Hockey

As a proud Canadian, I've been remiss in my patriotic duty in not even knowing which teams are in the Stanley Cup Finals, or even knowing when the final series starts. Well, imagine my surprise while channel surfing yesterday and coming across the start of the first game of the series between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. In high definition no less! I watched the first period and the final period, and it was actually pretty good hockey. Anaheim won 3-2, scoring the winning goal with only a few minutes left in the game. Now that I know that the series is on, I might even watch a few more games. For those of you on American cable systems, the games are shown on the Versus network, channels 34 and 665 (HD) on Comcast in Seattle.

I spent a good chunk of an absolutely glorious day touching up the exterior woodwork on my boat. I'll finish it up tomorrow and then try waxing the hull. There's a lot of real estate on the boat, and I suspect it will take me a couple of days to get it done, but I'll give it a try. If all else fails, I can pay someone $600 to do it for me. Assuming my handiwork turns out OK, my next post may include photos.

A few updates....

• My no smoking plan is going pretty well. No tobacco at all for over two weeks now, and no voices from god (or whoever the jerk was a year ago) commanding me to buy a pack of smokes.
• I talked briefly with Hal last night. He made it to LA without any more motorcycle maintenance issues. He's going to stay with his Mom for a few days, and probably won't be back in Seattle for another 8-10 days.
• My Mom is in hospital, and doing quite well after surgery to remove the colostomy she's been living with for the last six months. Let's all hope that this is the end of medical procedures for the old girl. She's had more than her fair share in the last couple of years.

Blake Island and Tacoma

A good time was had by all at what may well become the annual Blake Island Clambake, or maybe more appropriately the Blake Island Seafood Boil. A half-dozen boats and crew showed up, bringing clams, mussels, shrimp, potatoes, and corn. My turkey deep-fryer performed admirably well as a seafood boiler.

Here's Rita showing off a small sample of the food we had.

The weather was perfect. Even Mt. Rainier showed up at our party! Here's some of the crowd on a walk on the beach just after a lovely sunset.

Then it was on to Tacoma, a city often derided by long-time Washington residents as the ugly step-sister of the Puget Sound. Tacoma has a reputation as a grimy run-down industrial port city with high crime and high aroma (from the pulp mill). But there is hope. Over the last few years, the city fathers have been upgrading the image by cleaning up the Foss Waterway and rejuvenating the downtown area. We stayed in a brand-new marina a short walk from the UW Tacoma campus, the Museum of Glass, and downtown. Tacoma has some built-in obstacles to a truly major overhaul, like the freeway that runs between the water and the downtown, and a very busy main rail line a half mile away. I think the planners have done a great job with what they have to work with.

This is affectionately known to the locals as "The Volcano." It is part of the Museum of Glass. It's not exactly the Sydney Opera House, but I think it is pretty cool.

Even cooler is the pedestrian bridge across the freeway. This is part of the view a pedestrian sees if he looks up while crossing the bridge.

Another thing that Tacoma has going for it is that real estate prices aren't as outrageous as Seattle's. I have read articles about how Tacoma's artistic community is flourishing and growing because Seattle area artists are moving there to escape the high prices of Seattle.

I finished To Live's to Fly on this trip. It's an alright book, but I think you have to be a dedicated Townes Van Zandt fan (and I'm only semi-dedicated) to really get into the true story of a tortured genius who created some fabulous music while living an outrageously self-destructive lifestyle. I read it all .... out of kindness, I suppose.

Best Laid Plans

Good news and bad news....The good news is that I didn't bleed (much) yesterday when I installed a water flow sensor on the line feeding the shaft seal on my boat. The bad news is that my best laid plans didn't work. As it turns out, I need sensors that work at lower flow rates than the ones I bought. So I returned them and bought more sensitive ones on-line. I'll try the installation again next week.

Today I'm off to Blake Island and then on to Tacoma with the SSYC crowd. I'm bringing along my 10 gallon pot and propane burner for a clam/crab/mussel/shrimp boil tonight at Blake Island. The weather forecast is good, there will be lots of food and drink and good people to enjoy it all with.

It's a hard life, but someone's got to live it!

