mardigras

I had an appointment out of my area this morning and my friend that drove me there since we were doing I-10 combined the trip to go to Biloxi to follow leads for a replacement apartment (he's lived in Biloxi and worked at the casinos since they opened a decade ago, his apartment was destroyed in Katrina).

You can't drive down most of the beach road (everything several blocks of it is still curfewed after 11PM) but you can get down side streets from side roads to stuff on the beach.

We got to the mall. It's parking lot is a relief center. The strip mall across from it is nothing but frames that you can see all the way through. Our old Rocky Horror theater is gone McDonalds is only basic frame beams with some roof, a landmark restaurant and many other neighboring businesses are blown completley clean, only concrete slabs ... the road accessing the shopping area from the beach was collapsed.

We got down by the coliseum. During the storm the President Casino dislodged, turned 180 degrees crossed the beach and traveled 2 blocks west, slamming into and replacing an equal size section of the Holiday Inn. It is nested up right by an adjacent building and the casino barge is sitting so completely level that when you look at it from behind where the motel walls are smashed into the casino it looks like it is all part of one damaged structure that was there all the time. But from the beach side you see something completely different, it is clearly something that slammed into something else. When you look down the beach it's just rubble of everything.

I'm still working on replacing my car I lost in the storm (it's nuts here) so most of my travels have been essential local runs when I can get rides. This was the furthest into some of my old stomping grounds I had gotten. So much of everything I have known in city after city my entire life is just gone... it's surreal.

Keeping today from being a total bummer...

I'm very thankful for the livable part of my place. There's only 2 other houses on my block where anyone else is staying (my crazy neighbors who also stayed and got the water out of their houses quickly. )

Late this afternoon UPS delivered a replacement motor arm for my big dish that survived the storm (the dish survived but the motor arm died in the storm surge). I'm going to force my brother-in-law to help me replace it tomorrow I love scanning the skies more than I love surfing the internet.

Deej

Happy Scanning Buddy....you can find some wacky shit in them thar skies

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JJ Gold

Best of luck MardiGras.

Things will get better.

Holly

Like what? Not just TV channels?


Hope you're getting your shit together MG!

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mardigras

Lots of stuff bouncing around up there... There are some shows you can watch days before they air on their regular channels, you can see reporters before they "go live", a ton of crazy international stuff, some live events commercial-free, raw news footage, numerous odd little channels not available on Dish/DirectTV or our local cable, audio services, etc. I'm using a 4DTV receiver (it recieves subscribable digital channels along with the traditional C-Band frequencies) and I have an MPEG FTA (free to air) reciever slaved to that which picks up another whole band of digital frquencies using the same dish (10'). Cable type stuff is mostly scrambled so I subscribe to the news channels, the entertainment channels I actually watch and movie channels using the 4DTV (you can buy channels ala carte). The FTA receiver doesn't have a subcription module, so you can watch anything on it that is not scrambled (which is a majority of those frquencies). There are no providers that sell programming for MPEG in the US (actually, there are a few niche channels, mostly ethnic, that offer their own MPEG recievers equipped with a module to unscramble their channels). At one point I had over 2000 channels stored between my 2 receivers. Online satellite forums and charts help me keep up with what's bouncing around freely up there
Coming along great! My friend who lost his apartment in Biloxi has been alternating staying with me and his sisters in Jackson MS. By the time he left going back to Jackson yesterday he had helped me finish gutting the rest of my place and moving stuff I wasn't able to do by myself. It's a nice clean slate all ready to go for floor ripping. I had a washer delivered the other day. The nearest laundries are totally destroyed and if my friend hadn't made a laundry trip the other night I'd probably be sitting here in dirty clothes still waiting for one of 2 family members to have the time to take me there and back

I'm trying to find a car. It's a little difficult when you have little way to go shopping and at least half the city is buying cars all at once