BACK ONLINE

This is my first post-Katrina blog entry...almost a month after the storm...or a little over a month, depending on how you count.

Not much to say, except that it's nice to see Tom Delay get indicted. It's nice to be able to get online at home again.

It's not nice, however, to pay $3/gallon for gas. What is the deal with that? The reasons that I hear for it are:

1. No new refining capacity has been added in the U.S. in the last 15 years or so. OK, that may be true, but if that's a cause of high gas prices, why are they making such spectacular leaps just in the last year? Why wouldn't gas prices started rising long before now. I'm not buying that load of shitsodd.

2. Hurricane Kat-rita disrupted the supply. True, but gas prices were way off the chart--well over $2/gallon (where I live, anyway) long before the storms, so I'm not buying that excuse, either.

3. There's an increased demand for gas due to the "war on terror." The implication here is that since they're fighting terror for us, we should just be so grateful that we'll pony up any amount for gas. But haven't American troops been deployed around the world for years in the same numbers, if not the same concentration as the troops in Iraq?
Could the increased demand be from all the SUVs with yellow ribbon magnets bellowing on about how they support the troops' having to fight to keep gas available for their gas guzzlers? And all those friggin' gigantic half-ton pickups that people are driving back and forth to office jobs?

What are we gonna do about it?

KATRINA REMODELING
I had planned to do a big "return to blog hurricane experience special," but let's just say that we got a tree in our house (and all of our rent houses), we're living in our front room with a tarp over the hole (actually we just got our first blue roof yesterday--nice job, fellas) and looking to buy another house.

The days after the hurricane were actually kind of harrowing, with 5 hour lines at Walgreen's and gas pumps, ice, water and food in short supply, and lots of other stressful things. I never did much chainsawing before this happened, and I hadn't done any work on a roof in a long, long time (and never put a tarp on one before).
My parents and my friends were very helpful (dad helped tarp our roofs, mom watched our son) and we met and hung out with neighbors we'd only kind of half-waved at before.

We didn't lose everything, we're just inconvenienced for a while. So I don't want to go on and on about how horrible I think our situation is, I'll just post some pictures and let them speak for themselves.

Tree number one













Trees one and two (the second tree just grazed the south edge of the house)