I got in a nice and brisk 25 miles this morning. For some reason my legs were feeling good and it felt nice to attack the hills. Like yesterday, the weather was nice and cool, the traffic was practically nonexistant, and the asphalt was smooth as silk. What more can you ask? It would have been nice to have ridden longer, but we're basically back on the clock now and needed to get in to the hospital to get to work. My task for today will be to get in touch with the tech support guy here and find out if there's a way to improve internet access because we are probably going to have a couple more Tulane people in here soon who will also need to be using computers and my guess is that the system here is pretty overloaded already.
So yesterday I walked a few blocks over to the local post office and secured a P.O. box, then got online (they were out of "change of address" forms) and sent in our temporary mail forwarding address to the US Postal Service. It was all quite painless. I hung around the house all day waiting for the BellSouth modem/router to arrive and by 4:30 I was getting pretty pissed that it wasn't here. Well apparently FedEx or whoever delivered it just put it on the back porch around 5 p.m. without even ringing the bell, so I take back all those nasty things I was saying about BellSouth.
Installation was pretty easy, but we ran into all kinds of problems getting Jim's Windows98 computer to work with it. At first, we thought there was a problem with the encryption, and fooled with that for quite a while before deciding to just disable security altogether. Well, that didn't work either, so we're kind of baffled as to why it won't work. The WinXP computers work fine, though.
Right now I'm at the hospital, and connectivity here isn't much better. I'm using a Win98 Pentium II desktop right now, and it's struggling a bit.
The Wife got a call from her brother yesterday evening. He had been into New Orleans as part of a team from Baton Rouge that will be handling some of the cleanup, and was able to stop by our house. He said that it looked good and there was no sign of a water mark on the outside. One of the neighbors who had seen it at the height of the flooding said he didn't think the water ever got past the first step. That was definitely a bit of encouraging news! If that's correct, it means that we just had a few inches of water in the basement, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. The Mayor is now saying that he may allow residents back into the Uptown area on Monday to assess damage and retrieve essential items. That would be great. The Wife's brother said that you really don't want to stay in New Orleans right now.
3 comments:
That's huge news. The Commuter survived!
Sounds like very encouraging news about your house!
Indeed, we're taking this as very good news. Perhaps our biggest problem will turn out to be mold. In fact, word is that the building in which I work in downtown N.O. had about 5 feet of water on the ground floor and that there is already mold growing all the way up to the 4th floor. I think that they will feel obligated to decontaminate most of the building before allowing it to be used again, and considering that it is 24 floors, that might take some time.
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