Day 134: I’m Back, Four Months (And Some Change) Later

Back At Le Blog After A Trip To New Orleans: Not that there wasn’t excellent wireless signal emanating from my house over the course of the weekend, but who wants to sit at a computer with only 2.5 days back in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Orleans? Now I have nothing to do but (take care of puppies, kitties, puppy-kitty havoc and) sit at my computer to work and blog.

And go through a mountain of mail?! As I suspected, the ever-helpful USPS suspended my mail-forwarding order and all correspondence to me is now sent to my New Orleans address. Good thing C and I share a mailbox. Or I wouldn’t have received items of great import such as my URGENT insurance bill which asks me to pay $NONE at this time and a Christmas card from my company’s CEO, along with a few magazines, trivial notices, and the ever-faithful Door County Advocate. It’s amazing how much of our life’s business is now accomplished online. Snail mail – piffle! Except when friends send you packages and they sit somewhere in the bowels of the Loyola Ave. post office for four months.

But, I digress. My weekend in New Orleans was just what I needed. On Friday, I cleaned the Smell Of Dead Gumbo out of my kitchen and have set up the official Stench-Thwarting Station – a tray filled with Asian Spice room spray, Clean Linen scented oil refills, Sandalwood votives, incense, and a can of Lysol. Instructions: When spirit of said dead refrigerator threatens, attack with items from station.

Once Julie showed up on Friday afternoon, we promptly headed to Fahy’s where we ran into everyone in the usual crowd of ne’er-do-wells and met Alan of Blogometer and ThinkNOLA fame (blogger meetup – geeks unite!). The Fahy’s gathering turned out to be the 12th Night / Epiphany / Let’s Get Our Mardi Gras On / Any Excuse To Eat King Cake party and, apparently, Julie, Alan and I were the most underdressed people there, despite that I saw on my calendar that it was indeed an epiphanous night but still forgot to costume.

While K readied her Uptown home (the basement of which fully flooded and has since been redone) for her son’s 10th birthday party, all I seem to remember of Saturday is Breakfast #2 at Surrey’s and driving through Mid-City, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish with Julie. My next post will elaborate on what I saw there, how I saw it and a comparison with the growth of the relatively-undamaged parts of the city, including mine. A precis for those of you who can’t wait: driving up Magazine St. or St. Charles Ave. and then down Claiborne Ave. into Chalmette and Arabi makes you wonder if you’re living in the same city.

Sunday morning involved a nice episode of Coffee Klatch starring Mac, Julie and me at my dining table. More heartwarming came about at our noon krewe meeting, where everyone was, as usual, terribly happy to see me there and sad to watch me depart back to Houston soon after. K and I had a great drive back, in sharp contrast to the one there that took us 7.5 hours. Lesson learned: hit the road early in the afternoon to avoid traffic pickles in Baton Rouge and Lafayette.

More perspective and fresh pictures in tomorrow’s Return To New Orleans 4 (Kurt Russell sold separately).

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Four Months (And Some) Later: Speaking of my krewe, its oldest member and the music captain of the greater organization, Krewe du Vieux, was featured in a BBC news article on the fate of a handful of Katrina survivors three months after the storm. John Hyman appears in Katrina victims – where are they now?:

[John] is already lining up musicians to parade in February, and says the federal government is likely to come in for some scathing humour because of its response to the disaster.

“I felt from the start that New Orleans would not come back bigger and better, but smaller and better,” he says. “I still think that is likely to be what will happen.”

Just change the word likely to most decidedly in that first line. Take it from me, folks, you do not want to miss the Krewe du Vieux parade this year! [More details forthcoming as they are released to me by my krewe captain.]

BBC coverage of British expats in the Crescent City including John, the only person not to evacuate his block of the French Quarter during and after the storm, is available here.

The historic area where he lives is in the centre of the city, but escaped the worst of the flooding … Mr. Hyman’s telephone still works, the water came back on Thursday morning and he has enough tinned food and water to last for weeks.

Something I liked about the Three Months Later article is the Before & After picture set. In this case, however, they are not pictures of NO before and after the storm, but a comparison of right after the storm (before) with more or less now (after).

Also of great sociological and psychological interest is a Harvard Medical School project that will track the lives of Katrina survivors for two years (thanks, D!).

As per the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group website:

Government policy-makers need to know the practical problems these people continue to face as they try to reconstruct their lives. This can best be done by monitoring a group of people who represent those displaced by Katrina over time … Quarterly interviews are being carried out with all the Advisory Group members to monitor the pace of recovery. Reports are being prepared for policy-makers … The Advisory Group consists of a representative sample of over 1000 people who had to leave their homes because of Hurricane Katrina.

Perusing the website shows that it is fairly new; this will be a good study to bookmark and see how much people achieve and how far the project gets over a period of time.

A note before I close: More than anything I did in New Orleans, the simple pleasures of sleeping in my bed and lounging in my recliner (with my woobie) have yet to be paralleled in life’s best experiences.