No Snakes Yet, But ...

There's always one house on the block where all the kids go. The mom is always accommodating, and maybe the kids who live there have better stuff with which to play.
While our new Tyler home so far hasn't had the same wildlife excitement as our Pinewood place, the abundance of furry things running amok is perhaps greater.
I came home a couple of weeks ago to find not one but three dogs running around our back yard. The neighbor's dogs, wanting to socialize with our fun-loving puppy, burrowed their way under the fence. They've been back a couple of times since then.
Last night, a yappy dog from another neighbor's yard somehow got into our back yard, and my wife awoke at 3 a.m. today to find some woman walking around in our back yard with a flashlight and trying to corner her little yipper.
This came after I engaged in a cat rodeo in our new attic.
We were saddling up to go to the park yesterday so my kids could test drive some Christmas presents when my alarmed wife reported some strange noises above the master bedroom. Something was scratching at the air-conditioner duct.
Immediately, I suspected the neighbor's cat, who is rather nosy and will just walk in through any open door. It must be addicted to curiosity, more so than the usual cat.
So I put on a dust mask and head lamp, loaded up the pellet gun and headed up the ladder, which is in the garage. I didn't want to take the chance that it was an angry raccoon and not be armed.
I immediately saw the glowing eyes in the far corner of the attic, and sure enough, it was "Lucky," the nosy black cat from next door. As I carefully made my way across the dusty attic, Lucky pushed deep into the insulation in the far corner, so much so that I couldn't even see him.
I tossed a few little boards in his direction, hoping to scare him out, but he wouldn't budge. After a few minutes of coaxing, he finally came out, scampered across the attic and went down the staircase.
From now on, if Lucky wants to live up to his name, he might want to dial down his curiosity. Otherwise, he might wander into a portal somewhere from which there is no return.

Santa Tracker Better Than Ever

While Christmas is a time of tradition, this technological upgrade to one Santa tracking site is a beautiful thing:

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.html

It includes VIDEOS of Santa dashing across various regions of the globe.

Here are some other Santa trackers:
http://www.santaclaus.net/SantaTracker.asp
http://www.travelbygps.com/special/santa/tracker.php
http://mirror.airservicesaustralia.com/santa08/santa.asp

Oh, and here's a not-so-friendly, Scrooge-shooting Santa timewaster for you while you kill some time before you go home from work:
http://www.ugoplayer.com/games/santasniper.html

Now This Is Some Scary Stuff

http://www.wimp.com/scariesttrail/

I think I'd rather attempt Mount Everest.

There's Always Someone Out There Thinking Up This Stuff

Complicating The Already Complicated

Long ago, I chronicled the drama of trying to get a FEMA check following Hurricane Rita, which put a 100-foot-tall pine tree on our Beaumont home.
Part of it was my fault, thanks to juxtaposing the routing number with the checking account number on the FEMA form. My application then made a hilarious journey that took it through the U.S. Treasury Department and then right back to Square 1 - the FEMA office in Austin.
After Hurricane Ike, which put a 60-foot oak tree on our Pinewood home, the folly had nothing to do with FEMA, which was far more tight-fisted with its funds, although I did get $160 for a chain saw.
No, this time the problem was with the mortgage company, whom I'll call Lender X, whose name was on the insurance check.
Lender X has a threshold for these kinds of checks. Exceeding the threshold means having to send the check off to Lender X never-never land, where it is held in escrow and doled it out in burps as repairs progress. It also involves scheduling Lender X-hired inspectors, and that takes five days a pop.
The work was only supposed to take a week, so going the never-never land route meant extending the construction time by weeks while inspectors were scheduled.
Looking at the total damage, it was clear that if the destruction to the yard, fence and outdoor shed were subtracted from the insurance check amount, the amount for repairs to the main structure were far below the Lender X threshold. The tree mostly just clipped the roof over an outdoor storage closet.
With the move to Tyler looming, I made the fateful decision to go for an "exception," which a Lender X representative told me would only take five days to process.
That was Nov. 13, and I'm still waiting to put some insurance money in the bank so I can repair my slightly damaged home and get repaid for the money and effort I've already put into repairs and cleanup, some of it thanks to that $160 chain saw.
First, Lender X lost the worksheet detailing the insurance adjustor's notes on damages. Lender X found the worksheet and then sent it off to another department, which was to decide whether to grant the exception.
Weeks went by before I learned that the hangup was the shed, which I destroyed and burned myself. The question was whether the shed was part of the property's appraised value, which it was not, but those kinds of things take a long time to figure out at a lumbering, bureaucratically constipated behemoth such as Lender X.
Today, I called Lender X again, only to be told that the hangup was that they were waiting on me to send the worksheet. After I did some yapping, they determined that the first person who took the call back in November simply failed to make a notation on the computerized form. They claimed that they'll have a check in the mail within 48 hours, but I wouldn't bet my overworked chain saw on it.
So here it is, more than three months after Hurricane Ike, and the house, which we need to put on the market because we've moved to Tyler, remains as slightly damaged as it was then, with no money in the bank to pay for the repairs.
I would have been better off going through the long, tedious escrow process in the first place.
No wonder why our lending system is so messed up.

