Christmas in the Big Easy

You probably noticed I haven't blogged much lately. We spent last week in New Orleans. I needed to recharge my batteries for the final push to the election. It was nice to get away from everything. We stayed at a bed and breakfast just off the Garden District. Things still aren't quite back to normal, even in the areas that didn't flood. It was eery to see some houses not far from our hotel with the search and rescue markings still on them. Other clues still exist as well. There are blocks where trash and building materials from gutted houses still sit waiting for non-existent city services to pick them up. In front of one stately antebellum mansion the sidewalk still bore a spraypainted warning "Looters Shot." The Lower 9th Ward was pretty much everything I imagined. It's a ghost town. Standing in the middle of the destruction and looking at the levies as they loomed high above my head, I came up with one conclusion. No Way. No way would I live there. It's basically a big valley with some dirt and concrete keeping Lake Ponchetrain and the Mississippi River from crashing in the way they did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It just doesn't make sense to me to live in a place that is reliant on technology and electricity to keep from returning to it's natural state. That natural state? A lake.