Update on the latest in the power saga:
No one from Entergy showed up this morning, so Grandpère got on the phone to wherever the customer service call center is located, most certainly not around here, to ask when they were coming to finish. In response to the call, the same serviceman whom I chewed out finally showed up. It seems that Entergy thought we were proceeding immediately to trench and lay the pipe to pass the line through. They were going to leave the transformer (which does not power our whole house) and not repair the line.
We do not even have an estimate on the price of laying the pipe, nor any idea when the work might be done. The cost may run into the thousands. We want the line repaired, even if the repair will only last a few months, until we work out how and when to have the pipe laid. Good thing we cleared that up. It could be weeks or months before that job is done. The serviceman left, but he said they will return. We shall see.
Thanks to Tobias in the comments for the title to this post.
UPDATE: The line is repaired, and we are once again empowered.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Good For The Night, I Hope
We have power of sorts. If we conserve our use of power, we seem to do all right. Tomorrow (We hope!) the power company will try to find the bad spot in the line and do a temporary repair, and sometime soon, we will have to hire an electrician to trench, lay down a pipe, and the power company will run a whole new line through it.
Thank you all for your concern, and thank you for putting up with Mrs. Grinch today.
Thank you all for your concern, and thank you for putting up with Mrs. Grinch today.
Mean Mimi
So. I chewed out one of the servicemen who are working on restoring our power. He was giving me a load of BS. Entergy has a bad reputation for not maintaining their equipment and for ill-serving their customers. A company with a reputation like that coaches their employees from the top to the bottom how to shift responsibility. When I told the serviceman that our electrician said that the transformer was not big enough to power our house, he asked the name of the electrician and then smiled and shook his head when I told him the name. He's one of the best in town. I suspect that the Entergy folks don't like him because he calls them on their crap. When I proceeded to tell him what my microwave was doing, he said something was probably wrong with the microwave. I said, "Wait! It's my stove, my TV, the lights, and the heating system, too. Are they all faulty?" That was no.2 load of BS buck-passing, so I let him have it. When I was done, I said, "Whatever it takes, I want to be back in business. We are old, and we are cold."
He backtracked and said he didn't say anything about the electrician, so I shouldn't quote him. Nothing to quote, is there? But a smile and a shake of the head is a message, isn't it? Then he said that he really didn't say that my microwave was the problem. Whatever. I apologized to him later and said that I really wanted to chew out the CEO of the company. Still, he BSed me twice, and that pissed me off.
GP just popped in to tell me that the servicemen found another problem at the box, that something was overheated and melting. Why didn't they find that earlier? Our power is completely off now, and our neighbor, who cut our line, is without power while they work on it. That's a little sweet justice. He runs a business out of his house, which he's not supposed to do, so I suppose that smarts a little. Now you see what I'm really like. Chewing out the working people and Schadenfreude all the way.
He backtracked and said he didn't say anything about the electrician, so I shouldn't quote him. Nothing to quote, is there? But a smile and a shake of the head is a message, isn't it? Then he said that he really didn't say that my microwave was the problem. Whatever. I apologized to him later and said that I really wanted to chew out the CEO of the company. Still, he BSed me twice, and that pissed me off.
GP just popped in to tell me that the servicemen found another problem at the box, that something was overheated and melting. Why didn't they find that earlier? Our power is completely off now, and our neighbor, who cut our line, is without power while they work on it. That's a little sweet justice. He runs a business out of his house, which he's not supposed to do, so I suppose that smarts a little. Now you see what I'm really like. Chewing out the working people and Schadenfreude all the way.
Snow And No Dim Power,
This morning I woke up to face an angry Grandpère telling me that the power was off and on, and that when it was on, we were in brownout mode. None of the neighbors had the problem, so we knew that it was our damaged main electric line, which our neighbor cut many years ago, that had sprung a leak for the fourth or fifth time.
It is cold, and earlier this morning, it was snowing. I'm not kidding. Down here in south Louisiana, it was snowing. The snow has now turned to rain.
We thought we were back in business with our own personal generator, but we are on dim power. The stove and the microwave don't work. We don't know if the heat works or not. We'll know it doesn't, if the house gets cold.
That's the news from our house.
It is cold, and earlier this morning, it was snowing. I'm not kidding. Down here in south Louisiana, it was snowing. The snow has now turned to rain.
We thought we were back in business with our own personal generator, but we are on dim power. The stove and the microwave don't work. We don't know if the heat works or not. We'll know it doesn't, if the house gets cold.
That's the news from our house.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The Lunatics Are Outside The Fence
I was walking past the mental hospital the other day, and all the patients were shouting,
"13...13....13...13."
The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and looked through to see what was going on.
Someone poked me in the eye with a stick.
Then they all started shouting. "14...14...14...14....".
Sick, sick, sick. And I laughed and laughed.
From crazy Doug.
"13...13....13...13."
