Katrina Kabob Date Wednesday, April 24, 2024 - 08:50 AM PST Topic News OK, for everyone who is worried let me start with these simple words: We are OK!!! Life as we know it is currently a little fucked, but we are alive and well. Now for a bit more information. I think the easiest way to tell this will be from the beginning. Wednesday or Thursday before Katrina hit I started to wonder when the next hurricane would put in an appearance. Interestingly enough I saw that there was a small tropical depression just southeast of the tip of Florida. From all appearances, it was going to give the aformentioned tip of Florida a brief blow job and then give up the idea as a bad one. I smiled and drank my tea and went to work. My only worry at the moment was the head cold Callei was coming down with and the fact that I had to figure out to which chapter of Harry Potter I was listening. Friday I looked at the weather channel again, the tropical depression had developed into a low grade hurricane, but it was on the east side of the Floridian peninsula, nothing to worry about for us. Although I did spare a few moments to send good vibes to all those poor bastards in Florida. I could just imagine a state wide chorus of "Not again" wafting it's way into the sky as they sat glued to the television watching the hurricane march it's way towards them. Callei's headcold was developing into one of those cranky making headaching NyQuil commercials, but she was bearing up ok. Now where was I on Harry Potter today? Saturday dawned a glorious weekend morning. I slept in until noon, got up, stretched and put on the kettle for a cup of tea. I sneezed a few times and cursed under my breath at the realization that I was coming down with Callei's cold, after a few moments I decided that yes it was definitely her cold because I was already cranky, not a common state for me in the morning on the weekend. I decided to just ignore it. It was Saturday and the only real thing I needed to do for the day was to go shopping for groceries and maybe rent a few movies. So I rolled over, checked the weather channel and saw that the hurricane had actually moved over Florida and was now in the guld of Mexico. It was headed to New Orleans, but A: it was a category 3, which meant a little wind, some lightening and the same amount of rain we get every afternoon. And if it followed the normal pattern, It would head straight for us for about three days and then veer off to the left or right. Nothing to worry about. I got up and we went shopping and we got a massive handful of movies for the weekend so that neither of us would have to think during the weekend. We were both going to have a head cold so why bother ourselve with anything but getting naked, laying on each other, and watching a bit of mindless entertainment. Saturday evening we got a call from a local friend who wanted to know if we were going to evacuate. We talked about it a bit and checked the news. No real change in the hurricane at that point. No worries. We decided to ride it out like we had the last six or seven that have failed to make an appearance. I put on the Chronicals of Riddick and kicked back to ride out my headache. Callei made it clear that she wasn't opposed to evacuating, but I'll be honest, if it did come through I wanted to see it. I love the raw energy of really big storms, and at the moment, a: it didn't look that big, b: we lived on the third floor, and c: it was a big brick building. I wasn't very worried at all and rolled over to unpause Riddick and go back to watching him fight the death mongers. Saturday night/Sunday morning: 2 AM my father in law calls. I'd been asleep for two hours trying to sleep off what was becoming a pretty nasty head cold. He had been up watching the news of the storm and they had just announced a mandatory evacuation for New Orleans. He wanted to know not were we going, but when were we going. I mumbled something truly obscene and rolled over to try and go back to sleep. At around three AM I gave it up as a bad idea and sat up to check the weather channel web site while Callei took the next call from her dad. The site showed a much more startling image than it had earlier. I swore a bit more, rolled over and finally got back to sleep. Sunday morning I woke up at seven thirty, remembered that, in essence, there was a massive super storm headed straight for New Orleans and we needed to leave town right away. There were only a few problems. First on my mind was that our car had no air conditioning. While this might sound like a silly concern at the time, I was remembering that during the last evacuation there had been a couple of deaths in the traffic because people had been stuck in stop and go traffic for nearly four hours with no air conditioning. There was no way I was going to hop in our little sweat box and take us out for a shake and bake on the I-10 parking lot. The second problem we had was where to go. There was the obvious first step of course, away from there. But beyond that...well, first things first. I called my ex-boss, reached his wife and asked how they were doing. We spoke for a few minutes, she said they were planning on weathering out the storm in the Quarter and thanks for asking. In short I chickened out. I walked around in circles for a few minutes while Callei put stuff ina suitcase and we both gradually lost our minds trying to encompass the fact that in a few short minutes we'd be walking out of our house, abandoning it to the storm. So I had a smoke, made a fresh, really hot cup of tea and called my ex-boss back. I said hello and asked to borrow a car. It was an odd question, but all in all I figured it was worth a shot. The strangest thing was, after a few moments he said yes. So we grabbed the suitcase, my laptop and a few odds and ends that caught the magpie part of our brains which were all that was left at the moment. We arrived at Felix, my ex-bosses house. Spent a few minutes in conversation, and left our car behind, parked on the side of the road. We hit the road, turned around to go back to the house for one more round at the shiny things and then away we went. To spend the next twenty four hours on the road. The road trip itself is an entire article in and of itself, so I'm going to wait until the hallucinations are a little farther buried. Briefly though, we hit the road and called Kira and Paris who are putting us up for the moment. Life is pretty good at the moment. We are surrounded both physically and digitally with good friends and we have each other. Of course the house is toast and the car is probably at the bottom of the Missippi and our city has been closed to the public, including residents for the next five weeks, but what the hell, life is pretty good anyway. We're not entirely sure what were going to do next, but we will try to keep everyone updated and everything. P.S. Yes it's OK to laugh at the funny parts. Life's nothing without the laughs, even if they do happen in the midst of tragedy, especially when they happen in the midst of tragedy. Oh and I'm about two thirds of the way through Harry Potter and I think my movie rentals are going to be a wee bit late...They weren't shiny enough to warrant being picked up. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=784