It's Monday, and I have one thing to remember above all else--get the trash up to the road this evening. Otherwise, I'll be wrestling it there in the fairly early morning, dressed in go-into-New-Orleans clothes.

That's done--I did it just after I finished feeding the assorted beasts, so it had the cans from their dinners in it. No "bonus bag" of tossed out papers--I just didn't get around to that this week. I'm still looking at the new-found space appearing on my bookshelves and trying to decide how to rearrange my books in a more logical manner. I can almost always find the book I'm looking for, so it's not something urgent. But, as I pull books for which I can foresee no need, the spaces appear. Actually, it's more like the stacks of books on the shelves are getting a bit lower.

Other than cleaning cat boxes and some general tidying I didn't do much of anything this morning. But I made up for it (sort 0f) this afternoon. I had a late lunch at Arby's while I read a new (to me--it was written in the late 60s) book about the early Neolithic period in the Middle East. This is by the guy who did the first excavations at Çatal Hüyük. I like the way he writes because he says something like "the artifacts show that such and such did (or did not) happen, BECAUSE"---and then explains how he arrived at his particular interpretation.

When I finished at Arby's I shifted my base of operations to PJ's and ran into some of the "old crowd" there. Little by little the "regulars" are drifting in. The PJ's out by the interstate that everybody went to right after Katrina just doesn't have the same atmosphere as this one. And the owners are greeting everybody by name and catching up on the last six months.

Tomorrow is a "work" day and that's something to look forward to. It also means that I need to pay attention to what roads are going to be closed or restricted when, and whether fog is a morning possibility. Thank goodness my arrival time is not critical, like it is when I'm teaching! The road situation is the same on the old bridge--from 8 AM to 6 PM it has a one-way stretch that the cops control. But the westbound stretch of I-10 will be one lane for several more days while highway inspectors inspect the "temporary" panels that were used for repair. I keep an emergency book in the car for when I'm waiting for my lane's turn to move. It's just one more aspect of the New Normal.

I need to watch the LSU women to see if they, too, make it to the Final Four. I think they said that only seven times has a school had teams in both the men's and women's Final Four the same year. Normally I don't particularly root for LSU, but after all, it's Louisiana and it's nice to have something upbeat.