Sunday

If you pass by the grocery store to make groceries during a tropical storm, you must be in New Orleans.

The damncats are not happy with Tropical Storm Lee, now in its second day of rain and wind delivery to Laurel Street. The inside damncats have become bored and want to go outside, but when they get to the door and feel the rain blowing in, they turn around and go back for another hunkering-down session.

The outside damncats have hunkered down under the house. They occasionally come to the back porch which is on the north end of the house and more protected from the weather.

Neighborhood children have fared better. Yesterday during one of many lulls in the rain, there were several from two doors down who were playing the in puddles across the street at Wisner Playground and along the sidewalks. I thought to myself that I admired the parents who let them get out and enjoy the storm, just let kids be kids and make the most of what had come their way right on their own street.

The heaviest rain and wind came early Saturday morning. Water dripped through our house in several places, finding entry around a skylight in an upstairs bedroom and at a sloping roof’s juncture with a perpendicular wall. No surprises. Those places had both leaked during a heavy thunderstorm in July as well.

When weather permits, I’ll be sloshing around those two entry points with some type of expensive caulking which will be considerably less expensive than calling a roofer to repair it. I will probably end up buying the expensive caulk and then calling a roofer as well, my success rate at do-it-myself projects being what it is.

Yesterday — Saturday — the weather moguls were talking about the wind and rain moving out by today. Today, they are talking about another 30 to 40 hours. The problem is that there are no steering systems in the weather to move Lee along. It’s now waddling around just inshore near New Iberia. Now they are saying Lee is moving north-northwest at 3 miles per hour.

As tropical systems go, Lee is a minor event. It formed close to shore and never produced the 70 miles-an-hour winds that would have earned it hurricane status. Yet when you see the rain and wind that has continued for hours and over such a huge landscape and consider that this will keep up for some days, Lee is a huge weather system, now creating many problems for people in low-lying areas and likely to adversely impact harvests for farmers in Mississippi and Alabama later this week.

And one of Lee few anticipated benefits has not happened. Last week marsh fires east of New Orleans produced such smoke that when the wind brought it into the city, visibility was occasionally reduced from one side of the street to the other. People with breathing problems suffered especially from the oppressive, foul-smelling smoke.

When my wife first smelled it, she went upstairs to make sure it wasn’t our house and then walked up and down the street looking for its source until she learned that it was from the marshes near Lake Borgne.

Now, with all the rain that’s fallen you would think that those fires would have been extinguished, but it has not happened. According to the TV reports, the fires, though diminished, are still smoldering.