Legally Back

Today was the first day I was legally allowed back to my uptown New Orleans neighborhood, so I pointed the old Volvo in the general direction of the Crescent City and rolled into town unimpeded around 10 a.m. Despite the passage of an entire month, the area around my house was still a long way from ready for prime time. The house itself looked pretty much exactly like it had when we had visited it a couple of weeks ago. There were piles of branches on one corner, and on closer inspection I could see that they were not victims of the hurricane. They were victims of the power company’s tree-trimmers. In fact, while I was there, they were coming down Pine Street toward my house. It was like a parade. The first float was the tree-trimming truck. This was manned by Mexicans and they were lobbing off the branches of beautiful live oaks, magnolias and pine trees with reckless abandon. The pine tree across the street from my house that I had watched grow for the last 15 years was unceremoniously chopped off about 20 feet up. The oak tree across the street was practically destroyed. For all that, I still have no power at the house and from the looks of things it will be a while yet before most houses do. One thing that surprised me was how few people were there working on their houses. Perhaps there will be more tomorrow, since it’s a weekend?? I was the only one on my block.

Anyway, all of that Hurricane Rita rain last week had no effect, as far as I could tell, on the water marks that decorate my kitchen and hall ceilings, so my sense of urgency about the roof pretty much evaporated and I decided to concentrate instead on cleaning up the sidewalk and then starting the nasty work of tossing out the junk in the basement. Even after all this time, there were still a lot of wet things down there, most of which were now hosting a thick crop of mold. The only things that were really, really bad were the books. I had four or five boxes of books on the floor, and they were quite nasty. I filled up quite a few huge heavy-duty plastic bags with old textbooks, the originals of my master’s thesis and research notebooks, a full set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica from the 40’s, etc. I guess I got about a quarter of the way through before coming up for air, and rather than spending the night in the house, I headed over to my dad’s place in River Ridge where I knew there would be air-conditioning. Tomorrow I’ll be back early to meet The Wife, after which we’ll go check out Dr. W’s house which will definitely make my soggy basement problem look like a walk in the park.

Back to Uptown

I was out early this morning, but my mind was elsewhere, and although I had a nice enough ride, my legs were just putting in the miles while my head was thinking about work. As things have evolved, I have found myself doing a lot of work for various people, and it turns out that I rather like it that way. It can get complicated sometimes when schedules collide, but at any rate it does keep things interesting. On the one hand there is my regular work related to government affairs. That intersects quite often with the Research Office, and since I put up the Research News blog it has become a part of my daily routine. I am also immersed in the Psychiatry/Neurology department, and am often called on for technical help ("The computer just ate that document I was working on!") and miscellaneous other overflow tasks. So this morning was pretty busy and by lunchtime I was happy to accompany the department Chair and a few others to eat at an "upscale" Country Club a few miles down the road. It turned out to be about twice as much food as I needed, but not being the wasteful sort, I dutifully finished what was on my plate.

During lunch I made yet another call to my noncomunicative insurance agency and when I spun the roulette wheel this time, the ball landed on the number of someone who actually knew something. I was informed that my claim had been assigned to a new adjuster. This was actually good news, because the phone number I had been given for the previous one was coming back as disconnected. The bad news was that the company had not put the person's phone number into their database yet, so I was unable to harass her personally. The insurance company person promised to send her an "electronic inquiry" asking that she contact me because I was planning to be in New Orleans this weekend (no doubt along with a few hundred thousand others). Naturally, I have not received a phone call from this alleged claims adjuster.

So after lunch I made a trip over the Zachary where there is a Home Depot, and after negotiating a road closure (overturned tractor-trailer) picked up a bundle of generic roofing, a roll of tarpaper, nails, roofing cement, etc. so that I can make some temporary repairs to my roof. The mayor has opened up my part of the city, effective tomorrow, and I will be heading back to Uptown around mid-day to begin the big clean-up. The Wife will be coming down on Saturday with some other people who we will be helping out. They will be seeing their flooded house for the first time in person and trying to make some decisions and see what they might be able to salvage. I don't know if there will be any electricity at my house yet. I'm guessing not, but at least it should be back on soon. The Mom's condo had power restored today. One of the guys who lives there send the following email out today:
Friends

I was sitting at Igor's on St Charles washing some clothes and having a "Katrina" (hurricane that is) (actually I was having "several") and ran into someone from Entergy who said that they could turn on our building if someone could assure him that there would be no conflict (as in sparks flying) with generators on site which assurance I was willing to provide (wisely or not - our generator being dead as a door nail and tunrned off at the transfer switch today by me but that is another story) and he picked up his cell phone and called someone who threw the big switch in the sky and there was light. Simply amazing. So we are powered up. We will get Schindler in the building tomorrow for the elevators (Larry - please do) and life will go on. "His Honor" the mayor has opened the city to residents in our zip code starting in the am. Herein ends my story. Come home.

