Hey, we're people. I'm an idiot too. In the winter I curse and swear and shiver and promise to worship the themometer if it ever shows so much as 50 again. The sun and sweat sound wonderful.
Then, it's 90F and 90% and I curse and moan and long for the cooling winter--where at least you can take off or add a layer to adjust. The friggin heat is killing my ass. I can't, right now, remember what it's like to be cold.
When it's dry and everything is brown and no rain in sight, I curse and bitch and hold my arms up to the heavens praying for a soothing drop on the parched land. Then it's raining and I'm cursing and running around digging and laying tile and wondering when the christ it's ever going to stop.
being an idiot is what keeps me sane. I'd be down there in my FEMA trailer bitching about it to.
Pretty much sums up living in the midwest...
Eastern Iowa isn't nearly as heavily populated as the gulf area, and more effected people here had (or could afford) property insurance too, it wasn't mainly the lower income people that got flooded.
With Katrina they were getting people out before the storm happened... leaving their property wide open for anyone who wanted it. In the midwest it was a series of storms, the people were there pretty much right up until it flooded making looting difficult.
It also wasn't nearly as big, a tornado here and there with heavy rain doesn't compare very well against a hurricane several states wide, quickly followed by another almost as big...
The river came out of its banks in the Midwest, it is a given at some point that it would go back in, Lake Ponchitrain broke a levee in LA and flooded neighborhoods. The only way to fix it was repair the levee and pump it out, most of New Orleans is below sea level and a couple hundred years ago would have been underwater anyway. That isn't a waiting game with mother nature, that is waiting for someone to get it done.
And Katrina really opened peoples eyes about how to deal with a natural disaster. Most of the towns in my hometown area have Emergency Managers now, they keep people better informed about what is happening, like driving thru a baseball sized hail storm while talking to the radio station about how bad the weather is and the like...
Farmers do get a lot of help from the govt, a couple weeks ago down home they were planting like mad because it was finally dry enough to get in the field to plant/replant. The federal crop insurance deadline was due about that time where they get a big hit if anything more happens if it isn't in the ground by then, god knows this is the year we will get a really early frost too.
It is raining hard again today, so planting is curtailed for even longer now. General rule of thumb was "kneehigh by the fourth of July"
And no, aside from limited jobs you can't beat living in a small town.
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