Gearing Up

It was really chilly this morning when The Wife and I took off for an early-morning 20-mile spin, and although I would have like to have ridden farther and faster today, things are beginning to gear back up for both of us work-wise. We spent yesterday afternoon up on the roof of Jim L's house, about an hour from here, tacking down a tarp over the more badly damaged sections and patching up what we could so that there wouldn't be too much rain damage while waiting for the insurance adjuster to check it out and allow them to get it repaired. The house is way up near Franklinton, LA - quite far from N.O. - but there are whole sections up there where the pine trees are just snapped off like matchsticks. Jim had two pecan trees that were uprooted and toppled, along with a huge old oak tree that was also uprooted. Luckily, it fell away from the house (they were there at the time) and totalled the pump house.

I think that tomorrow morning I will try for a longer ride. I will need to get myself a proper pump pretty soon, and am already thinking about arm-warmers and vests.

Right now I am in a temporary office at the psychiatric medical center (aka East Louisiana Mental Health System facility) in Jackson LA. One of the doctors here had gone out and picked up a wireless router, and so I installed it on one of the ethernet drops, but it didn't really do much good. The main router here is apparently maxxed out, so adding additional computers, wireless or not, is not working well at all. Earlier this morning, however, I got in touch with BellSouth in order to get high-speed DSL installed at the house where we are staying. After about 45 minutes on the phone, the deal was done. Ordinarily, it would not be until the Sept. 22 that they could activate the upgrade and ship the modem/router out of Atlanta, but after explaining to the customer service rep that we were trying to get Tulane's Psych/Neuro department re-established temporarily here in Jackson they bent over backwards to expedite the process and so I am now expecting to receive the equipment via overnight mail tomorrow (they even waived the shipping charge) and they will activate the upgrade by midnight tonight, so if all goes well, we may be up and running at the house tomorrow night. So, BellSouth deserves a lot of credit for doing that. As you can imagine, their tech people are pretty swamped right now. I took a couple of pics of the house where we are staying, but won't be able to put them here until later. You're not allowed to bring photographic equipment onto the property at the hospital here, and I don't have a card reader.

There is a great article about one of the Tulane Researchers (Tyler Curiel) in the Ft. Worth paper. You can check it out here. He's heading into N.O. today via private jet, loaded down with LN2 and dewars to rescue research materials that were frozen in Liquid Nitrogen before the hurricane. Unfortunately, anything that was in the regular ultra-low freezers is toast by now, but much of what was in LN2 should be OK. WWLTV.com has some new before and after photos showing the current status of some of the flooded areas.

Much going on between Tulane, congress, and the Office of Management and Budget aimed at protecting existing research funding and providing some help with rebuilding research infrastructure that was lost in the hurricane. Can't really get into details on that, however. It looks like it will be a very busy week for us. This is the first break I've had today, and it's only because the department chair just arrived and everyone is in the conference room having their first big face-to-face meeting since the disaster.