Greetings from New Orleans! I’m here for a few days of corporate meetings followed by a day and a half of leisure. A perfect opportunity to hopefully meet in person the esteemed, all-knowing and all-powerful bodhisattva of CrabAppleLane Blog, my friend Rob. And, an opportunity to see how my friend Rock is hanging in there with his lock business almost two years after the post-Katrina floods.

Every time I return here, it feels like I’m back home again. It’s not just a New Orleans thing – it’s more a Mississippi River and southern Louisiana thing, I think. I come down here, and I automatically feel myself breathing and drinking in both a different kind of atmosphere and a culture – for both good and bad – that touches me deeply. My whole body feels alive, my mindset returns to some different yet familair time and place, and I feel more like myself than I do anywhere else I’ve ever been – and that includes my home in New England. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say that there was some kind of prior life experienced down here. But I don’t, so I content myself with keeping up to date with things down here via the Metroblogging New Orleans and Voodoo Cafe at TheMountainSplash website, making occasional calls to Rock, and trying to get down to the Gulf Coast as much as possible to renew as many acquaintences as I can in the little time I always have here.