Meetings, Calls and Muscadine

I knew it would be a busy day today before the sun came up. The Wife was up and down all night, and finally gave up on sleep altogether around 5:30 a.m. She was worried about the housing situation in Houston for the Psych Medical Residents who would be starting in a few days. It put her on edge most of the day, and believe me, I was keeping my distance! When I left to do my training ride she told me not to be late because she wanted to get to the office early.

I told her to not to wait for me.

It was cooler this morning and the ride felt nice. My calves were a little sore from yesterday's stair-climbing excercise, so I kept my pace moderate for the most part, although I couldn't resist sprinting up a couple of the little hills. Early in the morning on days like this you can already feel the change in the seasons coming. Somehow, I always find Fall to be a little bit depressing. The shorter days and cooler weather make me think of those brutally cold winter rides when I leave the house in the dark with lights flashing and shoe covers on and freezing fingers.

The news from New Orleans is upbeat today with the mayor announcing his new re-entry plan. My Zip code gets to officially come back on Friday, which was pretty much my plan anyway. The water situation is improving, but they aren't quite ready to say you can drink it yet, and I think that much of the uptown area has had power restored. Perhaps that little glimmer I see may be the light at the end of this long tunnel. A friend of mine, Chip E., whose house is on Grand Route St. John in N.O., has recently bought a house in Zachary, just down the road from here. His house and office had some significant roof damage, but being on Esplanade Ridge, there was no flooding. He has started a blog called the Katrina Chronicles.

It was another busy day today. We had to go into Baton Rouge for a Psych/Neuro conference call at noon that, thankfully, I wasn't needed for, so I walked around the corner to the coffee shop with free wifi, checked my mail and had a sandwich and cup of coffee. Then we walked over to the Camelot Club at the top of the Chase bulding for the Psych/Neuro general faculty meeting. I had a conference call I had to be in about half an hour after it started, so I snuck out and made the call. Along the way my cellphone battery started to run out, so I had to plug in my charger right about the time my pen ran out of ink. Man, I hate doing conference calls with a cellphone! I really needed a headset because trying to take notes while listening to a conference call on a cellphone with medicore reception is pure torture. About an hour's worth of torture to be exact. Finally the conference call and the meeting wrapped up and then we had to go look at some space that Psych is considering renting in B.R. for some of their clinical stuff. The department chair and his wife arrived just before the first conference call, and are staying at the house we're at, so after going to the office at the hospital for about an hour we finally headed back to the house. Someone went out and got a bunch of fried chicken, so we broke out a couple of bottles of that muscadine wine. Seemed somehow appropriate. Anyway, now I've got to put these conference call minutes together and update the research news website, but since it's after 9:30 already and I've had three glasses of the finest muscadine wine that Jackson has to offer, I may have to take a rain check on that and do it first thing tomorrow. One bit of good news coming out of the conference call is that the Tidewater building may be "up" today or tomorrow and things on the downtown campus are generally going well ahead of schedule. The building may be ready for limited occupancy a week from Monday. So we will be heading into New Orleans this weekend for sure, at least to patch up the roof and start the cleanup. There is still a dawn to dusk curfew, so we won't likely be staying overnight unless power is working and we can run the a/c.

We shall see.

Back Downtown

There was no chance to ride today because we headed into New Orleans to retrieve some stuff, including my desktop computer, from the Tidewater Building. After finally getting the OK from the appropriate people, five of us headed out in the wee hours for our 8:30 a.m. meeting with today's group of 20 that had been given permission to get into the building. We drove down in two cars. The lead car (actually a fancy truck) was driven by one of the psychiatrists who happens also to be a deputy sheriff, so he had his flashing blue lights going, his Glock strapped to his hip, and his badge hanging around his neck. We broke numerous laws along the way as he led us through the early morning traffic at speeds well above the speed limit. We arrived just in time to wait in the parking garage for 40 minutes for the latecomers to arrive, chatting with the security guards who were all carrying AR-15s. Then we headed over to the Tidewater Bulding which is still without power, water or sewerage. Equipped with our handy headlamps, we ascended the hot, dark stairwell, dropping people off at their designated floors along the way. Since I was going all the way up to the 25th floor, I was the last. It was nice to see that our office seemed to have survived the hurricane(s) intact, and although I didn't check out all of the individual offices, I did step out onto the roof and check the windows to make sure none were broken. The roof itself was a bit of a mess. It looked like a fair amount of sheet metal was scattered about, along with many of the compressors and other a/c equipment. Down on the 10th floor where The Wife's office is, there were two huge windows that had been blown out. Those two offices were completely trashed. There was nothing left but one heavy steelcase filing cabinet and an old psychiatrist's chair. Everything else was reduced to splinters and confetti. Back in my office, where I would estimate the temperature to have been at least 120F, I stuffed my computer, monitor and associated cables into a large shoulder bag I had brought with me and finally headed back down the stairs, waiting for the others along the way. It took forever for some to finish finding everything they had been sent to find, but after a couple of sweath hours we finally made good our escape.

