I think I know a little bit better now what it felt like for a lot of people not in New York four years ago at nearly this time. It feels wrong for anything to be normal around here when so much misery is being inflicted on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. The governor of Louisiana is now saying the Superdome will have to be evacuated. There's upward of a thousand people sitting on rooftops, waiting for rescue by helicopter or boat. The Army Corps of Engineers is still getting the equipment in place to try to fix the busted levee.

School in Jefferson Parish may start again in a few months, they're saying, although I would bet that nobody really knows enough to make those kind of predictions.

Nothing feels normal to me here today, and it's a bit weird that I'm the only obsessed one in my office. It's strange -- as a relatively rootless "Navy Brat" who never contemplated as an adult moving anywhere south of the Virginia college I attended, I never expected to feel so attached to that part of the country.

But then, the Big Easy is pretty hard not to love, and I've been there often enough in the last few years to be sure of that...

By the way, if you're looking for more detail than the big summary stories in the national media, WWL in New Orleans has been running a pretty informative blog, updating key points of information as they come in.