Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Quick summary
Update for today:
My father, Lloyd, is still in his hotel room in Baton Rouge for another day or two. We are working on how to get him back to California. Commercial transportation in that area is still pretty sparse. Pop seems to be prepared for another hundred miles of biking if necessary to get to the nearest operational bus station, but I doubt that will be necessary. We will most likely be able to arrange a ride for him wherever he needs to go.
Our website seems to be fully operational for the moment. The server that's handling our shopping cart functions is in a high-rise office building in downtown New Orleans, which is surrounded by flood water. It is in a secure server room with backup generators, but it is a mystery to me how the internet connections have been restored.
Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you find anything that's not working: www.stockroom.com
Anyway, I am enjoying the luxury of a properly functioning website while it lasts.
All of my New Orleans friends seem to have made it out safely.
Louis: His house was near one of the levee breaks, and it is flooded to the roofline.
Bart: His house in Metairie is eerily unaffected. A few shingles blown off, and a tree fallen over in the backyard, otherwise basically fine.
Mike: A friend said he had 6" of water in his house.
Jake and Elayne: Safe in Texas. Waiting for news from home. (They have a property across the street from mine.)
Cousin Frank and his wife Gretchen: No word on their home in Gretna. They are staying with relatives in Texas.
3rd Cousin Nancy & family: Doing fine, also in Texas.
I got a voicemail from my friend (and real estate agent) Melanie, She said she'd heard the French Quarter fared better than most parts of the city, obviously wanting to give me some hope about my property there. Interestingly, she made no mention of her own properties. Her net worth is all tied up in properties all around New Orleans (none of which is in the French Quarter) and I'm sure she will have a huge mess on her hands with all of that. But she didn't say a word about it. Melanie has also been acting as trustee and CEO of a box company in New Orleans which was left leaderless when one of her oldest friends died in a plane crash, and I'm sure there will be enormous challenges there as well. Again, no mention of that. It was oddly touching, and a reminder to me to try to keep the complaining to a minimum. Melanie sounded fine and relatively unruffled.
It will be very interesting to see what the future holds for New Orleans.
My father, Lloyd, is still in his hotel room in Baton Rouge for another day or two. We are working on how to get him back to California. Commercial transportation in that area is still pretty sparse. Pop seems to be prepared for another hundred miles of biking if necessary to get to the nearest operational bus station, but I doubt that will be necessary. We will most likely be able to arrange a ride for him wherever he needs to go.
Our website seems to be fully operational for the moment. The server that's handling our shopping cart functions is in a high-rise office building in downtown New Orleans, which is surrounded by flood water. It is in a secure server room with backup generators, but it is a mystery to me how the internet connections have been restored.
Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you find anything that's not working: www.stockroom.com
Anyway, I am enjoying the luxury of a properly functioning website while it lasts.
All of my New Orleans friends seem to have made it out safely.
Louis: His house was near one of the levee breaks, and it is flooded to the roofline.
Bart: His house in Metairie is eerily unaffected. A few shingles blown off, and a tree fallen over in the backyard, otherwise basically fine.
Mike: A friend said he had 6" of water in his house.
Jake and Elayne: Safe in Texas. Waiting for news from home. (They have a property across the street from mine.)
Cousin Frank and his wife Gretchen: No word on their home in Gretna. They are staying with relatives in Texas.
3rd Cousin Nancy & family: Doing fine, also in Texas.
I got a voicemail from my friend (and real estate agent) Melanie, She said she'd heard the French Quarter fared better than most parts of the city, obviously wanting to give me some hope about my property there. Interestingly, she made no mention of her own properties. Her net worth is all tied up in properties all around New Orleans (none of which is in the French Quarter) and I'm sure she will have a huge mess on her hands with all of that. But she didn't say a word about it. Melanie has also been acting as trustee and CEO of a box company in New Orleans which was left leaderless when one of her oldest friends died in a plane crash, and I'm sure there will be enormous challenges there as well. Again, no mention of that. It was oddly touching, and a reminder to me to try to keep the complaining to a minimum. Melanie sounded fine and relatively unruffled.
It will be very interesting to see what the future holds for New Orleans.
It's All About New Orleans -- Part II
Note: This is part 2 of a 2-part posting... but for those who want the latest news and don't need a long-winded historical backstory, you can just start here. Part 2 is long-winded enough by itself.
This past Friday, I was hearing reports that Hurricane Katrina was headed for the New Orleans area, and gathering strength as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico. The last serious hurricane that threatened New Orleans was almost exactly a year ago, but the city had been spared the worst of that storm, and my Decatur Street property had fared quite well without any special precautions taken.
Naturally we hoped for similar luck this time, especially since we were not really prepared with plywood for the windows, etc. Since I had hoped to sell the property soon, and I've been so busy with other things, preparing for possible storms had not been a high priority.
Pop, always the frugal one, was living in the upper apartments without a phone. Since I travel with a cell phone and a laptop with wireless internet access, I hadn't bothered to have a phone installed at the property.
During the day on Saturday, the storm was gathering strength, and New Orleans residents were being encouraged to evacuate. I spoke to other friends and family in the New Orleans on Saturday. Most (not all) of them were in the process of getting out. I hoped Pop would call, since I had no way of calling him.
On Saturday evening, I was visiting with some friends when a call came in on my cell phone from a New Orleans number. I tried to answer it, but not quickly enough, and it went to my voicemail. It was Pop calling from a payphone, and he left a message.
Pop said that he had hoped to get out of New Orleans by bus. But when he arrived at the bus station, he found it already closed. No more buses. Of course there were no more trains or planes either. So, always the courageous and eccentric fellow, Pop said that he was thinking of weathering the storm in New Orleans, and he would use the remaining time to do what he could to prepare the property for the upcoming storm.
I had been hearing the reports that the storm was becoming more menacing, and I thought it would be better for him to leave. I started calling friends and family. Most of them had already left town, but my 3rd cousin Nancy was just about to leave with her family. She said she'd be happy to go and get Pop and take him out of town with her family. I explained to her that there was no phone and no doorbell at the property, but that there was a key safe attached to the front door. I gave her the combination to the safe so she could open it, get the keys, and then go inside the property to find Pop.
A while later I got a call from Nancy on her cell phone. They had arrived at the Decatur Street address, found the key safe, opened it, and found it empty. I guess on my last trip to New Orleans, I had kept the keys, and Pop had taken his set inside with him. They shouted, and banged on the door, but there was no answer. It was 1am at that point, and Pop was inside asleep. He was on one of the upper floors, and he's a little hard of hearing. Besides that, our block of Decatur Street was home to quite a number of bars, which tended to stay open late and produce a lot of noise, so whatever noises did reach Pop as he slept were likely to blend in with the rest of the general cacophony on the block.
