The Trials and Tribulations of the not-so-New Bear Icon

I spoke to my parents again tonight. Despite being 100 miles away from Galveston, they were without power. Their whole county is in the dark, and may be for several days. My Dad said that not only were many of the powerlines hit in the area, but the main powerplant was also damaged in the storm.

Ike hit the area pretty hard, knocking down trees and powerlines. Unlike parts of Houston that flooded, or the virtual rubbing away of homes that occurred on the upper Texas coast, Hurricane Ike quickly blew over where my parents live, but still did a number on the power grid.

My parent's home, in the city I spent many years in growing up, isn't all that rural. It's a city that's a northern bedroom community of Houston, but the power company is still run like it's the 1950's. Outages were prevalent. Conroe and the surrounding areas are the only areas of Texas that are not on the Texas electricity grid. It's actually an outfit that serves much of rural Louisiana as well, so they were already overpowered by Hurricane Gustav, now they have a whole new problem to tackle.

According to their website, the company has only 2% of it's cutomers restored in Texas. Estimates say it could be as long as three weeks.

My parents seem to be handling it well. Although in the dark the last couple of nights, they've gone out for supplies and gone to one of the Points of Delivery or "PODS" that FEMA has set up to get ice, bottled water and MRE's. They've also kicked in the camping stove and cooked on it. They've been able to get batteries, too.

I spoke to them about what I could see, as Direct TV broadcast a Houston television station all this weekend. I tried to explain images to them to images from the storm that many of us had seen, but they haven't. Radio has been the lifeline, but even then, few stations in Houston have one reporter, much less enough to be able to broadcast news and information 24 hours a day. Thanks Clear Channel. They are under curfew as well.

My mom, who's a chatterbox by nature, was happy to have someone to talk to. She started going on about Sarah Palin, asking me my opinion. I had to tell her, "We're having such a nice call and you want to ruin it by talking about her?" Mom seemed very excited about her, and I said I don't think it's a wise choice, and left it at that. I didn't want to comment on it any further.

Luckily, my parents had a trip planned this weekend and they will get away to be with my sister in Baltimore. They said they are having trouble finding clean clothes to pack since they can't wash anything. (My mom is a compulsive washer - she washes clothes every night.) They might just go and buy clothes there. I think it will be nice for them to get away. They may want to extend the stay if they can, and wait for the lights to be restored.

Luckily land line phone service seems to be just fine.
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Otherwise, as I work for a financial firm, I took a lot of calls from people who are scared of a market collapse and that they will loose everything. It's hard to reassure people that your company is stable and secure and had very little holdings in the sup-prime mortgage business (less than 1%). Still, people don't always understand what actually is causing this meltdown, and how to see that some companies were not involved in it. (Thank goodness!)

One of our competitors took a nosedive this morning and we were having several people calling to see if we could take a transfer from them. The only problem is that it will take weeks for the transfer to happen, and I'm sure the competitor will do their darnedest to keep the money with them. We are all fighting for a small pool or retirement dollars that seems to be getting smaller all the time.

Still, even my company is feeling the financial strain and let 80 people go in the processing area that is on the floor below us. As much as I complain about my job, I still have to remember I still have a job. Now if I could get a few more sales!

As for the overall economy, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. We still haven't resolved the fact that many investment firms leveraged assets so much, that there was no way to actually pay all the debt back. It's just like someone who maxes out their credit cards and suddenly finds themselves without a job. If you aren't taking in money, you can't keep payments up to just pay the minimum payments.

The thing I'm afraid of isn't the subprime mess, we're dealing with that now, although it's going to hurt. The problem is our government has also been taking on trillions in debt to pay for budgets and the war. what happens if we are trying so hard to prop up business, the government has difficulty paying it's debt service. That could really make things bad.

One disaster after another. That's our America!