I had to postpone my trip to NOLA but it's on again in the near future.

I have hugely impractical fantasies of writing and projects I want to do while there. Despite not having a laptop computer or easy internet access, I'm hoping to blog from there and make notes for some writing projects. I want to take tons of pictures despite not having a computer to offload the snapshots in the memory card to. I'd like to interview a few people, including Andrei Codrescu, Malik Rahim and people at the Common Ground Collective. These interviews ideas are mostly pie-in-the-sky things since I am fairly amateur at interviewing but more importantly I don't have a particular project in mind for the interviews. I know I wouldn't grant an interview with someone with no stated goal beyond posting it to a small personal blog. I might bring my microcassette recorder on the off chance I can wrangle an interview but I also have sooo many other things to do while down there visiting family for the first time since Katrina. I doubt I'll even get around to making tentative calls or emails to these folks.

One place I've been getting info on NOLA is a LiveJournal community called poor_planning. Lots of synopses of news stories and things like that. The statistics on NOLA are incredibly poor almost a year after Katrina. (Quote me at your own risk on these stats: some are from memory, others from Wikipedia on Katrina and New Orleans.)

• The population of New Orleans is less than half of what it was before Katrina. (2000 census: 485,000. July, 2006: 192,000 to 230,000.)
• The number of businesses is one sixth of pre-Katrina levels. (this is from memory.)
• The number of murders (22) in July, 2006 were the same the pre-Katrina averages since 2002 despite the dramatically reduced population.
• Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are very widespread.

I'd love to also spend some time helping Common Ground or another group in reconstruction work but I'm again doubtful I'll actually make contact. I'm mentioning these doubts to lower expectations. I have lots on my plate just preparing to go down there. Wish me luck.