Umm... wow?

Things have been crazy around here for the past month or so - at least from my perspective. Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area, but it threw the hotel into chaos. Our reservation system sunce then has been unreliable, giving inaccurate availability data for practically every day since then. We've been doing manual room counts every day, making sure we have enough rooms for everyone that was already here and for those who had reservations. FEMA and Red Cross set up a program to pay for the first 14 days of hotel charges for those affected by Katrina, which is great both from our perspective and from the guests's. Helped to lighten a lot of moods around here.

Then Rita hit, and things weren't so peachy keen. My sister came up to stay with us to avoid power outages - when Lily went through Lafayette a couple of years ago, they didn't have power for a week. Bridget told me she was coming and I said, "Yeah, great. (pause) Oh, wait." My sister has 4 kids, all under the age of 4. Ages 3, 2, 1, and 2 months, to be exact. That was going to be tumultuous, I could already tell.

Rita hit, and we lots power, at the hotel and at our house. The hotel rented a generator, thankfully, to run our computer system, and the power was only out for about 14 hours. The city actually turned off the power at 4am to avoid live downed lines in any areas. Pretty smart, I think. We still had a lot of irate guests, especially when our cable system didn't come up until the next day. People wanted to see what their homes, or at least their home area, looked like, and couldn't.

Power wasn't restored at our house until Tuesday afternoon. We spent the weekend at a friend's apartment and cancelled class Tuesday night to clean up the fridge and resulting mess from leaving a vacant house for several days. My sister wen home on Sunday - their power had been restored Saturday afternoon. The kids were wonderful, when the 1-year old wasn't screaming.

In other news... I will likely be closing the karate school. Attendance, and thus fees, has been attrocious. I've been paying out of pocket for a few months now. This was why we moved to a whole new location a year ago, for cheaper rent that my student base could better support, and for no utility fees. Now, I often sit through empty class periods before anyone shows up. I don't need this stress, and I don't need this money sink. I've talked thinsg over with Charlie, and I'm going to restructure to a less commercial enterprise - so I suppose "closing" is a misnomer. I want to move to a less formalized environment, one where I don't need to worry about paying hundreds of dollars a month in rent and thus don't need to worry about my student base. I'll keep a few of my adult students, and that'll be about it. Problem is finding a location. Some place that would be willing to take us in for a percentage of my student income would be perfect - then I could just charge like $10 a month and not care about anything else.

In still other news, I saw Serenity last night, and greatly enjoyed it. I would highly reccomend people watch the Firefly series first, just to get acclimated with the characters first. It isn't neccessary, but it will definitely help. Great action, great comedy, just an all around good movie. I'll probably go see it again.

In further other news, Bridget got paid! <singing>We're in the money! We're in the money</singing> But seriously, if you see me attempting to splurge, STOP ME.