Tryin' to Wash Us Away

Holy S*#t! They really are trying to wash us away.

Another category 5 hurricane is headed this way. It looks like this one has its eye on the Houston area, which happens to be the place to which Tulane moved it's adminstration! Way to go, guys. Evacuate to another coastal city during hurricane season. Now they're getting ready to evacuate from the place to which they evacuated. I just hope they take the payroll records with them this time! Geez.... Of course, all of this has delayed the New Orleans recovery effort, and in particular my plans to start the major cleanup on my house on Friday. This thing is huge, and even if it goes in around Galveston as currently predicted, we will feel the effects here and in New Orleans.

I knew it would be a busy day today and so I did a short but fast 20 miles in order to allow us to get in to the office at the hospital early. Along the way I did a few unplanned dog sprints. It's a good thing that most of the houses along this route are set back quite far from the road. By the time the dogs race all the way from the house to the road, they are already a bit tired, so it usually just takes a brief surge to convince them that I'm far enough away to be considered harmless.

I was in a conference call today concerning Tulane's research operations. We are expecting many of our buildings to be operational on some level in about a week, which is to say that people will be able to enter. The Tidewater Bldg., where my office is, should have power soon. They tried to reconnect it to the grid the other day, but the main panel apparently fried, so it will take a little longer. It was a very busy day for me today, but I think some good things were accomplished. I wish I could say the same for my roof! All of the rain that hurricane Rita will bring to the city is not going to help that situation out one bit. Anyway, some of the inside people at Tulane are thinking that Nov. 1 is a reasonable target date to have people back working in the buildings. I think it could be done sooner than that, but we will see. One problem will be that many of the Tulane employees no longer have a place to live in New Orleans. Tulane is working with FEMA on addressing that problem, but they're not yet ready to say anything specific because a lot of it is still kind of up in the air.

I think I will try to do a longer ride tomorrow morning, since the forecast is calling for increasing rain as the hurricane approaches. I've been riding the same 25-mile loop, for the most part, all week, so perhaps I'll try and extend that a bit if I can.