Banks Kiss Off Coin Counting

Every family needs a coin jar.
It teaches myriad things, such as how the little things can add up. It shows the kids the importance of saving. It gives me a place to toss the day's change so I don't have a lumpy wallet or jingly pants pocket the next day.
It also has a potentially nice payoff down the line.
This morning, Curt, my oldest, who has grown curious about the change jar, came up and said, "I want some money." His interests spiked Saturday, when I gave him a penny, nickel, dime and quarter after he correctly identified them. He keeps the loot in a little toy cash register.
This morning, following his unwitting request for a handout, he went into deep thought, furrowed brows and all, as I subsequently explained how money, in general, is earned and its primary uses.
Lights. Home. Car. Toys. Food. Fun. Woo!
I could see his paradigm shift, from seeing money as fascinating shiny things to it being a way to get things he wants in life, which is Fruit Loops for the time being. Maybe his sparsely populated piggy bank will take on a whole new value to him, and maybe he's one step closer to pushing a lawnmower around the yard for his weekly allowance.
I started tossing change into a mason jar years ago. That jar would hold around $120 worth of coins, depending, of course, on the kinds of coins as well as my ability to resist the urge to vulture quarters from time to time.
I've progressively graduated to bigger jars and for the past few years have used this large piece of Polish pottery, something almost as valuable as the volume of the coins it can contain.
I don't remember the last time I cashed in my coins. It's been at least two or three years. After Saturday's garage sale, I finally finally topped off the jar, with fistfuls of mostly quarters, dimes and nickels.
There were a couple of pennies, and it made me wonder how they got there, what with all the prices at the sale pretty much divisible by 5.
Anyway, now it's time to count all the coins. I suppose there is nostalgia and anticipation-building in rolling the coins, but I wanted a quick count. I've been waiting years for this moment and am ready for the total.
The last time I rolled, I gave up by the time I got a little ways into the pennies. I just couldn't go on anymore. I looked into those machines at the grocery store, but they essentially charge a loan shark's take on the proceedings. I'm not giving up 10 percent of the bounty just to save some time.
So yesterday, I toodled over to First Intergalactic Bank of The Something Or Other And Trust, or whatever its latest incarnation is, and inquired about coin-counting prospects.
Nope, they said. I'd have to do it myself.

Well *^%$%^$#@!!

I later asked my wife whether her bank counted coins.
Nope.

> : - (

So what's the deal with banks not wanting to count money? And how do they know I haven't shorted them a quarter here or a penny there? Does this mean they have a counter they won't use for customers?
When I lived in Killeen, where I worked before coming here, my bank gladly took my occasional sock full of coins and emptied it into the counter, which spit out a total in seconds. I took that for granted.
Now, I suppose I'm going to have to do it the hard way. I don't know if I'll do it all at once or just kind of dabble in it here or there. Curt will siphon a few coins, but he's going to have to work for it somehow. Too bad Fruit Loops aren't currency.
All I know is that this time, I'm rolling and depositing the pennies - thousands of 'em. With any luck, the bank's supersecret counting machine will be on the fritz, and some poor soul will have to hand-count them all.

Ten thousand four hundred and fifty-six.
Ten thousand four hundred and fifty-seven.
Ten thousand four hundred and fifty-eight.
Ten thousand four hundred and ... oh no ... where was I?

Food Fight At The Not-So-OK Corral

Anarchy has ensued at West Orange-Cove Middle School, where a food fight Thursday led to class cancellation today.
The campus hubbub started recently when O. Taylor Collins, school district superintendent, dumped the entire middle school's personnel apple cart, saying that administrators, teachers and staffers would have to re-apply for their positions. The move came after a scathing outside review of the campus.
The problems at the campus, which has been divided over the school's principal, escalated at a hot-tempered school board meeting Monday, when audience members, including teachers, criticized Collins' decision. Collins fired back, saying some teachers at the campus had harassed and threatened the principal.
More napalm was thrown on the fire Wednesday, when three teachers allegedly tried to incite their eighth-graders into skipping school Thursday. The students told their parents, who flooded the administration with calls of concern.
The calls for skipping school went unheeded, and other than some student chanting and tray-banging in the cafeteria during breakfast, the potential uprising appeared to have been quelled Thursday morning.
But then came the lunchtime food fight.
Today, we're gathering information on how it started, what kind of disciplinary measures will be taken and how Collins and his staff are going to get this deteriorating situation under control. He wisely canceled school for today, although teachers must report for duty as an in-service day. I hope he gave the instigators an earful and then some.
While a food fight certainly has its entertainment value for those following this bizarre story, it underscores the screwed-up nature of this campus, brought on by the shameful acts of some teachers.
Regardless of how they feel about the administration's personnel decisions, the teachers' recruiting of eighth-graders, many of them tragically misguided, to do the dirty work is appalling.
The students who sparked the food fight either should be expelled or sent to the alternative school for the remainder of the year. They also should have to pay for whatever damage, preferably through some community service.
And those malcontent teachers should be sent packing. Their kind of instruction and guidance has no place here. If you don't like your job or your workplace, find something else to do.
Shame on you.

