atlanta and beer and new orleans

I am currently sitting the 5 Seasons brewpub in Atlanta. They have a neat little "living room" area with a few couches and tables, so I get to hang out, drink an interesting Abbey Brown-style ale, eat flourless chocolate cake and blog. It's a good life.

I spent last week in Atlanta, flew home on Friday, got to see D for less than three days, worked in the garden and flew back here yesterday. My brother is also working in Atlanta regularly, so he and I had dinner together last night, which was a lot of fun. He made my laugh so hard my drink (water thankfully!) came out my nose. What's a brother for? :)

Today was spent in the "Preparing for Work Overseas" course. Three days of listening to people talk at us about how not to be stupid when you work abroad. We're learning such useful things as:
no, you don't have diplomatic immunity and can't go around picking fights with people
driving in developing countries is dangerous
don't drink unboiled/unbottled water
get vaccinated
submit all your paperwork and make sure the embassy knows where you are
the bush administration has taken bureaucracy and paperwork to a whole new level
don't go anywhere without your travel orders
and so on and so forth.

So far, I haven't really learned anything new. Tomorrow we get taught what to do if you're kidnapped, etc. Maybe that will be more helpful.

And on to other completely unrelated topics. I was looking through some of my Katrina photos in preparation for a talk I'm giving. I thought I'd post a few just for fun. Enjoy!


This was my bunk when we were staying on the USS Iwo Jima. It required some very interesting contortions to get into every night. And don't try to move around much once you're there!




Shrub, our dear president, visiting a couple of times when we were on the Iwo Jima. This is the banner they hung up in preparation for his visit. I think I had to read it three or four times before I really believed what it said.




People in New Orleans wrote all kinds of messages before, during and after Katrina. Most were akin to "You loot, we shoot," but there were many other more original ones. This was probably the most interesting one we found. We drove by it every day on our way to the hospital that served as our "office."




We were in the rather unique position of being in New Orleans when it was largely evacuated. This is a picture of Bourbon Street at night. The lights are the flash reflecting off of street signs.





But there was one bar that stayed open the entire time, Johnny White's. Being the wonderful investigative epidemiologists we are, we managed to track it down and do a little "disease surveillance." Less than two weeks after these two pictures were taken, Bourbon Street was basically back to normal.