It happened

That job came through. It's a temporary assignment working with a government agency in the Gulf Coast.

Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, a thousand pictures could not tell the story of the destruction. You drive along I-10 near New Orleans and see mile after mile of water lines left on buildings. You see a Toyota dealership with a lot full of cars, all of them sitting under a blanket of brown. The water has receded but the mud damage remains.

They'll need an army of bulldozers for much of what remains standing in some places. In others they can just let it rot. No one's coming back. In southwesteren Louisiana Hurricane Rita wiped entire towns off the earth. That's not a metaphor. At least one town in Cameron Parish simply disappeared.

In some, if not all, of the southernmost parishes you have to pass roadblocks to get in. We have FEMA badges which should gain us admission.

That's if we ever work around the roadblocks we deal with inside the messed up wad of mud known as our government.

These freaking bureaucrats are trying to drive me crazy and, so far, they're succeeding. It's amazing that there really is a culture in which people don't have to produce results if they produce enough paperwork. They can spend all day in cubicles and conference rooms and think that they've done "work." They care more about scoring political points than accomplishing any real good. Any benefits to actual victims come as an occasional by-product.

It's almost as sad as the destruction. They both can beat down your spirit until it snaps. I'm not there yet but I'm closer than I want to be and I've been here less than a week.

I take it one day at a time. One $400 day at a time. Otherwise I'd flip.