Wow, even though I'm in SE Texas (which is still hurricane country) I've been obsessed with Katrina this weekend. My best friend Mary and most of her family live in the New Orleans area... which is currently the projected bullseye for Category Four Hurricane Katrina (which was a Category 5 just a few hours ago).

I called Mary the other night, before Katrina turned into a giant monster, and asked her if they were planning on staying and they were all prepared and ready. After the last big storm in July they had bought generators for their house, plus her mothers house. They had most of the storm shutters already up on their 100 year+ home. And this week her husband even went and got her mom a shotgun (just in case).

But Sunday morning the mayor issued a mandantory evacuation of the entire New Orleans area and people began fleeing. But there aren't that many routes to get out of the New Orleans area, and all of them became instant crawling traffic jams. Mary had called and left a message this morning that she and her husband, mother, three cats and her new baby (three weeks old) would be leaving as soon as they finished securing their house. My husband wandered into my darkened bedroom about every hour or so just and gave me an unwanted update of what the storm was doing and announced each time that it was basically the end of the world (or at least the end of New Orleans as we know it). I figured I'd better get as much sleep as possible if we would be having houseguests, and after his 1:30 proclamation that she had just called and said they had just got on the road I figured I'd have plenty of time.

Finally the apocalyptic cuckoo clock (known as Sparky) took his afternoon nap and stopped bothering me and I finally got a bit of uninterrupted sleep. I got up, fiddled around some, made salad for Sparky, ate some coffeecake (it was weird food day for me again), and then decided I'd better try and give Mary a call on her cell phone to see how close they were. After five hours in the car, they'd barely made it out of the city - they had given up on getting to I-10 and were taking the 90 alternate and were almost to... Houma? Yikes, that's all? Their caravan consisted of Mary and her husband, their baby, and three alternately yowling and hissing cats in the back of the car, with her mother following them in another car. So the revised plan was to try and at least make it to Beaumont and stay with a relative. The normal, light traffic commute from New Orleans to Houston is six to seven hours, so Beaumont sounded a little saner. I asked her to call me anyway to let me know everything was OK. This was sometime around 6:30 pm.

So I spent the evening checking up on the storm on the Weather Channel online, the National Hurricane Center, and aimlessly flipping around between the various live cams on Nola.com just to see what was really going on. Couldn't concentrate on my Ebay work, didn't get much accomplished at all. By about 11:30 I thought perhaps I should try and call Mary's cell again, but I figured they'd probably made it to Beaumont and were tucked in for the night. With the new baby she's not really a late night person as she has been, but more of a crack of dawn person (not by choice). I washed some clothes, nice brainless activity, but at least it's one chore done...

3:34 am, the phone rings. Sparky is snoozing in the next room but I'm still puttering at the computer. 504 area code on the caller ID, New Orleans, wow it's Mary! Are they in town? No, they are just now approaching Beaumont (which is a few miles inside the border of Texas), OMG! They have been in the car, inching along for like fourteen hours. The baby has been quiet, apparently she likes the motion of the car. One of the cats has been nonstop meowing pretty much the entire time, resulting in occasional hissing from one of the other cats. But, bless her little heart, Mary is still in a decent mood, she really is one of the most resilient people I know. And she's got an abnormal amount of endurance and apparently patience. And her husband was now driving her mom's car until they made it to a stopping place. Mom's got a lot of pep too, but it's 3:30 on the frigging morning...

Well, at least I know where they are now, it's 5:30 am now so hopefully they are in bed by now. Now if Katrina will behave and just move on through without stalling or destroying too much property. Did I mention Mary and her husband just spent the last three years or so non-stop renovating their Victorian home? It's really beautiful. And it actually sits in one of the higher areas (for New Orleans) where serious flooding is rare... Fingers crossed, and now I lay me down to.. sleep?

Last night was going along quite well until I got out of the shower and noticed that my vision was even stranger than usual... there were shimmering lights everywhere, growing brighter as I watched.

