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austingirl

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Posts posted by austingirl

  1. 54 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

    anyone with golden triangle / swamp people thinking of heading west...

    10, 90 and 105 are all trending to screwed.  96 north to jasper is the bomb, then re-assess.

    lufkin and nac would be my first targets for hotels.

     

    40 minutes ago, twosheds said:

    keep trying.  Tyler or Longview will be full in short order.  why people would go north is beyond me.  we don't have the infrastructure necessary to support sudden influxes of people in east Texas.  

    I would not be heading north at this point, especially not to Lufkin, which is still pretty close to Beaumont. This bitch is going to hit land and head northeast, going in around the same place Rita did, and if Laura also comes in strong a bunch of people up the TX/LA border are going to lose power and get stuck there. All those felled pine trees are going to block the roads and it'll be a mess. I'm sure traffic is awful but heading west and inland is the best bet at this point.

  2. 10 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Good question.  Wait.

    Remember Rita?  I remember folks that evacuated Beaumont and drove north....took them 20 hours to get to Tyler.  I was trying desperately to reach them via phone and text to tall them to turn west and head to Houston, the track had turned and Houston would be a good place to shelter.

    Of course, they were olds, who had their cell phones turned off because 1) "we only use them in case of emergency" and 2) evacuating from a Cat 5 storm with a 90 yr old woman doesn't qualify as an "emergency."

    You can dodge a storm sideways just as effectively as running north.   Shit, evacuate down 59 to Corpus, it would be easier than a drive north with all the other lemmings.

    Rita was a clusterfuck of nightmare proportions. Everyone was on edge already because of Katrina and then they told a million people to evacuate at the same time. And, if I remember correctly, in a lot of places they hadn't marked the contraflow lanes so people didn't know they were an option. Took my parents 21 hours to get from Groves to Austin - it was them, my grandma, a pug, and a cat in a carrier in a Toyota Avalon. Ever since they've tended to get out early even when there's still uncertainty about the track, and they're retired so they have more flexibility than in the past.They usually leave their RV in Crystal Beach all summer but they brought it up here yesterday - there's a decent KOA in Leander, and they didn't want to get caught in all the traffic when the evac orders hit. 

  3. 1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

    TL; DR.  I and girlfriend probably should have died.

     

    17 years old.  Driving my truck with girl friend. We had just left a convenience store, bought slurpees.  Two lane highway, with shoulders, flat ground.  Around noon, August, no rain.   Truck has no seatbelts.

    I'm following a semi towing a grain trailer.  I pull out to pass.  As I get to the front of the semi, there's a pickup in front of the semi, maybe 25-30 yards ahead.  Driving pretty slow.  I'm doing 60 or so, and figure I'll just pass this truck as well.

    We come up on an intersection, not marked.  Dashed line in middle of highway, still a passing zone.  No oncoming traffic.

    Just as I'm about to pass the pickup, he turns left for the intersection.  No turn lights (or brake lights that I recall).  I swerve onto the shoulder, but his left front contacts my passenger door of my truck. Truck goes sideways....towards a ravine, maybe 6-8 feet deep.

    I don't know how many times my truck rolled.  All I do remember after the contact and truck turning sideways was ground coming up towards the windshield.

    Truck comes to a stop upright and I'm blacked out.  I start to come to, and all I can feel is the seat is wet.  My initial thoughts were blood.  The cab of the truck is pushed down close to my head, and I look to the right, and the cab is torn off.  The girl with me (Holly) I can't find.  I immediately panic.

    I feel something on my feet...it's Holly.  Somehow, she was thrown into the floor of the truck, her torso on the transmission tunnel, and her head over the brake pedal.  She's moving around.

    Maybe 20-30 seconds pass, and she's asking if we are ok.  I smell gas.  Driver's door will not open, but the back glass is gone.  Holly is struggling to get out of floor, and she's bleeding from her head.  I climb out of seat, then crawl through where the back glass was.  I get into the bed of the truck, and it starts to hit me exactly how bad the crash was.  

    Gas smell strong, and I'm scared truck is going to blow up or something.  I tell Holly she needs to get out, and she struggles to get up into seat.  I help her out.

    Cars are stopping by now to check on us.  We are just shocked.

    Time passes.  Highway Patrol comes by, the other truck in the accident is there (he could drive his truck, that's how little the damage was to him).  It didn't seem like much time, but it probably was around an hour or more, taking the reports, getting a wrecker, that sort of thing.  Ambulance has shown up as well, and are looking at the two of us.  Other than the scrapes we both had (I'm wearing shorts, and the tops of my thighs have burns on them from the steering wheel) we both are fine.  Holly had a concussion; I probably did as well.

