A tardy post-Isaac update

We were fine. New Orleans proper was fine. Plaqumines Parish (the southernmost part of the state, the part that looks like a bird foot sticking out into the Gulf) flooded pretty badly, as badly as Katrina. However, they were able to get help in a timely fashion, because Obama un-gutted FEMA, and there was less competition for hurricane relief as well. Here are some pictures of our neighborhood on Thursday morning, about 24 hours after the worst of the storm. It was still windy. Here's the same under-construction house before:

 And after. It's since been fixed, and is now almost finished. But it's still ugly.

This fence blew down in the wind; again, this has been repaired since, mostly with the same materials. They kind of just hammered everything up again.

Leaf debris, everywhere. Everywhere. It was rather magical looking, actually. Like we were in the forest.

We lost power around 10pm on Tuesday night, and the most intense part of the storm was around 4am on Wednesday morning. We didn't sleep all that much--the wind was too loud. Our house is brick, with nothing to fix storm shutters to, so there were a few times we worried for our windows. But nothing broke. We stayed inside all day Wednesday, and ventured outside on Thursday. We never lost water or gas, luckily, so we were able to cook normally. All in all, we were pretty well prepared for the hurricane itself.

Thursday night, the wind stopped, and the storm was officially over. And then began the boredom. As I said, we lost power Tuesday night. We didn't get it back until Sunday afternoon. (And we were lucky. Some people had no power for 10 days.) We stocked up on ice and first aid and snacks, but we were profoundly unprepared for 5 days without internet, Netflix, or sweet, sweet air conditioning. What wusses we are. My grandmother was a WWII nurse, and she once had to singlehandedly care for an entire field hospital when the other nurses got dysentery. A hospital in Calcutta. And I bet she bitched and moaned less than we did.

Eran and I read every novel in the house. We took walks and drives. We went down to the French Quarter, which was the only operational part of the city, and charged our phones in bars. We played about 100 games of penny-ante poker. We helped our neighbors clean their yard. We filled the bathtub and just sat in the cold water, reading. We felt intense jealousy towards everyone with a porch to sit on. (Our apartment has almost bizarrely poor air circulation, even with every window open, as if it exists in its own windless pocket universe.) We yelled "Fix it! Just fix it!" out the window when we finally saw a utility truck. Okay, that was just me. The neighbors cheered. When the power came back on, we switched on every light in the house and put the AC on full blast, and danced around yelling "Electricity! Electricity!" and rushed to catch up on all our Internet bullshit. Next year we're going to stock up on board games and trashy novels before hurricane season. And possibly move to a house with a porch.