Garage Sales Rock

I love garage sales. I love to go to them. I love to have them.
On Saturday, we're having one at our house, five hours of merry, moneymaking entertainment.
"SELL IT!" has become my wife's battle cry this week. She points to something on a shelf. SELL IT! She trips over a toy in the living room. SELL IT! One of kids squawks about having to go to bed. SELL IT!
Yes, the spirit of capitalism will play out at our home Saturday. I'll sit there with my big cup of coffee and play salesman.
I'll make fun of those early birds who'll be sitting out there in their idling cars on the street at 4 a.m. The last time we had a garage sale, two early birds ducked under the rising garage door before it had opened 4 feet. They scurried around, quickly grabbed things and then tucked them under their arms. When they were satisfied that everything questionably valuable was off the tables, they put just about everything back following a closer inspection.
This kind of silliness just adds to the garage-sale fun.
All the good stuff will go first, and then the action will die down by mid-morning and come to a trickle by noon, the shank of the sale, so to speak.
In part, this is a moving sale. We're moving to Pinewood and want to minimize the backbreaking toils of Moving Day. But it's also time to get rid of a lot of stuff, particularly old clothes, baby stuff galore and all kinds of things - like a wide variety of knickknacks, whodunits and do-hickeys - that I never knew we had because my wife had shoved them in a drawer or dark closet corner. There'll be no-longer-used toys, books (lots of cookbooks), kitchen things and so forth.
The objective isn't so much to make a buck but to purge ourselves of the burdensome, cluttersome and unnecessary.
Out with the old. In with the new.
SELL IT!

More-the-Merrier Mardi Gras

They do it in Mamous, Eunice and Church Point. They do it in Elton, Soileau and LeJeune Cove. And don't forget Basile, Mermentau and Tee-Mamou.
Hurricane Katrina couldn't kill it, and neither could Rita, not in Port Arthur, Galveston, Lake Charles and New Orleans. Wind, rain, death and destruction only strengthened the party resolve.
When the going gets tough, the tough drink hurricanes, the pink kind whose sweet taste belies the alcoholic wallop.
Mardi Gras is celebrated both big and small in cities, towns and map flyspecks throughout the region, and now a private group wants to launch one in Beaumont. The first Mardi Gras on the Neches, put on by Parades Unlimited will include a carnival and parade in downtown Beaumont.
It will go up against Port Arthur's Mardi Gras, much to the chagrin of the organizers of that relatively large, 15-year-old event every February.
Floyd Marceaux, president of Mardi Gras of Southeast Texas, a consortium of civic groups that organizes Port Arthur's event, said Thursday that Beaumont will find itself in the Mardi Gras ring with a seasoned heavyweight, one that draws almost a quarter-million people annually.
However, it seems to me that the only competition that belongs in Mardi Gras is for beads and other float-tossed trinkets.
Americans love to party. They do it on St. Patrick's Day. They do it on Super Bowl Sunday. Cinco de Mayo used to be a celebration of when Mexican soldiers whipped the French and traitor Mexican army of 8,000 at Puebla, Mexico, in May 5, 1862. Now, for many Americans, it's an opportunity to stuff themselves with Mexican food and gulp down Corona beer and margaritas.
And, like Cinco de Mayo, Mardi Gras just gets bigger every year. It has transcended cultural and geographic lines.
Don't believe me?
They do it in Arkansas:
http://www.mardigrasdigest.com/News/arkansasmg.htm
They do it in New York City:
http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0506,zappia3,60792,15.html
They do it in North Dakota:
http://www.ndtourism.com/events/viewEvent.asp?ID=1569
And, by golly, they do it in Iraq:
http://www.armychic256bde.com/id42.html
So why not Beaumont? This where Texas and Cajun cultures overlap into a what I've coined as "Tejun."
Today, Mardi Gras is about as far off the mark of its original intent as today's Cinco de Mayo celebrations are to its beginnings.
In private company, as one does in Port Arthur, will orchestrate the proceedings - and try to make a profit.
Some might say the Beaumont Mardi Gras, centered in the region's largest city, will suck the life out of its counterparts' parties in places such as Port Arthur. But when it comes to this annual event, I see no reason for a the-less-the-merrier attitude.
Excess is what Mardi Gras is all about.

