R.I.P. Le Jardin?


A for sale sign appeared outside our community garden this week. As neighborhood assoc pres. I got many phone calls and emails about it. The way it works is, the garden is on private land and can stay there as long as the the owner allows; the gardeners maintain the land and pay the water bill. Unbeknownst to the gardeners and even Parkway Partners, the land had been adjudicated by the city and sold for $20k in November 2007. The currently asking price is $89K. If anyone pays that much for the property I'm sure they are not going to leave a community garden on it but rather build a house or apartments. Many people in the neighborhood love the garden. Non-gardeners come to enjoy the green and tranquility. I suggested a few options such as, create an LLC or some other legal intity and buy the land ourselves; convince someone to buy the land and let the garden remain (hello Brad Pitt?); start looking into some of the other empty lots in the neighborhood and see if we can move the garden. I remains to be seen how it plays out. But it will be a sad day when the garden is gone.

The NY Times has a column called "Happy Days"

About Happy Days

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed.

Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

What a refreshing perspective now days when it seems all the media focuses on if the negative. I don't understand why the local news has to cover stories about murders and and what not in towns on the other side of the country. Leave that to the national news.

Today's "Happy Days" is about New Orleans. link The author, Dan Baum, seems to have really picked up on what makes people here tick - "Their preference for having more time than money was at the heart of what made that city so much fun to visit and so hard to leave."

And his closing sentence: "New Orleans can teach us that the life we build with our neighbors deserves at least as much attention as our endless thrust towards newer and bigger."

Why does the 2nd District Police Station need a crime camera out front?

2009 Lafitte Corridor Hike

I posted my photos from the hike to my Flickr account. There's supposed to be a way in embed a slide show on your blog and even in a post, but I haven't found any clear instruction on how-to and don't have the patience right now to figure it out. So if you want to see then here's the link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27509547@N08/

If you want to see even more photos, there's a Lafitte Corridor group on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lafitte-corridor/

This year's hike number exceed everyone's expectations. There were guest speakers and more stops. Massey's provided lunch and amazingly I think there was just enough for everyone. Massey's also paid for a bus to shuttle everyone back to the start but we exceeded the number of seats. A small group headed over to the Bulldog at the end of the hike to cool off and enjoy some libations.

My company designed a new logo for the Friend of Lafitte Corridor, and has been very well received. Their newly redesigned website looks great. Check it out here and learn more about the Corridor and the project: http://folc-nola.org/

Quick car update: I got my car back, after a few sweaty days of riding the streetcar to work. Got a new ECM relay, battery terminals and a fuse. Everything seems to be working now *fingers crossed.*

When I worked downtown I used to ride the streetcar every day. Some people think it's just a tourist thing but it's not. I must say I'm impressed by their punctuality. I checked the times on the RTA web site and they were right on. The first day I just missed it. I was drenched in sweat by the time I got to the office. After the first day I got smart and took a change of clothes with me. Yesterday I had one of those drivers with the fun personalities. The machine didn't want to take my dollar and he was cracking jokes the whole time. "Did you print that dollar last night?" Most of them are pretty nice. I remember the one man (pre-K) who would talk to the cars. "Whooo, hold that buggy!" he'd say when a car looked like it was going to cross in front.

Last weekend we did the Lafitte Corrodor Hike (I need to post photos!) and we rode the Canal Street line back to our car downtown. A great way to ride.

