Saturday night

The models have shifted back east, so it's likely to pass right over us.

Let's see ... the game came off without a hitch (doing my sis a favor here and not giving away the score) and contraflow is scheduled to start tomorrow morning around 4 AM.

I touched base with my friend with all the family in New Orleans, and she won't have all the folks she had last time ... just her parents, brother, and a couple of guys who work with her brother.

Jeaux got the fence fixed, and we got the patio furniture moved into the shop. The bikes and garbage cans are strapped to the fence. All the clothes are clean. The dishes were all clean at 11, but lunch caused a few of them to get dirty again. We've checked in with all our friends and family. All we have left is church and plywood. And a last run to Albertson's to see if we can find any D batteries. We've got enough to run everything we've got (plus a few extras), but Jeaux wants a spare set. Just in case.

In one of those life-parallels that keep cropping up lately, one of our last acts of coping will be going to church tomorrow. I remember sitting in church the day before Katrina hit, and thinking about Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane ... let this cup pass from me. And all the while knowing the answer. The sense of inevitability, of knowing what's coming, and being unable to do anything to change it, or even hurry it up so we can get on with the recovery. I imagine Jesus having that same thought: let's get on with it. Why do we have to wait so long? The sooner we get the crucifixion over, the sooner I can get on with the resurrection.

I'm just tired of waiting. Either bring it on, or shut it down.

Hurricane Prep, part 2

It's hard to tell from the size of this photo, but Gustav has a really cool eye. And by "really cool" I mean "really dangerous and really beautiful at the same time." He surprised us by making cat 3 before he hit Cuba, and there's lots of hot water between Cuba and Louisiana. The prediction is that he'll hit Cat 4 before landfall.

About a bazillion years ago my sister and I were in a school that was hit by a tornado that spun off from a hurricane. Ever since then I've been fascinated by hurricanes. I have no less than three hurricane tracking programs on my computer, even though the internet does all the work for you now. (Did I mention Weather Underground? I've had it open 24/7 for nearly a week.)

Today is when we ratchet up the prep work. Jeaux is Disaster Preparedness Man, so we've had our hurricane box packed since May 31. All that stuff about stocking up on water, canned food, and batteries is SOP for us. So today is for routine things we may not be able to do for a few days (laundry, washing dishes, cleaning out the fridge, charging up all the electronics), things we've put off that need to be taken care of before the storm (fixing the broken fence post that may take down our whole fence if it gets hit by high winds) and stuff that can't be done until the last minute (moving the patio furniture into the house, moving the bikes into the shop).

Kickoff for the LSU game was moved from 5PM to 10AM so that it wouldn't interfere with the evacuation of New Orleans. Because of that, ESPN had to move the game to ESPN Classic, which is only available for digital cable customers. So, along with Home Depot and Lowe's, Cox Cable was open late for subscribers who wanted to upgrade their service. Only in Baton Rouge would seeing the game be considered a hurricane prep emergency.

Three Years Ago Today...

... Jeaux had been at work for several hours and Elizabeth and I were waiting for the power to go out. As I remember, it was about 9 AM when we lost power, and about that time that we saw shingles flying around. We didn't know if they were ours or the neighbors.

Gustav's predicted track on Wunderground.com has shifted a little west. Two of the six models (the purple and red lines) show him coming close to BR. If he were to follow the blue line, he'd make landfall very close to where Camille made landfall, and will also re-damage a lot of the area that was affected by Katrina. I think The yellow line takes it near at Galveston. Read Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson for a terrific history of the 1900 Galveston storm, one of the deadliest in history.

Here We Go Again.

Three years ago this morning I sat in church in jeans, a tee shirt, and flip-flops, which I would NEVER wear to church under normal circumstances. I had taken an hour's break from moving lawn furniture inside, mounting plywood, and locking the bikes in the storage room. Katrina would make landfall in less than 24 hours.

The latest 5-day forecast for Gustav shows him passing just west of Baton Rouge at 2 PM Tuesday. (WUnderground.com is the coolest weather website ever.) At least it'll be daytime, and at least we'll have a weekend to prepare. Jeaux will probably have to be at the hospital for the duration of the storm. Nurses don't fall into that "nonessential personnel" cateogry that always gets to stay home for storms. School will, in all likelihood, be cancelled, and the entire population of New Orleans will head this way. Of course "entire population of New Orleans" is a much smaller number than it was in 2005, right?