I considered telling Nancy and her husband Stephen to just kick the door in, but I didn't. At that point, breaking the door still seemed like a slightly drastic measure. I figured there would still be options the following day, including sending Pop to stay with other friends who were planning to stay in town, but who had cars to escape in at the last minute if things started looking worse. And of course I also had some concern for the property. I didn't really want Pop to leave the building with the main entrance ajar when there were still plenty of rowdy revelers around.
On Sunday, I awoke to news that Katrina had been upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane, which would rank it among the half dozen strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the USA in recorded history. And it was on course for a direct hit on New Orleans. This would definitely be the worst storm to ever hit New Orleans. It was looking a lot like the doomsday scenario that I'd been thinking and talking about for some time now.
I suddenly began to feel quite urgent about getting Pop out, and wondering how to get in touch with him.
I sent a quick email to my web-host friend Mike at Icorp, urging him (not for the first time) to get all his web-hosting and e-commerce systems backed up on a new server that was outside the area. Although he had systems in multiple locations, I knew they were all in the New Orleans area. My website ( http://www.stockroom.com ) was still up and running on two different servers, one in Metairie (a suburb of New Orleans), and one in the CBD (Central Business District) in Downtown New Orleans. My plea to Mike:
I turned my mind back to the question of getting Pop out, and how to get in touch with him. I called more friends, now looking for pretty much anyone who could go and retrieve my father from the French Quarter. My friend Bart had evacuated, but his parents were ready to leave within a half hour or so. But they were out in the suburbs, and headed away from the French Quarter. They were feeling time pressure, and it wouldn't make sense for them to backtrack for someone they didn't know. Pop didn't have a car, and there were of course no cabs. There were 3 bicycles that I had bought for the Decatur Street property; Could he bike out to the suburbs in time?Probably not.
Finally Pop called from a payphone again, and we had a point of contact where I could call him back at appointed times while we worked on what to do.
Pop said he had gone out and tried to hitchhike. He made a sign that said "Evacuate Me" and wore it. 100 cars went by, and nobody offered Pop a ride. Their loss, of course, but potentially ours too.
Time was passing. I spoke with Bart again, and he calculated that there wasn't enough time for my father to meet up with Bart's parents, unless my father could sustain a speed of 30 miles per hour on his bicycle. No chance of that.
I talked with Pop. We discussed the possibility of taking shelter in the Superdome, where the city government was encouraging the stragglers to go. But somehow that didn't sound too appetizing.
"If I were you," I said, "I'd hit the road on one of those bicycles."
Pop said he had thought the same thing, but wasn't sure about it. He knows he's a little eccentric sometimes, and he likes to get some validation for some of his more dubious schemes before risking his life on them. So he'd talked to a couple of other people about their evacuation plans, and when he mentioned the bike idea, they thought he was crazy. But I told him at that point, riding the bike is exactly what I would do, and in fact I had that very possibility in mind on the day I bought those 3 bicycles 18 months ago. I remember thinking that if the city was being evacuated and the roads were jammed, a bike just might be able to travel faster than a car.
The roads certainly were jammed now. Pop was heartened to hear that someone else thought the bicycle might be the best option, and not an entirely insane way to flee the storm that was approaching the city at about 15 miles per hour. Some of our shared family traits -- streaks of eccentric rationality and stoical pragmatism -- were showing themselves.
But even if Pop did flee on a bicycle, where should he go, and by what route?
I made another call to Bart, who is a bit of a cyclist himself. I was lucky to get through again, since the phone networks were becoming increasingly unreliable. Bart suggested that Pop head for Baton Rouge. He told me there was a bike trail that Pop could follow that ran along the top Mississippi River levee for about 30 miles. Then he could cross the river and take River Road all the way to Baton Rouge.
I told Pop about the proposed route and destination, which would be more than 80 miles. That is a long distance for anyone to travel on a bicycle, but Pop had gotten into pretty good shape with his recent hiking training and Appalachian Trail walk. We figured if he could easily walk 10 miles in a day, he might be able to bike 80 miles. In any case, even if he ended up 40 miles away hiding under a tree, he would be on higher ground, and inland, away from the most dangerous threat, which was the possibility of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. And there was the hope of catching a ride along the way, and/or finding shelter somewhere. Pop was ready to hit the road.
If Pop did make it to Baton Rouge, where would he stay? There certainly wouldn't be any hotel rooms that weren't already booked. At that point, it didn't much matter. Whatever could be arranged on the fly would surely be preferable to being trapped under a wall of water in below-sea-level New Orleans. We agreed he would hit the road while I continued working on options in Baton Rouge. I told Pop to stop and try to reach me on pay phones whenever he could. I would go to the office so he could call me on my toll-free 800 number and he wouldn't have to worry about carrying change.
My 3rd cousin Nancy had been headed for Baton Rouge, and I thought if I could get her on her cell phone, they would take him in wherever they were. But her cell number wasn't working. Cell phones were becoming increasingly unreliable with each passing hour, as circuits got jammed.
I spoke with another friend, Louis, who had evacuated the previous day. Baton Rouge? Well, there definitely wouldn't be any vacancies there, but it just so happened that Louis (who lives in New Orleans) has been working on an assignment in Baton Rouge, and he had rented a room at the Extended Stays Hotel there. He and his family had evacuated further inland, and his room was empty, so Pop was welcome to use that. Louis said there was even some food in the refrigerator, enough to make some sandwiches, and Pop was welcome to that as well.
This was a ridiculous stroke of luck, in a situation where there wouldn't be any rooms at any price for most of the refugees.
Pop called me after about ten miles. The weather had been deceptively nice when he started out, but within the first ten miles he'd been rained on pretty hard already, and he had also been hit by some frightening gusts of wind, strong enough at one point to cause some concern about being blown into the Mississippi river. He took shelter on someone's porch until the squall died down, and then got back on the path, which he said he had all to himself for miles and miles while the highways were completely jammed.
I told Pop about the hotel room, and he was encouraged and amused at our good luck. He said he would keep moving.
I talked to Mike at Icorp, trying again to impart my sense of urgency about backing up our web services. Although I knew I could get my website's content relocated to a new server quickly, I would need Mike's help to keep the online ordering system working.
