This has been a long, hard week. I don�t mention it much but I work for an insurance company, as you may of guessed we have be inundated with claims due to the hurricane. All day long I hear about people�s personal tragedies, losses and fears. The calls have been non-stop. It has been quite overwhelming. There is actually very little you can do to help people over the phone. I have been so stressed out. The company has even brought in crisis and grief counselors to speak with us on Saturday to see what kind of issues we might be having.

My nightly routine has been to go home, eat dinner and go to bed. My diet has sucked more than I thought possible and I only went swimming once last week.

It is hard living here in Houston where a lot of the evacuee�s, refugee�s or escapee�s (call em what you will) have come. Most of the people I know seem to be upset by this. The people who are being brought to Houston or the Astrodome are the people who have nothing and no resources. I won�t say they are all bad, but these are the folks who were evacuated from the superdome or pulled out of the jails and put on a bus. The people I have run into this weekend at the stores or restaurants around town have been half crazed, running into the streets to aggressively pan handle on every corner, going into restaurants asking for their LA discount and if not getting it refusing to pay and leaving. The police scanners are full of calls of rapes, car jackings, burglary and theft calls which are spreading out away from the Dome and into the neighborhoods. You can hear about these calls on the scanners, they even have special channels set up for the dome area, but you hear nothing about this on the news. They have taken their looting from New Orleans and brought it here.

I fully sympathize with these people and no, I don�t know what they are going thru but why do they think we owe them something? Why are they trashing our city and making it necessary for us to go out and purchase a gun so we can feel safe in our home?