Hmmm... is it my eyes or my brain? Close one eye... flashing away. Close the other eye... yep still there. Must be migraine time. Nothing hurts yet, damn Sparky wants his dinner soon, guess it will be delivery tonight after all. I tend to get migraines during that wonderful PMS time, which I'm sort of in now because I've been screwing around with my birth control pills (didn't want to have headaches during my road trip or the week after with my dad having surgery). I'd take them non-stop, but the doctor bitches about it and I don't want to run out before my 12 months are up. I only go 3 or 4 days off anyway, nothing happens except the damn migraines (I seem to have reached perimenopause).

Luckily I have a large supply of Maxalt tablets, Merck will send them to you free if you don't have insurance and are poor enough, bless their black little pharmaceutical giant hearts. They cost about $16 a pill, so that's one less thing to worry about. I also get my Singulair from them, which retails around $100 a bottle, so two less things. I wish the Ambien people has a patient assistance program (can't sleep... clown will eat me...), that's my only other hovering around $100 a month prescription.

So I took a pill and lay down on the bed till dinner came (Chinese, isn't that a brilliant choice with a migraine!) watching the as the lights went from SpiroGraph frenetics to a tolerable pulsing. The Maxalt makes you kind of woozy by iteslef, and I don't usually even take one till I've been in pain for a day or so already, but the aura or halo lights really freak me out. I've had migraines for years, but this is only like the fourth time I've had the aura warning. Last time was after getting out of the shower also...

So it was sort of a forcibly calm evening for me. I do now believe the vision problem in my right eye (varying degrees of double vision and presbyopia) really is neurological (MS, optic neuritis related) and not as much actually a physical problem (from RK surgery in the 80's to correct my vision) because my vision got noticeably clearer after taking the Maxalt. Still not real good, but not a complete blur like it's been doing lately.

No headache by bedtime. I was going to go over to my parents to help my dad out with his spinal implant remote control (that was the afore-mentioned surgery, more on that to come) today but when I called at 1:30 (had to set an alarm to wake up that early) to see if the rep was still coming at 2:00, my mom told me she was already there, came early, and was almost finished. I lay there a few minutes accessing my situation, felt a pain behind my left eye and decided since I could go back to sleep for a few more hours I may as well take another Maxalt to knock out round two of the migraine.

Several groggy hours later I finally got up, and have been having another quiet evening. Actually made Sparky his spaghetti tonight (I need to go grocery shopping, dammit). I had one of my weird concotions - cranberry chicken salad from Sam's Club, with spring salad mix, strawberries, raspberries and walnuts wrapped in a flour tortilla. I've been on an "everything tastes better in a tortilla" craze lately, I even put my chinese food in there last night (I'm not a big rice fan).

It's time to take another shower before bed and now I have a slight throbbing beginning behind my right eye, hopefully I'll sleep decent tonight and wake up feeling better tomorrow. I don't really want to spend another day in woozy druggy land. I haven't been sleeping worth a damn the last few days, most likely also a hormonal problem. Can we just bring on the menopause and get this whole thing over with? I think the perimenopause thing has been going on about four or five years now. Oh well, I think I'll go test the hot shower theory again now. Vision's still pretty good, maybe I can read for a few minutes before bed too.

I made a new category tonight for Shopping entries, and managed to find quite a few of my previous entries to add to it. Just one of those things I've been meaning to do...

We have a brand new Target in our neighborhood and so I had to go twice last week when it opened. I went with Sparky first and we wandered around aimlessly, he bought some DVDs, I bought some cool retro 50's style folder and a trash can with a computer smiley face on it, then realized I hadn't spent the $25 minimum in order to use the $5 off coupon they sent us.

So I went back a few days later (in the pouring rain, no less) and got to leisurely scope out most of the store. I was looking for some serving pieces for our weekend party, more bowls and some platters, something plastic, blue or red and hopefully cool, and actually walked the entire perimeter of the store before stumbling upon what I was looking for in an aisle end cap display.