The Democrats Have No Balls

Once again the Democrats have proven they have no balls. They've dropped their demand for a timeline for an exit from Iraq from a bill funding the war. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201329.html?hpid=topnews
Even when they won a majority (albeit slim) in the House and the Senate based largely on opposition to the war, they can't get past their fears of appearing weak on defense and not supporting the troops. They could argue the case purely on economic grounds. On last night's News Hour, there was a truly scary piece on the true cost of the war http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/05/22/20070522_warcost28.mp3
When all the costs are calculated, it's easy to come up with costs of $2 trillion dollars or more. That's over $6000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. Does that horrendous cost made anyone safer or even feel safer? As I noted in my last post, there's not much bang for the buck.

Jerry Falwell was buried yesterday. It would have been better if his theology was buried with him. If I believed in Hell, I'd hope he was burning in it, or if there is a god, that when (s)he greeted Jerry at the pearly gates, (s)he was a super-butch lesbian surrounded by a bevy of flaming drag queen angels.

WaveGuide update....My boat is back in its home slip and has been pronounced fixed, but no one has been able to tell me why the shaft bearing/seal failed in the first place. So needless to say, I'll be worrying about when it will fail again. Yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day chasing down a couple of inline flow switches that will set off an alarm if water flow to the seals fail. I'll install them today and see how it works. A full report with photos, and possibly blood but no sex, to follow.....

Bang for the Buck

This is a column by Nicholas Kristof from today's New York Times. Normally, I'd just link to the column, but in their infinite wisdom, the NYT has put their columnists behind a wall that requires a paid subscription to get past. I subscribed a couple of years ago at the super-discounted student rates, and they haven't asked for any more money since, so I'll enjoy it until they catch up with me.

Kristof brings up most of the points I bring up in my conversations with people about the American health care system, so he must be a pretty smart guy. The bottom line is that the US spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but by any statistical measure (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.), the outcomes are definitely second tier. Not much of a bang for the buck. And yes, Canada and the Western European countries have issues with their healthcare systems, but I'd rather have Canada's screwed up system any day than the American screwed up system.

How’s this for a glimpse into America’s health care mess:

The student winner I’ve chosen to accompany me on a reporting trip to Africa next month is a superb medical school student named Leana Wen. She receives her M.D. this month, and will research health care access this summer at a Washington think tank.
I asked Leana about her health insurance coverage, just in case she catches leprosy on the Africa trip.
“Actually, I was going to become one of the 45 million uninsured for the summer,” she said. “The think tank does not provide insurance for ‘temporary’ employees, and my school did not allow extension of health insurance post-graduation. I still haven’t found a reasonably priced insurance plan for this period.”
Aaaaargh! When a newly minted doctor investigating Americans’ access to medical care has no insurance — then you know that our health care system is truly bankrupt.
Let’s hope that the presidential campaign helps lead us toward a new health care system. John Edwards has set the standard by proposing a serious and detailed plan for national health care reform, and other candidates should follow.
The medical and insurance lobbies have been busy blocking national health care programs since they were first seriously proposed back in the 1920’s — and the result has been millions of premature deaths in this country because of people falling through the cracks. Doctors fighting universal coverage have been saving lives in their day jobs while costing lives with their lobbying.
Over all, a person without insurance is less likely to have diseases diagnosed early, less likely to get routine preventive care — and faces a 25 percent greater chance of dying early.
Americans with good jobs and complex needs receive superb medical care. But a child in Costa Rica born today is expected to live longer than an American child born today.
The U.S. now spends far more on medical care (more than $7,000 per person) than other nations, yet our infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and longevity are among the worst in the industrialized world. If we had as good a child mortality rate as France, Germany and Italy, we would save 12,000 children a year.
It is disgraceful that an American mother has almost three times the risk of losing a child as a mother in the Czech Republic. According to a new report from Save the Children, a woman in the U.S. has a 1-in-71 chance of losing a child before his or her fifth birthday.
Some speculate that America’s high infant mortality rate is partly a result of greater honesty about neonatal deaths or of more in vitro fertilizations. But even if those are factors, they don’t explain why a woman is 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth in the U.S. than in Europe.
The existing medical financing system also creates perverse incentives for expensive procedures; that may be why Americans are far more likely than Europeans to get C-sections. Meanwhile, the burden of paying for these second-rate statistical outcomes is crippling American business. By next year, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care than it earns in net income, according to Steve Burd, the head of Safeway. Mr. Burd and other executives have formed the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, creating a corporate constituency for national health reforms.
There’s evidence that the most efficient financing system would be a single-payer structure, such as that found in most Western countries. Some 31 percent of U.S. health spending goes to administration, more than twice the rate in Canada.
So bravo to Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of 14,000 doctors and other health professionals that favors a single-payer system.
But universal coverage is only part of the answer. We also need far greater attention to public health programs focusing on prevention. Two of the most important life-saving health interventions in recent decades weren’t medical at all: the cigarette tax and laws mandating air bags and seat belt use. A national public health campaign on obesity (similar to the one Gov. Mike Huckabee started in Arkansas) should be an essential component of health care reform.
Even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now, universal coverage is feasible through other mechanisms — as Massachusetts has shown. We need to hold the presidential candidates accountable, for universal coverage is an idea whose time came in the 1920s. We should insist we get it before the 2020s.

