Noteworthy in Nola

Okay, so Gustav and Ike have both moved on, and while we keep our eye on the tropics and Texas in our minds, I want to pass something along that Charlie wrote in the 24 hours following Gustav.

Link: St. Louis Beacon

Well, in the end, we decided to stay home and not evacuate.

I waited for the 4pm weather update, hoping the worst of the traffic would let up. We had reservations in a Birmingham motel- 5 and a half hours to get to in the best of times, and I wasn’t too excited about doubling or tripling the travel time- with 2 dogs, 2 birds and 1 teen in the car, no less. So we waited a bit, hoping that either people would get where they were headed and off the road, or something about Gustav would change that would make leaving optional.

And that’s just what happened- since Gustav is weaker than expected, and since he’s aiming at other areas of the state, we decided to hunker down and go with the flow.

That flow arrived a little sooner than expected. A little after 6, Charlie called, yelling to bring the camera ASAP. The first big band of the hurricane was here-

On our brief tour through southwestern Louisiana, we stopped in Crowley while we waited for a crawfish place in the next town to open for dinner. Charlie actually would have liked to tour a rice farm and/or processing plant (it’s a guy thing), but there were no such immediately apparent establishments.

Instead, we just drove around. It’s a nice little town with some interesting touches.

This certainly got my attention more than a typical neighborhood watch sign.

The streetsigns are still in both English and French…

And then we ran into this odd car. Charlie got went to take a closer look, and saw the owner was sitting under his carpark, repairing his accessories. It’s something that was put together for a charity, and he drives in all the parades. He’s always accepting donations- both for the car and for the charity.

What most surprised me was a) How many commercially recognizable items there were (likely from Happy Meals and suchlike) and b) How many vaguely naughty ones there were. Ah well. I guess we all contribute our own unique talents.

We left behind $5 for the car and $5 for the charity. Click on the thumbnails for a closer look.

When we were on our road trip around the coast of Louisiana, we stopped into Rayne, a teeny tiny town that happened to lead to Hawk’s, a locally famous crawfish place in the middle of nowhere.

Along this country road was this cemetery- it, like everything else around, was pretty small, but as we passed by I wondered why there was a carport in the middle of the thing. Since it was still light when we came back through, we stopped for a bit.

Despite having only a few dozen graves, there were some really interesting things. They like their statues in Rayne, they do. Lots of them about. And several had quotes and such on them, something that doesn’t seem to happen much in New Orleans.

And there was certainly a sense of style. Take Gertrude Hamilton Johnston’s marker, complete with dog etchings:

A slideshow gallery follows after the jump with more, including the carport that originally caught our eye.

Read More…

Sorry for the silence, all…vacations, company & computer meltdowns have kept me all too occupied.

The good news is that there’s lots to go up on the site…the semi-bad news is that I’d better get to it asap because French Quarter Fest is this weekend and we have friends coming into town to have a great time. If I don’t do it before Friday I may kill so many brain cells that I forget what the hell it was I was going to post.

So here’s just a little something to start- a shot of a pelican taking off over City Park at sunset.

Okay, way behind here. I’ve still got Super Sunday photos from a week ago, not to mention Easter and that I’m going away to Cajun country this week for the first time, so that should be interesting.

Also, frankly, I’m feeling like crap. So I’m going to post all this stuff rather than work. I’ll start at the oldest and work forward.

There are more photos in the Gallery- click the link above. Right now I have more photos in there than before, in alphebetical order.

The captions aren’t in yet, but I’m getting there. I’ll also subdivide at some point, so if you’re just looking for Mardi Gras, or Cemetery shots you can do it. For now I’m just stuffing content in.

I’m trying to think what’s new. Cemeteries- Masonic, St. Patrick’s and Lakelawn Metarie. Easter parades. Random French Quarter things.

I dunno- lots!

Had one to go to yesterday, sadly, for my friend Jazz’s uncle. She cared for him, bringing him food and generally running errands.

Naturally, it’s all really sad, but…he was 85. He died surrounded by his big family, and you can’t do much better than that.

So. The service:

First off, there are the programs- before moving here I’d never seen anything more elaborate than Mass & Prayer cards, but these are a different animal altogether. I had a pile of these dropped on me last year when I was asked if I could put together a program for a neighbor who’d died. I tried to change the format a bit to…um…condense. I was kindly (but in a brooking-no-nonsense tone) told to get it back on track and make it look similar (but better, if you could, because, you know, people notice).

Things you’re likely to find in a program: The full obit, many photos of the deceased, including in their coffin, long long lists of relatives left behind, texts of psalms, personalized poetry.

Here’s that first one I did- pretty typical, overall. No coffin photo, though. (Thankfully.) Read More…

Sorry it’s been a quiet week around here. The office was crazy with last minute Halloween orders, plus getting ready for our big party PLUS the KaBoom! build.

On top of which the new blog has some issues I’ve spent the whole day trying to figure out. I’m not sure if it’s something about the template I started with, or a modification I made, or one of the bazillion wordpress updates or what, but somewhere along the line I’ve got major Feedburner/rss issues.

As in, they don’t think I exist and no amount of jumping around and shouting, “Hey! OVER HERE!” is making a difference.

Well, whatever. I’m kicking off for now, gonna go have myself the relaxing adult beverage of my choice and promise proper posts tomorrow- good stuff, I promise. Charlie went with me and now my stock of inappropriate beads is massive, and lots of other interesting weirdness.

As soon as you think your teen’s wings are really really extended and they just can’t wait to jump out of the nest you get a panicky call that you have to come home from your meeting NOW because she’s having a meltdown about homework.

Then you spend (another) several hours researching the Kyoto treaty and coloring posterboard charts so she can go in and anhilate the other debate team.

But her killer instincts weren’t really the issue, the coloring was. It’s been a long long time since I’ve taken out the crayons with her, and it was a really nice throwback. Okay, so I was working on graphs of pollution levels and not fuzzy teddy bears, but you take ‘em where you can get ‘em.

But as it approached 1am, I noticed that my throat really didn’t feel very good. Ali was down with a throat thing last weekend, and despite repeated doses of Airborne -lucky me- it’s boomeranged back (again). Then she announced that lice is going around the school (again) and she’s totally freaked out about it (again) and she’s spent time with some of the girls who’ve been sent home (again).

So some things just never change. She still drags home every bug- literally and figuratively- home from school. She still waits until the last minute to finish her homework.

And she still wants my help. Not such a bad tradeoff.