It was the first time I had been back downtown since Katrina, and although the building itself looked pretty good above the first floor, the city is still quite a mess. There are hundreds of flooded, abandoned cars all along the streets, and the high water marks are evident everywhere you look. In most places, it was maybe three feet, but as we headed toward mid-city, the water marks got higher and in some places looked to be around 5+ feet. Not nearly as bad as the 9th ward, but still far worse than I have ever seen. Downtown, and especially around Tulane and Tulane Hospital, there were lots of people working on the buildings. When we arrived we had seen a small army of people, all dressed in those Tyvec hazmat type coveralls, getting ready to start working in the Hospital. I am confident that by November 1 most of the University's downtown buildings will be ready for occupation. The first floors will still be closed, but everything else should be OK. BTW, the reports of mold spreading up to the 5th floor constitute genuine urban myths. I would have loved to have gone by our house while we were there, but the others were anxious to get back. We headed out by way of Veterans to see if there was somewhere we could eat lunch, but the few places that were open were packed, so we decided to wait until we were around Baton Rouge.

Anyway, it was a long day and I'm looking forward to getting in a ride tomorrow morning before I have to go to Baton Rouge for a meeting and a conference call. It's looking like another long day! Perhaps we'll be able to get back to our house this weekend????

Restoration Ale

It seems that Abita Beer is launching a special beer called Fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale. One dollar for every 6-pack sold will be donated to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Fund. They say that it should be on the shelves by mid-October. Just in case you needed a reason to drink more beer right now . . .

This morning I headed out for my regular 24 mile ride and found it really humid. Granted, I was at about 75% effort much of the ride since I know I won't be able to ride tomorrow. The legs felt pretty good today, and I was quite hot and sweaty by the time I got back, and then had to rush to get to the office. I hate that!

I'm supposed to be going to New Orleans with a little convoy to liberate some important stuff from the Tidewater Building for Psychiatry and for my office. The key thing for our office is actually my computer (and my backup CDs) since it has copies of most of our recent publications and legislative requests on it. As an added bonus, it also has a copy of our two websites, plus the NOBC website (or at least most of it). I never did hear back from our Space Czar after leaving him a voice message that I would be coming in with Psychiatry, so it's always possible he'll refuse to let me in the building for some reason. Anyway, it should be an interesting day. People are really starting to insist on getting back into the city, and today a whole group headed into St. Bernard Parish had a stand-off with the state police, who eventually let them in.

Tour of the Feliciana Wine Country

It was still quite windy this morning, but since the clouds didn't look very threatening, I decided to take my chances and hit the road. Pushed along by a brisk wind generally out of the South and Southwest, I had a really nice ride up into Mississippi to the old town of Woodville. The road was mostly dry, although often littered with fallen tree branches from Hurricane Rita. One thing I just can't get over around here is the lack of traffic on these wonderful country roads. In the 23 or so miles from here to Woodville I probably didn't see more than 10 cars. Again today I saw a few deer rushing in to the underbrush as I approached. The ride out to Woodville was really nice, and when I turned around I realized why.

The return trip was, for the most part, right into the wind the whole way. At least I was spared the full force thanks to the trees that formed a canopy over much of the road. It was turning into a good workout and so I took a slightly longer way back to Highway 10, logging 50+ miles.

This afternoon we decided to go check out the local winery, Feliciana Cellars, which is within walking distance from here. It's located in a rather pretentious building right on Highway 10 and always looks to be deserted. When we entered there was one other couple there. The Wife and Jim tasted a few wines and bought a couple of bottles.

Then they decided that we should drive about fifteen miles down the road and check out Casa de Sue winery as well. It was already about 4 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, but, what the hey? Finally spotting the aging road sign, I stabbed the brakes and tugged the Volvo off the highway onto a narrow old road that consisted of small patches of asphalt connecting innumerable potholes. The car's worn-out suspension complained loudly as we made out way yet another five miles into the woods where the asphalt ended and the road turned to gravel. Soon we were wondering if we had taken the wrong road, but finally we came to a little sign and turned onto the long driveway to what was essentially a metal warehouse surrounded by a small vineyard. There was a guy walking out of the place as we drove up and Jim asked if they were open. Amused, the proprietor said that they had actually moved their tasting room to Clinton (about five miles back), that it was closed on Sunday, but that he'd be glad to give us the tour and sell us a few bottles of wine. So he took us through the place, showing us all of the machinery that they use to press the grapes, make the wine, bottle it and label it. We tasted a few of the wines while listening to him complain about the crooked state legislation that essentially makes it impossible for a small wine or beer maker to market his product. (He was right - a couple of big distributors have complete control over the state, which is why there are practically no Louisiana-produced beers or wines on the market.) As a grower, he can sell to individuals, but he cannot wholesale his own product. Anyway, this guy's wine, at least some of it, was much better than what we had tasted at the other place, and at $6 a bottle we bought five. He stuffed the cash into his shirt pocket.

