No More Banana Flips (and other critical news)

We were out wandering around a week or so ago, looking for something else when we happened across one of those Hostess Bake Shop clearance places. There was one of these near where I grew up and I remember my parents buying car-loads of Wonder bread for something like 20 loaves for $1, then carrying sandwiches made with freezer-burnt bread until Thanksgiving when whatever was left got made into stuffing. Mmmmm. Good times.

Anyway, we're both big fans of Banana Flips (yea, yea; just stuff it, will ya?) and we hadn't been able to find them for several years. So we head in and no Banana Flips. We asked at the counter and were informed that Hostess had discontinued Banana Flips about three years ago. What?!?!? Holy crap! I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open for a full minute. How could a company that continues to make those disgusting, pink, coconut-covered balls of glop discontinue the very food of the gods? I don't think I said anything for the rest of the day other than mumbling "What in the.... How in the.... Who in the.... WHY!!"

Anyway.

Hurricane Isaac completely missed us. It rained for three days straight and we've had some wind gusts that were barely strong enough to ring our largest Arcosanti bell. The highlight was a flood warning that came over the Emergency Broadcast System for some minor little creek. (Most likely a man-made drainage ditch dug by some developer literally selling swamp land in some real estate scam, but I digress.) As always, these things break into the TV show right at the most critical point of the whole thing. So we're squinting at the TV trying to read lips while this guy drones on about how many feet above flood stage this immaterial body of water is. Then he goes on some tangent about "normal" flood stage vs. some other kind of flood stage. Then he launches into the entire flooding history of this creek, yapping on about how many feet above flood stage it was in 1957. Dude! You're not on some frackin' PBS special! Shut! the Hell! Up!

So that was the extent of our suffering and drama related to Hurricane Isaac.

It does look like Isaac is going to test whether anyone in Louisiana learned anything from Katrina. Isaac seems to have stalled just off-shore and is beating the living crap out of the coastline. We'll see now if any of the federal tax dollars that were supposed to repair and improve the levees actually did any good, or if it all ended up in Swiss bank accounts like most of the pre-Katrina levee money.

We're still in various stages of unpacking and trying to unload furniture on Craigslist that won't fit in our 600 square feet. Craigslist doesn't seem to work in Florida, likely due to the high percentage of con artists and grifters that live here (approximately 98% of the population). So far we've managed to unload exactly one thing. We'll try some other avenues and we always have Restore if all else fails. At least it won't end up in a landfill. We still need some major plumbing work done and the electrical is becoming critical. We talked to the park manager yesterday about getting our power pole upgraded, but she wouldn't commit to anything definitive other than having "someone look at it." Bottom line, instead of new windows and doors in the Florida room or a bathroom redo, we'll be rewiring and replumbing. woo. hoo.

And I'm still pounding on the new scanner. The hardware seems solid, but the software was written by coked-up chimps on a Friday afternoon. The automatic mode seems to do a decent job, except when it decides that negatives are slides. There is no way to override without going into one of the non-automatic modes (Home, Business, Professional), and at that point, gods help you because not even something as simple as a check box works correctly, and the scan results SUCK. So far, I've been able to work around the glitches, but they seriously slow down the process. I'm still trying to get through 1986. Only about 18 years to go.

Well, back at it.