My heart is sad from to much CNN watching today. While my New Orleans friends and family are 95 percent accounted for, the devestation has hit me deeper than I expected it would. While grocery shopping I found myself grabbing battery packs off the shelves in large quantities today; pulling flashlights out of cabinets to make sure they were there; doubling our bottled water stash. I walk away from the tv (and am grateful for the first time that the office tv broke several months ago and hasn't been replaced), but then find I'm refreshing the same news links on my pc trying to find the most current news.

I keep trying to find a scale to measure it all against, and feel as if I'm weighing elephants with a kitchen scale.

Where do these people go? If they are lucky enough to survive the shelter that is now more of a refuge camp, the rampant looting, the car jackings. The majority of people who are stranded in New Orleans are there because they have no means to get somewhere else, even if they have a somewhere else to go. What will they eat? Where will they find shelter?

There are over a hundred thousand people in New Orleans alone who will be months without homes. (And I do not mean to focus on New Orleans, but it is the only city I have personal ties to of the many communities effected.) Many of these people assuredly did not have any form of hurricane insurance. If they escaped with their lives, and possibly the lives of those they loved, that is all they will have to call their own for many days to come.

Sad doesn't begin to cover it. To say I am devestated would make a mockery of the people who truly *are* devestated. But my heart weeps for them, and their loss.