Mike's shopping-cart system, which was such a leading-edge product in 1996, is now a bit antiquated, but still very fast and solid under normal conditions. Mike is the only person who really knows how it works, which makes us dependent on him. We had already identified that as a liability, and have been working on porting our website to a new system so we can be more leading edge again, and less dependent on one person (as well as the New Orleans weather). That project has been going for months, and is expected to be completed within weeks. But it's not ready yet, and so we are still dependent on Mike.
Mike was in his calm-down-the-client-who-is-freaking-out mode, even though I didn't feel freaked out at all. (I felt calm, and was trying to make what I thought were logical and rational arguments in our mutual best strategic interests.) Mike told me again about his multiple servers, his backup generators, and his stores of food and drink. He said he thought things would be fine, pointing out that his downtown servers were on an upper floor that couldn't be flooded. I told him none of that would do any good if the city was inundated with water. I said that if that happened, there was no chance that his internet connections would keep working, even if his servers did stay on and powered up. He was unmoved. He just didn't see things getting that bad.
I looked at my website, and noticed that it was slowing down. I could guess one reason: One of Mike's other clients had a webcam attached to one of his servers that served up an image of Bourbon Street, updated every 5 minutes. Every year during Mardi Gras, or anytime a bad storm hit the city, traffic to that cam would always spike up, causing slowdowns to one of the two servers that was serving up my webpages.
I called my in-house webmaster, Steve, to come into the office for a Sunday crisis session. Steve was quite helpful. He had a friend in Germany, a fellow photographer, who kindly offered us the use of his webserver for our content. We got busy uploading our files and getting ready to move the site. I kept talking to Mike, lobbying for him to back up his shopping cart system on one of our servers, or somewhere else outside the threatened zone. He finally seemed to warm up to the idea just the tiniest bit, but there were technical barriers, not the least of which was that his shopping cart software was built on a relatively obscure variant of the Unix operating system, and all the servers I had access to were running the more popular Linux. Also, although my grasp of technical issues is better than average for the owner of a business like mine, I am not a real IT person, and I didn't have one on site to help me sort all this out.
In the midst of all this, another call from Pop. Someone with a truck had picked him up, and he had a ride the rest of the way to Baton Rouge. Excellent news.
Mike seemed to disappear for a while, and his cell phone wasn't working. Later in the day, I got in touch with him again, and learned that he had monitored the news, seen the light, and fled New Orleans after all. I was glad to hear that he had evacuated, since I thought it was dangerous to stay in the city under the circumstances. But even then he was still trying to calm me down with respect to the prospect of catastrophic outages.
I was able to get Mike the passwords to a new Linux server, where he could poke around and do some testing to see if he could make his software work there.
We got our site content moved over, and prepared to move traffic over to the new server, even as Mike assured me that such drastic measures would probably not be necessary. In testing the site, the complications became apparent. I knew my online ordering functions were at risk, but there were other services and customizations that weren't going to work right on the new server without a fair amount of work. Search functions, chat, our gallery, and most vitally, e-mail. Mike was also handling our Domain Name Services, and I knew little about how to reconstruct those if all his servers went down. Without properly-functioning DNS, nobody can find a website, even if it's up and running on a server somewhere.
I'd given Mike the passwords to a new server, and he had said he'd have a look at it. It was getting late, and I was tired after a long day in crisis mode. I went to sleep on my couch for a few hours, hoping for the best. The hurricane was supposed to get really intense shortly after midnight.
I woke up a little before 4:30am. I jumped up, went to a computer, and checked the website and email situation.
The site was sluggish, and seemed to be going up and down. I saw a collection of "Device Down" and "Device Up" alerts in my inbox, showing me that the site had been going up and down starting about 1:55am, when the storm started hitting the city pretty hard. The last "Device Down" message was at 4:26AM on Monday.
I sent Mike a message at 4:27AM:
What I didn't know at that moment, though of course I feared it, was that our New Orleans servers had just gone down for the last time just one minute before.
Shortly thereafter, I lost the use of my stockroom.com mailserver because of the DNS servers going offline. People who tried to email me or any other address in my company would now just get a bounce message.
Mike was now at his girlfriend's family's country home north of Baton Rouge. It took him a while to get internet access, and cellphone services were spotty. Later in the morning he was able to get online, and was working on moving his shopping cart services to one of our Linux servers, when the power went out and he lost his internet access.
We had a discussion about how maybe he could talk me through the rest of the process over the phone. But then, of course, cell phone services quit working too, so I had lost all contact with Mike, and any hope of getting our online ordering services working any time soon.
I found a new DNS server, and gave myself a crash course in DNS configurations, which involved some trial and error. But I was able to remap web traffic to our new server in Germany, so graciously provided by Steve's friend Martin. At one point our site's traffic apparently overwhelmed the server, and it crashed for a while, but Martin got it up and running again.
Mike resurfaced on Tuesday afternoon. He had driven down to into Baton Rouge, and after a difficult and frustrating search for internet access in that city (also ravaged by the storm), he ended up at a crowded and noisy coffee shop, using his laptop with their wireless network.
Mike ran into more snags than expected with Linux, while I placed an order for a new server with one of my vendors that would run his preferred version of Unix. Finally, Mike, exhausted, gave up. So our online ordering services are still down, but we hope to have them back tomorrow, after about 3 days offline, to the tune of about $10,000 in sales per day. (And, mind you, that $10K is not our company profit; most of it is just the daily cash flow that is needed to pay the mortgage, keep the lights on, and make payroll for 35 people!)
We have put up notices on our website explaining the situation, and even offering people a small discount if they will call us and place their order by phone. Since our website does its heaviest business at night, I thought it would be a good idea for me to stay around tonight and cover the phones, and that's what I'm doing right now, at 12:14 am. But nobody is calling. I have taken one call since 10pm, and it was a guy who was only pretending to be interested in product because he wanted to talk to another man about leather sex toys. He went all through the order, asking about the prices, the sizing, the discount, the quality of the leather codpiece he was interested in, whether I had ever worn one myself, etc. He said he wanted to go ahead and place the order, and at the exact moment that I asked him his name, he hung up. This is exactly why we are not normally open at night-- only lonely weirdos call at this hour. I thought tonight might be an exception, but I guess not.
I notice that this blog is all about me in one way or another, and I guess that's not so out of the ordinary-- It's my blog after all, and nobody is making you read it, whoever you may be. I have been told from time to time that I have an interesting life and I should write about it more and share that with the world. So here you go.
