My webmaster is very kind to step in and shake the place up a little, and to add all of those colorful feeds. What is a feed? I don't know how to use them, only how to flaunt them. Does this mean you feed me, or that I feed you? What a lousy hostess I've been. Can we start over?

Nothing much is happening in New Orleans; the city looks just like it did after the levee breaks except that green grass has pushed through, and shrubs and flowers are blooming in spite of the brackish water that flooded their root systems for three weeks. Now we need rain.

Birds sing again in the trees, lucky birds.

The mid-city Save-A-Center reopened and they upgraded the store with hardwood floors and a big ass wine & flower section. Some of the neighborhood's restaurants are back, so we don't have to drive into Metairie to pick up Chinese food. Andrew walks in after school with a 16 oz. green apple snoball because Pandora's reopened and the line's long and eager. The Carrollton streetcar will roll by in time for Jazz Fest. What a fine, jangly sound that'll be.

I've been tutoring twice a week at a charter school. I work with two beautiful and gentle sisters - Keyola and Adrienne - who're in the sixth grade and don't know their multiplication tables, and a good-natured kid named Roland who reads haltingly but with gusto. His mother drives him in from a town that's 40 miles away. I'm afraid of not being able to help them learn what someone should've taught them three years ago. This city's a pile of old lies, apathy, unpunished crimes, sins against children.