I had noticed the trend items for their 'back to school' theme all had a very 50's clean retro look - they had bolders & binders, desk accessories, and even sheets and pillows in several different coordinating colorways and to my amazing luck they also had an entire display of melamine and plastic in the same themes! Yippee! I bought a lovely platter with a multicolored starburst design, several smaller clear platters in blue and smoke with a quilted texture, and four bowls (two large and two small) in clear blue and smoke that were cut like diamonds. And matching rubber starburst coasters, coordinating napkins, and even a clear plastic tumbler with the starburst that looks fabulous in my pink 50's tiled bathroom.

I want to go back tomorrow and look over everything again (if there's anything left). I don't like to be too matchy, but the pieces they have coordinate without looking too much like an actual set which is cool. I'd like to replace my poor kitty ripped shower curtain (never buy a horizontally ribbed shower curtain if you have a spring-loaded cat with front claws) with something with a little color. All of our friends at the party commented on the new serving pieces, and the best part was everything was very affordable. I think the most expensive piece was like $6.99.

I love Target - they always have the best Halloween stuff also. If you're into design, especially contemporary, you really could decorate your whole place just from one store and not break your budget.

As a public service (and because I just finished eating some and my taste buds are still all wired), I wanted to make sure people outside of Texas knew about the weird yet incredibly addictive party snack that's been at almost every party I've gone to in the last few years, including those held at my house. If you put a plate of this out people will not be able to stop eating it, if nothing else it's a neat little experiment just to watch your friends reactions.

A company called Fischer & Wieser in a small town in the Texas Hill Country (which is the prettiest part of the state) came up with something called the Original Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce in the 1990's and if you pour some over a few blocks of cream cheese, you've got heaven on a cracker. It's an odd looking party food, and people will look at you funny and ask "what the hell is it", but give them some Wheat Thins or Triscuits and once they've tried it they literally won't be able to stop eating it.

I know I can't, it can get sort of embarrassing even, especially if you drip any on your shirt. And I don't (and can't) normally eat anything that's all all spicy, but somehow this sauce and the cream cheese manage to hit all of your taste buds at once - sweet, spicy, smokey, tart and creamy all at the same time.

I had half a bottle left over after our party and just made myself a little snack with some whipped cream cheese and crackers (which I purposely bought in hopes of having leftovers) and my sinuses are nice and cleared out now.

The "can't stop eating till I look stupid" predecessor of this party snack was the Grape Jelly and Meatballs appetizer, another weird sounding but super addictive food. I really think both of these are sort of Southern recipes, so I wanted to share them. Locally I buy the raspberry sauce at Randall's / Safeway and Whole Foods (it's considered a gourmet item), but you can order it online at the companies website also. Someone told me there are knockoff brands made, but I'll pay the extra buck or two and get the good stuff, personally.

Oh good, I feel better already. At least I broke through the perfectionist paralyzation and "where to begin" barricades.

Way too much stuff, good and bad has been going on this summer. Overwhelming, suffocating things (literally). Been filling the voids with a weird balance of obsessive work and obsessive shopping. And I don't have to leave my chair to do either (sigh). And I'm scarily efficient at both.

In the "real" world, I've been helping my parents with some of their medical problems, being chauffeur and escort, which is one of the reasons I got a big four-door car last year when it came time to replace the old two-door. And I took the Maxima on it's first road trip, it did everything beautifully except maneuver the narrow streets of New Orleans (there's got to be something I can do about it's lack of turning radius, it's embarrassing). And the factory stereo system is lacking, doesn't do well with the 70 mph road noise. Amazing highway car, though, just a joy to drive.

I've been dealing with my own really horrendous health problems too (yes, worse than my usual problems). I seem to have developed a really bad case of asthma (yea! a new health problem, more meds to buy each month!), which started as just a cough, turned into lots of chest congestion, and then manifested itself as full-blown can't breathe, wheezing bronchial spasm attacks. I have a whole new respect for my father's emphysema, which is one of many serious problems he battles daily. And I don't smoke, never have, hate to be around it. But my theory is my problems came about as a result of an incorrectly diagnosed medicine (which dramatically worsened, if not caused, the congestion to begin with).

But more on all these stories to come... particularly since I now have extremely limited vocal abilities to do much in the way of oral storytelling, perhaps I can clear some of the static in my brain by writing it down.

Small amount of guilt now assuaged, perhaps I can sleep tonight...