But I'm well aware that other people have bigger problems today. Even Mike, who has been a source of frustration for me by not listening to my annoying (and now obviously correct) advice, is faced with some very difficult realities, since his house is almost certainly underwater and the future of his business is in doubt. Many of my friends have lost their homes and businesses. And, as most everyone knows quite well, many have died today. I haven't forgotten that.
And yet, here I am, with a business to see to, and it is in crisis now. And I suppose I am too. My bread-and-butter website isn't working, I am contemplating a possible total loss of my property in New Orleans, and the clock is ticking on an impressive portfolio of mortgage debt. Even before this latest glitch, we were facing some difficult cash-flow realities, because of intensified competitive pressure in our market, and this huge, interesting, expensive building here in L.A. that we recently bought (planning for growth that hasn't yet materialized). And then there are the expensive ongoing renovations on the building, which are threatening to break the quarter-million-dollar mark. To save all of those 35 jobs and grow into this big building that we bought, we will have to pull a few more rabbits out of that same rather well-worn hat that has produced more than its share of rabbits already in the last 17 years. And I'm getting tired.
Meanwhile, on the periphery of all the other things I've been working on, I watched the news from New Orleans. The levees are broken, and the city is filling with water, just as the worst-case scenarios predicted. The French Quarter isn't quite so badly flooded as many neighborhoods, but whatever's left of my 170-year-old building after the surely very serious damage from the intense wind and rains will be standing in water, and probable prey to the looters who are now ravaging the area. Also, since there are refugees in the city now, and the French Quarter is some of the higher ground inside the New Orleans bowl, I would not be at all surprised to find squatters staying there at present. But I won't know for quite some time what's left of the building, because at this point the city government is saying it will be at least a month before anyone is allowed back in, if there's anything left of the flooded city at that point.
It seems as if sometimes the universe decides to erase things... like when I was a kid, playing with an Etch-a-Sketch toy. You could spend hours or days working on an intricate drawing of some kind, and then at some point get tired of it, and decide to start over with a clean slate. You shake it up, and it goes blank again.
The universal version is that this can happen to a person, a city, a civilization, a species, an entire planet, or a star system. It is How Things Work. Powers greater than ourselves. New Orleans has been a fascinating but famously corrupt city for hundreds of years. It maintained its existence on borrowed time, while doing a typical New-Orleans-style half-ass job of staving off its own doom. Remember the line from that 70s commercial? "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature." In hindsight, New Orleans could have done a MUCH better job of protecting itself, but it would have cost billions of dollars that nobody could find, staggering sums of money that are, ironically, dwarfed by the much-much-larger calculations of the damage that has now been done.
New Orleans was beautiful, byzantine, stratified, aged, haunted, and crooked. And I experienced (and ostensibly "owned") part of it for a while. But does anyone really "own" land or buildings, or do we just imagine that we do? Seriously, friends... it's just a nearly-but-not-quite-unanimously-shared delusion. There are precious few pieces of ground on this earth that haven't been forcibly appropriated from prior human inhabitants at the point of a spear, a sword, or a gun, prior to coming into the hands of the current "owners." Where is the legitimacy, ultimately?
It's hard to predict the future of New Orleans at this point. It might have been nice for me if I'd taken one of those lower offers I got, and sold my Decatur Street property before this all happened. But to wish that were so is merely to wish my troubles onto someone else. Just as well me as anyone. Maybe it's better that this should happen to me, since I have a bit of detachment from these things, and other individuals stand to be more hurt or upset by their attachment to land and buildings and things. (I could've sold the property to a non-individual-- Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or Halliburton. But I don't remember any of those entities making an offer, and I'm not sure how I would've responded if they had.)
As for the difficult times, and the threat of losing most of what I've spent the last 17 years trying to build, well, I have been here before, numerous times. It just keeps happening, at an ever larger scale as it continues its geometric growth. The scale becomes more daunting, the trapeze seeming ever higher. But there is still a net. I have my health, my intelligence, my network of friends and family. And even if I lose some or all of those things, I have what I have come to know spiritually: That there is no end, no death, no separation of anyone or anything or any place or any time from any other person, thing, place or time. So worry and fear are illusions-- and not pretty, Glenda-the-Good-Witch-descending-in-a-bubble illusions either, but useless and limiting ones that will swallow as much of my mind and my life as I surrender to them. If I let my fear rule the day all the time, or even more than half the time, I wouldn't have this interesting life and portfolio of assets and responsibilities and concerns and challenges to work with.
I am feeling that big L.A. earthquake coming any day now. This super-cool old building was built in 1928. It's 3 stories, 30,000 square feet, made of unreinforced masonry. It has been retrofitted as required by law, but it isn't the kind of retrofit stands much chance of saving the building; It's just the kind that gives whoever's inside the building extra time to evacuate it before it falls down, or is condemned and demolished. That scenario would probably force an exit from this business for me. I will flee the country with whatever cash I can scrape together and move to Bombay.
Or, maybe my psychic premonitions are off by a few years or decades, and there will be time yet to get this machine properly tuned again (as it has been in the past at smaller scales), and make it churn out another good run of productivity, relative harmony, and profit. For a while.
We'll see.
Thanks for listening.
This past Friday, I was hearing reports that Hurricane Katrina was headed for the New Orleans area, and gathering strength as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico. The last serious hurricane that threatened New Orleans was almost exactly a year ago, but the city had been spared the worst of that storm, and my Decatur Street property had fared quite well without any special precautions taken.
Naturally we hoped for similar luck this time, especially since we were not really prepared with plywood for the windows, etc. Since I had hoped to sell the property soon, and I've been so busy with other things, preparing for possible storms had not been a high priority.
Pop, always the frugal one, was living in the upper apartments without a phone. Since I travel with a cell phone and a laptop with wireless internet access, I hadn't bothered to have a phone installed at the property.
During the day on Saturday, the storm was gathering strength, and New Orleans residents were being encouraged to evacuate. I spoke to other friends and family in the New Orleans on Saturday. Most (not all) of them were in the process of getting out. I hoped Pop would call, since I had no way of calling him.
On Saturday evening, I was visiting with some friends when a call came in on my cell phone from a New Orleans number. I tried to answer it, but not quickly enough, and it went to my voicemail. It was Pop calling from a payphone, and he left a message.