When you have 13-year-old car, you can expect it to break down from time to time. About a week ago I had trouble starting it. Turn the key – nothing. I checked the battery, nothing loose, wiggled some things around. After turning the key a few more time it started up. Had to turn the key a number of times to get it started at the end of day. The next morning, no problems. Didn’t have any problems until Wednesday. Took a number of times to get started. I should have taken the car into the mechanic then. Live and learn. Yesterday I had no problems. I had decided to go ahead and take it in today, and idea confirmed when it took many time to get it started. Driving along I noticed my radio kept powering off and on. All of a sudden it just turned off completely. I managed to coast over to the side. Turn the key, nothing. Mess with the battery and wires, still nothing. After a while I call AAA for a tow. I was told 45 minutes, so I sat and waited. As I’m sitting there, a trickle of very nicely dressed people start parking around me and going to the church across the street (I was broken down next to the post office on Louisiana Ave.) More and more people arrive. I’m guessing it’s a funeral. I notice men in gold blazers with “Zulu” on them. The crowd grows; a cop starts to direct traffic. I’m worried about my tow truck getting to me. I hear a brass band in the distance but I can’t see them. Now I’m kind of hoping my tow truck doesn’t show up for a while. A procession comes down LA Ave. and goes into the church. There were about 100 men in gold blazers standing on LA Ave, swaying to the dirge the band was playing, like they were marching in place. It’s been 50 minutes I call AAA. The truck is 5 miles away will be there in 20 minutes. An elderly woman walked by me asked if I needed help. I told her thank you but no, I was waiting for a tow truck. She said she read about the man who had died in the paper yesterday. “Must have been someone important, that’s a lot of people.” I agreed with her. The music stopped and slowly the men swaying in the street file into the church as other people file out. At long last the tow truck arrives and he gives the battery a jump and the car starts. He says I need a new battery and I tell him the other things that happened and that I was worried it would died again, so he says he’ll follow me to the mechanics. We go 4 blocks and my car conks out. He jumps it again. While standing there, my friend Michael, who lived near by, walks up “I saw on your Facebook status you had broken down and was wondering if you were close by.” I had posted the photo you see here to Facebook. I get in my car and we drive another 2 blocks. The tow truck driver states, “I’ll need to tow it.” No shit Sherlock.

I had not heard from my mechanic and it was getting to be the end of the day so I gave them a call. "It started right up" I was told. I was pissed and went off on a rant of the problems it gave me. They can keep it until they figure out the problem. I walked home which was good for the nerves. Monday the saga will continue.

Tomorrow, June 1 marks the official start of Hurricane Season. Yippee.

After donating last year’s canned goods in a recent food drive, I stocked back up for this season. Still need to get water… turns out there was a gallon from 2 years ago in the back of the pantry. It sprung a leak. That’s why the “use by date” is 2 years from when it’s bottled: isn’t not that the water goes “bad” but the plastic just can’t hang anymore.

Today’s paper had a special hurricane preparedness section with checklists, contraflow maps, lists of this year’s storm names, etc. I think even more helpful was Saturday’s column where readers sent in their thoughts. Another article that really interested me was “Airport a vital escape route from storms.” What fascinated me was this:

During Hurricane Gustav, federal officials originally wanted to stop flights about 10 a.m. on the day before the storm made landfall, but airport officials were able to get a few more hours of flying time, Wilcut said. "That allowed us to get a lot more people out of the city," she said.

The last flight out was Aug. 31 at 6 p.m., according to news reports. The storm made landfall the next morning about 10:30 at Cocodrie.

For Gustav, the airport opened again to commercial flights on the afternoon of Sept. 3. It took about two weeks to reopen to commercial flights after Katrina, Wilcut said.

As Gustav made its way towards Louisiana, I was road tripping from Georgia to New Mexico. Aug 30 Aug 31

I’m glad the airport didn’t close at 10 am August 31, because I would have been stuck in Dallas. I was in a serious race against time to make it back to New Orleans to help Greg evacuate. My friend in Albuquerque said I was welcome to stay as long as I needed to, but I would have lost my mind. I couldn’t even sleep the night of the 30th, I was so amped up with a singular thought “I must get home.” Not only would there have been a period of time during the height of the storm when I would have no idea if Greg was OK, but who knew how many days it would have been before the airports reopened. As you can see, after Gustav it was a few days. After Katrina, two weeks. One of the most important lessons I've learned about hurricanes and storms is no two or exactly alike.