Did you know you could fly

To Do Today:

• Take out trash


• Laundry, laundry, laundry


• Enjoy electricity

To Do This Week:

• Get mini grill


• Get snake food


• Get *real* coolers (not the styrofoam ones I have)


• Clean out aquarium (a week of no filtering is ugly)


• Do grocery shopping:




• Cat food


• Cat Litter


• Bread


• Lunchmeats for sandwiches


• Hot dogs


• Fresh condiments


• Ice!!




• Fill up car with gas at last minute before Ike


• Get gas can and fill that up too


• Get lockbox for important documents

I'm sure I'll think of other things. Good thing my electric bill is going to be low this month, cause I'm going to be way overbudget on everything else. *sigh*

Didn't we just do this? Just who is it that Louisiana has pissed off lately to deserve this? Fuck.

So Gustav downgraded to a category 2 overnight, and seems like it shifted a bit further west, all good things for me. From what I can tell from satellite the eye is making landfall around Houma, LA, right about now. I'm in the middle of one of the outer bands. It's raining, but not coming down too hard. There's about 3 inches of standing water in our parkinglot, but we get that with bad thunderstorms here. And the trees are whipping about every 30 seconds or so when a strong gust comes through. However, I still have power, obviously, and the apartment itself isn't shaking the way it did in Katrina. At least not yet. It'll probably get worse as the eye makes its way up here.

Ok, just a note to let y'all know that I made it back home safe and sound, and am all holed up and prepared for the duration. I'll be online for the next few hours, probably. It's raining a little now, but nothing really bad yet. The radio said we should start to see the first major effects around midnight here, and I figure I'll probably lose power soon after, so after that I'll just send updates as I can. Here's hoping I get through as well as I did in Katrina. Please keep *everyone* on the Gulf Coast in your prayers tonight.

Well, current predictions now have Gustav hitting Louisiana Tuesday morning instead of Monday, which means my flight home this weekend might actually happen as scheduled. Of course, I'll be flying into Louisiana at the same time that everyone else will probably be trying to get out, but that's ok :) Looks like if everything goes as expected I'll actually be home for the event after all. I know I shouldn't feel better about being in the path of a hurricane instead of safely out of it, but I'm not really anticipating any major damage where I live, and I'd rather be around to keep an eye on things.

I'm reading this book, a mystery that's set in a small town in Louisiana. This fictional town is in the process of recovering from the devastating fictional hurricane Bernardine. It is quite clear that Bernardine is a stand-in for Katrina.

For some inexplicable reason, this fictionalisation really bothers me. If there were any differences between the two that were important to the plot that would be one thing. But there aren't. So why doesn't the author just *say* Katrina? Katrina was real. Katrina was devastatingly real. I may not have been in New Orleans, but I was close enough, and I saw all the destruction and pain and loss and recovery first hand. Katrina *means* something to me, and to the people of this state. The very name itself is emotionally charged, so much so that I feel sorry for anyone living here actually named Katrina, because they'll never get past that. Taking that very real catastrophe and turning it into something fictional, with a meaningless fictional name, feels disrespectful. Turning something that was all too real into not-real, like a big game of 'let's pretend'. It feels to me that if you're going to set a story in post-Katrina Louisiana, you need to acknowledge that difference. And there *is* a difference. Something happened that changed the way the people in this state think and function on a very basic level, and that something was Katrina, not Bernardine, or Gretchen, or Falstaff, or any other imaginary name you want to come up with. Acknowledging that difference without acknowledging the real source feels as bad or worse as not acknowledging it at all.

Perhaps I'm overreacting. Perhaps I'm the only one that feels that way. You can say it's just a name, but to me it's *not* just a name. It's Katrina.

Book #136 -- Gwen Roland, Atchafalaya Houseboat: My Years in the Louisiana Swamp, 161 pages.

This turned out to be more a memoir than an ecology book, but what a memoir it was. For about 10 years in the 70s and early 80s, Gwen Roland and her partner lived on a houseboat they built themselves (the house part at least) moored in Bloody Bayou in the Atchafalaya basin, in almost complete solitude, living off the land. Rolands recounts the story of how they decided to live in the swamp, how they built their houseboat, planted a food garden during the dry season, raised chickens in a floating coop, fished and traded their catch for other essentials like milk and bread, and what they discovered about Louisiana and themselves. The book includes pictures by C. C. Lockwood, who stayed with them part of the time he was capturing his famous Atchafalaya photos. It provides a slightly modern glimpse into a lifestyle as old as the Mississippi, but fast disappearing. No one lives in the Atchafalaya basin anymore, and the old ways have almost died out. This book made me yearn once again for the simple life, as much as I can acknowledge to myself that I could probably not live without my computer, TV, and air conditioner.

Progress toward goals: 317/365 = 86.8%

Books: 136/150 = 90.7%

Pages: 39076/50000 = 78.2%

2007 Book List

cross-posted to 15000pages, 50bookchallenge, and gwynraven

I've read the numbers millions of times since starting the project on Louisiana ecology I'm working on. But the images are what never fail to astound me.

Since 1932, a portion of Louisiana wetlands equal to the entire state of Delaware has sunken in to the sea. The current rate of land loss is at a football field every half hour. The GPS maps fishing trawlers use on their boats are out of date practically as soon as they're released, large swaths of bayou having succumbed to erosion between the survey and the production of the map.

Canal Street at night, New Orleans.

It actually still looks like that too, just more cars.






However, Baton Rouge no longer looks like this. Many more buildings, far fewer trees.

More birds to add to my sort-of birding list. I'm not really going out of my way for these, they're mostly birds I've seen on my way to and from work (I pass the University Lakes, where there are lots of waterbirds). Louisiana is a birders paradise, and one of these days I'm actually going to go to one of the preserves and come back with an even better list.