I'm feeling very Linda-Hamilton-in-the-Terminator-today...

And I know it's because of Katrina.

I know I said that I wasn't going to write about Katrina but having said that I am going to write about Katrina. Here's why:

I'm a mama's girl, big time. I call my elderly and ailing mom in Ohio every day. Vacation is no exception. She's been extremely anxious and fretful since the hurricane and the thought that the Big Man and I could be down in NO this week has caused her to have lots of stinking thinking. I've been trying to talk her down and calm her down, but it's been kind of hard looking for the silver lining in this damn cloud. The only thing I could come up with? It's a stretch but I think it's true.

Is Katrina a blessing in disguise?

Will Katrina be the reason this country finally gets its act together?

Dirty bombs? Bio-weapons? If our Islamic enemies succeed in plotting another attack on a major metropolitan area Katrina may be the only reason this country survives.

We better get our act together.

I tried floating this by my mother to see if she bought it. She didn't. She is still anxious. I hung up and went about my blog business - checking out all my favorites, getting my first hat tip and trackback, getting really excited about it. listening to the hurricane coverage up in my office and just sucking up band width in the process - all the tv's on, flipping back and forth between Fox, CNN, Msnbc, Laura Ingraham on the Patriot via the internet. I was rocking...

Then the power went out.
And you know what really ticked me off?
My first thought.

"Wouldn't this be a great time for a terror attack?"

I can't tell you how much the pisses me off.
You know why?
Because if it wasn't for Al Qaeda and OBL it would never have entered my mind.

It's kind of like when I discovered post 9/11 that because of terrorism concerns the West Branch Dam had been blocked off. I used to love walking across the top of that damn dam when I went to visit my mom. Now I can't and it really annoys me. I know that sounds like a small thing, but that's just the sharp point of it. It is a small thing in my small world and it's all because of that isolated desert derelict, OBL.

It didn't take long for me to start jonesing without power - I really missed all stimuli of the cable news din I surround myself with. Without that, my dog heard the big man walking around in the bedroom upstairs for the first time in his life. He growled.

The power stayed off. The house started to get warm and stuffy.

I kept thinking about how happy OBL would be taking out the power grid along the eastern seaboard. And I kept thinking about those poor people in New Orleans. The more I thought, the more freaked out I was about getting some information about the power outage.

The power stayed off.

I started thinking about my disaster plan.

My disaster plan was a disaster and I really should know better with my disaster street cred.

My first disaster experience was domestic and occurred when I was a teen-aged babysitter. I was babysitting one Saturday night when one of the neighbors got drunk, went off and started firing off random potshots. (He was a Vietnam vet.) I put kitchen pots and pans on all the kids heads and we made a serpentine run for safety to get out of the way til the sheriff came.(I was the only girl in a neighborhood full of boys, Barbie and war were the games I played.)

I went on to have hurricane experience. My brother was getting married in Florida when Hurricane Floyd passed through. My grandfather, an old sailor from the Merchant Marine, had been in a bad storm at sea once down around the Cape. He said it scared the liver out of him. The hurricane approached and he literally worried himself sick ending up hospitalized with an acute G I Bleed. He was too sick to be moved and we were marooned at the hospital much like some of those poor people in NOLA. I know it was the thought of going through another one that drained him of his life force. He was in emergency surgery when the storm hit and he died on the table. Then during Hurrican Hugo, my brother was seriously injured trying to escape Raleigh NC during Hurricane Hugo. His so-called girlfriend at the time called my mom and asked her to wire her some money via Western Union. My mom did. She took the money and took off. He was sick for a long time and still has scars, mental and physical.

Not having learned my disaster lesson, I went on to have earthquake experience. I was stuck on the 39th floor of the Bank of America building during the World Series earthquake. I watched the lights go out in Candlestick, the collapse of the Bay Bridge and the Marina when it burst into flames all from the comfort of my office. I walked down 39 floors and proceeded to shuttle 25 employees (6 at a time) to spend the night at my home out in the Mission because they had no place else to go. I was shell shocked for quite a while after that but that was nothing compared to 9/11.

During my days on Wall Street, the World Trade Center was my stomping ground. I used to attend Gambling Nights in the Presidential suite at the Vista Hotel. 7 WTC (the third 9/11 building to collapse) was the hq for my old firm, Salomon Brothers. Watching it collapse after 9/11 was life changing.

Which brings me back to my pitiful disaster plan. What a disgrace! The batteries were dead in the boombox and I didn't have replacements even if I cabbaged them from all the flashlights in the house. 2 out of 3 flashlights were dead.) I had lots of bottled water but I had no ready cash stashed and even worse, I had left the car's gas tanks dip way below the 1/2 tank mark. Important papers all in one place? No. Copies of insurance information? Good luck.

I would have been well and truly f(*&ed if Katrina AL Qaeda had struck again. I was totally unprepared.

The power stayed out. I fixed my lunch while missing my favorite soap opera. (I wasn't too happy about that either.) I had a peanut butter sandwich and thought about the news clip I'd seen showing two little kids sitting in the grass, being given what looked like a peanut butter sandwich after being rescued from the flood waters. Man.

The power stayed out and the Big Man got ready to drive up to Stamford Ct (biz meeting - so much for our vacation.) He reminded me to keep the doors locked because a local homicidal maniac had escaped from the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and there was a BOLO alert for him in the neighborhood because he was from the neighboring town. This reminded me that the Mercer County Jail was located not too far up the river from our happy abode. I flashed on the sight of all those convicts lined up on the freeway ramp in New Orleans, forced to evacuate the jail due to flooding and now rumored to be among the rampaging looters.

Right then and there I resolved to start keeping a nice hunk of cash in the safe. I think I'm going to get a Glock and some ammo too, and keep that in the safe as well. I'm going to prepare a "go bag". I'm going to revisit my first aid kit to see what kind of shape it's in. I'm going to get a new radio - and batteries. I'm going to get important documents organized and I'm going to seriously pursue getting a portable generator because while I am going through this in my mind the power is still out. And I don't like it one bit. I am really feeling bad for those folks in NOLA.

But I'm still mad at OBL so I pull the car out of the garage and drive it up to the end of the driveway to pick up the XM signal and see if Al Qaeda had attacked the eastern seaboard.

He hadn't. Thank God.

The Big Man walks up from the house, gets in the car, cautions me about keeping the doors locked and drives off. I wave goodbye while fretting that we haven't definitively established our automatic meeting place in the event of nuclear holocaust.

The power was back on when I went back in.

The Big Man called from the car telling me he had seen a PGSE truck down at the end of the street doing some work.

I'm still thinking about getting a gun.