Live from New Orleans: looks like we have a winner! It's a few blocks off St. Charles Avenue, quiet and lined with old trees. About a mile's walk or bike ride to the University. I'm on the second, main floor of a gorgeous old monster of a house, with some of the other five apartments taken by a Tulane med student, an Army Corps of Engineers engineer, a pair of Teach For America girls, and a law student. Looks pretty perfect. My department chair actually came on this visit with me because if I wasn't interested in it, he wanted to scout it for an incoming Islamist the department had hired, and he thought that it looked great from his own long knowledge of New Orleans apartments. So that was reassuring.


Getting the paperwork started on that got me out of the tedium of a few more scouting visits in this heat (90-ish, with 67% humidity, which the locals tell me is "a cool day"), after I had met some more of the faculty at a retirement party for a woman named Carol who I had met yesterday, and who had been running the Religious Studies office for 37 years, making her the senior member by far. I felt like I just sort of squeeked in right at the end of an era.

Now I'm killing a bit of time before going out to dinner with my chair, another prof, and the assistant Dean of my college this evening, up by the lake. Two nights dinners so far have included redfish in a sauce with nuts, raspberries and small shrimp at the College Inn on Carrollton, and then last night (with my chair and the chair of the Philosophy department) with a baked flounder (crawfish and andouille stuffing, corn, burdock, mushrooms, roast tomato vinaigrette) at a place in the Riverbend area called Dante's Kitchen. It's all pretty fab so far.