Weird Bier

As most of you know, I have a love for beer, and will drink and have drunk beer of almost any kind, anywhere. I've drunk ales, lagers, pilsners, porters, stouts, lambics, and even a malty, yeasty pseudo beer called Shake Shake in Lusaka. That's me grimacing and Marian enjoying my discomfort as I sample the gritty brew.

When I was in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, I had a beer of a type I'd never heard of, a beer from Bamberg, Germany, called rauchbier. Literally, smoke beer. The waitress told me it tasted like drinking bacon, and she wasn't far off. I asked if she had hash browns and egg beer to go along with it. It was interesting stuff, but nothing that you'd want to drink too much of. Anyway, all those memories came back when I read this article about specialty beers in Germany. http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/travel/20beer.html

It might be time for another trip to Germany soon.

Paying the Price

Being on the road for over a month has its price. As well as watching only a couple of hours of TV while I was gone, I read almost nothing. Now that I've caught up on past episodes of The Sopranos, I've got to get back into a regular reading routine. As a result, I went down to Elliot Bay Book Store (no big-box book stores for me!), and bought a bunch of books I've been meaning to read for quite some time, and one book recommended to me by my big sister Marian, whose past recommendations have been great. The books I bought are:

The Looming Tower, Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright
The Prince of the Marshes, And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year inIraq, by Rory Stewart
To Live's To Fly, The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, by Jon Kruth (hat tip to Marian)
The Worst Hard Time, The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

I've heard several good reviews, both published and word of mouth, about The Looming Tower, and The Prince of the Marshes. I've liked the music of Townes Van Zandt for quite some time, but don't know much about him other than the legends of his privileged birth, hard-charging lifestyle, and premature death. The Worst Hard Time is written by a local Seattle author, and I've heard him interviewed on the local NPR station. I hope he writes as well as he talks.

Stay tuned for book reports.

Faces in the Crowd

I don't think I mentioned it in any of my previous posts, but I did get my dog "fix" while in New Orleans. Panda (on the left above)and Buckley were soon trained to start getting excited at the word "walk," more excited with the rustle of the plastic poop bags, and then would sit patiently on command at the door until I got their leashes on. Buckley slept on the floor beside the couch I slept on, while Panda would often sleep on the couch on my feet. I think the couch was hers before I showed up, and she wanted to make it plain that she would share, but it was still hers.

It takes all kinds, including a Flamingo head at the Jazz Fest. Complete with her own dancing pool!
A typical Ben pose.
Crystal is a real sweetheart.
Here's Colin, a friend from Seattle who flew down for the first weekend of the Jazz Fest.
An anonymous freelance dancer who loved showing off for the camera.


I've been home a couple of days now, and have emanaged to catch up on my mail, pay my bills, do my laundry, and catch up on three of the five Sopranos episodes I missed while I was gone. Comcast On Demand is a wonderful thing!

I haven't managed to make it down to my boat yet, but I think I will check it out tomorrow. The folks from Hatton Marine (a local Yanmar dealer) went down to the boat while I was gone and pronounced everything was OK. No one has been able to tell me why the shaft seal failed in the first place, so it will be something that will be nagging at me in the back of my mind for a long time. I'm going to try and rig up a water flow indicator of some sort so that I can check the flow periodically.

While in Montana on the way back, I decided, once again, to quit smoking. Over the last three or four years, I've quit for periods ranging from a few days to almost six months on a couple of occasions. Last year when I quit for almost six months, I thought I had it licked, but one morning, an inner voice told me I was going to buy a pack that day, and I did. Anyway, once again, my self-loathing and fear of death have reached a critical mass, and I've decided to live the rest of my life tobacco-free. Smoking really is a filthy disgusting habit that has no redeeming social value. It's too bad I like it so much. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Home Again

After 7235 miles, I'm home! Further posts to follow, after laundry, a shower, buying some groceries, checking my mail, etc., etc. NPR is on already, and I'll be cooking in my own kitchen tonight!

