Friday::::::: “Working For the Weekend”

Friday::::::: “Working For the Weekend”

For those of you that might like to know. New Orleans will be open for Mardi Gras. The airport is currently building its flights and if you can stand the smell, you will find the French quarter actually somewhat better than it was last year. Good luck finding a place to stay…. What was once a 70 or 80 min drive down I 10 or I 12 is now on the order of 3 and a half hours if you are lucky apparently due to traffic rather than damage. Everyone working in the city has to leave to eat and sleep for the most part.

There are still about 1800 people living in tents in the state, I read they have put up 30,000 “blue roofs” with another 30,000 to go these are tarps in place of a roof on a house. FEMA is still serving three hot meals to evacuees in a tent city just across the river from me. Some folk are staying there because the food is so good. Several of our Local hires are people displaced by both Hurricanes.. One just get set up in a trailer and her remaining belongings put in safe storage when the trailer she was in got destroyed by Rita after Katrina and 30 days later. She lived on a cot upstairs for 30 days eating meals here and working during the day.. and has been sharing hotel rooms with co-workers on Per-Diem and with fema supplied housing since there is simply no place to live in Baton Rouge either. That is actually one of the success stories, FEMA was going to stop paying for hotels for evacuees on December 2, but got it delayed to December 15 as it apparently would have made 52,000 people homeless if they did that (/? The math of that does not pass my sniff test but I cannot prove or disprove it)

We had two bomb scares this week that we evacuated the building for, the first one we moved outside the compound fence, the second one I actually went to lunch for the duration.

I found a place to do my laundry, they do wash and fold and they came out real pretty…. 8 lbs of laundry was $10 folded.. this seems very cheap to me but I was able to run the clothes in and get them during the work day on my breaks as it is so close to work. Our presence seems to be impacting this laundry lady in a very positive way.. she has hired her sister to help and they are doing very well it seems (Doc’s Laundry if you are ever here for any Length of time.. on Government Street) Laundry is a little sub story of this whole place. One savvy lady has bribed the hotel laundry person to do hers on Sunday when she is very slow for about $12 a week.

Parking is insane. The old mall parking was too small anyway so they park on sidewalks.. grass medians, parallel and in every possible way on the parking lot itself.. it forces you to walk on the street which is death defying anyway… This place opens at 7, and if you get here at 6:45 you can park anywhere you want.. if you get here at 7 you will hear honking and tire squealing I am very surprised there is so little paint swapped in this lot.