Hope again for New Orleans, Bad for Bay St. Louis?

Katrina appears to maybe making a little jog north towards the mouth of the river. When a hurricane begins to make landfall, they tend to crook ever so slightly right. Maybe Camille ver 2.0? Each mile east... is good news for us... but of course bad news for our friends in Southern MS. In fact, a heck of a lot of ex-pat New Orleanians live in Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis.

Don't get me wrong - New Orleans is NOT out of the woods. We are just trying to find even a piss of good news for us - which as everyone probably knows by now, is the worst case scenario for a Cat 5 striking the US.

Currently light drizzle and winds that you couldn't even fill up a sail with... but we can see the bands that are in our near future.

Almost finished with boarding up... damn close. Beginning to jury rig defenses using incredibly heavy sugar pots to add weight to the doors. We're laughing though... none of us know what's heavy enough that 165 mph winds can't move... My parents went through Betsy back in 1965. They were actually at a hurricane party in the quarter when a wall collapsed down into a courtyard killing a dog. Luckily it was only a bedroom wall where they were storing coats.

I'm not making light of any of this. With the stress that we're under and the little pieces of good news that we get which are suddenly an hour later quashed... even before the storm has hit we're getting a little punch drunk.

Just heard from my friend Robert. He left New Orleans at noon and is now seven hours later finally approaching Jackson, MS - it's normally a three hour drive.

The Ship Channel near Shell Beach is reporting massive whitewater. This is a fairly protected waterway.

Heard that oil futures have already topped $70 in markets that are opening for Monday morning.

Reports are that cars are beginning to run out of gas all along the interstate. North of New Orleans there is nothing but rural areas until Jackson. By the time Katrina is sitting over say Amite, LA or Brookhaven, MS -- she'll still be a Cat 4.

More later... oh yeah, there was a funny report about someone passing by a house down south of the river, where the owner had put his lawnmower up on blocks and covered it with a tarp...