As for the cleanup, only by seeing the vast amount of work being done, realizing that it has been going on for weeks, and then seeing how much is left to be done can one who was not there get a sense of how truly devastating Ivan was to the Pensacola area.
Along I-10, virtually every sign is down or missing. Trees are down everywhere one looks, many having been snapped off about half way up their trunks. Dump trucks, cranes, stacks of fresh building materials and the sounds of chainsaws and wood chippers are all about. One bright note is that seeing such activity reminds one of the tremendous ability our great nation has to recover, regenerate and rebuild.
VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE
A cowboy was herding his cows in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a YSL suit, Fendi shoes, Bulgari sunglasses & an Armani tie leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex numbers.. He
uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a consultant to the Kerry campaign." says the cowboy.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business...
...Now give me back my dog.