Pop said that he had hoped to get out of New Orleans by bus. But when he arrived at the bus station, he found it already closed. No more buses. Of course there were no more trains or planes either. So, always the courageous and eccentric fellow, Pop said that he was thinking of weathering the storm in New Orleans, and he would use the remaining time to do what he could to prepare the property for the upcoming storm.
I had been hearing the reports that the storm was becoming more menacing, and I thought it would be better for him to leave. I started calling friends and family. Most of them had already left town, but my 3rd cousin Nancy was just about to leave with her family. She said she'd be happy to go and get Pop and take him out of town with her family. I explained to her that there was no phone and no doorbell at the property, but that there was a key safe attached to the front door. I gave her the combination to the safe so she could open it, get the keys, and then go inside the property to find Pop.
A while later I got a call from Nancy on her cell phone. They had arrived at the Decatur Street address, found the key safe, opened it, and found it empty. I guess on my last trip to New Orleans, I had kept the keys, and Pop had taken his set inside with him. They shouted, and banged on the door, but there was no answer. It was 1am at that point, and Pop was inside asleep. He was on one of the upper floors, and he's a little hard of hearing. Besides that, our block of Decatur Street was home to quite a number of bars, which tended to stay open late and produce a lot of noise, so whatever noises did reach Pop as he slept were likely to blend in with the rest of the general cacophony on the block.
I considered telling Nancy and her husband Stephen to just kick the door in, but I didn't. At that point, breaking the door still seemed like a slightly drastic measure. I figured there would still be options the following day, including sending Pop to stay with other friends who were planning to stay in town, but who had cars to escape in at the last minute if things started looking worse. And of course I also had some concern for the property. I didn't really want Pop to leave the building with the main entrance ajar when there were still plenty of rowdy revelers around.
On Sunday, I awoke to news that Katrina had been upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane, which would rank it among the half dozen strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the USA in recorded history. And it was on course for a direct hit on New Orleans. This would definitely be the worst storm to ever hit New Orleans. It was looking a lot like the doomsday scenario that I'd been thinking and talking about for some time now.
I suddenly began to feel quite urgent about getting Pop out, and wondering how to get in touch with him.
I sent a quick email to my web-host friend Mike at Icorp, urging him (not for the first time) to get all his web-hosting and e-commerce systems backed up on a new server that was outside the area. Although he had systems in multiple locations, I knew they were all in the New Orleans area. My website ( http://www.stockroom.com ) was still up and running on two different servers, one in Metairie (a suburb of New Orleans), and one in the CBD (Central Business District) in Downtown New Orleans. My plea to Mike:
That advice was dismissed, for the time being, as it always had been in the past. Mike has always been a die-hard, one of those who stays in New Orleans when the majority of the residents are fleeing the city."I really think you/we need to consider the possibility of catastrophic
failure of *all* your internet connectivity and/or all servers. I suggest, if
it isn't already happening, a complete off-site backup of website data and the
VOE. We can give you FTP access to one of our servers and diskspace for the
purpose."
I turned my mind back to the question of getting Pop out, and how to get in touch with him. I called more friends, now looking for pretty much anyone who could go and retrieve my father from the French Quarter. My friend Bart had evacuated, but his parents were ready to leave within a half hour or so. But they were out in the suburbs, and headed away from the French Quarter. They were feeling time pressure, and it wouldn't make sense for them to backtrack for someone they didn't know. Pop didn't have a car, and there were of course no cabs. There were 3 bicycles that I had bought for the Decatur Street property; Could he bike out to the suburbs in time?Probably not.
Finally Pop called from a payphone again, and we had a point of contact where I could call him back at appointed times while we worked on what to do.
Pop said he had gone out and tried to hitchhike. He made a sign that said "Evacuate Me" and wore it. 100 cars went by, and nobody offered Pop a ride. Their loss, of course, but potentially ours too.
Time was passing. I spoke with Bart again, and he calculated that there wasn't enough time for my father to meet up with Bart's parents, unless my father could sustain a speed of 30 miles per hour on his bicycle. No chance of that.
I talked with Pop. We discussed the possibility of taking shelter in the Superdome, where the city government was encouraging the stragglers to go. But somehow that didn't sound too appetizing.
"If I were you," I said, "I'd hit the road on one of those bicycles."
Pop said he had thought the same thing, but wasn't sure about it. He knows he's a little eccentric sometimes, and he likes to get some validation for some of his more dubious schemes before risking his life on them. So he'd talked to a couple of other people about their evacuation plans, and when he mentioned the bike idea, they thought he was crazy. But I told him at that point, riding the bike is exactly what I would do, and in fact I had that very possibility in mind on the day I bought those 3 bicycles 18 months ago. I remember thinking that if the city was being evacuated and the roads were jammed, a bike just might be able to travel faster than a car.
The roads certainly were jammed now. Pop was heartened to hear that someone else thought the bicycle might be the best option, and not an entirely insane way to flee the storm that was approaching the city at about 15 miles per hour. Some of our shared family traits -- streaks of eccentric rationality and stoical pragmatism -- were showing themselves.
But even if Pop did flee on a bicycle, where should he go, and by what route?
I made another call to Bart, who is a bit of a cyclist himself. I was lucky to get through again, since the phone networks were becoming increasingly unreliable. Bart suggested that Pop head for Baton Rouge. He told me there was a bike trail that Pop could follow that ran along the top Mississippi River levee for about 30 miles. Then he could cross the river and take River Road all the way to Baton Rouge.
I told Pop about the proposed route and destination, which would be more than 80 miles. That is a long distance for anyone to travel on a bicycle, but Pop had gotten into pretty good shape with his recent hiking training and Appalachian Trail walk. We figured if he could easily walk 10 miles in a day, he might be able to bike 80 miles. In any case, even if he ended up 40 miles away hiding under a tree, he would be on higher ground, and inland, away from the most dangerous threat, which was the possibility of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. And there was the hope of catching a ride along the way, and/or finding shelter somewhere. Pop was ready to hit the road.
If Pop did make it to Baton Rouge, where would he stay? There certainly wouldn't be any hotel rooms that weren't already booked. At that point, it didn't much matter. Whatever could be arranged on the fly would surely be preferable to being trapped under a wall of water in below-sea-level New Orleans. We agreed he would hit the road while I continued working on options in Baton Rouge. I told Pop to stop and try to reach me on pay phones whenever he could. I would go to the office so he could call me on my toll-free 800 number and he wouldn't have to worry about carrying change.
My 3rd cousin Nancy had been headed for Baton Rouge, and I thought if I could get her on her cell phone, they would take him in wherever they were. But her cell number wasn't working. Cell phones were becoming increasingly unreliable with each passing hour, as circuits got jammed.
