[blizzardND]

Doc, bless you for your service to others, a close friend of mine was sent to Mississippi to set up a big National Guard Camp. He and a helio pilot flew over the area and he brought back a slide show that would bring you to tears.

We sent down semi load after semi load of goods from our area. Flash forward to this summer, our payroll specialist's son was in NOLA with a big 25,000 student Lutheran youth convention. One of their "projects" was to go to a cemetery and re-set the pastor of a churches fathers marker, took about 5 minutes for 4 HS boys. Did they really need to raise money for 6 months and travel 1500 miles to do that? She told me of all these pittly little "projects" that were more or less "make work" just to give these well intentioned kids something to do. I think if I was the pastor, I'd just ask at the end of the service- "can I get a couple of you fellas to come out back and help me reset a stone or 2?"

What bothered me the most when we were there in March was the people that were living in a house and it appeared by the toys outside that they have children, yet they would not do anything about the houses next door that had been abandoned and rubble was still piled on the sidewalk, is it really that tough to pick up a little each week so that your kids have a safe place to play? this was 5 years after the storm. I guess I'm just the kind of guy that would have had a big ole party at my house; bring your own chain saw, and me and my friends would have cleaned our block in a Saturday. then cool ones later.

A couple of 55 gallon drums and a match would make a great disposal system for the junk wood. Or just toss it all back into the house it came from and follow it up with a match and a quart of gas. If you set 4-5 of them on fire at once, a couple of them should be burnt to the ground before the fire department could put them all out. Hell, have the national fire truck convention in the 9th ward. Set 50 of those not even good enough to make crack houses on fire at the same time, and the fire crews could just make sure the restored houses stay safe.

Getting back to that trailer featured here, I'm thinking I might sleep in my car before I spent a week or so with 21 other guys in that trailer in the NOLA humidity. But for fire crews out west or guardsmen up here during our big flood this spring it might be a pretty cool idea.