Southeast Texas Cliff Jumping

A leisurely home-shopping adventure my wife and I embarked upon months ago recently crested the first hill of the roller coaster and began a wild, white-knuckle plunge into a breakneck series of turns and more hills.
In other words, we put a contract on another home.
This isn't the first contract during this recent odyssey, but it has produced more stress than the sum of our previous home buys and sales.
However, much of our motivation for this one grew out of the first one, in which some sinister flippers came along and effectively booted our offer, which contained a contingency, meaning our current home had to sell first before a purchase could be made.
A contingency is a nice safety net, but in this market, it is little more than a fancy way of saying "I want to buy your house!"
Our current contract has no contingency. We are walking out onto the tightrope with nothing between us and the rapids to financial ruin raging below.
We have backup plans to backup plans, and then fallback positions to those, but it keeps the stomach churning and the mind whirling, sometimes at the expense of sleep.
If all this comes to pass, the longer our house sits on the market, the longer we'll have to pay two mortgages, two insurances, etc.
That's stressful enough, but analyzing mortage and insurance companies has become an exercise in juggling a roaring chainsaw, an angry badger and a flaming log.
Here are some highlights:
1.) All State, my current car and home insurer, won't insure the new home because it is a frame and not brick house. This is the new Southeast Texas policy, apparently. So All State is off the list, and that takes the car insurance with it, because most insurance companies offer discounts for doing the auto-home thing with them. We need discounts. In addition, now I see the real-estate world as brick vs. frame.
2.) We had USAA until we came to Beaumont. However, because Jefferson County touches the Gulf of Mexico, it is considered a "coastal county," and USAA won't cover wind and hail. Never mind the fact that residents 15-20 miles closer to the coast in southern Harris County can get USAA wind and hall. So if you have USAA in Jefferson County, you have to go outside the insurance company, and that can be very expensive. Obviously, wind was a good thing to cover last year.
3.) Hardin County, where we have a contract on a house, is not a coastal county, so that qualifies us to go back to the USAA family. However, USAA requires way more coverage than one might want. Let's say, for example, you're buying a $200,000 home. USAA will not budge from its requirement of the customer carrying enough to replace the home at a cost of almost $300,000. They're the same way with home contents. Never mind that our home contents might be worth only $25,000. USAA wants to insure it for almost a quarter million. Subsequently, the customer might be paying a much higher premium than desired for more coverage than he feels he needs.
4.) I'm tussling with other insurance companies now, but I won't go into all that. It is too painful.
5.) The lending front is far bloodier than the insurance front of this residential war. The Houston folks who backed the last two mortgages say they won't touch this one until we sell our house, because of a "debt ratio" they feel would be too much. Debt ratio is the monthly gross income that the lender allows for housing expenses plus recurring debt. The Beaumont mortgage companies I've recruited into the lending rodeo say they'll be happy to get the financing.
6.) I'm still grappling with the myriad ways a home can be financed: 30-year fixed, 80-20, bridge loans, etc.
7.) Rather than wait until closing day to be in financial shock and awe, I'm grinding through the numbers now and getting all shocked and awed while we're still in the 10-day option period in which we can run away and risk only losing $100 in good-faith money. All kinds of crazy fees get tacked on to the closing costs: Loan origination fee, appraisal fee, tax related service fee, application fee, administrative fee, closing fee, attorney fee, fee fee, stamp-lickin' fee, etc.
If they raise a pen or flex a muscle, there is a fee for it.
So this is where it all stands right now. I should charge everyone a stress fee.

