Hello Mary Lu

Tonight about 25 minutes ahead of schedule Hurricane Rita came inland about at 2:30 AM (Central Time), 5 miles east of Sabine Pass on the state border of Texas and Louisiana. Rita hit land with winds in excess of 120 mph (CAT 3) pushing a storm surge of 20 feet or more, and was moving northwest at 12 mph.

As of 6:25 AM the Lake Charles, LA weather radar went out due to a power failure.

Over in New Orlean's the rain has compounded the situation and there are several places where the river has overflowed the retaining walls.

auryn24 AKA Elizabeth “Liz” Welch is a registered nurse who worked the entire Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orlean's Methodist Hospital. Over the last couple weeks Liz has shared her thoughts and feeling as to what really happened inside the hospital before, during and after the hurricane. She has also shared her thoughts on her own personal recovery from "caregivers trama." Her story is being picked up by the news finally.

For 7 days she and her co-workers at Methodist did everything humanly possible to protect and care for their patients, her co-workers and even the patient's family members. Her personal dedication to her patients, under the worst of conditions comes through her story. While Liz doesn't think she's a hero. She and the entire staff at Methodist are hero's. Despite the fact she's still overcoming the shock of the event, there is still a real nurse inside there... "We did what we did. We did what we could do.”

It was about 5 PM and I was at Petco buying foot for Andy and Teddy, when the cell phone rang. It was Pam, my girlfriend in LA who lives near LAX. She wanted to know if I'd seen the news-- which wasn't likely since Doug and I had been out for about 2 hours running errands. While I finished shopping for the boys, she brought me up to date on a problem with Jet Blue Flight 292. It appeared that the landing gear had flipped 90 degrees around and was hanging sideways off the nose of the plane. Within minutes everyone in the store was talking about it, like a real life blog. Doug was picking up the news from the other people, I was talking to Pam.

Having grown up with a few pilots in my family, as well as fire and rescue people, I knew if there was any place that could handle the emergency, it was LAX. So we finished shopping and hit the road for home with the radio on KABC 790AM. About 1 minute into the trip Al Rantel comes on to announce that the plane had landed safely and all 145 passengers and crew were fine. Thank God.

When we got home the local news in LA, who normally treats a freeway car chase with more coverage than a political campaign, was giving us the instant replay in nearly every imaginable camera angle of the landing, while they waited for the plane to unload the passengers and crew on the tarmac to the awaiting buses.

As a someone who's watched more plane land and take off in my lifetime than most traffic controllers have, the pilot did a stellar professional job. He used what was left of the front landing gear to act as a ski, and flared the tail of the plane to take the brunt of the landing and slowed the plane in a perfectly controlled landing. Congradulations Captain and your Co-pilot. I'd be honored to fly on your aircraft anytime.

The wierd thing is the passengers via Jet Blue's in-cabin television system got to watch a good portion of their flight making the news. Talk about being wierd.

It looks like the guys over at DirectNIC are going to ride out Rita from the comfort of their well tested bunker in New Orleans. Mike's doing an excellent job of reporting and photographing the proceedings.


Vandenburg Evening Launch
Brian Webb over at SpaceArchive has notified me that our good folks at Vandenburg AF Base, CA will be hosting a rare evening (dusk) launch next Thuesday Sept 22. between 19:24-19:40 PM. For those of you who have never seen an evening launch, they are pretty impressive to see. Viewing can be seen as far away as the Southern California coast, Arizona and Nevada. I've been very lucky to photograph several. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend you check out his website and sign up for the email newsletter.

Yes folks, I'm back to blogging again after a long sabbitical which was not of my choosing. While I was not blogging, I was reading and surfing through all your weblogs. It kept me sane. As for what I was doing during my sabbitical isn't important at the moment, I'll talk more about that later. However I do have a question which I need an answer...

Does anyone have a clue how to get a RADIO weblog converted or imported to a Blogger or Typepad weblog? Feel free to email me at my new weblog email addy hellomarylu AT gmail dot com.