Five Years

I'm sitting here at Gate 24 up in National Airport with a couple of hours to kill before my return flight to New Orleans.  When I left home around 4:30 am on Monday I forgot to put my camera in my bag.  I've been kicking myself for that ever since.  The annual NCURA meeting went well, even though I had to miss the Sunday night festivities. The sessions themselves were good this year.  I think that I attended only one that was kind of a dud. The traditional Tuesday night party seemed better than usual.  Perhaps both the band and the participants put in a little extra effort this year because it was the last time the home-grown NCURA band "Sole Source and the No-Cost Extensions" would be playing.  They've done this every year for the last 20 years.  After the music ended at midnight I went up to the hospitality suite in order to be, you know, hospitable.  I guess some of the other regions' hospitality suites must have closed at midnight this year because ours was absolutely packed.  Around 1 am I figured I'd better go ahead and make my way back to my little hotel three blocks away before it got too late.  If I'd had another glass of wine I'd probably have decided, however unwisely, to stay longer.  When I left, the party was still going strong.  So after the final two sessions this morning, I walked out of the hotel at noon with a lot of time to kill, so I wandered over to Georgetown, mostly for the exercise, ate lunch, and ended up at a Starbucks so I could send off some emails before picking up my bag and hopping on the Metro for the airport.

When I checked Jill's "Jill Outside" blog and saw her retrospective "Five Years" post, I thought I'd look to see what I was up to on this day five years ago.  We were still living mostly up in Jackson, Louisiana but had come back to New Orleans for a few days.  The city was still reeling from Katrina, but some things were beginning to stabilize and most of our neighbors had been back in their houses for a week or two. It doesn't seem like it's been five years.  It would still be another week or so before we would finally move back home for good and set up the Psychiatry office in our living room.