I spoke with another friend, Louis, who had evacuated the previous day. Baton Rouge? Well, there definitely wouldn't be any vacancies there, but it just so happened that Louis (who lives in New Orleans) has been working on an assignment in Baton Rouge, and he had rented a room at the Extended Stays Hotel there. He and his family had evacuated further inland, and his room was empty, so Pop was welcome to use that. Louis said there was even some food in the refrigerator, enough to make some sandwiches, and Pop was welcome to that as well.
This was a ridiculous stroke of luck, in a situation where there wouldn't be any rooms at any price for most of the refugees.
Pop called me after about ten miles. The weather had been deceptively nice when he started out, but within the first ten miles he'd been rained on pretty hard already, and he had also been hit by some frightening gusts of wind, strong enough at one point to cause some concern about being blown into the Mississippi river. He took shelter on someone's porch until the squall died down, and then got back on the path, which he said he had all to himself for miles and miles while the highways were completely jammed.
I told Pop about the hotel room, and he was encouraged and amused at our good luck. He said he would keep moving.
I talked to Mike at Icorp, trying again to impart my sense of urgency about backing up our web services. Although I knew I could get my website's content relocated to a new server quickly, I would need Mike's help to keep the online ordering system working.
Mike's shopping-cart system, which was such a leading-edge product in 1996, is now a bit antiquated, but still very fast and solid under normal conditions. Mike is the only person who really knows how it works, which makes us dependent on him. We had already identified that as a liability, and have been working on porting our website to a new system so we can be more leading edge again, and less dependent on one person (as well as the New Orleans weather). That project has been going for months, and is expected to be completed within weeks. But it's not ready yet, and so we are still dependent on Mike.
Mike was in his calm-down-the-client-who-is-freaking-out mode, even though I didn't feel freaked out at all. (I felt calm, and was trying to make what I thought were logical and rational arguments in our mutual best strategic interests.) Mike told me again about his multiple servers, his backup generators, and his stores of food and drink. He said he thought things would be fine, pointing out that his downtown servers were on an upper floor that couldn't be flooded. I told him none of that would do any good if the city was inundated with water. I said that if that happened, there was no chance that his internet connections would keep working, even if his servers did stay on and powered up. He was unmoved. He just didn't see things getting that bad.
I looked at my website, and noticed that it was slowing down. I could guess one reason: One of Mike's other clients had a webcam attached to one of his servers that served up an image of Bourbon Street, updated every 5 minutes. Every year during Mardi Gras, or anytime a bad storm hit the city, traffic to that cam would always spike up, causing slowdowns to one of the two servers that was serving up my webpages.
I called my in-house webmaster, Steve, to come into the office for a Sunday crisis session. Steve was quite helpful. He had a friend in Germany, a fellow photographer, who kindly offered us the use of his webserver for our content. We got busy uploading our files and getting ready to move the site. I kept talking to Mike, lobbying for him to back up his shopping cart system on one of our servers, or somewhere else outside the threatened zone. He finally seemed to warm up to the idea just the tiniest bit, but there were technical barriers, not the least of which was that his shopping cart software was built on a relatively obscure variant of the Unix operating system, and all the servers I had access to were running the more popular Linux. Also, although my grasp of technical issues is better than average for the owner of a business like mine, I am not a real IT person, and I didn't have one on site to help me sort all this out.
In the midst of all this, another call from Pop. Someone with a truck had picked him up, and he had a ride the rest of the way to Baton Rouge. Excellent news.
Mike seemed to disappear for a while, and his cell phone wasn't working. Later in the day, I got in touch with him again, and learned that he had monitored the news, seen the light, and fled New Orleans after all. I was glad to hear that he had evacuated, since I thought it was dangerous to stay in the city under the circumstances. But even then he was still trying to calm me down with respect to the prospect of catastrophic outages.
I was able to get Mike the passwords to a new Linux server, where he could poke around and do some testing to see if he could make his software work there.
We got our site content moved over, and prepared to move traffic over to the new server, even as Mike assured me that such drastic measures would probably not be necessary. In testing the site, the complications became apparent. I knew my online ordering functions were at risk, but there were other services and customizations that weren't going to work right on the new server without a fair amount of work. Search functions, chat, our gallery, and most vitally, e-mail. Mike was also handling our Domain Name Services, and I knew little about how to reconstruct those if all his servers went down. Without properly-functioning DNS, nobody can find a website, even if it's up and running on a server somewhere.
I'd given Mike the passwords to a new server, and he had said he'd have a look at it. It was getting late, and I was tired after a long day in crisis mode. I went to sleep on my couch for a few hours, hoping for the best. The hurricane was supposed to get really intense shortly after midnight.
I woke up a little before 4:30am. I jumped up, went to a computer, and checked the website and email situation.
The site was sluggish, and seemed to be going up and down. I saw a collection of "Device Down" and "Device Up" alerts in my inbox, showing me that the site had been going up and down starting about 1:55am, when the storm started hitting the city pretty hard. The last "Device Down" message was at 4:26AM on Monday.
I sent Mike a message at 4:27AM:
Hey.
I'm getting periodic Device Down messages from the server.
It looks like the server that's handling cam traffic may be hosed pretty bad,
and is essentially useless for serving our pages.
I request that you route ALL stockroom traffic to the server that is NOT
handling any cam traffic.
Joel
What I didn't know at that moment, though of course I feared it, was that our New Orleans servers had just gone down for the last time just one minute before.
Shortly thereafter, I lost the use of my stockroom.com mailserver because of the DNS servers going offline. People who tried to email me or any other address in my company would now just get a bounce message.
Mike was now at his girlfriend's family's country home north of Baton Rouge. It took him a while to get internet access, and cellphone services were spotty. Later in the morning he was able to get online, and was working on moving his shopping cart services to one of our Linux servers, when the power went out and he lost his internet access.
We had a discussion about how maybe he could talk me through the rest of the process over the phone. But then, of course, cell phone services quit working too, so I had lost all contact with Mike, and any hope of getting our online ordering services working any time soon.
I found a new DNS server, and gave myself a crash course in DNS configurations, which involved some trial and error. But I was able to remap web traffic to our new server in Germany, so graciously provided by Steve's friend Martin. At one point our site's traffic apparently overwhelmed the server, and it crashed for a while, but Martin got it up and running again.
