the frustration of adult children

Today, I talked to a man whose ill parent lives very near the Texas gulf coast and who is too ill to drive to safer ground. Originally, this man's concern was that this parent would be unable to evacuate by car, so I obtained some contacts through Red Cross and the local Emergency Operations Center down there, as those organizations have the ability to transport special needs people by air or bus (we have made sure they have plenty of air support to do so).

I checked in with the man later to discover that his parent had decided to stay home and try to brave through the storm. He was incredibly frustrated and worried. It is difficult enough to live so far from an ill parent; the distance makes you feel impotent in addition to fearful. The man wanted so much for his parents to evacuate but could do nothing about it. Please send good karma in the general direction of the Gulf for his and his family's sake.

I'll be calling my father tomorrow and giving him a lecture on the scale of some of the many he delivered when I was a child (which is to say, lengthy and outraged). And since I get my hard-headedness from him, I'm sure he'll reject my arguments outright, mull them over, and then accept them but never actually tell me that he came around to seeing my side of things. (While I will reject some arguments outright, I get my ability to sheepishly admit fault from my mother.)

Anyway, my fair readers, we're looking at another full weekend of hurricane response work; thanks to Baby J, I've gained a couple more pounds from the little care package she sent (the caramel chocolate popcorn was damn good, by the way); and tomorrow, I get to meet with the attorney who is prosecuting the case against the idiot who tried to steal my purse when I was on a first date last October. Yowza. I so need a vacation.