My Sister

This is the day I go stay with my sister while my brother-in-law goes to breakfast with his friends. She gets more incoherent every time I go...telling me the very same things over and over again. She gets very confused too. That is part of the process, I guess.

The rest of the day until evening, is free. This evening I go to give the invocation at the City Commission meeting. I will probably stay for the rest of the meeting. There is one very cantankerous member who keeps an uproar going all the time. You never know what he is prepared to start each meeting.

I once thought I would like to serve in that way but I don't know if I have the patience for it. The community needs a watchdog though. Perhaps that is his function. They have spent well beyond their means and just keep raising taxes. When we moved into this house six years ago, our taxes were $775 per year. Last year they were nearly $1400. This year they will probably be even more.

This week I will need to pay the taxes on our vehicles. Those have gone down due to their age. Both together vehicles are $215 this year. What I dread to see in December is our property taxes. They are also raising our utilities. Since they lost the entire east side of Coffeyville in 2007 to the big flood, they also lost the income from those homes. They are trying to make up their loss starting this year. We lost nearly 400 homes over there because of the flood.

The refinery had left a valve open while filling a tank to keep it from floating off during the flood. So oil covered all that water over there. Then the Independence, Kansas sewage plant was inundated and their raw sewage floated down the river and covered the entire east side. The refinery bought out several hundred homes and FEMA bought out the rest and they just bulldozed everything. It's a vast green land over there now and the city and the refinery must pay someone to keep it mowed.