Timewaster Of The Week-Dec. 12

1,000 awesome things!

http://1000awesomethings.com/the-top-1000/

A new one is added daily.

Charming Times In Tyler

Nothing gets done simply in the world my wife calls The Pearson Family Adventures. It's not just a fly or two in the ointment. It's all ointment-covered flies sometimes.
My move to Tyler has been no different.
There was The Little Blazer That Could, pulling a wagging 6-by-12 trailer mostly likely loaded well beyond the poor vehicle's towing capacity. There was the mortgage circus, which I'll detail later. I haven't really moved into the house yet. There is no electricity.
Beyond all the craziness, though, there is a unique sense of charm in Tyler. I was suprised to find that folks here out-friendly Southeast Texans, if you can believe that.
Here's an example:
As the clock ticked down last week to moving here, the mortgage folks informed me that the jittery underwriters decided that I absolutely could not close on the house until a day after I'd started work at the Tyler Morning Telegraph.
I responded with two questions: Where are you going to put me up? Where are you going to store my trailer full of stuff? What am I going to do with the dog?
So now I'm staying at a fishing resort, my trailer load was placed in the sellers' home and my dog is somewhere out in the country staying with the mortgage broker.
Realtors usually want to keep apart buyers and sellers, but in this case, underscoring the way things get done here, the sellers, a young couple moving to the Dallas area, agreed to let me put my trailer load in their garage.
I arrived at the house Sunday to find the wife alone at home and frantically boxing up things. So there we were, seller and buyer, with me unloading and she packing. She even let our dog run around her back yard. Meanwhile, her husband was off hunting. (If I tried to go hunting while my wife boxed up a house in advance of a move, there'd be nothing left of me but a greasy spot.)
I ran out of room in the garage's storage closet, so the woman allowed me to store stuff inside the house.
A few minutes later, she took off, leaving me all alone in the house.
With the trailer finally unloaded, I left the couple a note of thanks and a CD from my band, Buffalo Blonde.
For all I know, that CD now could be lying on the Interstate 20 roadside, but at least I took my first step in trying to fit in around here.

The Long, Heartbreaking, Deeply Meaningful Goodbye Column You're Supposed To Write When You Leave One Newspaper Job For Another

We're moving to Tyler!

Bye bye Beaumont!

So long Sour Lake!

See ya, snakes!





(I plan on keeping the blog going, by the way. I wouldn't want to let down the dozens of readers!)

Timesaver Of The Week-Dec. 1

Holiday movie season is here, so a lot of big ol' blockbusters will be coming out.

Perhaps you missed some blockbusters of the past and feel the need to catch up.

Well, worry no more, because these guys can save you the wasted time by giving you the spoilers to 100 movies in under 5 minutes.

Warning! Mass spoiler alert!

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1890198/