Attempted Suicide Sparks Editor Debate

Contrary to what readers sometimes allege, The Beaumont Enterprise newsroom is not a callous machine with no sensitivity in regard to stories and their play, meaning whether it'll go Page 1A or find itself buried in a shallow back-page grave.
Fairness runs neck and neck with accuracy in the Enterprise newsroom mission.
Earlier this week, Enterprise editors waged a healthy debate over a story that fell into a gray area: suicide.
An Ozen High School senior attempted to kill himself in a bathroom. Another student discovered him and notified school officials. Conscious and breathing, the boy was taken to the hospital.
Was this news?
Some editors argued that it was, while others called its publication a dangerous, slippery-slope precedent. Were we giving this student a platform to call attention to himself? Would this set off a chain reaction of suicide attempts? No one died, so does that change anything? Would parents be interested in this story, serving as a catalyst for communicating with their own troubled children? Did the public have a right to know?
Suicides are hot potatoes in most newsrooms, and, unfortunately, I have run across the issue many times.
Years ago, while I was an education reporter, two popular high schoolers made a suicide pact and killed themselves with carbon monoxide fumes in a garage. The ripple effect among their fellow students and the community certainly was news. The school was devastated.
So effect plays a role on the news end. Also, if it's a public figure, such former U.S. Attorney Michael Bradford, who died in 2003, that's clearly news.
Suicides involving private citizens fall into a gray area. If the person wasn't a public figure, and the death didn't reverberate throughout a community, then chances are that a newspaper will not run it. An exception, though, is if a body is found and police provide no initial cause of death. We'll report on the discovery, and then, when the information is made available, we'll report on how the person died, even if it's suicide.
The attempted suicide at a high school was a curve ball. I've never run across a story like than in my 20 years in this business.
Ultimately, we ran a Page 13A brief that left out the more gruesome details found in the Beaumont Police Department news release.
Whether I argued for or against the brief's publication is moot. What is important is that readers understand that these decisions aren't taken lightly, and every weekday afternoon, in a back conference room, we often debate the merits of even the smallest of news items.

Marathon No. 16

Twenty-seven bands over 26.2 miles.
Welcome to the Country Music Marathon in Nashville, Tenn., where this sea-level flatlander Saturday got a taste of hills, hills and more hills. They weren't big, but they certainly were numerous.
This was marathon No. 16, and while it wasn't the slowest for me, it certainly was the hilliest and most crowded. Some 22,000 participants total in the half marathon and marathon, with about 5,000 entered in the latter. I came in around 490th.
I loved every minute of it.
For those who haven't been to Nashville, the terrain is similar to the Texas Hill Country, only without the cactus. It's a great city. Not too big. Not too small.
I got to see a lot of it Saturday, hills and all.
This was my eighth state in my quest to run a marathon in every state. I thought the Little Rock, Ark., marathon was hilly, but what it really has is one long, long grinding hill that seems to go on for miles.
Just about every mile of the Nashville event was going up or down, sometimes gradually, sometimes sharply.
At this writing, my quads still burn. Sitting down requires what I call "The Plop," because the sore leg muscles make a gradual descent too painful and difficult.
Nevertheless, with my time of 3:52:21, I still finished in the top 14 percent, which is amazing considering that race's size. Whereas the locals had the edge on hills, I had the edge on relatively warm, humid conditions. Lots of people dropped out of this race.
The bands were a race highlight. There were 27 of them spread out along the course, with most of them playing country rock and fronted by a female singer.
The best part, though, was staying with a college friend whom I hadn't seen in years. He, his wife and three beautiful daughters live on, of course, a hill in a quaint place called Leipers Fork. After the race, I got to just sit on their porch, sip a beer and relax.
I'd love to have a place like that in the country, hills and all.
I'm not sure what my next marathon quest will be. Maybe it'll be Oklahoma City next spring. I hear that's a top-notch marathon. Maybe it'll be Las Vegas in December. My wife has no desire to go there, so I might as well get that one out of the way, like I have with some of the less desirable places, such as Mississippi and Alabama, although my marathon experiences there were fantastic.
We're saving all the cool states - Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, California, Colorado, etc. - for when the kids are old enough, and we can make a family vacation out of it.
Sure, it sounds odd to have a marathon stuck in something labeled a "vacation," but I suppose having a vacation built around a marathon just makes the goal a bit more palatable.
Rock on!