...and the livin' is easy

I've been taking it easy the last couple of weeks, enjoying having my daughter home for the summer, painting and refinishing furniture, and gathering boxes of necessities for the apartment she'll be moving into this fall.

But I did manage to submit the proposal for Book Number Eight in the Sebastian series, tentatively entitled Who Bells the Cat. My editor is most enthusiastic, so all I need to do now is, um, write it.

And if you're curious about the rose pictured above, it's my favorite of my four dozen or so old roses, the gloriously fragrant and deliciously named souvenir de la malmaison.

Pomp and Circumstance...and Lots of Beaches

If you're wondering where I've been, my younger daughter graduated (brief pause for an indulgence in maternal pride here: Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) from her college down in Florida last weekend and we decided to turn the expedition to celebrate her achievement (and help haul home four years' accumulation of stuff) into a brief vacation. At one point we were afraid only Steve would be able to go while I headed for high ground with the family's overpopulation of cats (I cannot drive Steve's hulking white SUV, nicknamed "Moby Dick"). But in the end the Mississippi River's threat to New Orleans receded and I was able to make the trip, too .



I know most people think graduations are boring, but I actually love them--or at least, I love the beginning of the ceremony when the graduates march in accompanied by a seemingly endless loop of Pomp and Circumstance. The auditorium or stadium (or giant tent overlooking the bay, in this case) swells with such a heartwarming surge of joy and pride that I usually find myself fighting back tears. Students graduating with honors are justly proud of their academic achievement, while those not graduating with honors are equally proud (and often enormously relieved) simply to have managed to graduate at all. It's a long, hard slog through college, four years of fun and pain, growing and decision making, sacrifice and transformation, exploration and discovery. And it all seems to come together in that one uplifting, shared moment of giddy rejoicing. I am soooo glad I didn't have to miss it.



Woven in amongst the various ceremonies were also multiple trips with my daughter to her favorite beaches and piers. She grew up on the beach in Australia, so the last four years have been bliss for her. And somewhere, strolling along some shell-strewn beach, I stumbled across the solution to a problem that's been holding up my proposal for book #8 in the Sebastian series. So I guess maybe I can call it a working vacation?



No?

Breathing Easier

The Corps has opened the Morganza Spillway, which has actually dropped the river level at New Orleans by about half a foot and is taking potentially lethal pressure off the metropolitan area's levees. We are all breathing a lot easier today even as our hearts go out to those with homes along the Atchafalaya who are now facing increased flooding.

We went and looked at the river yesterday. Yes, it's still scarily high, especially at Audubon Park, above. But you could see that it had been higher, and the levees in Jefferson Parish (below) still had reassuring stretches of concrete and green grass showing above the water line. In the picture below, the river is normally on the left side of the batture trees. That's the bike path you see running along the top of the levee; the River Road is far below, to the right.



I snapped these pictures with my phone, which made them easy to email. But I have other shots I hope to get uploaded, including of a truly impressive mass of debris piled up against the pier in Kenner's old town.

Getting Scary

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That's the second story of the cathedral you're looking at here; the street level is far, far below.

Of course, the Corps keeps assuring us that New Orleans will be safe...probably. That's after they put up this map to scare the bejesus out of us:

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My house is in one of those areas colored for flooding of depths from 25 to 40 feet. Seriously? And everyone down here has soooo much faith in the Army Corps of Engineers. As for what's happening to the west of us, in Cajun country...it's just heartbreaking.

I need drugs.

(Photo by Matthew Hinton. He describes how he took the shot here, since, believe it or not, some people are trying to dismiss it as Photoshopped.)

Blogger Issues

Blogspot has been having problems, locking us out for nearly 24 hours and deleting recent post. But they're finally open again and say the missing posts should be back up soon. Stay tuned...