Helping

Went and donated dog and cat food, litter, and some assorted toys and care products to the LA SPCA today to help with hurricane relief efforts. Let the strong young men volunteering there do all the lifting.  They were thankful for the help. Just wish I could do more.

Updates, Nirding

I return. Sort of.  I have had a horrible go at it with reoccurring flair ups of my autoimmune issues. No thanks to the stress of having to jump through more hoops to get a little help.

It is better explained here, with neat pictures of my crazy flesh!

http://www.patreon.com/posts/handy-hands-5871180

It is finally letting up enough where I can think somewhat clearly and function enough to venture on here and see what everyone is up to.

I have a ton of little updates to make here or there, mostly passing comments about random things that have happened.

That includes a very random and rapid visit from my friend, the good doctor Jenn.

She brought along her friend and fellow doctor Abby ( who was moving to Louisiana, yay! ) and Abby had with her an awesome gyr-burd.

The nirds taught me great wisdom of avian ways. Shenanigans were had, great photos were captured ( envy of Jen and her snazzy super lens ), tasty gator was partaken and good company shared by all. It was an awesome day and evening full of laughs and animal geekery that I have been dying for.

They got to meet Ember and Chakotay and experience the silly that is service dogs given a "relax and say hi" command.  Chakotay did very good for his first lengthy outing working alongside Ember with all sorts of crazy distractions ( like birds! ).  It was also his first experience doing a long and boring down/stay under a restaurant table.

It was totally worth the recovery time from all the activity afterwards.  They went to the French Quarter the following day before leaving town, and while I wish I could have too, there is no way I could have gone along and managed to keep up. Especially not in the scorching heat and humidity.

Other stuff happened. I found a baby possum skeleton, I saved a fledgling Blue Jay in epic fashion, I have been training with my dorky dogs when my body allows, and I continue to battle medical conditions and fight for the aid I need.  With the Medicaid expansion I am finally getting access to immunological medications and other treatment options, which we hope will better control symptoms.

I think I covered all the main highlights. 

Holiday Update

Christmas was nice. Got to visit with mom and grandma and had a nice dinner. It just didn't feel like Christmas though, in a lot of different ways. It was 80F here. In December. Up where Mike is in the mountains in NJ, they have always had snow by this time of year, but not this year. It was around 50F and Mike said he had the windows open. It's so warm there were tornadoes in Texas, in winter (bless those poor people ). I distinctly remember Decembers down in the 20F range with freeze warnings and wearing heavy coats as a kid even in Louisiana. I don't understand how people can keep denying global warming or climate shift. Anyway, hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.

10 Years After Hurricane Katrina

10 years ago my life changed forever when Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi.  I lost my lifelong home and everything in it, as did many others in the effected regions.

"Get over it" some people say as they sneer at those of us living here because "the region is known for flooding and hurricanes".  I want to point out that the areas that were most drastically effected by the hurricane, were areas that actually *NEVER* had problems on the scale we saw in Katrina.  Slidell ( where I lived ) was north of the Lake Pontchartrain and in the 22 years I lived there, we never, *ever* flooded or had severe hurricane damage at our house.... until Katrina.

We were far enough (about 6 miles ) inland and above sea level to where it had never been an issue.  Same can be said for the hardest hit areas in Mississippi, from Gulfport, to Waveland, on through Biloxi. Unless you lived right on the lakefront or beachfront or in a low area, the worst you had to worry about was wind damage as opposed to severe flooding. Even many places that did get water, it was normally only a few inches to at most 2ft or so depending on where you lived.

To those people who would still sneer, I point toward New York and Hurricane Sandy.  They weren't expecting a hurricane to bring severe flooding and damage either, and like many of us across Louisiana and Mississippi, they lived in an area where it wouldn't normally have been a problem.  Should they have "gotten over it" because "they chose to live there"?  Those same harsh words sound vastly different when applied to a similar situation, don't they?  Katrina was a far larger, more powerful, and far more destructive storm. Not just New Orleans suffered, where most damage was done because the levees/seawalls failed, and water rushed in - in most cases hours after the worst of the storm had already passed.  Slidell didn't have levees/seawalls or need them, and neither did cities in Mississippi that were destroyed. It was likely tornadoes spawned from the storm, as well as the storm surge itself that at times was pushed 6 to 12 miles inland ( carrying boats and everything else it swept away with it mind you), that caused the most destruction across multiple cities and across multiple states.




It's very difficult to talk about what I went through during that time, and what I witnessed others go through.  It's been 10 years since it happened, but it still feels as raw as if it were yesterday.


I've been living out of boxes for the past 10 years because I don't have a home of my own anymore.

I have been living by the good grace of others a majority of that time.  It leaves one with intense mixed emotions. Full of thanks and gratitude. Yet never feeling like you really belong. Never feeling settled.  You know it is only temporary. You'll collect all your boxes and go somewhere else soon enough, so why bother to unpack anything?

Or worse now that I am living in New Orleans again. I dread the warmer months now and the storms they might bring. Having to pick and choose what to take if we have to run from a storm. You can't take it all when you run from a storm. Knowing you might lose everything all over again.  I can't describe how gut wrenching it is.

I would rather live anywhere but here. Further inland, maybe up toward Baton Rouge.  But family and their livelihoods are here and their support is here.  None of them have ever talked about wanting to move elsewhere, and I don't have the luxury to choose since I am currently not able to hold work and support myself with my health problems.

I never had a chance to really properly grieve.  Never had a chance to really properly recover and heal the damage done.

You learn to let go as much as you can and move on.