I heard one of those infuriating comments the other day from a Houstonian who had not been to Galveston. “Yeah, our neighborhood was really clobbered by Ike. Why, I’ll bet we lost twenty trees on our street.” Twenty trees. Imagine that. We have block after block with twenty business each that haven’t come back. We have plenty of neighborhoods of a hundred homes with only twenty occupied. Interestingly, most everyone who was missing after Ike has been found or the body recovered. Heck, there are only about twenty left to go, and the cadaver dogs are busy wrapping that up. Yep, things don’t seem so bad here when you hear about a guy whose street lost twenty friggin’ trees.

Yesterday, I found a note taped to my front door. It was from FEMA and read: “Are you currently living in this damaged dwelling? Please update and verify your FEMA case file.”

‘Are you currently living in this damaged dwelling?’ That’s sort of like, ‘Are you still beating your wife?’ or ‘Were you always that heavy?’ I’ve gotten more or less accustomed to my damaged dwelling. Why just this morning I fired up my little gas space heater to warm up the living room and sat down with my computer and cell phone connection to log on. You see, we don’t have heat or air-conditioning ducts nor internet service here.

But it’s a pleasant, crisp morning. A nice time to switch on NPR. No Meet The Press for us. You see, we haven’t had television for some time. But Kathy and I are getting pretty good at Scrabble, and we’re running right through all those books and magazines that have been laying around. I’ve got a Roy Rogers DVD I think we’ll watch tonight.

So yes, I am verifying it: We are indeed currently living in this damaged dwelling.

Cheers