Here I am, battered but unbowed. My house smells like the boy's locker room at a high school, my roof is sporting a nice blue tarp (the state flag of Louisiana!), a tree that was snapped in two but is still precariously together hangs like the Sword of Damocles over my back porch (I think of such trees as Gustav's wishbones), and I'm in a walking cast, courtesy of an unrelated accident while I was walking my ingrate of a dog last Saturday.

Or maybe it wasn't an unrelated accident, entirely. When  your mind is on a hundred different things (when will that tree guy come? should I break down and get a generator? where will we sleep tonight? do we need ice again?), you're bound to miss that hole at the corner of the neighbor's yard where you twisted your ankle last month. Since your dog is extra freaked by all the piles of tree debris and all the people out and about trying to put their homes back in order, you may or may not be paying more attention to said dog than to the terrain, resulting, perhaps, in a twist, a moment of sharp pain, and a loud snap! as you fall to earth. That's how it worked for me, anyhow.

So now I have a quite Byronic walking cast, and the power company says that it'll be September 24th before we have electricity. Classes at the university started up again this week, and we're attempting to superimpose some sort of quasi-normality on top of neolithic living conditions. More later on all that...for now, thanks to everybody who expressed concern for us here in Baton Rouge. Our story is far less dramatic (and tragic) than was New Orleans's in '05, but we'll be sorting out the comparisons between the two storms for quite a while, trying to figure out what they tell us about human folly, strength, and weakness.