Mike resurfaced on Tuesday afternoon. He had driven down to into Baton Rouge, and after a difficult and frustrating search for internet access in that city (also ravaged by the storm), he ended up at a crowded and noisy coffee shop, using his laptop with their wireless network.
Mike ran into more snags than expected with Linux, while I placed an order for a new server with one of my vendors that would run his preferred version of Unix. Finally, Mike, exhausted, gave up. So our online ordering services are still down, but we hope to have them back tomorrow, after about 3 days offline, to the tune of about $10,000 in sales per day. (And, mind you, that $10K is not our company profit; most of it is just the daily cash flow that is needed to pay the mortgage, keep the lights on, and make payroll for 35 people!)
We have put up notices on our website explaining the situation, and even offering people a small discount if they will call us and place their order by phone. Since our website does its heaviest business at night, I thought it would be a good idea for me to stay around tonight and cover the phones, and that's what I'm doing right now, at 12:14 am. But nobody is calling. I have taken one call since 10pm, and it was a guy who was only pretending to be interested in product because he wanted to talk to another man about leather sex toys. He went all through the order, asking about the prices, the sizing, the discount, the quality of the leather codpiece he was interested in, whether I had ever worn one myself, etc. He said he wanted to go ahead and place the order, and at the exact moment that I asked him his name, he hung up. This is exactly why we are not normally open at night-- only lonely weirdos call at this hour. I thought tonight might be an exception, but I guess not.
I notice that this blog is all about me in one way or another, and I guess that's not so out of the ordinary-- It's my blog after all, and nobody is making you read it, whoever you may be. I have been told from time to time that I have an interesting life and I should write about it more and share that with the world. So here you go.
But I'm well aware that other people have bigger problems today. Even Mike, who has been a source of frustration for me by not listening to my annoying (and now obviously correct) advice, is faced with some very difficult realities, since his house is almost certainly underwater and the future of his business is in doubt. Many of my friends have lost their homes and businesses. And, as most everyone knows quite well, many have died today. I haven't forgotten that.
And yet, here I am, with a business to see to, and it is in crisis now. And I suppose I am too. My bread-and-butter website isn't working, I am contemplating a possible total loss of my property in New Orleans, and the clock is ticking on an impressive portfolio of mortgage debt. Even before this latest glitch, we were facing some difficult cash-flow realities, because of intensified competitive pressure in our market, and this huge, interesting, expensive building here in L.A. that we recently bought (planning for growth that hasn't yet materialized). And then there are the expensive ongoing renovations on the building, which are threatening to break the quarter-million-dollar mark. To save all of those 35 jobs and grow into this big building that we bought, we will have to pull a few more rabbits out of that same rather well-worn hat that has produced more than its share of rabbits already in the last 17 years. And I'm getting tired.
Meanwhile, on the periphery of all the other things I've been working on, I watched the news from New Orleans. The levees are broken, and the city is filling with water, just as the worst-case scenarios predicted. The French Quarter isn't quite so badly flooded as many neighborhoods, but whatever's left of my 170-year-old building after the surely very serious damage from the intense wind and rains will be standing in water, and probable prey to the looters who are now ravaging the area. Also, since there are refugees in the city now, and the French Quarter is some of the higher ground inside the New Orleans bowl, I would not be at all surprised to find squatters staying there at present. But I won't know for quite some time what's left of the building, because at this point the city government is saying it will be at least a month before anyone is allowed back in, if there's anything left of the flooded city at that point.
It seems as if sometimes the universe decides to erase things... like when I was a kid, playing with an Etch-a-Sketch toy. You could spend hours or days working on an intricate drawing of some kind, and then at some point get tired of it, and decide to start over with a clean slate. You shake it up, and it goes blank again.
The universal version is that this can happen to a person, a city, a civilization, a species, an entire planet, or a star system. It is How Things Work. Powers greater than ourselves. New Orleans has been a fascinating but famously corrupt city for hundreds of years. It maintained its existence on borrowed time, while doing a typical New-Orleans-style half-ass job of staving off its own doom. Remember the line from that 70s commercial? "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature." In hindsight, New Orleans could have done a MUCH better job of protecting itself, but it would have cost billions of dollars that nobody could find, staggering sums of money that are, ironically, dwarfed by the much-much-larger calculations of the damage that has now been done.
New Orleans was beautiful, byzantine, stratified, aged, haunted, and crooked. And I experienced (and ostensibly "owned") part of it for a while. But does anyone really "own" land or buildings, or do we just imagine that we do? Seriously, friends... it's just a nearly-but-not-quite-unanimously-shared delusion. There are precious few pieces of ground on this earth that haven't been forcibly appropriated from prior human inhabitants at the point of a spear, a sword, or a gun, prior to coming into the hands of the current "owners." Where is the legitimacy, ultimately?
It's hard to predict the future of New Orleans at this point. It might have been nice for me if I'd taken one of those lower offers I got, and sold my Decatur Street property before this all happened. But to wish that were so is merely to wish my troubles onto someone else. Just as well me as anyone. Maybe it's better that this should happen to me, since I have a bit of detachment from these things, and other individuals stand to be more hurt or upset by their attachment to land and buildings and things. (I could've sold the property to a non-individual-- Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or Halliburton. But I don't remember any of those entities making an offer, and I'm not sure how I would've responded if they had.)
As for the difficult times, and the threat of losing most of what I've spent the last 17 years trying to build, well, I have been here before, numerous times. It just keeps happening, at an ever larger scale as it continues its geometric growth. The scale becomes more daunting, the trapeze seeming ever higher. But there is still a net. I have my health, my intelligence, my network of friends and family. And even if I lose some or all of those things, I have what I have come to know spiritually: That there is no end, no death, no separation of anyone or anything or any place or any time from any other person, thing, place or time. So worry and fear are illusions-- and not pretty, Glenda-the-Good-Witch-descending-in-a-bubble illusions either, but useless and limiting ones that will swallow as much of my mind and my life as I surrender to them. If I let my fear rule the day all the time, or even more than half the time, I wouldn't have this interesting life and portfolio of assets and responsibilities and concerns and challenges to work with.
I am feeling that big L.A. earthquake coming any day now. This super-cool old building was built in 1928. It's 3 stories, 30,000 square feet, made of unreinforced masonry. It has been retrofitted as required by law, but it isn't the kind of retrofit stands much chance of saving the building; It's just the kind that gives whoever's inside the building extra time to evacuate it before it falls down, or is condemned and demolished. That scenario would probably force an exit from this business for me. I will flee the country with whatever cash I can scrape together and move to Bombay.