    Wrecker driver shows up.  I know him and he asks if he should take the truck to my dad's business.  I tell him sure, and we go off in the ambulance to the hospital.

    My parent's or Holly's still have not been contacted by this point; the first my dad knew of the truck was seeing it towed in front of his shop.  He ran out, and the wrecker driver assured him we were both fine and probably at the hospital by now.

    Oh, and the wet seat that caused me to think there was blood?  Slurpees, poured out everywhere.  

    I got the ticket.  Passing at an intersection.  That was marked as a passing zone.

     

    Damn, that could've ended really badly. 

    Had a similar incident with the spilled drinks - my car got clipped turning left at an intersection, and we spun around a couple of times before landing in the median. My brother and his friend were with me and the friend blacked out for a few seconds. He'd been drinking a root beer and between that and him being unconscious we thought he was dead. (We all walked away with minor injuries.)

  4. I think I told this on Shaggy, but in 2014 I was run over by a golf cart. We were at Crystal Beach and my mom and I took the golf cart to see a friend a few sections over. She was driving and one of my kids was in front with her, and I was sitting in the back facing out with my other kid. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but when she backed out onto the street, the gas pedal got stuck and we went across the street into a ditch filled with about 8 inches of water. Mom and the kids were fine but I went forward and the cart kept going and stopped with my head under one of the wheels, in the water. She didn't see where I was at first and tried to drive it out of the ditch, but it spun out on my head. I had thrown my arms in front of me when I fell, and was able to push up on one of them just enough so that I was able to get my mouth and nose above water a few seconds at a time. I was about 99% positive I was going to die right there, under a golf cart in a ditch at fucking Crystal Beach, but by then my mom had started screaming for help and some people came running over and got it off me. I had a baseball-sized lump on my forehead, most of the skin on my left palm and fingers was gone, and I was pretty sure my arm was broken. 

    Someone called 911 and I ended up in the ER at UTMB where they cleaned me up and gave me every possible antifungal, antivirus, antibiotic, etc, because Crystal Beach muddy ditch water. They had to debride my hand in the burn unit and that was by far the worst pain I have ever experienced. Even with a ton of morphine and a fentanyl "popsicle". I couldn't use that hand for a month. I had two black eyes and a bandage-wrapped head wound, and a bruise on the underside of one forearm that was the entire length of my forearm. My arm wasn't broken though and I didn't die, so that was nice, I guess. I try to avoid golf carts these days.

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  5. 3 hours ago, futureman said:

    so I’m not starting a thread for this and I figured this was the best place for it, the dog experts... my sister lives in highland hills just northwest of 2222/mopac.  this morning this dog came out of a creek bed and was just staring at her in her car.  anyone know what kind of dog this is?  something about it is creepy to me.  I don’t think it’s a coyote?

     

    45FB7B04-891A-4CA8-9025-72D7402D6DD2.jpeg

    Welp, if we needed more proof that the apocalypse is nigh, it's whatever the fuck this is.

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  6. 9 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

    The butidiene plant is very close to campus 

     

    14 hours ago, Bojack said:

    That was me.  My parents graduated PNG in the late 60s.  My brothers and I graduated Nederland in the late 80s, early 90s.  I'm perfectly serious.  

    My brother asked my dad, who worked at Gulf/ Chevron for a long time, what chemical accounts for the smell near the PNG high school.  He said it's butadiene and suggested that the drill team could be known as the Butadienettes.  

    I would like to see them adopt a unique nickname with a local flair like Gators, Alligator Gar, Pelicans or some shit.  It's their chance to give themselves any name they want so it'd be a shame if they chose Eagles or Wildcats.

    I think there's more than one - the TPC one that exploded was maybe half a mile away, but there's a Huntsman plant right across the street and when we would be outside for practices after school we figured that one was the cause of the smell. Nothing like being outside in that heat and humidity with eau de chemical plant wafting through the air. I'm not sure what exactly they make at the Huntsman plant, or even if it's owned by Huntsman anymore.

  7. 14 minutes ago, Bojack said:

    That was me.  My parents graduated PNG in the late 60s.  My brothers and I graduated Nederland in the late 80s, early 90s.  I'm perfectly serious.  

    My brother asked my dad, who worked at Gulf/ Chevron for a long time, what chemical accounts for the smell near the PNG high school.  He said it's butadiene and suggested that the drill team could be known as the Butadienettes.  

    I would like to see them adopt a unique nickname with a local flair like Gators, Alligator Gar, Pelicans or some shit.  It's their chance to give themselves any name they want so it'd be a shame if they chose Eagles or Wildcats.

    You were serious that PNG's mascot should be Bulldogs? That's what I was referring to.

