Hey guys! Hopefully now I can actually be around this year. Obviously the rest of the '05 season was a blur and then last hurricane season I was knee deep for most of it re-building the house and THANKFULLY it was quiet!! Here's a little update as to how things are going:

Well after a miserable 18 months, things are finally looking up. Most of the work to my house is done (we moved back in on June 22, 2006) and have spent a lot of time gardening, replacing things outside for the kids, re-soding the lawn and things of that nature since then. We're acutally back into a livable routine and have probably 60% of the people back on our street. Still the damage is done.......we just finally got Burger King and Popeye's and McDonald's has been open the longest about 5 months now I guess. Still, other than that and local mom and pop restaurants that's the bulk of the business that has returned. Home Depot came back of course, and is making about $1 million a day! No Wal-Mart, no Sears, no K-Mart, nothing like that.....they've all deserted us. It make things a little harder, but mostly depressing. Now on to the good news. I'd say roughly 22,000-25,000 of the 67,000 residents here in St. Bernard are back for good. Another 5,000-10,000 are probably working on their homes and living eslewhere for now. I think we will be back to around 50% of the pre-Katrina population by the two year mark. It would be even faster if the state could get the money to the people. The school enrollment is amazing.

Pre-Katrina: 8,800
Re-opened AMAZINGLY in November 2005 only 11 weeks after Katrina: 334
December 2005: 640
February 2006: 1700
May 2006: 2350
August 2006: 3000+

There are now some 3,800 students back and they fully expect 4,500 to 5,000 by the opening of the 2007-08 school year in August. The super of the schools, a lady that was there when I was in school won the JFK Profiles in Courage Award for basically telling FEMA to go fly a kite and getting a school open 11 weeks after it was under 11 feet of water from Katrina. My daughter goes to elementary school in a high school campus with 68 classrooms that weren't enough. They added 9 trailers with 8 classrooms each and they have 2,100 kids there. It's really heart-warming the school situation.

Anyway, enough of my rambling about stuff most of you all don't care about anyway! Maybe if anyone gives a hoot I will post the video of the re-building of my home. It's pretty cool, and goes from what it looked like when we pulled up for the first time to the re-building stage, to what it looks like now. I just need to figure out how to compress it!!

Hope to see you guys a lot on here this season talking about how no one is in DANGER AT ALL!!!