Also in the audience was one of the main supporters of our Honduras project this summer. I won't use his name without permission. At any rate, it was great to meet him face-to-face for the first time, and for him to get a chance to meet some of the students he impacted directly with his financial gift. Jonathan, Ryan, and Lisa all got to say hello, and he knew us all by name from, get this, reading this blog!

Followers, a New Gadget

I have added a new thingy to my blog, a tool called "Followers". Congratulations to Mighty Bob (not her real name!) for being the first to sign up. When you sign up, you will receive a steak dinner, a copy of my new book, and a barrage of unsolicited emails for life. What a deal.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for my infrequent blogging as of late. While we were in Honduras I was posting several times per week with stories that were meant to inform and entertain, and with photos that were meant to express the world as I was seeing it. Since I have been back, the boys and I are reinvolved in Boy Scouts, The M and I are reinvolved in leading a small group associated with our church, the students and I are reinvolved in learning engineering, and some of us are trying hard to launch a company to franchise village-level energy micro-businesses. And frankly, I have been fighting a little depression.

I know that exercise helps with my depression. When I lift weights or ride my bike or even walk, I tend to feel better. But apparently, once a month is not frequent enough. I seem to let all those other things take priority, because frankly, they are more fun and/or interesting. If only I had access to a nice gym to work out in - oh wait, I do, and it's free. If only it were located at the university so I didn't have to go far out of my way to exercise - oh wait, it is. Maybe I can get a graduate student to do it for me...