Jackson Hole

I don't know why this program lays things out the way it does. I can't seem to get pictures where I want them, and the text doesn't line up the way I think it should. Oh well, bear with me.

Yesterday, I drove in from Thedford, NE, pop. 423. Thedford is in the middle of the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which are supposed to be an interesting geological phenomenon, but I guess they're best viewed from the air to get the full effect. The most impressive things were the 1.3-mile-long coal trains that ran eastbound along the highway about every half hour or so. As an old railway guy from the Canadian National Railways days of my misspent youth, and like Fred Eaglesmith, I like trains.

This place is way cool (literally and figuratively)! I've never been to Yellowstone/Grand Teton/Jackson Hole before, but I will come again. It's got everything from plains to mountains to bubbling pools of boiling water to a decent brew pub (Snake River Brewing). I guess I had expected more of a Whistler or an Aspen as a tourist resort destination, and don't get me wrong, Jackson Hole is very touristy, but Jackson (as the maps and road signs call it), was a real town before it became a resort. Real people, not just the rich and famous, live here.

Today, I rode about 250 miles around the southern loop of Yellowstone. I stopped at Old Faithful, but it wasn't due to erupt for over an hour, so I didn't wait around to see it blow. I didn't know there so many hot springs and bubbling pools of geothermal activity in the area. It was almost other-worldly at times. And it was certainly cold at times. Some of the lakes were still iced over, and there was lots of snow along side the roads. I'm glad I had a good riding suit.

Tomorrow, I'll start off on the last leg of my journey home. I figure I have about 900 miles to go, so I should be able to make it in two days without too much difficulty. I've put on almost 6500 miles since I started, and I'm somewhat surprised that I'm not sick of riding yet. I am looking forward to getting home, catching up on HBO, NPR, sleeping in my own bed, and cooking in my own kitchen. Just a couple more sleeps.

Oh, and don't forget to give your Moms a call tomorrow. I know I will.

No more friends

After spending one night with Gregg Orr (an old friend and former co-worker) and his family in St. Louis, and a night with the Giroux's (neighbors from our days in O'Fallon, MO) in Columbia, I'm off into the western wilderness with no friends to mooch a dinner and bed from until I get to Seattle.

I'm going to head north of Kansas City and then turn left into Nebraska, where I've heard there is an interesting ride through sand dunes in the northwestern part of the state. That will dump me into Wyoming, where I'll head to Jackson Hole and Yellowstone. I might actually spend a couple of days exploring up there before going into Idaho and then home.

I expect to be back in Seattle sometime on Monday, but that could slip a day or two, depending on how good a time I'm having and what the weather is like.

On the Road Again

I left New Orleans late yesterday morning with the intention of getting to Memphis before dark. I came within about 30 miles before it started getting dark and I decided to quit for the day. I stopped in Jackson, MS, and had a good visit with Ebie Jarvis and her 15 year old twins, James and Jeremy. Ebie is the widow of Mark Jarvis, who was one of the first friends I made when I moved to the USA in 1983. The friendship survived multiple moves, marriages, divorces, and career changes over the years. He died last year after struggling with cancer for a couple of years. As I've often said, life isn't fair.

I'll spend tonight in St. Louis, and Wednesday night in Columbia before heading back home with no friends on the way to harass until I get to Seattle. I haven't decided yet on which route I'll take, but I think I might head through the wilds of Wyoming through Yellowstone. I've been close, but never actually gone through the park before. I hope my camera hangs in there. Yesterday, it decided to give me the Olympus equivalent of the Microsoft "blue screen of death." After burning a half hour of airtime and cell phone battery life and coming up with nothing from the Olympus help line, I tried holding down various combinations of buttons and controls on the camera trying to find the equivalent of the three-fingered salute. Miraculously, I found a combination that worked (don't ask me what it was), and so far the camera is still working.

I posted this picture of Hal because he was whining that all the pictures I've posted of him were dorky. I replied that if he didn't always pose like a dork, I might have something better to post. Here's one of the least-dorky shots, taken at the Chaz Fest, a mini-alternative to the Jazz Fest we found.

