Birthdays and Hurricanes -- and Cocktails!

Moogie’s Mansion is all shuttered up.  It’s dark in here!

I spent my 2005 birthday in Little Rock, having evacuated for Katrina.  That’s one birthday I’ll never forget.

Pepper and I were just strolling down memory lane, trying to recall what we were doing when Hurricane Gustav blew in about this time in 2008. 

He was still running Disaster Management for Entergy back then (as a secondary responsibility to his regular position — his last billet with Fifth Army was pretty much the same thing, except that the Fifth Army’s responsibility for the Northcom region encompassed most of the central portion of the United States instead of just southeast Louisiana;  Entergy had flown him back to Baton Rouge from our evacuation in 2005 to manage the post-Katrina recovery as military liaison.  He apparently did a good job because they kept going back to him for subsequent storms – and Russel Honore still gets on his last nerve.  Long story.), so he headed to the state EOC (Emergency Operations Center) in Baton Rouge while I loaded the car with a whole lot of stuff, plus three dogs, and set out for Little Rock.  In contraflow, the pace of which made snails look like Speedy Gonzales and his amigos.  The trip that usually takes 7 hours took more like 12, and there were no bathroom stops for the first 7 or 8 hours.  And I saw the remains of an enormous snake on the road, which meant that I had the heebie jeebies for the remainder of the trip.  And I had to walk three cranky dogs when I gassed up in Tallulah.  On my birthday. 

It turned out that Gustav hit Baton Rouge instead of New Orleans, and Pepper was stuck there.  Then, it tracked up into Arkansas and dumped a walloping amount of rain on me.

And Ike hit a week or so later, so I just stayed in Little Rock. In a house with three people, one bathroom, and four dogs.

Last year, TS Lee hit the weekend after my birthday, while our downstairs air conditioning was out of service.

We’ve decided that we’re tired of celebrating my birthday in the company of hurricanes and tropical storms.

I think we deserved the fancy cheese tray during Cocktails with Isaac yesterday evening.

And , I think I really hope that Entergy doesn’t call Pepper back from retirement to do one more round of consequence management, disaster or otherwise!

I think cocktail hour might arrive a little early today.