Saturday, September 6, 2008

The Disappointing Protection of Prayer

An actual e-mail received today from our landlady. She is the polar opposite of our previous landlady, who, four months on, has yet to respond to a single one of our inquiries about our security deposit, and is now delinquent on responding to the small claims suit sent to her address. Reproduced in its entirety as sent to my roommate, minus full names:
Hi J,

We were keeping a close eye on T.S. Hanna and Paul and I had made the
decision that we were not going to make a special trip to arrive
before this storm. We are still in IL and had not planned to leave
for HH until the end of September due to an upcoming family reunion in
Madison, WI. I will let you know as our final plans take shape, but
estimate that we will arrive at HH about October 1st. We are keeping
a close eye on Ike and will decide this weekend whether Paul needs to
get to HH to do any window boarding before Ike's landfall.

Unfortunately, I may have left T's personal e-mail address at our HH
home and I only have his business e-mail address with me and I didn't
want to bother him at work with this information. Would you please
be so kind to let him know that we are thinking of you both and pray
that you will be safe!

Please let us know as soon as possible if anything needs our immediate
attention after Hanna's fury passes. For your convenience, here are
two IL phone contacts: (555) 555-5555—Sue's cell and (555)
555-555—Paul's cell.

We did receive September's rent and thank you very much.

Take care and drive safe on wet, flooded roads! We had Gustav's
system here yesterday and it rained all day. The rain was steady,
wind mild, but no thunderstorms.

Thank you, J.

Sincerely,

Sue and Paul

Important note: this storm was the crappiest crap fest that ever crapped on our shores. It rained. Not even all that hard. I barely noticed any wind. And lots of people got to get off work early anyway, including our newspaper's advertising department. Hanna, you disappoint me. I thought you'd at least be interesting.
My editors had me out live blogging the storm all day, an idea that would have been interesting had their been any storm to web log about (and had our web site's software been more up to date to handle such an exercise).

Most significant update
of the day:
Since returning from the drenching I got at the beach, the buttons on my cell phone have decided they will no longer respond to me. I can only take incoming calls. Hanna claims its first victim! Except for, um, you know, all those people in Haiti. Yikes.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

She claimed another victim in my cell phone. I dropped it in a Hanna-produced puddle.

I, too, can receive calls, yet no screens or lights work.

Thanks, Hanna.

Anonymous said...

It tagged me anonymous before I could type my name. (It's Ashley Ammons, by the way). :)

I suppose Hanna will cost me 100 bucks on a new phone ... just what someone in the journalism industy can totally afford these days!

Anonymous said...

Dude, what storm was it that "hit" when I was there? I remember it as being a Spanish male name, like Armando or something like that, but I could be way off. Anyway, I remember that they cancelled school and all that and it barely even rained. I remember suggesting the headline of "Heavy drizzle terrorizes region" to Sally. Keep me posted. DWi