The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and looked through to see what was going on.
Someone poked me in the eye with a stick.
Then they all started shouting. "14...14...14...14....".
Sick, sick, sick. And I laughed and laughed.
From crazy Doug.
Stuff You Never Wanted To Know About Aging
Click on the pictures to enlarge.
From Ann, courtesy of Louie Crew.
Testing For Deep-seated Tendencies
From the Church Times:
CANDIDATES for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church are to undergo psychological screening that will identify “deep-seated homosexual tendencies”, the Vatican has announced,
Gay men thus identified will be deemed unsuitable as seminarians, even if they have no difficulty in remaining celibate, says the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood.
Such screening, it says, would help avoid what the report calls “tragic situations” caused by psychological defects, an undoubted reference to the damaging and costly number of sexual-abuse cases exposed in recent years.
This is such a vicious load of crap, that I'm left outraged and nearly speechless, but not completely. Since the document is not yet fully translated into English, should we give the Vatican the benefit of doubt that the "tragic situations" do not refer to child abuse by gay priests, but rather to CHILD ABUSE BY PRIESTS WHO HAVE DEEP-SEATED TENDENCIES TO ABUSE CHILDREN?
Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, who presented the report, is reported to have described homosexuality as “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound” even for celibate gay men.
More from Cardinal Grocholewski in The Catholic Herald:
Cardinal Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said "The candidate does not necessarily have to practice homosexuality. He can even be without sin. But if he has this deeply seated tendency, he cannot be admitted to priestly ministry precisely because of the nature of the priesthood, in which a spiritual paternity is carried out. Here we are not talking about whether he commits sins, but whether this deeply rooted tendency remains."
He added: "It's not simply a question of observing celibacy as such. In this case, it would be a heterosexual tendency, a normal tendency.
"In a certain sense, when we ask why Christ reserved the priesthood to men, we speak of this spiritual paternity, and maintain that homosexuality is a type of deviation, a type of irregularity, as explained in two documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
"Therefore it is a type of wound in the exercise of the priesthood, in forming relations with others. And precisely for this reason we say that something isn't right in the psyche of such a man. We don't simply talk about the ability to abstain from these kinds of relations."
There is so much wrong with Cardinal Groch's statement, that I don't know where to begin. His words are cruel, insulting, and unpastoral in the extreme. What about his responsibility to exercise "spiritual paternity" for the gay men in his church?
Thus, a priest is not capable of "spiritual paternity" unless he is robustly heterosexual, a true manly man. Of course, the idea of Jesus as exercising "spiritual paternity" doesn't seem quite trinitarian to me. I don't know about you, but I've always thought of Jesus as more of a brother than a father.
In the light of recent history, will the candidates be tested for deep-seated tendencies to child abuse? Why the focus on homosexuality? In the US church, which is already suffering from a severe shortage of priests, and where the estimates of the percentage of gay priests range from 10% to 40%, the result will be a large drop in the numbers of candidates considered suitable for seminary and, I would think, a large drop in the numbers of men who present themselves as candidates.
It seems to me that "something isn't right in the psyche of such a man" as Cardinal Groch and the men in the Vatican who make these decisions. Of course, I could be wrong.
Now, I'll stop, because I seem to be babbling.
One more thing. What about shallow-seated homosexual tendencies?
H/T to Lapin.
CANDIDATES for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church are to undergo psychological screening that will identify “deep-seated homosexual tendencies”, the Vatican has announced,
Gay men thus identified will be deemed unsuitable as seminarians, even if they have no difficulty in remaining celibate, says the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood.
Such screening, it says, would help avoid what the report calls “tragic situations” caused by psychological defects, an undoubted reference to the damaging and costly number of sexual-abuse cases exposed in recent years.
This is such a vicious load of crap, that I'm left outraged and nearly speechless, but not completely. Since the document is not yet fully translated into English, should we give the Vatican the benefit of doubt that the "tragic situations" do not refer to child abuse by gay priests, but rather to CHILD ABUSE BY PRIESTS WHO HAVE DEEP-SEATED TENDENCIES TO ABUSE CHILDREN?
Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, who presented the report, is reported to have described homosexuality as “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound” even for celibate gay men.
More from Cardinal Grocholewski in The Catholic Herald:
Cardinal Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, said "The candidate does not necessarily have to practice homosexuality. He can even be without sin. But if he has this deeply seated tendency, he cannot be admitted to priestly ministry precisely because of the nature of the priesthood, in which a spiritual paternity is carried out. Here we are not talking about whether he commits sins, but whether this deeply rooted tendency remains."
He added: "It's not simply a question of observing celibacy as such. In this case, it would be a heterosexual tendency, a normal tendency.
