AUSTIN, Texas, September 5, 2005 — It's a holiday, but what difference does that make to retired folks? Dad asked me yesterday if there would be water aerobics. It didn't even occur to me that there wouldn't be a class and there was. The teacher said she may be out Wednesday because she may be taking her daughter to Houston where they may get Tulane athletes enrolled in classes.

Before I went to class, I ordered a shirt that Jette designed in support of New Orleans. I hope to receive this and wear it while on my trip. I have designed stuff for my gifts in Cape Town on Cafe Press. I was thinking (before Katrina)

that we should start a 'friends' network. People could wear their Austin friend shirt or carry their Austin Friend tote bag in, say, Cape Town and people might ask them about going to Austin and make contacts through 'friends of friends.' After Katrina is seems a lot of the southern gulf coast needs a friend. By the way, all counties in Texas were declared a disaster area so that cities like Houston and Austin could recoup local funds that are being used to shelter the tens and tens of thousands of evacuees. I have now heard that they are flying people to shelters in Arizona.

After class I take a shower. I comment to the ladies in the locker room that I took a shower before working out because otherwise my skin itches from the chlorine. Can you imagine having been in the filthy flood waters and waiting days for a shower? Yikes.

I do fifteen minutes on the bike working up a sweat so I'll need another shower and do a few things like assisted chin ups and scapula squeezes and some ab and lower back stuff. Then I head home because I'm hungry. My friend SuRu is there using the computer but she rushes off and I have a salad with cold leftover salmon and drink some water and coffee. I turn on the tennis coverage.

I get a shower and turn on the tennis. SuRu gave me an old VCR and I rig it up to play in our back room. I try to fix it up to offload stuff from the DVR going so far as to go to A&B TV to get a cable, but that doesn't work. I take an old tape out of my office to try in the thing. I find myself flipping from an ancient match between Boris Becker and Brad Gilbert and the current tennis. Strange. I read and watch a bunch of tennis. I try to help with an effort to build a database of info from message boards about Katrina survivors. I doubt that I'm doing any good and when I claim one batch of data someone else comes behind me and claims it so that when I'm going to mark it done they have claimed it. Some people seem to be looking for people they lost track of long ago. "May have moved to New York. Haven't heard from in three years." Hmm.

So I lounge around the house eating and watching tennis and it's eleven in the evening before I know it. A lady has called and asked me to substitute in their casual tennis game tomorrow and Thursday. Why not? I don't seem to be doing a good job in the gym anyway. Might as well be playing tennis and doing water aerobics so I'll have an excuse.

Yeah, I was lazy today. But, um, it was a holiday.

FFP has been reading all this stuff on the Internet about the Katrina tragedy. I'm having trouble reading more about it. I'm such a wimp. What is something happened to me. Actually when things happen to me I do better because I focus on what I need to do and it's obvious what that is, often. When my mother was sick, when my dad's back hurt, when my sister had her aneurysm rupture. You know what others will do, what you should do and you can usually (after an effort) figure out what no one can control. With a national tragedy that affects so many others, your appropriate response is not so clear. Whatever you do you feel bad about it.

FFP found this news:

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush's visit to New Orleans, officials said. "We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won't let helicopters fly," O'Shea said Friday afternoon. The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.

We couldn't help but recall when Bush decided to hobnob at the American Cemetery in Normandy, locking down the whole region to traffic of any kind and making a bunch of elderly vets use fetid port-a-potties and run out of food and water while he fiddled around. We had been saying that he should stay out of the coastal areas where rescue was going on because we knew that security could interfere with normal stuff. As I said June a year ago, "Yeah, George, sometimes your actions have unintended consequences." He can take money away from the Corps of Engineers in Louisiana and rebuild utilities we or the insurgents blew up in Iraq. But there are always consequences. It's a huge game. Bush controls a lot of the Monopoly money. He can make colossal changes in our world. But there are consequences for everyone in their actions. And most are difficult to foresee. Every time I drive now I think about the gas I'm using. Not that I think I can't afford gas or that there will be shortages in the near future. No, I think of the cumulative results of my using gas, my choice of car. Just like when I bypass McDonald's and eat at Billy Burgers I think, "What if everyone ate at McDonald's as often as we do?" (Which is about once a year, if that. Which, if my calculations are correct and my guess as to the number of stores in the U.S. correct would give each store about sixteen visits a day.) Everyone doesn't behave the way I do. And every politician would make different decisions if in office with different possible consequences when the vagaries of nature are factored in. Some things you can't accurately predict. But, if the president hangs around an area, you can be sure that in today's post 9/11 world that the lives and work of ordinary people will be impinged on in unfortunate ways. So, George, go to Crawford and stay the hell away from the rest of us. You can make your bad decisions from there.