Lovely Rita - not

What a bitch...packed the photos and documents; getting ready to flee. Going to the Mineloa, Texas area. What a pain in the ass - of course, if that's the worst of it, I'll consider ourselves lucky. Last check showed it sliding a little further south; we might just get ten feet of water then, and 80 mph winds.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

-- Groucho Marx

National Hurricane Center's official forecast naming Galveston as Rita's most likely Gulf Coast target

Great, just what we freakin' need.....

Sept. 19, 2005, 1:32PM

Galveston considers evacuation

By RHEA DAVIS and KEVIN MORAN
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

GALVESTON - With the National Hurricane Center's official forecast naming Galveston as Rita's most likely Gulf Coast target later this week, island officials will announce this afternoon a voluntary evacuation and the possibility of a mandatory evacuation.
The Galveston Police Department said the city's mayor is holding a 1:30 p.m. news conference -- to be Webcast here -- to call for a voluntary evacuation in preparation of Rita, which is a tropical storm now but is expected to strengthen into a hurricane when it moves into the Gulf later today.
.....

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/avantgo.hts/topstory/3360091

Canadians beat U.S. Army to New Orleans suburb

Canadians beat U.S. Army to New Orleans suburb
08 Sep 2005 05:08:07 GMT
Source: Reuters

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 7 (Reuters) - A Canadian search-and-rescue team reached a flooded New Orleans suburb to help save trapped residents five days before the U.S. military, a Louisiana state senator said on Wednesday.

The Canadians beat both the Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. disaster response department, to St. Bernard Parish east of New Orleans, where flood waters are still 8 feet (2.4 metres) deep in places, Sen. Walter Boasso said.
"Fabulous, fabulous guys," Boasso said. "They started rolling with us and got in boats to save people."

"We've got Canadian flags flying everywhere."

Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

www.nytimes.com
Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street
By DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

240,000 Evacuees Strain Capacity

n Texas
240,000 Evacuees Strain Capacity
By Lisa Rein and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page A01

HOUSTON, Sept. 3 -- Thousands of evacuees, exhausted and frustrated after days trapped in flooded New Orleans, continued to pour into Houston and other cities in Texas on Saturday, rapidly filling enormous arenas and small shelters in an extraordinary exodus of humanity that has quickly strained the capacity of the Lone Star State.

Over the past six days, Texas has mobilized its emergency relief operations almost as if Hurricane Katrina slammed into its borders, rather than the neighboring eastern states, and in a very real sense Katrina has hit Texas with massive force. About 240,000 Louisianans have found sanctuary in the Lone Star State in hotels and large shelters, state officials said. Many more are in church-run shelters and even some in private homes. Officials are scrambling to stay ahead of what they anticipate could be a long-term relocation of humanity.

Katrina Refugees Will Go to Astrodome

HOUSTON - At least 25,000 of Hurricane Katrina's refugees, a majority of them at the New Orleans Superdome, will travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and will be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which hasn't been used for professional sporting events in years.

Got this from the AP Wire. I'm near Houston, and we've had two shelters since Monday in our little town, about a thousand people. It's just getting worse down there in NOL.

sweet ride i saw in the local kroger parking lot. it's a '41 something 

Indy 'net Radio

Just starting using this, but I think it is a pretty cool little tool. Plays items at random that you just might not get to hear, and you get to keep the tracks you like.

don't you just hate it when a black hole appears in your living room? 

One Mars Orbiter Takes First Photos of Other Orbiters.

This is pretty cool ...

One Mars Orbiter Takes First Photos of Other Orbiters.



Photographs from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft released today are the first pictures ever taken of a spacecraft orbiting a foreign planet by another spacecraft orbiting that planet.

New species of rodent discovered in Laos market

Just what the world needs - a new species of rat, or squirrel, or whateverthehell it is - and it was found in a market!

h2g2

Well, I got to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Very good, though I have to admit, I did like the BBC series better. Over all, though a very good movie. I'm afraid that most people will not get a lot of it, though, unless they have read the book(s). The TV series was able to avoid that problem, though with a dozen episodes you are able to avoid the setup and explanation problem; the narration seemed more natural in the TV show.

Susie's Birthday Cake

Susie's birthday cake. Her birthday was a wonderful ending to a fantastic week.

party party

at the house of voodoo - tropical shirts will attract other tropical shirts :)

St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square

Madam Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen's, tomb.

Here's a good link with more information. http://www.parascope.com/en/articles/voodooQueen.htm.

name says it all

'Snow Storm' of Christmas Eve, 2004

Lydia walking in the snow.

A rare even here in south-east texas - a christmas eve snow fall! It was only about three inches, but here, that's a lot.