Five Years After Katrina

Old French Quarter Balcony New Orleans by figstreetstudio
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I was in the Great Smoky Mountains a place I visit now days during most of hurricane season and decided to head home for the five year anniversary of Katrina. Programs, news, and friends all were going to discuss where we are now. Personally the storm made many changes to my family. People are displaced, in new cities, in new homes. Just my two daughters have braved it back and bought flooded homes to fix up. Yes, to fix up because the effects of the flood are still around and both homes still need repair. One big thing was the sinking of foundations. Both my daughter and son had to have their houses shored and leveled 4 years after the flood. I am not sure why or how the ground was affected but it is so common now here in post Katrina New Orleans. Trees died, were removed so I think the roots died too. Ground water must have changed, and I am sure just plain rot of the old foundations occurred. That is another high expense that no insurance covers.
One daughter bought a house in Mid-City that one apartment was not repaired since Katrina. It had mold behind the wall paper, electrical and plumbing problems, and a lot of rot. She fixed it up the best she could and it now looks nice, before repairs it would have been impossible to live in yet the old owner tried to rent it out? So we make progress even if it is slow and in fits and spurts.
Me, I stayed in my cabin in the woods on the North Shore. I still cut,and remove broken trees and branches each day. Only about half of my two acres are cleared from Katrina debris. I get a lot of exercise though. The barn is falling down, too costly to repair. No tin on the roof and I would need heavy equipment to tear it down. It can wait to whenever. Everything stored in it got ruined and most is still sitting there until whenever. I always have had plans for a pond, plant grapes, or some goats and chickens but that is again whenever. Still there isn't enough time to get the repairs needed just from that one storm. Helping family, painting, work are still the priority and cutting trees or cleaning out a falling down barn is rated low on the list.
If you want to help and do not have time to put on work clothes and help cut trees and burn branches or clean out an old barn, just buy some of my art. I try to live off the income it generates but with the economy faltering art sales are a slow go.
I paint, do graphic designs and try my best to sell them on the web at my Fig Street Studio web page http://www.figstreet.com/studio. I also have shops at Cafe Press, http://www.cafepress.com/figstreetstudio and Zazzle, http://www.zazzle.com/figstreetstudio*. Both shops have lots of neat stuff from an old New Orleans artist. Christmas cards and ornaments, prints, invitations, t-shirts, fridge magnets, great gifts that help me out when you buy them. Things from $3.00 to $300 so they fit in every budget. Stop in and look around. This Christmas use one of my many Christmas Cards with New Orleans art, it helps me pay my bills. get a porcelain Christmas Ornament, or buy a print. And I have some of the funniest t-shirts available. Now go visit my shops and tell all your friends.

Interstate Enforcement of Child Support Orders, 37 Am Jur Trials 639 (1988)

In 1988 I had published in the American Jurisprudence Trails by The Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing Co. of Rochester, NY an article about interstate enforcement of child support orders. The article now over 20 years old is dated, we have come a long way since then. I mention it here because it is difficult to find that article. I had some re-prints available I gave out back then but those are gone. I did the article from the many years of work I did as head of the Child Support Division of the New Orleans District Attorney's Office. Basically we went from nothing to a large operation obtaining child support for the many kids in Orleans Parish whose fathers failed to pay support letting the tax payer through welfare raise their kids. I have many war stories from those days but basically lets say the attitude of the fathers were let welfare pay for my child as they have done in the past. The change in making them support what they created took a while to take hold. I was surprised to discover we had about 20,000 children on welfare whose fathers were missing or failed to pay support. The other surprise was the number of illegitimate children. So we had to create a process of going to civil court to get a determination as to who was the biological father of the child. In many cases the man denied paternity like you watch on the Maury Show. We began the use of the paternity test way back then. After proving who was the daddy we then were able to get an order making the father support his child. Being away from it these many years I am not sure what the current numbers of children with fathers who are missing but I assume by doing the work we did back then the numbers have fallen a lot. It would be interesting to me to see how what I worked on to help create is doing these days.