"RELIANT CITY"
Fourth Posting.
Next To Last One.
Hello again all,
Well, Sunday was a pretty uneventful night. We had a couple of disturbances, a couple of ladies got to fighting with each other at one point and it wasn't the first time. Unfortunately for them, we have experience with that sort of thing and since they couldn't get along, I had one of them moved from the Dome to the Reliant Center, and problem solved. LOL. We do that with inmates at the jail all the time. Move one of the two combatants to another jail cellblock, problem solved.
As I said, Sunday was pretty uneventful, but last night, Monday night, we had a fire in the Astrodome, right out on the main floor, at about midnight. I was standing at the bottom of the east ramp, speaking to some deputies, and we saw a column of smoke coming from toward the southwest end of the floor. As the ceiling to the Astrodome is WAY up there, the column of smoke was quite high.
Now, we all started moving that way at a pretty good clip, and two of the firefighters assigned to us got their little extinguishers ready. As we got closer we could see some kind of flames down near one of the cots and I just knew some child had started a blaze on his cot and it had gotten out of control. But as we got closer it started to look like something else. The flame would appear, and then disappear. Only to appear once again. It also became clear it was being held in the hands of an individual. Okay, now WTF, over?
As I got up to the spot where the fire was I could see it was a very large birthday cake being held by the "birthday boy", who was all of 20 or so years old....sheesh. They had put those huge number candles on the cake and in addition to that, the candles were the trick kind that you can't blow out....lol. So as this fellow was trying to blow out the candles, they'd keep lighting back up. As this went on for several minutes, the column of smoke developed. As he kept trying to blow out the candle, and the more he failed, the more they melted onto the top of the cake, till the flammable material that allows the candles to reignite got all over the top of the cake, and then, ignited!! So we had a blazing birthday cake by the time we got over there....LOL. The poor fellow had managed to get the flames to go out just before a firefighter would have just blown that cake apart with the fire extinguisher and the crisis was over....lol.
One nice thing about the story, the fellow whose birthday it was, offered all of us a piece of cake...lol. We politely thanked him, but declined, and went our merry ways. It did liven up an otherwise pretty boring night.
Later on myself and three of my deputies confronted some individuals who were in the Dome but had armbands from the Center. When we ran them on the computer one had a warrant in the system for aggravated robbery, but, of course, Louisiana couldn't verify the warrant, so we had to cut him loose. We kept the name and information so we could at least let Louisiana know he was in Houston on such and such a date and time, so they can try to look him up later on once their computer system is back online.
But that's it. No meetings with people of great intellect. No promising young people the past couple of nights. It's been more of a disappointment lately with the "Reliant City Whine" that's going around. Kind of a combination of "what have you done for me lately" & "Why aren't you doing even more?" I am so sick of some of these peoples' attitude of entitlement, and holding their hands out for a, well, handout, that I can hardly stand it. While on the one hand you have some really outstanding examples of the goodness in people, we also have some of the dregs of humanity right here in the Dome.
I'm really tired as I just got in, so I'm not going to even try to get off into the philosophy of a dependent society, et al. It would make my brain hurt to try it right now, I'll probably be able to put something together once this is over when I've had time for the entire experience to sink in and settle into me. Hopefully, anyway.
Sax, your box was delivered to the daycare center set up at the Reliant Arena. People from the Dome and the Center can drop their small children off there during the day while they go out and look for housing or jobs. It is a really neat setup. They were THRILLED to get the little kids stuff.
Chief, picked up your boxes from my office yesterday morning, and took them into the Dome last night when I reported for duty. Those goods were placed in the distribution queue and lined up to be given out just as all the rest are. Everyone thought it was pretty neat that I had stuff from people in Dallas (Sax) and Minnesota. Thank you very much guys, several of those Red Cross volunteers are VERY cute, and I sure liked having them smile at me...heheheh. Your efforts are appreciated on many levels.
That's all for now folks, my eyelids are making a trek south, along with my chin, and pretty soon I'll be dead asleep, so I don't want that to be while I'm sitting here at this keyboard...lol.
Take care,
Mac