In what was perhaps the longest labor day weekend of my life, I:

- evacuated Baton Rouge
- sheltered from Gustav back home
- celebrated a cheerful, subdued birthday with my family
- stressed out about my job, my apartment, and my friends, all of whom have been adversely affected by the storm
- picked up a lot of storm debris

My family came through the storm well. The house suffered no damage, only a few trees down in the yard, and – we never lost electrical power – a hurricane first in my lifetime.

As to my room in Baton Rouge, well, I know it has very little to no damage although power is out and may be out for a few more days (weeks?). Hopefully the girls are taking it in stride, as I have no way of knowing since I can’t reach them by phone. I know they are safe, but that is all.

I’m off of work till Monday, which means I’ll have to take vacation or lose wages, neither of which I really want to do. Sitting around here in L-town hasn’t been a blast either, but I’m trying to keep my morale up by reminding myself how lucky I am to have hot food, a shower, gas, and electric lights.

One thing I haven’t mentioned on this blog is that I haven’t been playing any guitar for about a month now because I sort of hurt my hand at work and then practiced too much until I was having some hand pain just sitting around doing nothing. I stopped playing completely for four weeks starting when I went to Chicago (another thing I haven’t blogged about) until now. I tried to play a bit yesterday and guess what? Still painful. I think I may have some kind of tendonitis.

Related to the no-playing issue is my shoulder which I’ve dislocated a few times and which has been hurting recently. I need to go to the doctor to get it checked out, and I have a feeling that it may have something to do with my hand pain as well – like maybe some tendons are messed up or something.

It’s coming up on a year since the awful car crash that messed me up for months this time last year, so I’m not thrilled about having doctor issues popping up right now. Fortunately, these are manageable, treatable problems, pretty small beans in the big picture. But I just needed to complain to the internet about them.

So, despite my birthday, this has been (for me and everyone I know), a really stressful couple of days. My housing situation in power-less BR is unknown, I’m missing wages, I can’t play music (#1 pastime), I’m worried about my friends, and my shoulder hurts!

But I’m safe with my family, I have food, water, shelter, and creature comforts. And I’m 24. Getting off to a rough start this year, but I’m much tougher than a few aches and pains and a hurricane.

PS – Misery loves company. I welcome complaints in the comments below, esp. hurricane related ones.

This entry was posted by jon on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.