On Fire

It must be getting to be summer because almost everyone was out early this morning for the Wednesday training ride. For the most part it was a bit slower than I wanted, but I went with it anyway and behaved myself, more or less. I was feeling pretty good today and was glad when the pace picked up toward the end of the ride and I could finally get my heartrate up into training effect territory. As I write I'm watching a couple of helicopters circling back and forth between the river and a huge fire that broke out at the Orange Street Warf this morning. The fire started about 9:30 a.m. It' s now after 11:00 and they are still dumping water from helicopters and the sky is still full of smoke. I mean, this fire was huge. I assume that they are concentrating on keeping it from spreading because actually putting it out looks like it would be practically impossible despite the helicopters dumping swimming pool sized bags of water every minute or so. We had a pretty good view from the roof here, so I took a few photos, but the cheap little fixed-focus camera I have here they don't really tell the story very well. It is fortunate that the wind is blowing more or less away from the city and toward the river, although I think that the adjacent warf and building downriver is the one owned by Tulane and the planned site for the RiverSphere center. Right now most of the black smoke has been replaced with white smoke which usually means that the fire is finally coming under control.

Yesterday I went out after work with The Wife to buy this rolling kitchen island thing at Linens and Things, and after fighting rush hour traffic, loading the thing (assembly required) into the wagon, hauling it home, and getting it inside, I discovered that the butcher-block top section was broken into three pieces, so we get to repeat the process today.