As we were walking out he mentioned a name that The Wife recognized. She told him that she was from Baton Rouge that she had known a family with that name when she was growing up. He asked her what her family name was and then says, "on Harrell's Ferry Road?" It turned out that this guy had dated The Wife's sister. He then proceeded to tell us the story of how she had asked him to take her to her prom and hot he had forgotten about it completely. Their parents called his parents, but it was already too late. He added that he remembered their house because the road turned from asphalt to gravel there. One night he was being chased by the police (he said this like it happened all the time) and when he sped through that spot, the police car slid in the gravel and turned over. He got home and went to bed, only to be awakened by his brother saying, "wake up, the house is surrounded by police. What did you do??" Anyway, here we are out in the middle of nowhere talking with some oddball guy who runs a vineyard in Louisiana and he turns out to know The Wife's family.

Small World.

Another Day, Another Hurricane . . .

I have to admit I was rather surprised at the intensity and duration of the wind and rain that we felt up here in Jackson, LA as Hurricane Rita came ashore nearly 200 miles away. From around midnight until 5 or 6 a.m. a relentless and gusty East wind battered the 150 year old house as the rain pounded on the metal roof. All night we could hear the wind rushing through the two large pecan trees outside, and I wouldn't have been too surprised if some large branches had come down from them. Somehow, though, the trees and the house stood up to hurricane Rita and around 7 a.m. I went downstairs to make some coffee. Although most of New Orleans weathered this one pretty well, the lower ninth ward was again flooded when the water in the industrial canal poured over the temporary patch that the Corps of Engineers had made only a couple of weeks earlier. Of course, I didn't sleep very soundly last night. Every now and then the steady roar of the winds would be inturrupted by a sudden gust that would shake the house a bit. Somehow, we never lost electrical power except for a few times when it went out and came back on a second later.

It rained pretty much all day today, and it wasn't until around mid-afternoon that the strong wind gusts and sudden downpours finally ended. Riding today was just not an option, and so I spent a couple of hours building a website on Blogspot that we can use as a temporary home for information and announcements about research grant opportunities. It was kind of fun, but of course Blogger isn't really intended as an HTML editor, and I was missing my copy of Dreamweaver that resides on my office desktop that I hope is still safely tucked away in the supply room of my office.

The University is organizing a group to go into the Tidewater Building on Tuesday to retreive some essential stuff - computers, documentation, paperwork, etc. - and I think I may be part of the team that will be doing what Mark D. recently called "authorized looting." Mark works for Shell, and he did some major authorized looting of One Shell Square recently, carting off to Houston three tractor-trailers full of computer equipment. He's now in Houston babysitting all that stuff. Luckily, Hurricane Rita took it really easy on the Houston area. Apparently Mother Nature wasn't quite finished slapping South Louisiana around yet. In preparation, The Wife picked up some of those little flashlight things that you strap to your head. Since there's no power in the building, we'll be hauling equipment and stuff up and down10-20 flights of dark, damp and slippery stairs. Sounds like fun!

So the big question is whether I'll be able to ride tomorrow or not. The weather is, to say the least, unsettled and unpredictible, so I suppose I'll get up around 6:30 and make a decision then.

Photo from the WWL site in N.O.

Hurricane Watch . . . Again

Well, here I am sitting in front of the TV in Jackson, Louisiana, watching the ongoing hurricane coverage. I really could have gone out for a ride this morning before the rains started, but I was lasy, or perhaps preoccupied, and didn't. By 8 a.m. I was already wishing I had ridden because it is looking like it will be raining for a while around here. Candy and I stayed at the office well after everyone else left today, and we were a little bit surprised when we went outside to leave because the wind and rain was already pretty strong. It was relatively quiet again at work today. I'm sure most people are more worried about the weather than work, and I can't say I blame them. I did make a little bit of progress on that grant proposal idea, and I think I have found someone who will be able to take the lead on it, but of course this hurricane will set everything back a couple more days.

The house where we are staying has a metal roof and as I sit here the sound of the rain pounding on it is quite loud. It comes and goes depending on which band of rain happens to be moving by. I'm looking at a live report right now coming from Canal St. in New Orleans where the power is on and there are people driving up and down the street. I wouldn't mind being there right now.

I am hoping that none of the branches from the old pecan trees outside come down on any of the cars outside. We are already getting some very heavy rain and strong winds here in Jackson. It was discouraging to hear that one of the levees in New Orleans had already yielded to the storm surge. If the levee patch on the 17th Street canal holds, the flooding in my own neighborhood will be whatever is caused by the torrential rain. With the 17th street canal and its pumping station closed off, the rain water will just collect in the lowest parts of the city and gradually move into the higher areas. Meanwhile, the local power company, Entergy, declared bankruptcy today in order to get enough of a cash infusion to tide them through until they have some paying customers again. Trust me, I will never again complain about my utility bill again. Those guys have been working their butts off repairing power lines, and I have no doubt that the most important factor in the recovery of our city is the quick restoration of power.

So I'm sitting here, a couple of glasses of wine past where I should be, once again wondering what damage is being done to the house and once again feeling rather helpless to do anything about it.

I wonder when I'll be able to go out for my next ride.

