"Make Levees, Not War!"

It was another chilly morning in the quiet town of Jackson, but I dressed a bit more lightly than yesterday because I was planning on more of a workout. Although I've certainly lost a lot of fitness over the past month, it felt good to be pushing on the pedals again, even if it was for only 22 miles. On the way back I stopped by the Post Office, encouraged by yesterday's mail stash. It seems that they've finally started to forward some of my mail, and yesterday I had two months worth of a couple of bills (but not others??). Go figure. It's a good thing I've been paying the bills online.

It was a very busy day at work for me, which was great. It's really frustrating, though, trying to use the incredibly slow ethernet at the hospital and trying to make phone calls on a cellphone that is doing its best to pull in one bar's worth of analog signal. I did commandeer the one land line we all share for my 1-hour conference call, though. After working frenetically most of the day pulling together an impossible report with inadequate data, we skipped out around 4 p.m. to head back to New Orleans. Traffic through Baton Rouge was stop-and-go, and once we got out of the city it was still very crowded on I-10 all the way to New Orleans. I was glad that we didn't have any more trouble with the flaky temperature sender, so I guess my wiring repair did the trick. I have to admit that I'm pretty surprised that something as simple as a loose connection to a temperature sending unit could mess up the engine management system and make the car run so badly.

The Wife has a flight out to D.C. tomorrow afternoon, and had an informal dinner meeting scheduled with one of the folks in her office. We ended up at Louisiana Pizza Kitchen on Carrollton Avenue and had a nice little dinner, although we practically closed the place down around 9:00. Most of the area restaurants are running shortened hours, and this one closed at 8. The person we were with had attended the local Voodoo Festival, held this year on the "fly" which is the riverfront batture area of Audubon Park. She said it was great, and added that she has been seeing a lot of interesting Katrina-related T-Shirts. One that I liked said "Make Levees, Not War!" She also said that many of the jazz places down in the Quarter, like Snug Harbor, are not charging for the jazz shows!

So I think I'll probably hit the levee tomorrow morning rather than trying to make the Giro ride, since I'm planning on doing the Northshore training ride on Sunday and I have a lot of work I need to get done tomorrow. Hope there's somebody out on the levee I can ride with. I really need to learn to plan ahead for these sorts of things. Living in two different places is making it really hard to keep track of my stuff. I can no longer remember what stuff I have where, so I've been basically packing everything every time I move. It's getting really heavy.