There are no available hotel rooms in town since LSU plays the season opener in Tiger Stadium Saturday. The governor has prepped us for contraflow and evacuation. my friend Lauryn is clearing out her guest room. Jeaux has packed up all the ice from the ice maker so that we'll have some reserve ice if we need it.

Yuck.

Falling In Love On a Mission Trip

This post made me laugh!

I have a teenager now, and it scares me, because I remember how stupid I was at her age. Every once in a while, though, something comes along to remind me of the up-side of the chemical onslaught of adolescence, and all I can hope is that she comes out of hers with a few good memories.

The blog is called Stuff Christians Like; the blogger is Prodigal Jon. In this post he talks about how teenagers always fall in love on mission trips. I propose that the same is true of church camp, choir tour, or any other time when kids, busses, and sleeping bags are involved.

Reading the post, I remembered my first church camp in 1975. I had just finished 9th grade and was getting ready to move to the High School when my youth director bribed me into going to Camp Istrouma for a week-long Senior High camp. I took my guitar (because I always took my guitar; it was my identity; The Girl Who Always Has Her Guitar) and discovered another guitarist there: Jimmy Phelps. He was cute, and he played well, and all the girls loved him. We spent some time together that week, and even dated once or twice after camp was over, but it didn't take long for us both to realize that any idea that we would have a real relationship was absurd. We had nothing in common other than the guitar, and we lived an hour away from each other. He was conservative, I was more liberal, and last I heard he had headed to a very conservative military boarding school to finish high school.

But man, camp was fun that year!

***

Scan report:

Total slides: 1015
Scanned to date: 692
% complete: 68.2%

Rededication

About five years ago I started scanning in all my old photos. I got my first camera when I was 14, so I've been taking pictures for 36 years now. My first digital camera was about 3 years ago, so 33 years of photos are either on paper or slides. Heaven only knows how I paid to get all these photos processed!

The scanning job has been an on-and-off process. Other things take priority and my photos get pushed aside, then I pick them up again for a few weeks, then something else comes up. But I REALLY want to get these things finished up. Several years ago my sister and her family had a fire in their house, and I don't want to lose these things. Even plowing through them at breakneck speed has brought up memories that I had long forgotten.

I'm working on slides now. I just counted everything, and I've got a total of 1015 slides. Of those, 596, or not quite 59%, are scanned in. I'm planning on blogging my progress, so if you don't see anything posted for a while, send me an email and tell me to get busy.

Addendum: I tend to scan in batches of 12. If I can do a batch a day, I'll be through before I go to San Francisco in September! (Through with the slides ... the paper photos haven't even been counted yet.)

A Trifecta!

Three things that I enjoy:

• A day with no appointments
• Having the house all to myself
• Rain.

Today I got all three. I've gotten so much done, and I've managed to have some time to just enjoy my day at the same time. The task list isn't clear, but it's a little smaller than it was this morning, and I'm satisfied with that.

Elizabeth is job shadowing at the hospital today. She started last Friday job shadowing the Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists, and Speech Therapists. So far, her favorite has been Occupational Therapy in Rehab. It seems that helping people with ADL (Activities of Daily Living) appeals to her. Yesterday she helped patients bake bread, cut up apples, eat, and take a shower. She's been so excited every day coming home that I think she may be on to something! I told her if she was interested, I'd see if we could get her into Woman's so that she could see how PT's and OT's work with babies.

I remember having a PT and an RT there the first time I fed Elizabeth. I was feeding her breastmilk out of a bottle, and there were two or three nurses, the aforementioned PT and RT, a nutritionist, and about 297 other people standing around monitoring as I gave her a bottle. One of them remarked about how well I was doing for a first time mother, so I told them she was the first one I had given birth to, but she certainly wasn't the first one I'd fed. I'd been feeding babies since Connie was born when I was not-quite-3.

So back to today ... I've still got about two hours before Joe and Elizabeth get home, so I'm going to take a shower and read. Doesn't that sound wonderful?