It appears that Hal has survived another bout of Motorcycle Maintenance. His Triumph started running really poorly for no apparent reason (maybe it was the torrential downpour we had last Friday). After taking everything apart, cleaning things up and finding nothing obviously amiss, Hal was at wit's end as to what to do. The closest Triumph dealer is in Houston, and Hal was leaving for New York today. Quite a conundrum. But not long after I left, the bike started running smoothly again. Maybe it was the Zen.

Reflections on New Orleans

I left the Jazz Fest early today. There were a zillion people there, it was hot and muggy, and there was no one I really had to see. So I did some disaster tourism instead, and went down to the Lower 9th Ward to see how it looked this year compared to last. The Lower 9th, a predominantly black area (where Louis Armstrong grew up), was one of the areas of New Orleans hardest hit by Katrina. Last year at this time, it was pretty much as Katrina left it, with blocks of houses destroyed, cars on tops of houses, houses on cars, and houses on houses. Today, it’s been cleaned up a lot, with most of the destroyed houses gone. The houses that remain are pretty much empty with very little signs of reconstruction. From what I understand, there won't be any major reconstruction there until levees are strengthened and raised or a new levee plan is in place. It was more than a bit eerie to drive through on my bike, and I have to admit I felt a lot more nervous than I did at the Banks Street Tavern the other night when there were gunshots down the street. I didn’t stay long.

I like New Orleans. I like the food and the music, and even its dilapidated streets and buildings have a certain charm. I like to think that these are hard times for New Orleans, and that one day it will return to its former glorious self. But then I start thinking about it. I'm not a New Orleans expert by any stretch, but exactly when were New Orleans glory days? Before the Americans took over in 1803? Then it bounced back and forth between French and Spanish control, and was a center for piracy, international intrigues, and the colonial slave trade. After the Americans took over and turned it into a major center of the antebellum south and its plantation economy? During the Civil War when it was firmly on the Confederate side? After the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era? At the turn of the century when jazz and blues got their roots? During the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when the city fathers intentionally blew the levees and flooded St. Barnard Parish to save the city? (As many had predicted at the time, the Mississippi jumped its banks above New Orleans a couple of days later and took all the pressure off the New Orleans levees, so breaching the levees was unnecessary) And then they refused to pay the promised reparations to the mostly poor Cajun and black folk in the affected areas. During the Great Depression? I don’t know what New Orleans was like then, but I don’t know of anything memorable that happened there. What about WWII and afterwards? What about the civil rights era? Didn't black musicians have to enter French Quarter bars by the back door, and black patrons were not allowed in at all? But what about Mardis Gras? Isn’t that a wonderful cultural event? Its roots are deeply, deeply, racist, with groups like the KKK forming the core of the secret Krewe societies. Throughout its history, New Orleans has had a reputation for extreme corruption and racism. Anything good that came out of New Orleans came out in spite of the culture, not because of it.

Today, at an event like the Jazz Fest, a year and a half after Katrina, one would like to think that the music and the food and all the good things from here, along with the shared suffering would bring people together. But the Jazz Fest is 95% or more white. There are more black people working at the Fest than attending the Fest. At any of the clubs I’ve been to, the clientele is exclusively white, even if the entertainment is black. In my very unscientific survey of racial relations, I’ve personally found that the black folks I’ve encountered in grocery and convenience stores and other commercial establishments are indifferent at best and rude at worst to white customers like me, in spite of my best efforts to be friendly and engaging. This city has some deep racial scars.

Sad to say, I think New Orleans is now, and has been for a long time, a dysfunctional city plagued by rampant racism, crime, and political corruption and incompetence. Katrina might have been straw that broke the camel’s back, but I don’t think that camel’s back could supported its own hump for much longer, even in the best of times. I don’t see much hope for New Orleans. If the powers that be get their act together and come up with a rational river management plan and a plan to restore the wetlands, there might be some hope for the physical New Orleans. And without the physical repairs, I don't see any way that New Orleans will ever heal its spiritual scars.

And the Deluge Came

The rains came yesterday morning and flooded most of the fairgrounds. Even the inside of the Blues tent was flooded in ankle deep water. When the rains hit, I took refuge with The Lord in the Gospel Tent. It was nice and dry, and the music was great, but once again, the seed fell on stoney ground, and I walked out as unbelieving as ever. The rain was good in that all but the hardiest muswic lovers left, and when the skies cleared in the afternoon, there was actually space to move around the major venues. The Acura mainstage closed off with ZZ Top. It was a lot of fun.