  8. 37 minutes ago, BearSchlong said:

    Along the petrochemical theme, the PNG Flares?

    The Blast?  that's too soon, I have friends that live several miles from Merriman that still can't open their windows because the explosion shifted their full brick house, and shattered the rafters in their attic.

    The Tugboats?

    to Kyrie's point, lol at what would happen if they chose bulldogs.

    Yeah I'll have to look back to see who wrote that (about the bulldogs) but I wasn't sure if they were being serious or not.

  9. Oh, and this is the petition they started to keep the name:

    Quote

     

    We, the people of Port Neches, Texas are fed up with the left wing nut jobs who are trying to destroy the United States of America in the name of "social justice".  We will not give in to these mobsters who are demanding that the Port Neches, Texas mascot, an Indian, be removed from our school and for us to change our name.

    This has been our mascot for a very, very long time. Now, with all this insanity of tearing down statues, assaulting our first amendment rights, and erasing our country's history, these clowns believe now is a good time to push their agenda.

    Let's spread the word and share this everywhere and demand that our mascot not be touched.  Enough is enough. God bless America.

     

    Also, I'm 99% sure that the guy who started the above petition is who we used to call Indian Ken, because he always wears full Indian garb and a full-length headdress to all the games. Basically a real-life Buddy Garrity.

    • Like 1
  10. 3 minutes ago, Bevo said:

    Before my time, but PNG played some team in the Astrodome in 1979 and they sold out the stadium. I remember hearing that the whole town pretty much shutdown for the game.

    They still shut down every Friday night during football season. It truly is just like Friday Night Lights.

    • Like 1
  11. For those not from southeast TX, the rundown is that in 1925 Port Neches-Groves ISD (or whatever it was called then) decided that their mascot would be the Indians. Every school in the district, not just the high school, has as its mascot some kind of variation on the theme. The high school is called The Reservation, etc. In 1979, the district got a certificate from the Cherokee Nation calling them "ambassadors of goodwill". Every time the question comes up of whether or not they should change their mascot, they bring up this certificate.

    Well, last week, the Cherokee Nation formally rescinded that certificate and asked them to change their mascot. As you can imagine, people are losing their shit. This is the superintendent's response:

    Quote

     

    PNG Community,

    It seems that recently our school district has been repeatedly challenged by natural and man-made disasters. I'm also certain that many are aware of the recent strides and efforts of individuals to create tolerance and acceptance within our country and society. The irony behind those efforts is that the Port Neches-Groves Independent School District has received them in the form of written and verbal attacks. It seems that our students, staff and community have come under criticism and ridicule for the 1925 decision to choose the Indian as a mascot. After many years as the Indians, the Cherokee Nations certified and recognized Port Neches-Groves as "Ambassadors of Goodwill." Sadly, today July 8, 2020, we received notification to revoke the October 1979 certificate. However, it is important to remember that our PNG schools belong to the PNG COMMUNITY and any future decisions on this topic will also belong to the community.

    Like thousands of schools across the nation, PNG has been working tirelessly to find a way to fight the Covid battle and safely resume a traditional educational setting for our students. We will continue to focus on creating an environment that is easy and safe for our PNG students and families.

    Sincerely,

    Mike Gonzales

     

    Of course, now all I'm hearing is "we don't need their permission anyway" and "the chief now is a leftist Democrat and I don't think he represents everyone in the Cherokee nation". This is a Beaumont Enterprise article about the superintendent's response. He and everyone else there are doubling down. For the record, I don't think they will change the mascot - there would be actual riots if that happened. But this is as close to change as I've ever seen.

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  12. On 7/7/2020 at 11:03 PM, DaysOff said:
    On 7/7/2020 at 10:33 PM, gsoda3 said:
    they're allowed with the distinctions that collective bargaining and striking are not allowed. 

    Then that's not a real union recognized by any labor relations board. There are no real teachers unions here.

     

    On 7/7/2020 at 11:07 PM, RexWilson said:

    Correct. They do not negotiate wages/benefits. They are just professional associations really. Your dues get you legal coverage and lobbyists for education issues with the state.

    Ok yeah, this was my understanding - my husband's a teacher and is in one of these but it has never functioned as more than a standard professional organization. That's why I was confused.

     

  13. 5 hours ago, Dr. Beeper said:

    My wife was a school teacher before she retired at the age of 29. I know a little about this. The teacher union is not exactly a strong one, but districts do not want teacher deaths on their hands. They don’t want litigation risks. They will face them up the wazoo by being hard asses. This is not the year to be enforcing rescissions. 

    Are you in Texas? I thought teacher unions weren't allowed here.

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