Dark and Stormy

Wednesday's morning ride turned out to be a very nice and smooth ride at a moderate pace. In a way, it was kind of a throw-back to the early levee rides, with Donald taking three-mile pulls and everyone else quite content to sit in the paceline and daydream. I was nursing a scratchy throat and hoping I wouldn't end up with The Wife's head cold. The weather was again cool and clear in the morning, but by afternoon there were some clouds rolling in and the forecast was deteriorating.

The evening news warned of a line of heavy thunderstorms expected to hit the city some time after midnight. This time, the forecast was accurate and I was awakened around 2 a.m. by howling winds, blowing rain and relentless thunder and lightning. I got up to make sure there was no water leaking through the patched (and unpatched) parts of the roof and then fired up the computer to check the radar. It looked bad. A couple of minutes after downloading the radar image, the DSL line went dead. Half an hour later, the power went out. I looked out the window and it was deja vu all over again. The streets looked just like they did at night the first couple of times I came back after the hurricane. It was completely dark and silent, other than the pelting rain and howling wind, without a single light visible in any direction. As it turned out, thousands of people were without power and there were reports of at least a couple of possible tornados touching down during the storm. The airport suffered some damage, a huge radio tower at the state police station collapsed and fell across Veterans highway, and a probable tornado did a lot of damage along the street near the spot on the levee where we meet in the morning. I finally went to sleep again, and since the power never came back on, there was no alarm clock, and I didn't wake up until it was too late to try and get in even a short, wet ride. Instead of riding, I drove in to the office with The Wife, stopping for a big cup of hot water extracted drugs (with four sugars) along the way. I added a couple of tablets of pseudoephedrine to the mix since it's pretty clear I'm getting a head cold. The weather now is rather nice, of course, as it always is after a storm blows through from the west.

There's an article in the news this morning about HANO (the housing authority of New Orleans) asking residents of one of the city's housing developments, the one downtown just off Canal St. that has been thwarting efforts to revitalize the downtown area for the last twenty-five years, to return. HANO is a largely corrupt local organization that handles funds from HUD. About the Ibberville housing project, they say they want to "integrate it both socially and economically."

Yeah, right. That'll work.