Remembering Katrina five years later

In one of my earliest posts after starting this blog, I promised to post some images I took while assisting in the cleanup in the New Orleans area.  I had at least six opportunities to go into New Orleans to assist in removing fallen trees, gutting ruined homes, and cleaning up debris in neighborhoods, following the big hurricane.  Some of the visual images of the devastation will stay with me for a lifetime.  Five months after Katrina, members of  our stake, including myself, assisted in a cleanup project in Chalmette (east side of New Orleans).  One month later, members of our ward, including myself, were involved in gutting Dennis and Michelle Pixton's home Chalmette.  They lost everything and moved to Houma to restart their life.  I have included a brief PowerPoint presentation of these experiences.

Chalmette

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Pixton home

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Update on modular home in Tennessee

Our new home, being built by ModularOne at their plant in Pulaski, TN,  is scheduled to be delivered to our lot at Sewanee Creek near Tracy City, TN over the Labor Day weekend!  This assumes that there will be no unforeseen delays, weatherwise or otherwise.  We are excited and plan to be on site from September 1 - 6, returning on Labor Day.  The house will be relatively small, at 1,560 square feet indoor space, but with a big porch in the front.  We settled for a good-sized carport and attached storage building instead of a basement, largely due to cost, but also partly due to the topography of our rather shallow lot.  As to when we will occupy our Tennessee home, that depends to a great extent on when we are able to sell our current home.  Retirement and moving to Tennessee is not an option until our home in Houma, LA is sold.  "Until then," as Judy posted at the Friends of Sewanee Creek website, "our little house will sit, lonely and unoccupied up on the hill."  


To get a sense of where we will be located in Tennessee, click on the map above and look for the little square box to the right of Tracy City.  Even though our post office address will officially be Tracy City, we won't even be living in the same county.  Tracy City is in Grundy County, while we are in Marion County.  Sewanee Creek is the separation between the two counties near where we live.  More than that, being on the Marion County side of Sewanee Creek puts us in a different ward, stake, mission, and temple district than church members that live on the Tracy City side of the Creek.  We will live further east than do Matt & Julie in Plymouth, IN, but we will be just inside the Central Time Zone, while they are just inside the Eastern Time Zone.

More trivia:  Which state is the only state in the U.S. that has a,a,a,a as the only vowels in its name; which is the only state that has e,e,e,e as its vowels; and which is the only state that has i,i,i,i?  Hint: We will be traveling in all of them over the Labor Day weekend.

Diana Hansen-Young - an artist we knew in Hawaii

Diana Hansen-Young

 I was browsing the net and bumped into dianahansenyoung.com.  We knew this rather intriguing lady, Diana Hansen-Young, and her two young children, when we lived in Hawaii.  They lived in our neighborhood and attended our church.  She was a fairly well known artist and had her own distinctive style of Hawaiian art that had a lot of local appeal.  Click on "Paintings" at her website to see a sampling of her style of painting, as illustrated by the painting below.  She is of Swedish stock and definitely doesn't look Hawaiian.  I don't know how she came to live in Hawaii, or the circumstances behind her marrying a fellow of Chinese descent (Mr. Young).  Her two children by her Chinese husband are named Heidi and Thekla.  She divorced Mr. Young. Discovering her website, and filling in some of the blanks up to the present time was fascinating for me, because she was such a compelling lady.  It doesn't surprise me that she is now living in Paris, and has continued to pursue the arts, both art and music.  She appears to have recently married another rather interesting fellow.  Her children, now grown, are obviously gifted.  I note that Thekla has become an attorney...even spending a brief time in New Orleans.  Apparently, Thekla moved down here two days before Katrina happened.  What a bummer.  It's too bad we weren't aware that she briefly moved down here.  I'm sure she would have remembered us, and our children who would have been about the same age range as herself.

First day of school for Allison

Our oldest granddaughter started school today, first day in first grade.  We're excited for her!  We got a kick out of the Bertasso blog report of her struggle to get her teacher's name right. 

Roundup Ready sugarbeets in the news again

Sugarbeets are grown on more than 1 million acres in the United States and account for over half of the sugar produced here, the remainder almost entirely coming from sugarcane.  Sugarbeet farmers very quickly adopted Roundup Ready sugarbeets when they became available.  This year, 95% of all sugarbeets planted and soon to be harvested are Roundup Ready, which means that about half the total U.S. sugar supply will be from genetically modified plants.  As of August 13, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White revoked USDA's approval of Monsanto's genetically modified sugarbeets.  His ruling will not affect this year's crop, but may have huge consequences for next year's crop, in that there is a general consensus within the sugarbeet industry that non-modified seed is in very short supply.  Even if non-GMO sugarbeet seed were available, many farmers will likely switch to growing other genetically modified crops, not wanting to or no longer having the equipment to contend with weeds the old fashioned way.

I suspect that the judge's decision has far more to do with concerns about large corporate seed companies having a monopoly on seed than it has to do with dangers associated with genetically modified plants, per se.  After all, much of the food and drugs we consume are from genetically modified organisms, and have been for some time.  Granulated sugar, once fully processed, is nothing more than chemically pure sucrose, devoid of protein, so to make this an issue about consuming a tainted product, really doesn't make any sense.  To be concerned about sugarbeet pollen is just as big of a stretch, considering that the sugarbeet is a biennial crop and does not flower when grown for its sugar.  Good luck to those in the USDA who will be called on to complete a voluminous environmental impact statement for Roundup Ready sugarbeets that couldn't possibly be completed before 2012.

Sugarcane growers have to be happy they aren't in the middle of this controversy.  Besides, this decision stands to further bolster the price of sugar.

Sweet potato variety 'Evangeline'

This is the second year that we have let 'Evangeline,' a sweet potato variety developed at Louisiana State University, essentially take over our garden during the hot summer months.  Actually, I don't mind having a garden crop that essentially does its own thing with very little effort on my part.  It literally filled up the garden from two little plants that survived through the extra cold winter we had.  Evangeline is quite attractive, with its unusual purple pigmented leaves, and colorful flowers.  It is also sweeter than earlier bred sweet potato varieties.  Sweet potato is related to the infamous morning glory weed, so it is not surprising that it has the ability to cover such a large ground area in a short time.  In late September, we expect to dig out another bumper crop of sweet potatoes.  This is about as good a garden crop as there is from the perspective of minimum input and maximum output.  The variety name, Evangeline, hearkens back to the poem by the same name, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and has a special connection to Louisiana, as explained in the Wikipedia article about the poem.

In the upper picture, you might have noticed that I have a row of beans, actually edible soybeans on the right side of the garden which the sweet potato vines are beginning to take over.  I will probably get my cane knife out, sharpen it, and do a quick slash cut down the row between the sweet potatoes and the soybeans.  I may have to do this a couple more times until the soybeans are mature enough to eat.  I wish I had planted a few more soybeans, now that I know they can be productive in Louisiana's intense summer heat.