Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

I talked to my family today for a few hours. They are still in Jackson, MS. It’s my mom and dad, two grandmas, my sister and her fiance, Jonathan. And my grandmother’s dog. In one motel room. With a zero homicide rate. My mamon is being picked up by in-laws who are driving down from Memphis, where she’ll stay until my two aunts pick her up and take her to live in San Antonio. Otherwise, the rest of the family leaves soon to begin their new life in Birmingham for presumably the next couple of months/forever. They’re renting an apartment and then going to rent furniture. My dad’s company has an office there so he’ll go back to work soon. We have some very close family friends that relocated there about ten years ago, so they’ll have some people to hang out with.
They said conditions in Jackson are pretty bleak. There’s four hour waits at gas stations. The local water supply is undrinkable because power outages have knocked out the water purifying plants, making the tap water questionable. They had to drive up to Vicksburg yesterday to eat because a lot of places were closed due to the outages. My grandma said she was happy yesterday to buy some clothes because she left with the clothes on her back and her wedding ring. But obviously they’re grateful to not be in New Orleans. And both grandmothers said this event couldn’t compare to when their husbands died.
It’s staggering to think how quickly things can change. I’m very grateful that my family is so lucky and so strong.

Kim alerted me to the free housing offered on Craigslist for displaced New Orleans people.

I’ve been watching live feed on the internet all day of the NBC affiliate covering New Orleans and I’m a little crazy now. Here are some facts and stuff:

• WDSU live video
• an email attributed to a rescue worker
• missing people and neighborhood forums on nola.com
• a disturbing view of the breach in the levee near my parent’s house
• donate to the Red Cross

right outside of Baton Rouge, from last month
I gave up on the cable news coverage today when I realized I could watch the local NBC affiliate from New Orleans broadcasting out of Mississippi. They had nothing but hours of footage of the wreckage. Plus, I talked to my family for hours today and my friend Kim, who had a lot of reports from relatives that had stayed in the city. The news is really bleak and hard to piece together since eighty percent of the city has left. All the roads leading into town are either impassable or blocked off because the city is without electricity and in most cases without running water or sewage and much of the city is under six to fifteen feet of water. So most people will probably not be able to return for at least another forty-eight hours to a week. And there might not be electricity for up to a month or beyond (which means no air conditioning in 100 degree heat). Add to this that the flood water is largely contaminated with sewage and chemical waste and oil. Add to that a CNN report that, “The water also has dislodged thousands of snakes — including poisonous water moccasins — from their homes, as well as fire ants.” And there’s an outbreak of West Nile disease being carried by the current mosquito invasion, which would be compounded by all the standing water. New Orleans is a crumbling creaky city that can barely keep itself going under normal conditions.
So seeing all these pictures today of familiar neighborhoods severely flooded really tore me up. A lot of places I hung out at and ate at last month are probably gone, like the Mother-In-Law lounge. Once you get flood water in your house, it’s a write off. Even if it’s not structurally damaged, all the contents of the building are destroyed and the walls have to be gutted to the stud because the mold that will grow there makes the building toxic.
On a personal note, my family and everyone I know there is okay. Though a lot of my friend Kim’s relatives have already learned that their houses are destroyed. All the doors of her father’s business got blown off leaving the contents exposed to looters, which unfortunately has already become a problem. There was a bad levee breach near my parent’s house but since everyone they know is gone, they haven’t been able to figure out if their house has flooded. Shockingly, everyone I talked to was in really good spirits. Not freaking out and having a nervous breakdown like I would be. My parents took both grandmothers with them. My mamon (father’s mother, yeah, we’re French) forgot her purse in the rush to leave. My aunts in San Antonio want her to come live in Texas for a while, but she’s literally carrying no ID and can’t get on a plane. My other grandmother accidentally forgot her heart medicine and had to go to an emergency room to get a refill. Not to make them sound absent-minded, because they really didn’t have much time to get ready. You see these storms coming, but there’s so many hurricanes every year that the threat doesn’t really get properly assessed until the window to leave is very small.
I heard this on the Mississippi TV station I’ve been watching, “You know it’s serious when even super Walmart is closed.”

Jesus, fuck CNN! At one point today (Sun) they were saying if they have to re-build New Orleans from scratch, they’d probably do it on a different location. Oh-kay… Though definitely the strangest thing to hear was that they were saying in NO that they didn’t have enough body bags, which is something since it’s the murder capital of the world. My whole family split on Sunday morning to Jackson, Mississippi. My dad said they took as many photo albums as they could fit and then put the rest upstairs.
All the ‘Atlantis’ bullshit seemed a little much, but New Orleans turns into a disaster zone if it rains for more than a few hours (like the dead literally float out of their graves), so it’s hard not to be anxious and kind of freaking out. My friend Kim spent 14 hours in a convoy with her family to Houston, which is usually a six hour drive.
Both pictures above are from my dad. The second shows the ‘contraflow’ of cars leaving the city where all lanes of the highway led in the same direction. The first one is from right outside of Jackson. I love the little girl waving. Hurricanes are pretty exciting business when you’re a kid.
I saw this piece of garbage movie tonight called The Island (well, duh), where all these people are living in this Santa Monica-looking industrial cement city of the future after the world has been ‘contaminated’. I kept wondering if that’s what New New Orleans would look like after the original town sustained it’s 30 feet of water. But then I thought no one from New Orleans would wear a skin tight track suit no matter what and it made me feel a little better.

Te-eva, you’re no Hansen! Still, it was a 190 degrees that day and you saved my life.

Jeremy informed me there’s a pepper mill museum in Gatlinburg, TN. Jami, it’s on!

More soapbox. Even though somebody got run over by one of the cars seconds after Sally and I left, I still have to say it was a pretty impressive event. People on walkies ran it with Swiss precision, both in tracking the times and getting people out of the way of oncoming vehicles. And there was this huge super mixed Portland-esque crowd, from suburban dads with their sons to Special Edition hipsters trying out tomorrow’s styles today. Seems like anywhere else I’ve lived, this kind of thing would have required tons of cops and swat teams and firemen. I guess the trouble set in after the speed trials ended when there was a hiatus and you could see everyone there started to get drunk. Still…

Last night I designed a page just for my photos. It’ll have a unique URL once I can come up with a good name. If you look at this site, there’s no new revelations. But like this site, it’s a big design snooze.I told you so.

Brian Ulrich had a good link to vintage supermarket photos.

Finally watched the last episode of Six Feet under and while, yes, tears were jerked by that last sequence (poor Keith!), mostly I kept thinking about how if I were to slip into a super depressed state, I’d totally be watching reruns of “Just Shoot Me”.

Some portraits done on Saturday at the Soapbox races.

Sandy Avenue used to be the strangest place on Earth. Evidence here.

Does anybody know the javascript for a repeating image that refreshes only when you hit the ‘refresh’ button but doesn’t animate? If that made sense, write me!

Casa du April, which is also about to be abandoned. I’d heard about this Mary & Rhoda portrait for a long time before I finally saw it in person, but I still had a heart attack. It was painted by her mom. So lucky.

For the next few days, all interior design all the time.
To start off with, here’s Ben’s apartment, now abandoned.

Thrifting in Atlanta was pretty good. I was warned that there was nothing left, so maybe I have no taste because I saw lots of hilarious stuff. Ben bought this lacquered wedding portrait and the cashier claimed she knew the people in the photo.

Below are some pictures from a roll of film Millie found in a thrift store recently.