Calm Before the Storm

This morning I got in about 30 miles, riding hard up the little hills but coasting the downhills. An idea had been forming in my head all morning for a grant proposal and it just wouldn't go away. I probably would have ridden longer, but I felt like I had to get into the office and see if the idea was going to fly or not. The Wife had said they were going into Baton Rouge to buy some dicatation equipment so that the doctors could get their secretaries to do all of their reports and stuff, but it turned out they didn't need to go after all, so I was a little surprised to find The Wife and Jim waiting for me when I returned. I took a quick dip in the bath tub while they went to check the post office box. As it turned out, something about the way they had done their department's forwarding order had resulted in a while lot of the mail for the entire Tidewater Building in New Orleans being diverted to their little P.O. box her in Jackson. The folks at the Post Office were kind of excited about it all when they handed Jim a big tub of mail. This little post office has one mailbox marked "in-town mail" and another marked "out of town mail."

Compared with the prior two days, today was quite quiet at work. With most of the senior administration trying to evacuate from Houston to Dallas, and many others just plain preoccupied with this new hurricane, not too many people were in the mood for work today. As we watched the hurricane track shift more and more toward the east, we decided to call it a day early and try and get in a ride before dark. We met one of Candy's assistants, Dianne, in front of the house where she is staying, about four blocks from us. Dianne had brought her bike with her, so the three of us headed out in the increasing wind to do the 24 mile loop that has now become my "standard" ride. The ride was nice, although perhaps a bit of a strain for Dianne who hadn't been on her bike in weeks. Half-way through the ride as we were climbing up one of the hills, she said "I miss New Orleans." It was a nice easy ride for me anyway, and I got to look around at the scenery a bit more than usual. I was supposed to be making pasta salad for dinner tonight, but as we rode past the restaurant in town Jim flagged us down to say that he and his wife were in there. So Candy ended up inviting three other people to come with us. The prices were high, the food was mediocre, the atmosphere was lacking but otherwise it was OK and I ate way too much.

Everyone is getting worried about the hurricane, and it looks like New Orleans will get a lot of rain at the very least. Since the Corps of Engineers has driven sheet piles across the mouths of three of the drainage canals to protect them from the storm surge, the city's pumping capacity is way, way below normal and it is entirely possible that some heavy rains could cause a fair amount of flooding. Anyway, I am hoping for the best. Tomorrow an entire mental hospital from southwest Louisiana is moving into the mental hospital here, so it should get exciting. I have a lot of stuff I should be working on, but under the circumstances, it may be hard to get much accomplished tomorrow.

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.

On the Bike, Back to B.R.

I went out for a nice 25 mile ride this morning quite early. The weather has been warmer and more humid lately, but the mornings are still quite nice. After a few days off the bike, I felt pretty good, but I have to confess, the motivation is lacking. It almost feels like fall in that regard, and it's hard to push myself, but easy to sit up and look at the scenery, which I have in abundance up here in the woods. The best part was being able to ride on fully inflated tires for the first time in three weeks!

I had called my sister about the Corps of Engineers' Operation Blue Roof, because both of our houses need some sort of temporary roof protection right now. She went down to Mardi Gras World on the Westbank where they are taking applications, but found out that they can't do my house because I have good old fashoned shingles and not the more modern soft sealtab type of roofing. On the more positive side, the hurricane currently in the gulf is on a more westward track than yesterday, which is good news for New Orleans. I'm holding out some hope that if it continues that way, we'll be officially allowed back into the city sooner rather than later.

We are working with the state, FEMA, NSF, NIH, etc. now to secure funding to replace storm-damaged equipment, provide bridge funding for faculty, provide housing for displaced faculty and staff, etc. We are talking in very big numbers. If we assume that most of Tulane's major research equipment will need to be replaced, we're probably looking at something like $800M, for example. Anyway, it's getting pretty interesting now, but I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the communications problems. My cellphone does not like being up here in Jackson at all. This morning as we drove, once again, into B.R. to buy some more supplies and another computer for one of the faculty, my cellphone finally picked up it's voicemail, one of which was about a meeting the prior day that I would have liked to attend. I'm at the hospital right now and my cellphone battery is already dead. We have set up shop in a vacant office down in the basement where we have one telephone line, five people, and four desks. However, we do have good internet access!

Another One

I was up until 1 a.m. last night and then got up early this morning to work on our supplemental funding request for the National Science Foundation. It started out around $2M and ended up closer to $9M. I don't know exactly how it will fly, of couse, but considering how long some of the big expensive and sensitive research equipment has been subjected to 100% relative humidity, it may turn out that a lot of it will need to be replaced. Anyway, it was all finally done and approved and sent out by about noon, and after running a couple of little errands in the heat, I just couldn't make myself go out for a ride in the heat. Candy went into B.R. again today to look at some space that the department may need to use for one of its units. They came back with another computer for me to set up for one of the faculty members. It's amazing that you can get a brand new computer and find that they have Adobe Acrobat 5.0 installed (current version is 7.x) and that there are a bunch of windows updates to install.

