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January 01, 2007
Personal Update...
I didn't want to put a lot of personal stuff in the weekly streetcar newsletter, mainly because it's got a high circulation. Still, I thought an explanation of why I stopped producing the newsletter last February and am returning to it now warranted an explanation.
This hasn't been the easiest of years for any of us, to say the least. When I was producing the newsletter, I was trying to figure out how to resurrect my computer training business in a world where everyone was more concerned about remediating mold in their houses. About that time, I got an offer to do training for two companies, Hitachi Data Systems and EMC Corporation. The stuff I teach is on the high-end side (local and remote replication on large-frame storage systems). It's not the kind of stuff I can teach to folks who live in metro New Orleans, for a number of reasons. That meant I had to go on the road between two and four months a week. While that was great for our household income, it meant I wasn't around the area to take pictures and such. The sad part of that dilemma was that there was so little progress in terms of the restoration of the streetcar lines that it was difficult to come up come up with things to talk about.
The lack of progress really did a number on me. You see, I was more of a bus kid than a streetcar kid growing up. Carter-Lake Vista-Lakeshore-Veterans. That was my way home from Brother Martin High School to Metairie. Either that or Broad-Canal-Veterans. Driving through Lakeview and Gentilly to bring my boy to school each day last spring was painful. Seeing the amount of destruction in Gentilly just broke my heart. While the whining of hardcore Republican residents of Lakeview about how the Bush administration was screwing them was bittersweet irony, it still broke my heart to see the non-existent recovery of both neighborhoods.
So, I did my best to separate myself from the nightmare, and that's why the newsletter went on hiatus. The return of control of Congress to the Democrats is encouraging for New Orleans, in spite of the side show that is William Jefferson. Combine that with finally shaking off most of my post-storm funk and it's time to get back to business. Oh, and there's the story about the restaurants that my friiends and I bought in Metairie and Kenner in 2006, but we'll get there... :-)
And so we shall.
Posted by YatPundit at January 1, 2007 06:37 PM
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