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STILL (Almost) For Sale
Christmas 2007 update
We have officially moved to Baltimore now; as our house in New Orleans is not yet for sale, we are renting a small house in a quiet area of Baltimore near Johns Hopkins University. Chuck drove a truck with a portion of our furniture up here in late November, and while we miss our lovely New Orleans house quite a lot, we are slowly acclimating to the Baltimore environment (it snowed in early December!) There are still many parts of the city we haven’t seen and others we are looking forward to exploring further, like Hampden, a working class neighborhood not far from us which features restaurants and shops exactly like those in John Waters’ movies- because they ARE exactly those restaurants and shops.
Chuck is commuting to DC three to four times a week to work at the National Gallery as a consultant on a conservation database design project for them, and is also still working part time at the Historic New Orleans collection. Iris is slowly acquiring all of the affiliations, permissions, and magnetic stripes to be a tenured full professor at the University of Maryland Med School. Lianna is at Tulane as a freshman and also working part-time at an Italian restaurant and pizzeria to stretch her college dollars; and Alex is a junior at Ithaca College. We are all spending Christmas together in our New Orleans house, together with Iris’s mother who flew in from California.
We often feel that we are in a Talking Heads song- how did we get here? is this our beautiful house? (the one a thousand miles away from our jobs…). People think that Katrina was so long ago that surely two years is enough to fully recover, but in fact our recent move was largely precipitated by the realization that Iris simply could not do science at LSUHSC anymore. Her last grant application there was denied mainly because of the lack of institutional support; and the international postdocs she requires to carry out the research programs also consistently lacked interest in moving there. This widespread lack of understanding of the long-term ramifications of disaster makes going back to NOLA oddly comforting. At least here everyone knows what Katrina meant- and many, many people went through much worse than we did, and are still struggling. But in general there is an optimistic spirit in the city, and the effects of the billions of dollars in rebuilding aid have resulted in large state surpluses, which- it is hoped- the new governor will put to good use. People here are confident that New Orleans will eventually- on a glacial, Southern, timescale- be rebuilt better and stronger- if only the city can get a handle on crime. The schools are better, wages are better, and more and more housing is available every day. It is the crime situation which still makes people want to leave; and it is the accumulation of interesting people from all over the world which makes people want to stay/ return. The population is now at 300,000 and will probably not rise too much further. We are sad that we will miss Mardi Gras this year- last year in the Marigny was terrific.
In August Iris and Chuck went to California and spent a delightful week in the mountains with old friends Alan and Sue and Albert and Cookie (Susan to you!) at the cabin that Alan and Sue co-own in Pinecrest. It was great!
Iris and Alan relaxin (left). Kids still play Badminton (right).
In November Iris and Lianna joined Silvia Lindberg at a gigantic Alemann family reunion in Buenos Aires. Iris met a few cousins she had never met before and Lianna met a few hundred relatives she had never met before. While there they stayed with Iris' cousin Roxanna and her husband Jean-Louis. They were joined by one of Lianna's German cousins, Hillja.
So, in 2008 we hope to buy a house, move our furniture and completely relocate to Baltimore, and end this schizophrenic phase of our life. Our email addresses are linked below; write if you would like our temporary address in Baltimore, or use Iris’ work address at the University of Maryland.
Click here to email Iris at UMB
Click here to email Iris at Yahoo
