This week, my husband went off to visit their parents in Ohio. I figured I was gonna have a little bachelorette time. Maybe I’d get Psychonauts 2 and play it.
But Hurricane Ida had other plans. A couple days later I was frantically getting all the boxes of stuff off the floor and packing bags of the absolute bare minimum of stuff I could take out, and leaving lots of food for the cats who live under the house. And then Saturday I was hooking up with some friends and putting those bags in their car, and spending four hours to drive two hours to Hattiesburg, MS because of highways clogged with other New Orleanians fleeing. The traffic would have been worse if we’d hugged the coast like most of them, even worse if we’d gone west. And then Sunday we were pressing on to Birmingham, AL, where we ended up glued to the internet as the storm passed over the city.
The predictions kept on wavering between a Category 3, 4, and 5. It hit the land, and the city, as a 4, on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina devastating the place. We were all there for Katrina so we were all kind of feeling a lot of PTSD rising up.
And… our worst fears weren’t realized. The levees held. The whole city lost power, but the Sewage & Water Board’s generators kept running – they had barely enough of them up to keep the pumps going, got one more up the same morning that Ida was coming, and ended up with one shutting down once the worst of the storm had passed. Those people are fucking heros and they really need to be paid a lot better. So far there has been all of one hour officially reported, though more are probably coming.
This morning, we saw this absolute wonderful unit on CNN. And I had to draw him.
Twice, because the first time was from memory while waiting for lunch, and I knew I could do better. I could probably do even better if I tried a couple more times, I was being lazy in some ways the second time too.
At present I dunno when I’ll get back. The mayor’s asking evacuees to please stay out. The power’s probably gonna be off for at least a week. I do want to get back soon and see what the state of my home is, and also start feeding the poor kitties under the house. We have a possible sighting of one of them from some acquaintances who dropped off some food, and they probably would have mentioned it if the house was obviously missing a chunk of roof, but I can’t know for sure until I’ve been inside. If the place is screwed then we have at least one spare bedroom we can stay in for a while. I’m gonna go to the REI here in Birmingham before we leave and buy like a dozen solar chargers for myself and whoever I know who wants them, FEMA’s promised to pick up the bill for evac expenses and help with rebuilding too.
All the friends I’ve been in contact with through the storm are okay too. The friend with an incredible library of early American newspaper comics in his house still has it. The city’s sustained damage but nothing like Katrina.
And unlike Katrina, Biden declared a goddamn state of emergency before the storm even hit. Have I mentioned how much I hate Dubya for his bungling of that? Because he sure did fuck that shit up and he can rot in hell for that.
Anyway. I turned on the computer thinking I was gonna work on this drawing:
…and decided to make an update on my status for Patreon because my last one from before leaving was pretty damn bleak, and I figured I’d say something here as well.