to-SHEE-buh, Japanese, "We don't give a crap about our customers!"

Howdy. Yes Grandma (and other concerned parties), I’m still alive. The reason I haven’t written in the last month has nothing to do with your stance on beer. (Beer is “Anti-Grandma”) My absence from online life is actually due to a bad power supply on my Toshiba M35-X laptop. This part is evidently located on the main system board, which has been on back order for the last month. I wish I could say that Toshiba’s customer relations department has done everything possible to help me out and support their three-month-old product, but even online I’m a horrendous liar. They are worthless, incompetent saps! No one expressed any desire whatsoever to help in finding a temporary solution, and no one had any access to the parts people who could tell me when I might expect to have my computer back. After two weeks of daily calls to Toshiba and their authorized service center, I finally got through to someone who was able to tell me that the part was to be shipped on March 14, which happens to be tomorrow (and my birthday). We’ll see.

So, tonight finds me in the bayou. That’s right, Cajun country. The first night I was here, I ate two pounds of crawfish and a half-pound of shrimp. Beautiful. I’m staying in Galliano, Louisiana, a town situated on either side of a canal that runs 25 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. There are three North-South roads, one on the east of the canal, and two on the west. Every couple miles there is a drawbridge crossing the canal and linking one side of town to the other. People around here wait for barges and shrimp boats like people in Kansas wait for trains.

Flying around here is fascinating! On the way down from Athens, I filed my flight plan so as not to fly over the large lake north of New Orleans because I’d rather not over-fly large bodies of water if avoidable. The controllers asked why I was taking the route I had chosen, and when I told them, they all but laughed at me on the radio. After I passed New Orleans to the south, I saw all the swampland and realized that the whole place was water. Then I understood why the controllers had thought I was ridiculous. Even what looked like solid ground from the air was mostly just junk growing on top of the water.

The network of canals is laid out like a diabolical aquatic maze and somehow I doubt there are “road” signs out there. I found out from Jeff, the airport manager, that the reason there are so many dead ends has to do with the oil drilling that is so prevalent down here. I guess that when they cut through the swamp to drill a well, they leave a canal behind.

Occasionally, I see an isolated shack hidden deep in the bayou. My curiosity and imagination go wild! Who in the world lives there? Why? Is that the Toshiba Parts Department?

I’ve got to get the computer back to my boss now. I can’t wait to call Toshiba tomorrow and find out if the part actually shipped or if I’m going to have to buy a Dell and sell the lemon on E-Bay.