Sunday, August 26, 2012.
Isaac Looms.
Isaac has our full attention now. The unmistakable rituals attending an approaching tropical storm are underway across New Orleans. You fill your car's gas tank, load up on batteries and a couple of day's worth of food, and start cleaning up the perimeter of potentially flying objects. Then you watch the familiar faces of the weathercasters on television, especially those who have been watching hurricanes for a long time.
I was thinking that a book about the pre-hurricane culture of New Orleans might be worth writing. I'll remember that if I ever find myself with nothing to do.
Mary Ann, who worries about some unlikely threats (example: she will not valet park her car, because what really do we know about the sanitation practices of people who park cars?), pooh-pooh's hurricanes. The only one that ever really convinced her to evacuate was Katrina. The reason she agreed to leave town for Gustav was that we had so much fun on previous evacuations that she considers them vacations. For Gustav, we went to Santa Fe, hiked the Grand Canyon, and spent a week in Los Angeles.
She laughs at my hurricane preparations. I have to agree that some of them are dweebish. For example, as soon as hurricane season begins, I collect empty gallon milk jugs, clean them and fill them with water. By the peak of the season, I have about fifteen or twenty gallons of drinkable water. If a storm heads this way, I empty them into the stoppered bathtub and refill them with fresh water. Then I fill the tub the rest of the way. Reason: when the power goes out (an inevitability), we no longer have water, either. Our water comes from a well. That was a problem after Katrina, when we came home to check on the place and empty the refrigerators. We had to quit before we were done because of a lack of water to drink and wash up with, to say nothing about flushing the facility.
Thanks to my water jugs, we will never have that problem again. But Mary Ann finds the whole rigamarole ridiculous. A guy just can't impress his wife or his mother, can he?
Mary Leigh came up with loge-level tickets for the Saints game. She called you-know-who to ask him to join her, and he did with alacrity. That left MA and me to figure out how to spend the afternoon and evening. We headed out to dinner at Trey Yuen, but a discussion about finances made us turn around to eat leftovers at home instead. I must make this sacrifice now and then. Mary Ann has a large stock of food that must be eaten, no matter how old and unappetizing it is.
On her menu today was shepherd's pie, source and age unknown. My sensitive palate put it at Winter 2009, but I kept that to myself and just ate the stuff. I'm glad I wasn't eating what she was eating, whatever that was. She immediately began to pity my having been brought down to such a state, but I can take it. I really can. It's helping me lose an ounce or two.
Late in the evening, we spent an hour or so switching back and forth among the weathercasters. I thought the one who was doing the best job was Carl Arredondo at Channel Four. His presentations were calm, knowledgeable, and filled with enough conjecture to illuminate the whole situation. Margaret Orr was her usual self, excitable and enthusiastic, and looking the same as she did when we first saw her. . . was it three decades ago? She let it out that she remembered the 1965 hurricane Betsy, but then she quickly added that she was a very small child at the time.
I didn't check in with Bob Breck, but only because I watch television so seldom that I couldn't find his station. The guy on The Weather Channel seemed to me to have it all wrong, particularly his statement that the rain and wind would be worse in New Orleans than it was in Katrina.
My tension level is high. I thought about having a drink, but I've given up alcohol for that purpose. Café au lait would calm me as well.
