… that New Orleans wasn’t the only place devastated by Katrina.

The post below this one is password protected. It’s a small bit about what my family went through the past few weeks.   You can email me (saintseester@saintseester.com) and I might give you the password.

Please understand, it is in no way personal if I ignore your request for a password.  I will not be giving it to people who know my family in real day-to-day life.   I still had to write about it and get some of it off my mind.

Updated:  I decided to make that post private for a while.    It’s just too raw.

This has been an extremely difficult week, following 2 other difficult weeks, dealing with my mother’s hospitalization and subsequent weeks in a rehab facility. I can’t really go into the details, but hopefully things will settle down soon.

Yesterday was incredibly fatiguing, and when I finally got home at around 6pm, I realized I had not eaten all day, and I convinced my husband to take me out for a salad bar. I wolfed it down, not tasting any of my food. I was regretting going out at all, because I was so tired. Then the waiter who came and checked on us looked and sounded very much like my recently deceased brother.

I just started crying. I do not know what it is with my family and breaking down at Ruby Tuesdays, but it’s happened at least 3 times over the last 20 years.

Today was a tiny bit better.

Well, except for when I checked in at work, and my boss told me they were going to wipe the hard-drive of my computer because there was a security issue on it. Yeah. Where are those damn Kleenex?

This morning, I awoke in the middle of a vivid school dream. It was the kind where I’m forgetting to do something, like an assignment or showing up for class all semester. I have those pretty regularly. In this instance, I departed from my usual norm of realizing I was in the course when exams rolled around.

I was actually sitting in the lecture hall, surrounded by people I’ve known throughout my life; just a smattering here and there, not everyone.   My freshman composition teacher was at the dais telling us our journal topic for the day, only I was not paying attention.

Suddenly, about 5 minutes before the work was to be turned in, I realized I was supposed to be doing something.  So, I asked my neighbor, and he told me our journal assignment had to be turned in at the end of class today, or we would receive a zero.

Seester doesn’t get zeros.

Frantically, I began searching for a clean sheet of notebook paper to write on.  I could not find any.   Settling for the back of an old Calculus homework, I got busy writing this:

Last night, I was upset and frightened.  It was dark and cold.  I stood at the edge of a bridge, not wanting to step on it – REALLY not wanting to.  Under the bridge was a deep gorge, littered with craggy, sharp rocks.   As I stood there, anxiety built in me because I knew I must test the bridge, but was afraid of making a disastrous mistake, resulting in a long fall onto those rocks.   I looked up, realizing I could not see what was at the other side of the crossing.   I do not want to know what is there.     End.

Then I woke from the dream, and it was time to go back to the hospital and see my mom again.

As I sit here, watching the gulf coast suffocate and die, while people bicker and argue over suspend / don’t suspend drilling, I find out that 3 (THREE) days after the rig explosion, the Dutch offered help. They offered ships and equipment that could help skim oil from the water. Each system can process 5 million gallons of water a day.

How much oil could have been removed from the gulf over the past 54 days since our government said “Thanks, but no thanks,” to the offer?

Oh. They are taking them up on it, now.

Meanwhile, the entire economy of the gulf region has been yanked out from the people who live there. There are 3 major industries: seafood, tourism, and oil platform work. I read that the moratorium on drilling can lead to 40,000 out of work in the next few months. That is not counting the fishermen and other jobs reliant on tourism.

I’ve heard talk that BP will make it right on lost wages and clean up. I’ve seen the president say he wants a slush fund to compensate victims. I don’t think there’s enough money in all of BP to fix this, and the government will just piss the slush fund away, a la social security lock box, etc.

It’s dying. My coast is dying.

Watch what happens around the 2:30 mark. It illustrates well the pain the people who live through this crap have to endure while the media postures and points fingers and bickers.

Never again, Obama said during his campaign, in his criticism of Bush’s response to Katrina.

“If catastrophe comes, the American people must be able to call on a competent government. When I am President, the days of dysfunction and cronyism in Washington will be over.”

“And as soon as we take office, my FEMA director will work with emergency management officials in all fifty states to create a National Response Plan. Because we need to know – before disaster comes – who will be in charge; and how the federal, state and local governments will work together to respond.”

Here’s the full speech he delivered in 2008 at Tulane University: http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/barack_obamas_speech.html