First things first, though. As the summer and the presidential election bring us to thoughts of Hurricane Katrina again, perhaps a small lesson in American history is in order. While the residents of New Orleans and the surrounding areas continue to rebuild, on this day sixty years ago the residents of Vanport, Oregon, lost their city, and it was never rebuilt. Obviously Oregon has never been at much risk for hurricanes, but Vanport, a public housing city and the second largest city in Oregon at the time, was built close to the Columbia River. Dams were all that stopped the river from flooding the city, and government officials repeatedly told the residents of Vanport — which had one of the largest percentages of African-American residents of any Oregon city — that the dams would hold, and even if they broke, the damage wouldn’t be that bad. When it became clear that the damage was, in fact, that bad, it still took the government forever to get proper aid to the region. Does all of this sound familiar? The only silver lining in this whole episode was that there weren’t many people in the city at the time the dams broke because of the Memorial Day holiday, so only fifteen people wound up losing their lives. Again, thoguh, the city was never rebuilt. On that note, let’s play the friday5.org Friday Five.

1. What piece of information do you keep forgetting?
Nothing springs to mind here, but there’s a lot of fairly obvious stuff that I find myself, at times, unsure about. I’ve had to look up some pretty basic information on the Web just to reassure that I had something fairly simple straight in my mind.

2. What regular event in your life do you keep forgetting?
I haven’t been that good at remembering to replenish some foods and other staple items in the house after Dad died; I wasn’t used to buying some stuff, and I still haven’t really gotten into the habit of buying it when I need to.

3. How are you with remembering the names of people you meet?
Horrible. I’ve never been one for tying names to faces, and as a teacher, that poses a big problem for me in the classroom.

4. What kinds of tricks do you have for remembering to do stuff that falls outside your regular routine?
I’ve never been one for devising mnemonic devices, which may explain why I get so hooked on regular routines and why I have a hard time remebering to do stuff that falls outside of those routines.

5. If you keep a daily planner, what is it like? If you don’t, why not?
I don’t keep a daily planner because up until recently I’ve never had much need for one. I have started to use Google Calendar more over the past few months, though.