Or, maybe my psychic premonitions are off by a few years or decades, and there will be time yet to get this machine properly tuned again (as it has been in the past at smaller scales), and make it churn out another good run of productivity, relative harmony, and profit. For a while.
We'll see.
Thanks for listening.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
It's all about New Orleans
Hello all.I thought this might be a good day to start my new blog. Lots of people are calling me looking for information about what's going on with me, my company, my property in the French Quarter, etc. I'm busy dealing with the affairs of the day, and I thought this might be an efficient and interesting way to keep everyone updated.
For this first posting, I will offer some background information and stories, and then in my second posting I'll address the latest news. Then I'll let people know about the blog, and those who are just interested in the latest news will see that first, and peruse the backstory at their leisure if that's of interest.
In early 2003, life was interesting. I was living here in Los Angeles, but I had recently hired a CEO to help run my company, so I was free to travel a lot. I was taking advantage of that.
I had an apartment in the French Quarter in New Orleans that I kept as a getaway. New Orleans had become a home away from home for me, and I always had friends to visit there. There was business to do there too, with the company that hosted my website, http://www.stockroom.com. The host company was Icorp.net, which was located in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. I had worked closely with them ever since I discoveredtheir leading-edge shopping cart software in 1996.
I had a small, charming rear apartment in a large old house on Chartes Street, with a private entrance. The rent was $300/month, less than what a lot of nicer hotels will charge for one night, so it was a nice and inexpensive retreat. But then the elderly woman who owned the house passed away, and her heirs decided to sell it. After it sold that summer, I was put on notice that I needed to clear out.
I had the idea that maybe I would just buy a property there, and then no one could make me clear out. So I started looking at properties around New Orleans.
I found an interesting property in the French Quarter, an old "row house" built by the Ursulines nuns in 1833, right near the riverfront. There were two buildings; The one in the front was 3 stories plus a converted attic. The ground floor was a storefront on Decatur Street, the second floor was a residential rental, and the third floor and converted attic were a larger residential unit which I claimed for my new apartment.
The smaller back building was originally built as a slave quarters. It was two stories, plus a converted attic, structurally sound but otherwise in very poor condition, with no windows, doors, or operative plumbing or wiring. I thought it would someday make two nice residential units, but at the time I bought the property, the only tenants were pigeons, and the rear building needed a lot of work.
But I thought, since I had my CEO in place, I could split my time between Los Angeles and New Orleans, giving this property some of the attention it deserved, and make a creative, fun and entrepreneurial project out of this property.
The previous owner was an older woman who was in poor health. She had owned the property since the 1960s, and said she had many interesting stories to tell about it which she promised to tell me someday. We agreed on a price of $700,000 and went into escrow.
By the time escrow closed, an unexpected situation had come up with my CEO, and he had resigned his position for personal reasons. I went ahead with the purchase, but in the nearly two years that I have now owned that property, I have been quite busy being back at the helm of my company, and I haven't had the time to visit New Orleans as much as I had originally hoped. I did have a lovely, expensive and much-needed new roof put on the buildings, but the rest of the planned renovations were left undone.
In March of this year, I was embroiled in other real estate dealings in Los Angeles, and feeling stretched too thin. While meditating on how I'd bitten off more than I could chew with my New Orleans property, the lines from an old song came to mind: "Go on, take the money and run." I made a decision to put the property back on the market. I still liked staying there when I could get away, but the place was underutilized, and costly to own without it being fully renovated and occupied. But meanwhile, real estate prices in New Orleans had risen, and my real estate agents felt that a nice return on my original investment was likely.
Also, I knew that New Orleans was in a precarious position with respect to hurricanes and flooding. The city had been slowly sinking for years, until it was surrounded on all sides by water that was sitting at a higher level than the city itself. I had studied the so-called doomsday scenarios for New Orleans, and concluded that it was a significant risk. I talked to my New Orleans friends about these concerns, but most of them were dismissive of the worst-case scenarios.
In discussions with my real estate agents, we decided at the outset to be patient and wait for a decent return on the property. I was concerned about the dangers, but I also liked the property a lot, and was still willing to keep it rather than let it go cheap. I had a few offers on the property that were above
My father, Lloyd (affectionately known to me, my friends, and my employees as "Pop"), went on a hike on the Appalachian Trail this year. Pop was diligent and creative in his preparations, reading accounts of other hikers and studying their experiences. He noted that most serious hikers became obsessed with the weight of their packs, since when hiking over long distances, every extra ounce is felt in a magnified way in terms of added fatigue and aches and pains. So he spent a great deal of time considering exactly what to bring, and inventing and perfecting his own pack design, which consisted of a series of pouches he could wear around his waist rather than the usual backpack.
Lloyd got his entire carrying weight down under 20 pounds, a feat most veteran long-distance hikers found really remarkable. On the trail, Lloyd said his packing system worked extremely well, leaving everything accessible. I told him he should consider mass-producing and marketing his eccentric pack design. He agreed that might be a good idea. But he and I are always cooking up new ideas for million-dollar companies, which we share with each other the way a lot of families tell jokes. They're just fun ideas, and we both tend to be quite busy with our already-existing projects.
Pop made it about 200 miles along the trail, which was far enough for him to have a few interesting adventures, and to conclude that he'd seen enough of long-distance hiking for his first time out. He then retired to my cousin Philip's spacious and well-appointed home in the New Jersey countryside (or as close to countryside as one can find within a 20-mile radius of Bell Labs) to rest up and regroup.
Pop and I met up at the Tucker family reunion at a state park in Indiana about a month ago. We discussed his next move, and he decided to go and hold down the fort at my place in New Orleans, since it was vacant anyway. I dropped him off at the bus station in Indiana on my way to the airport. He bussed to New Orleans and I flew home to L.A.
Two weeks later, I made a quick weekend trip to New Orleans to visit Pop. That was less than two weeks ago. On that trip, I discussed the New-Orleans-doomsday scenarios with some of my friends there. Most of them waved away my concerns, though all agreed it was a theoretical possibility.
There were a few who shared my views. One was my cousin Frank, who was living across the Mississippi river in Gretna, Louisiana. Another was Pop. It seems that there is a streak of rational/stoical realism that runs on that side of the family.
Also in agreement with my worst-case concerns was my old friend Elayne. She and I are old friends who met in the late 1980s in Los Angeles, and then, oddly enough, ended up owning properties facing each other on either side of Decatur Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
To Be Continued....
