Season of Change

A strange end of summer. We had our faculty meetings, got through registration, had one day of classes, and then Hurricane Isaac came in and did a slowwww fade over southern Louisiana, dumping tons of rain and causing Xavier to cancel school until this coming Tuesday.  We're basically starting from scratch because there'll be a new registration period, and there were so few students on our regular first day of classes that no one really covered a lot of material. I had to send out revised syllabi to everyone from a hotel room in Byram, Mississippi where Lana and I rode out the storm. I would probably have stuck it out at home but Lana was very concerned about the heat if the electricity went out, and that was enough to convince us to leave.

We did lose electricity. I don't know how many days, but we threw out a couple of hundred dollars worth of food this morning that had spoiled or was beginning to. We spent four days in Byram, then came back to New Orleans to another hotel for a day and a half. I drove out to the house on Saturday to find that the electricity was back on so I fetched Lana and we were happy to be home. She slept well for the first time since we'd left.

We were pretty lucky. The house did not take any water and no trees were down on our property. Our next door neighbors were not so lucky. The patriarch got blasted in the head by a tree that came down on their house and he had to be evacuated and have his scalp stapled. They also lost a car. Lana's car had water in the floorboards, but only on the driver's side. We'd parked it in the highest spot in our yard and that turned out to be a very good thing. The car started fine.

I spent a lot of Saturday and today cleaning up and trying to get the water out of Lana's floorboards. I'm also worried about her because she just can't eat. She's been living on a liquid diet for a couple of weeks now, and not even any protein drinks, just ginger ale and occasionally some tea. She was drinking milk but has given that up. She's getting her energy from putting sugar in her drinks. I'm sure that part of the problem now is the side effects of the meds she's being given. She's also almost given up talking since it hurts her throat to do so and her voice is so raspy it's hard to understand.

Anyway, I was able to visit some blogs today and probably will tomorrow. But then it'll be back to school so things will be haphazard. We'll have a lot of catching up to do.