One thing I did do first thing this morning, after being frustrated last night trying to juggle a bunch of email via the Yahoo website, was to spring for the $20 annual upgrade so I can retreve my yahoo mail via their popmail server. Then I downloaded and installed Eudora, set it up to get mail from yahoo, set up a few filters, and the quality of my life improved dramatically. Yes, yes, I know that gmail has free popmail access, but changing what has now become my primary email ID is just not feasible right now, so I'll stick with yahoo and save my gmail account as a backup account. I could also get Eudora a little cheaper and not pay the sales tax, but you can't do that via the online purchase and at this point it just ain't worth it.

So there's another hurricane entering the Gulf of Mexico. The projected tracks all take it into east Texas, but that will mean some strong east and southeast winds for N.O., which will cause a storm surge and raise the level in the lake. Ordinarily that wouldn't be a big deal, but with two key floodwalls in important drainage canals currently patched up with sandbags, plus a drainage system that is functioning at perhaps only 25% of what it should, it could be bad. If it looks like there will be a big storm surge, the Corps of Engineers is planning on driving sheet pilings across the mouths of both of the canals which will keep the storm surge out but will mean that those pumping stations will not be able to operate. So if it rains a lot, guess what will happen. Anyway, I am hoping that the computer models are accurate and that we miss most of this one. Even if we do, it would be a real twist of the knife if Houston got hit with a hurricane, considering that's where Tulane's central administration is currently operating in exile. Now the mayor is backing away from officially letting people back into my part of the city on Friday. Damn. I really really wanted to spend the weekend cleaning out the basement before the mold takes over completely.

Definitely need to get on the bike tomorrow morning! One thing that I brought back from the house was my trusty Silca pump, which I had put up on a table in the basement just in case there was some flooding. It will be nice to have normal tire pressure again!

I checked the LAMBRA website today, and it was sad to see a big "Cancelled" next to all of the rest of this season's races. I had really been looking forward to the September and October races this year.

Re-entry

It was another day off the bike for me as we decided to re-enter New Orleans in the morning to see how bad the damage was. After getting through the checkpoint, manned by National Guardsmen and City Police, we arrived around 10 a.m. There was a pretty strong odor of natural gas (all the pilot lights were out), so the first thing I did was go down in the basement and shut off the gas. Down in the ground-level basement, the water must have reached a maximum of six or eight inches deep, so everything that was on the floor was soggy. Camping equipment, stuff stored in boxes, some books, an old carpet, mattresses, etc. Nothing really of any great value, and a lot of stuff that I should have thrown out long ago anyway. Just before we evacuated I had put the washing machine up on top of four paint cans. It was just enough to escape any obvious damage. The dryer, which I forgot about because The Wife was doing a last-minute load at the time, wasn't so lucky. There was a little pool of nasty water in the bottom of the drum, so I guess that machine is toast. When I checked out the roof, I found maybe 16 square feet of roofing missing on the Northwest corner where the wind had gotten underneath the shingles at the edge and ripped a bunch of them off. There was one spot that was down to the bare wood. Inside, we had some water damage to the ceiling in the hallway and kitchen, but nothing quite bad enough for the ceiling to have fallen down.

All-in-all we left feeling pretty lucky. The flooding in our immediate area wasn't very bad. Our neighbor who had just bought the house and moved in the day before the hurricane had much more extensive roof damage and from what I could see through the windows a lot of resulting water damage inside. Anyway, it was a long day and now I have to write up a summary of Tulane's needs for continuing NSF research to submit to the Board of Regents tomorrow. I put a bunch of photos of the house on my Kodak Gallery site. I am planningon going back next Friday to start the cleanup. In the meantime, I'll try again to contact the insurance guy. The number they gave me for him is coming up not as having been disconnected, so somebody at Allstate has screwed something up there. I'll be working on that tomorrow for sure.

It will be a long night.

A Day Off

I decided to sleep in a little later than usual this morning and so skipped my usual ride. Then I made the crucial mistake of agreeing to drive in to Baton Rouge with The Wife to get some groceries. First we picked up her sister, who is currently in B.R. and may end up staying with us in N.O. for a while until her house gets repaired (must have been a couple of feet deep inside). It wasn't until I walked into the huge Whole Foods store until I fully realized the magnitude of my mistake. I was in a grocery store with two women. I wandered around for a while trying all of the little samples that they have scattered around the store - chips and salsa, shrimp salad, barbecue shrimp, various cheeses, etc. Then I walked outside and wandered over to the Gap store and walked through that for a while. Then I returned to Whole Foods to find them just barely out of the produce section. Finally The Wife was ready to check out and when we came out the other side she left me there with the basket and went to look for her sister. I stood there for, I kid you not, at least 30 minutes more before they appeared again in the checkout line. Anyway, it was a long day! We had talked about trying to go into New Orleans today but decided we needed a better plan. I think we have something lined up for tomorrow that will work.