Last night we went to a local block party, the like of which I've never seen. They had a beer wagon, 2000 pounds of crawfish, and live bands playing. Hundreds of people showed up. And it's all FREE! I heard it's an annual tradition in the neighborhood during Jazz Fest. The cloudy-looking picture is about 50 pounds of crawfish just after it was dumped on the "eating" table. The other picture is of the same table about 20 minutes later. I think I may have found my true calling. As a professional crawfish eater! Having never eaten these things before, it does take a bit of practice and technique. I think some of my sunflower seed eating skills were transferrable, and before you knew it, I was eating with the best of the locals. The technique in a nutshell is this: twist off the tail while pushing the tail into the body; crush the head while sucking out its juices; then gently grab the bit of exposed tail with your teeth and pull gently while squeezing the tail like a tube of toothpaste. Then repeat until all the crawfish are gone!

There's no one that's really on my must-see list today. The closest to a must-see are the Allman Brothers. I love their music, but I've seen them live before and wasn't impressed. The music that I like best of theirs is very sweet and melodic, e.g., Melissa, and isn't well suited to be played at a zillion dB. I'll go anyway. You never know, I might find the group of my dreams that I've never heard of.

It Ended with a Bang (Several Actually)

The day started off normally enough. I left New Orleans in the morning to ride down to Grande Isle, which is out in the Gulf of Mexico, east of where the Mississippi ends. It's bayou Cajun country, and I'd never been there, so that alone was enough reason to go. It turned out to be quite a pleasant ride, starting with the forested swamp land south of NO, and eventually changing to grassed marshes the further south I went. At Grande Isle, there's a small state park with decent beaches and camping. It would be a good place to spend a weekend. I also had one of the best meals of BBQ pork ribs I've ever had. It made me see that I'll have to raise the bar on the ribs I make myself.

I got back late in the afternoon, only to find that Kara and Ben's father had taken Ben to Houston for medical treatment. All I can say is that I wish Ben a speedy recovery.

Later in the evening, Hal and I went to the Banks Street Tavern, the same place we saw Walter "Wolfman" Washington sing. Hal and I were sitting outside, listening to the band, making a few phone calls, and enjoying the sultry evening when I saw and heard what I initially thought were firecrackers going off less than a half block away. The flashes didn't look like any sparklers or fireworks I'd ever seen, and the sounds had a resonance and depth also unfound in firecrackers. As you may have guessed by now, they were gunshots. I heard at least a half dozen in quick succession, about as fast as you can pull a trigger. We all went inside the bar, and the bartender called the police. MP's in Humvees arrived within a couple of minutes. It was comforting, but also a bit disconcerting to see the military arrive. The NO police arrived a few minutes after that. Pretty soon the area was swarming with police and MP's with guns drawn. The tavern patrons were essentially locked up inside the tavern until things cooled down a bit. The band started playing again, and opened with a couple jokes about their "captive audience." Hal and I hung around for about a half hour, and then walked the few blocks back to Kara's place. On one hand, we felt safe with all of the official firepower around, and on the other hand, we kept looking over our shoulders for suspicious looking characters. Needless to say, we made it back all right. I scanned the paper this morning, but there was no mention of the incident. I'll report back if I hear or read about what actually happened.

Ps. I know my mother doesn't surf the net, so the only way she'll find out is if someone tells her. This is something she doesn't need to know.

NO Marina

The Lake Pontchartrain Marina is in a lot better shape than it was last year. At least the boats are off the streets now. Obviously, there's still lots of work to be done. I did see several laser-like sailboats that looked like they were being readied for use, and I saw a sign saying the Power Squadron would be back, so maybe by next year at this time, the marina will be approaching normal.

No that isn't a new wainscoting-type look on houses. It's the bathtub ring that the flooding left. You can see (if you click on the picture, it will appear full size on your screen) the various levels where the water level stabilized for some period of time. These bathtub rings aren't nearly as prevalent this year as last, but you don't have to look too hard to find some. This particular house was located a mile or two south of the marina.

Yesterday, I had a great day. Hal and Colin were off doing other things, and I stayed at home to cook. I found the local NPR station and listened to All Things Considered while making a pork filé gumbo. I also had a couple of local microbrews to cool me off. Listening to NPR, cooking, and drinking fine beer. It doesn't get any better. And the gumbo turned out pretty well, especially considering I had never made one before.

Tomorrow, I think I'll go further afield and get out of town for most of the day. I think I'll go to Grand Isle, and see what it's like down there.