The Wind Is Fierce Today…..

@Heartlander I hope it eases off for you guys.

@4meAndyou not much to slow it down. A neighbor shot me a warning to be sure everything was tied down.

@4meAndyou I hope so, saw an alert for counties with wildfires and mine is in it. They are warning us to stay indoors because even power lines can go down in this wind, not to mention the stuff flying around and branches breaking.

@cherokeepatti Oh gosh...not fires!!!! Not with wind like that.

@4meAndyou I don’t know how many people lost their homes in Oklahoma yesterday. Fires all over the state. Someone took a video on his camera of a group of deer running for their lives. A meteorologist said that with all these fires some of them were probably arson fires. When me & the boy were leaving a restaurant in Oklahoma City and going back to the car lot there was a woman higher than a kite walking across the road with a lit cigarette in her hand. I told him that’s how some of the fires could get started if people are smoking around dry grass or weeds, which there was a large patch of about 3 blocks down the road. Several people inside the city in Norman (not rural area) also had fires, have to wonder if it was the transients walking around smoking and throwing the butts down. One of them was a grass fire in a backyard about a mile and a half from here…they were home and got it put out with a water hose. They had scooper planes available that scoop up water from the lake but couldn’t use them because the winds were too violent.

@cherokeepatti I am praying that none of these fires TOUCH you or your house!!!

@4meAndyou Thank you, the winds have calmed down quite a bit, 15 mph now, not too bad.

@cherokeepatti Thank you, GOD!!!

@4meAndyou The skies are clear now too. There was a dusty-smoky haze that wasn’t healthy to be out in.

@cherokeepatti Better and better. God takes care of His own!

@4meAndyou that one grass fire in someone’s backyard that was about a mile from (as the crow flies) was not all that far from the food & shelter place. So many residents are reporting that they are getting into their yards to prowl around, sleep or take a dump. If they were back there smoking well then there you go. There was a long closed business here that caught on fire during the winter and they said that they believed it was transients getting inside.

@cherokeepatti I think your city government needs to be told, in no uncertain terms, that the homeless are becoming dangerous.

@4meAndyou They’ve been told by hundreds if not thousands of residents at city council meetings etc. So they know very well. Twenty-five percent of the people who are arrested are homeless or transients. And they let most all of them right back out on the street because the jails are at capacity. This is what happens when people don’t think of unintended consequences of having so many charities in one area. They are calling up their friends and bragging on the benefits and coming here. Not to mention the ones that the state of California has gifted us so Oklahoma can take care of their medical needs so they don’t have to. Hospitals are being burdened with them wanting to get out of the weather and have an extended stay. If they pretend to have chest pains, for example, it’s very difficult to make them leave. And they’ve got everything they need donated to them but they still stand around and panhandle to get money for booze and drugs. Not to mention the ones that approach customers at gas stations aggressively or cars waiting in long lines circling behind Chick-Fil-A restaurants etc. Then the police have to deal with their drunken or high butts acting out or breaking into homes for shelter or vandalizing. So many have become a menace in public, threatening children who are skateboarding on sidewalks or whatever. One mother told me she won’t let her kids out in the front yard unless she’s with them and they aren’t that young.

@cherokeepatti Time to close down the charities.

@4meAndyou There are some that are wanting to legislate where to put the shelters. Especially since they’ve been allowing registered sex offenders to stay in them. They aren’t supposed to be near schools, daycare centers, playgrounds or parks. Which the shelters are too close to. There are a very few places inside the city limits that they are allowed to live and the police station has maps of those areas. Also no new shelters and send them to a centralized location near organizations that can help them. It seems some of these are coming from Oklahoma City too. They migrate around.

@cherokeepatti When I first began to volunteer, it was at a live-in drug rehabilitation facility for women with children trying to overcome their addiction to cocaine and other drugs.

At that time, back in the late 80's, High Point hadn't been built yet...that is the drug rehab and alcohol abuse facility that exists today.

Covered Bridge was WAY the heck out in the country down Rte 105 on the way to Middleboro...and THAT was deliberate. It was very important to keep the drug addicts isolated and distant from their drug sources. They also had to have a "new life" plan in place, away from family and friends who had influenced them down the wrong road in the past.

Once a week, the women were taken by van to the Homeless Shelter where I worked later, and they were allowed to take whatever food they needed from the food pantry, and any clothing items they needed from the clothing donations.

One of my jobs in my early volunteer days was child care. The women had to attend classes, so I would take care of their children with one other woman. Babysitting for crack babies and little children who were scared and mistrusting. I would take them on field trips sometimes, if there were just one or two, picking blueberries, or other activities.

Until your town takes steps like this, and isolates the drug addicts way the hell out in the country, the drug addicts won't ever recover, and addiction CAUSES homelessness.

@4meAndyou There was some talk about making a shelter way out in the country. But rural people aren’t too keen on that, either since the city annexed so much land including residential areas back in the 1960’s. This city was in terms of square miles the 10th largest city in the USA and Oklahoma City was the largest city in the USA. I don’t know if anything has changed on that now or not.

There is a drug rehab facility north of here in a rural area. I heard from someone who came out of another rehab that drugs are just as easy to get inside of the rehabs as they are on the outside. I don’t know if that is true or not. I do not they are having a hard time keeping the drugs away from jail inmates, have had several deaths this past year including drug overdoses. Probably someone working for the jail to blame for it. They caught and charged a deputy warden at a prison in Oklahoma for allowing drugs & other contraband to be brought into the prison and it was last year.

@cherokeepatti Perhaps a concerned citizen or two needs to print some flyers bringing up the subject...again.

@cherokeepatti
THIS illustration could be included on the flyers, and delivered to the town council personally...🤣🤣🤣