Kenny B. sent a copy of an article that they wrote around him in the Time Picayune. At the risk ov violating a number of copyright laws, here it is:


N.O. cyclist becomes guide for Guard unitMonday, 5:07 p.m.When word of Hurricane Katrina's destruction arrived, Kenny Bellau, a professional racing cyclist from New Orleans, was nearing the end of a French Guianna tour, the Caribbean answer to the Tour de France.He finished the race, then raced back to New Orleans, furious about the early reports of chaos in official efforts to help storm victims, and worried about his home town."The main reason I wanted to come back here was because of all the confusion I saw on the news," he said. "I honestly didn't see anybody doing the right thing."Bellau, 37, a Brother Martin High graduate, arrived two days after Katrina hit the city and plunged headlong into rescue work. Gathering acquaintances' requests for help in locating loved ones, Bellau attached himself to Alpha Company of the California Army National Guard, working out of Sophie Wright School on Napoleon Avenue. He offered boat-driving skills and an intimate knowledge of city streets and neighborhoods. For most of the last two weeks Bellau has served as the Guard unit's native guide, visiting house after house in Uptown and Central City enclaves, helping pull out survivors."He had beads on people in their houses, people who were in need, he saved us a lot of time," said Capt. Gerald Davis from the California unit. "Every day he would come out and take care of us."Bellau said he has seen too much death and misery. He is not one to cry, but has cried every day since he returned to New Orleans."These are people's grandmothers, people's grandfathers. We pulled a Mardi Gras Indian out the other day," he said. "It just hurts to see the fabric of the city torn apart and know it'll never be the same."Bellau, who is staying in his powerless house on Constance Street Uptown, is glad that his mother evacuated to Tylertown, Miss., before the storm, but her eastern New Orleans home is now destroyed. He paddled to the brick house, on Perelli Drive, a few days ago, finding it filled with five-plus feet of water, amid so many houses suffering the same fate. "I was just overwhelmed at the destruction, the totalness of the destruction."

Capitol day

After a nice brisk 25 miles this morning, I was off to Baton Rouge for a couple of meetings involving research and research funding at Tulane and other universities affected by the hurricane. The Board of Regents handed out a memo asking for an assessment of needs for NSF-related projects and programs. They need it by noon on Monday. They handed it out around 2 p.m. on Friday. Do you see a problem here?? Guess what I'll be doing this weekend. After that meeting we waited quite a long time in order to get a few minutes with the Governor's Chief of Staff. I wish I could work on this all day tomorrow, but I really feel like we need to make an assessment of our house, so I guess I'll be making calls from the car!

A Busy Day and a Good Report

Dr. P and his brother headed out this morning after fixing a flat tire on their car. We had almost a little party last night, grilling a few chicken breasts and doing a good job on two bottles of wine. They had been in to New Orleans yesterday and flats seem to be a very common souvenier for visitors lately. The Wife and I did a nice easy 24 miles around 7 a.m., but after that things got down to business pretty fast. It felt warmer and more humid this morning, but by the time we returned to the house around 8:30 is was still quite comfortable. I have to admit that it's pretty nice to be able to ride out the door and within a mile be on a smooth stretch of nicely rolling asphalt with hardly a car in sight.

The Psych folks, including The Wife and Jim, had a meeting with the Department of Hospitals down in Baton Rouge, and so we went in early to buy some laptops for the staff who were arriving today. The Chairman of the department also needed a new laptop. So the first place we hit is Office Depot in Baton Rouge near LSU. Well, the entire shelf of laptops was cleaned out. There was just one lonely Toshiba sitting there. So we headed over to CompUSA where we had better luck. We were pressed for time because of the meeting and the gridlocked traffic that the evacuation of N.O. has caused in Baton Rouge, and within half an hour we had purchased three Toshiba laptops and one sweet little ultraportable Sony Vaio with built-in WWLAN and Bluetooth for the Chair. It took me quite a while to download all the automatic updates on the four machines (Windows, Norton/McAfee, etc.) and to convert the trial versions of Office to full versions. Anyway, while they were in their meeting, I found a little coffee shop in downtown Baton Rouge and hung out for a while. When I fired up the computer, there were about eight wireless networks within range, none of which belonged to the coffee shop. Four were unsecured, so I raided the closest one and plowed through some email while I drank my coffee.

I have a meeting in BatonRouge tomorrow at the La. Board of Regents, so we won't be making our first re-entry trip back into the city until Saturday. This should be an interesting meeting. I even stopped at the local Dollar General store to pick up some black socks since all I have are riding socks!

However, I did get a good report from The Brother-in-Law who was in N.O. and went into our house to check things out. He said that although some of the ridge tiles on the roof were missing, there didn't appear to have been any ceiling damage (aside from what was already there, I guess). The basement was of course musty and damp, and things that were directly on the floor were probably wet, but it didn't really look like it had been "flooded." Of course, electricity is still off, and there is some natural gas leaking somewhere (probably a pilot light or two that went out). He couldn't find the gas meter, since it's inside our basement, so the first order of business on Saturday will be to shut it off or re-light the pilot lights. Then the fun part will be dealing with a refrigerator full of perishibles that have long-since perished. It will be rank, to say the least. I might just duct-tape the door to the case and muscle the whole thing outside so I can open it up there and then hose it down. Easier said than done, of course.

