My life has been a hectic mess for the past few months so the appearance of Hurricane Isaac in the Gulf of Mexico barely registered a blip on the screen with me. I simply did not give a damn.

This is too much information but, what the Hell? My fabulous, sexy, wonderful ( I know this now) guitar hero husband, Andrew Fox (see image at right as proof) and I hit a major bump in the road (really something more like the San Andreas fault) a few months back and we split up after 12 years together. Our unexpected reconciliation began a few days before it became clear that Isaac would be paying us a visit so we embraced the opportunity to loaf around with no power, our five dogs (I know, I know), plenty of candles and a battery-operated sound dock for the I-pods.

A real man and a manly one at that, Andrew is a contractor. After boarding up and securing dozens of his clients' homes, he returned to his own home to do absolutely nothing by way of preparation save for gassing up the generators so we could save the reefer (refrigerator) and picking up potential projectiles in the yard. As the 'cane blasted in we greeted it by opening up the big, glass French doors that line the back of our house and open onto a covered porch. We just sat there and watched it blow and go for two days, tossing down towels from time to time to collect wind-driven rain. When the urge to explore struck, we took walks along the Mississippi River or through nearby Audubon Park in the 100-mile-an hour winds, downing the occasional lukewarm beer, some of which were thrust upon us by perfect strangers we encountered on our journeys because that's just what people tend to do when hurricanes visit.

Last Wednesday night we decided we were sick to death of beer, chocolate and takeout poor boys from Cooter Brown's (which I do not think ever closed) and I decided to cook dinner. Most of the ingredients needed for Panang Curry were hanging around so that's what I cooked up on our gas stove by way of candlelight and a rechargeable snake lamp in the middle of the pitch black night. Ordinarily I would serve such a dish with a bottle of fruity Vouvray but beggars can't be choosers so we washed it down with Ravenswood Merlot and were no worse off for the experience.