"In a certain sense, when we ask why Christ reserved the priesthood to men, we speak of this spiritual paternity, and maintain that homosexuality is a type of deviation, a type of irregularity, as explained in two documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
"Therefore it is a type of wound in the exercise of the priesthood, in forming relations with others. And precisely for this reason we say that something isn't right in the psyche of such a man. We don't simply talk about the ability to abstain from these kinds of relations."
There is so much wrong with Cardinal Groch's statement, that I don't know where to begin. His words are cruel, insulting, and unpastoral in the extreme. What about his responsibility to exercise "spiritual paternity" for the gay men in his church?
Thus, a priest is not capable of "spiritual paternity" unless he is robustly heterosexual, a true manly man. Of course, the idea of Jesus as exercising "spiritual paternity" doesn't seem quite trinitarian to me. I don't know about you, but I've always thought of Jesus as more of a brother than a father.
In the light of recent history, will the candidates be tested for deep-seated tendencies to child abuse? Why the focus on homosexuality? In the US church, which is already suffering from a severe shortage of priests, and where the estimates of the percentage of gay priests range from 10% to 40%, the result will be a large drop in the numbers of candidates considered suitable for seminary and, I would think, a large drop in the numbers of men who present themselves as candidates.
It seems to me that "something isn't right in the psyche of such a man" as Cardinal Groch and the men in the Vatican who make these decisions. Of course, I could be wrong.
Now, I'll stop, because I seem to be babbling.
One more thing. What about shallow-seated homosexual tendencies?
H/T to Lapin.
RUN! RUN!
To save the economy - in 2009 the government will start deporting all of the weird people.
I started crying when I thought of you.
Run, my friend, RUN !!!!
What can I say....someone sent it to me! I'm not going alone.
From my dear friend and admirer, Doug.
I started crying when I thought of you.
Run, my friend, RUN !!!!
What can I say....someone sent it to me! I'm not going alone.
From my dear friend and admirer, Doug.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Obscene
From Bloomberg:
American International Group Inc., the insurer whose bonuses and perks are under fire from U.S. lawmakers, offered cash awards to another 38 executives in a retention program with payments of as much as $4 million.
The incentives range from $92,500 to $4 million for employees earning salaries between $160,000 and $1 million, Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy said in a letter dated Dec. 5 to Representative Elijah Cummings. The New York-based insurer had previously disclosed that 130 managers would get the awards and that one executive would get $3 million.
“I remain concerned, as do many American taxpayers, that these retention payments are simply bonuses by another name,” Cummings said in letter responding to Liddy.
I remain concerned, too. That's our money. When is a bonus not a bonus, but simply a retention payment? In this job market, are the managers threatening to quit?
American International Group Inc., the insurer whose bonuses and perks are under fire from U.S. lawmakers, offered cash awards to another 38 executives in a retention program with payments of as much as $4 million.
The incentives range from $92,500 to $4 million for employees earning salaries between $160,000 and $1 million, Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy said in a letter dated Dec. 5 to Representative Elijah Cummings. The New York-based insurer had previously disclosed that 130 managers would get the awards and that one executive would get $3 million.
“I remain concerned, as do many American taxpayers, that these retention payments are simply bonuses by another name,” Cummings said in letter responding to Liddy.
I remain concerned, too. That's our money. When is a bonus not a bonus, but simply a retention payment? In this job market, are the managers threatening to quit?
Blagojevich - Corruption On A Grand Scale
From MSNBC:
CHICAGO - Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich embarked on a "corruption crime spree" and tried to benefit from his ability to appoint President-elect Barack Obama's replacement in the U.S. Senate, federal officials said Tuesday.
At a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called it a sad day for the citizens of Illinois and alleged that the governor tried to "auction off" the Senate seat "to the highest bidder."
He said the alleged behavior "would make (Abe) Lincoln roll over in his grave."
Blagojevich had been arrested hours earlier and was released later in the day after posting a $4,500 bond.
That seems a small bond, but I suppose he's not violent and not likely to flee. He sounds a bit nuts to me. His hairstyle should have been a dead giveaway that all was not well. He was not invited to speak at the Democratic Convention, so it seems that many knew that he was someone to avoid.
Corruption on a scale grand enough to arouse deep disgust.
CHICAGO - Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich embarked on a "corruption crime spree" and tried to benefit from his ability to appoint President-elect Barack Obama's replacement in the U.S. Senate, federal officials said Tuesday.
At a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called it a sad day for the citizens of Illinois and alleged that the governor tried to "auction off" the Senate seat "to the highest bidder."
He said the alleged behavior "would make (Abe) Lincoln roll over in his grave."
Blagojevich had been arrested hours earlier and was released later in the day after posting a $4,500 bond.
That seems a small bond, but I suppose he's not violent and not likely to flee. He sounds a bit nuts to me. His hairstyle should have been a dead giveaway that all was not well. He was not invited to speak at the Democratic Convention, so it seems that many knew that he was someone to avoid.
Corruption on a scale grand enough to arouse deep disgust.
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