So for now it sounds like although the homes of my three immediate family members here in New Orleans sustained only minimal damage and will be fine once the power is turned back on. The Mom's rental, however, had enough water to damage the wood floors and perhaps some of the walls, despite being raised about three feet off the ground.

House Pics - Look Good

This morning when we went into our makeshift office at the hospital, I finally tracked down their data systems guy who quickly produced a nice little 4-port ethernet hub. After cutting us a bunch of cables, everybody was happy and the wireless router that we had put in the day before became unnecessary. After work we drove into Baton Rouge to drop Dr. W. off at the place where he's staying just off Perkins Rd. His house in Lakewood South had, conservatively, eight feet of water. As we neared Baton Rouge and my cellphone got back within digital range, I started getting all of the text messages I haven't been getting out in analog-land. One was from Kenny B. It said "Uptown is dry u can come back now." When we got back to our temporary home in Jackson this evening, we rushed around and assembled a bar-b-que pit, grilled a few chicken breasts, and put together a nice dinner with Dr. Pena and his brother, who are staying here for a couple of days. Afterward, I checked my email and found two reports on our house. One was from the Brother-in-Law ,who had been in to town and taken a good look at our house. He said that although we might have gotten a slight amount of water in the basement, it looked quite good otherwise.


The next message in my in-box was from Adam of Adam's Bicycle World, who had also stopped by. Adam sent me these photos. The first shows mainly the front steps and porch, and as far as I can tell, everything looks pretty normal in that one. The second is of the side door to the basement, along Pine Street. If you look really closely, you can see a light water mark about four inches up from the bottom of the door. There also seems to be a darker water mark on the sidewalk. Whatever, it looks like pretty good news to me. The best part is that the door is CLOSED and not smashed in! Adam reported that his shop had a fair amount of water, as did his house. Nothing really catastrophic, though.

We are going to try and get back to town on Friday or Saturday for a quick assessment and maybe to pick up some clothes and stuff. The mayor is sounding pretty optimistic on the news tonight about announcing a re-entry plan for the French Quarter, CBD and uptown tomorrow, so I think all we really need is to have electricity at this point. Then we will have a lot of cleaning up to do, but might be able to move back in once things are cleaned up and disinfected. I'm sure we might find a bit more damage, but so far it's looking pretty good.

A Bit of Encouraging News

I got in a nice and brisk 25 miles this morning. For some reason my legs were feeling good and it felt nice to attack the hills. Like yesterday, the weather was nice and cool, the traffic was practically nonexistant, and the asphalt was smooth as silk. What more can you ask? It would have been nice to have ridden longer, but we're basically back on the clock now and needed to get in to the hospital to get to work. My task for today will be to get in touch with the tech support guy here and find out if there's a way to improve internet access because we are probably going to have a couple more Tulane people in here soon who will also need to be using computers and my guess is that the system here is pretty overloaded already.

So yesterday I walked a few blocks over to the local post office and secured a P.O. box, then got online (they were out of "change of address" forms) and sent in our temporary mail forwarding address to the US Postal Service. It was all quite painless. I hung around the house all day waiting for the BellSouth modem/router to arrive and by 4:30 I was getting pretty pissed that it wasn't here. Well apparently FedEx or whoever delivered it just put it on the back porch around 5 p.m. without even ringing the bell, so I take back all those nasty things I was saying about BellSouth.

Installation was pretty easy, but we ran into all kinds of problems getting Jim's Windows98 computer to work with it. At first, we thought there was a problem with the encryption, and fooled with that for quite a while before deciding to just disable security altogether. Well, that didn't work either, so we're kind of baffled as to why it won't work. The WinXP computers work fine, though.

Right now I'm at the hospital, and connectivity here isn't much better. I'm using a Win98 Pentium II desktop right now, and it's struggling a bit.

The Wife got a call from her brother yesterday evening. He had been into New Orleans as part of a team from Baton Rouge that will be handling some of the cleanup, and was able to stop by our house. He said that it looked good and there was no sign of a water mark on the outside. One of the neighbors who had seen it at the height of the flooding said he didn't think the water ever got past the first step. That was definitely a bit of encouraging news! If that's correct, it means that we just had a few inches of water in the basement, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. The Mayor is now saying that he may allow residents back into the Uptown area on Monday to assess damage and retrieve essential items. That would be great. The Wife's brother said that you really don't want to stay in New Orleans right now.

Where I'm At - Holcombe House

I took a couple of photos of the house where I'm staying now in Jackson. Jackson is a small but somewhat historic town, and most of the houses around here seem to have historical markers in front of them. Twyana, who owns this house, works at the hospital and offered to take in a couple of Tulane refugees for the duration. This particular house has been through a lot of remodeling and renovation, and has survived two fires. It is right down the street from the old Centennary College that moved long ago up near Shreveport. In fact, it was owned by one of the professors from the college.


It is quite a nice place, and like most such houses it is still a work in progress. It's been a long time since I was without a shower, though. The old claw-foot tub in the bathroom adjoining our bedroom is just like the one we used to have in our old shotgun on Burthe St. in New Orleans. My sister still owns that house, and I'm sure the tub is still there.