OK, picture me as a fat man in overalls sitting on a fence and picking a banjo (since I haven't gotten very far on my ukelele yet):

Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excess of misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony on meeeeeeee.

This is just what we needed, the giant whirling cherry on the stinking sundae of an almost incomprehensibly shitty fortnight. We have never evacuated for a hurricane and probably never will. This isn't bravado; it's just due to the logistical impossibility of evacuating 28 animals, some of whom are uncatchably feral, and I have no intention of holing up somewhere safe and dry while the animals cower in terror and go hungry. Besides, we couldn't evacuate this time even if we wanted to; we're contractually prevented from taking our cheapo rental car more than 25 miles from New Orleans.

I'll finish reading through the Soul Kitchen manuscript today and try to get all my line edits, at least, done by Sunday night so I can e-mail it to my agent. If we are all washed away or drowned under thirty feet of toxic sludge, at least the book will be turned in.