From the category archives:

Essays

Reflections From Oz

“New Orleans is Oz, and everywhere else is Kansas” -Unknown Bourbon St, hours after Superbowl 2010. “Sunday night, Bourbon St. was like a capital city of some country after a dictator has been overthrown”, said the NY Times on Monday morning. And I thought, no, that’s what we did on Saturday. To outsiders, New Orleans [...]

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Cried Wolf (#18)

Essays

I knew it: Stay or Go?Some La. residents rethinking evacuating And of course, the most tragicomical: Nagin worries residents could stay if Ike threatens. Well, I don’t suppose it could be YOUR fault Ray, what with the crying wolf dramatics like “mother of all storms” and “900 miles wide”. And of course, FoxNNbc is totally [...]

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Gustav #17

Essays

At about 6pm last night we got electricity back. We were convinced it wouldn’t last, but started cleaning up the inside of the house anyway. We swept out the leaves on the floors (from having the windows open for almost three days), turned off the generator, picked up the fans, reconnected the refrigerator, etc, etc… [...]

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Gustav #16

Essays

Day 3 post-Gustav, and all is going pretty well. Humans! There are other humans here! Many of my neighbors are returning and cleaning up now. We STILL don’t have power, but I just saw four energy trucks turn down Magazine and Leontine so I HOPE we’ll get it soon. 54 hours and counting… Anyway, my [...]

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Gustav #15

Essays

When I woke up this morning I was going to write a rant about how they mayor of New Orleans is overstepping his authority regarding the return of citizens to the city after Hurricane Gustav, but Times Picayune writer James O’Byrne said exactly what I wanted to say: Next Time We Won’t Leave. Two city [...]

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Gustav #14

Essays

Dear parish leaders, any points you earned by calling early evacuations and getting everyone out, you just lost by botching the return plans. You CANNOT tell people they can’t go home. If you keep this up, and don’t let people return for up to a week after they leave, then they’ll ignore your ‘mandatory’ evacuations [...]

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Gustav #13

Essays

Just drove around uptown a for a few minutes and took a few pics. There really isn’t much damage except for tree debris and power lines down in a few places. A few trees fell down, but otherwise the worst thing I saw was a leaning house, and for all I know it looked like [...]

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Gustav #12: The Day After

Essays

Everyone slept in one room last night. We cranked up the generator and put a window a/c in our den, then shut the door and went to sleep. The baby was a bit cranky last night and we realized she’d never been hot before. As soon as we put her in the “icebox” room she [...]

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Gustav #11

Essays

Ok, last post for tonight. We still don’t have power, but I know other people uptown who do so I guess it’s random. There’s still a pretty good wind, maybe 25mph, and I have all of my kitchen windows open, letting it whip on through. We had a great dinner. Cooked steaks on the BBQ, [...]

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Gustav #10

Essays

Things are calming down a bit now. I don’t think we got more than Cat 1 winds here. We were able to go outside through most of it, and never really felt unsafe. Things got busiest around 11a-12p with some fiesty gusts that ripped a bit of siding off the house. It didn’t rain much [...]

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