Halloween is the weekend that begins all the goings on in New Orleans, although actually the goings on never seem to stop even in the dead of summer when you’d think they should. Voodoo and Halloween go together like red beans and rice, and Marie Laveau was the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans so it’s natural that around this time of year, with the first good reason to costume, in a city where the dead…
You know the saying this too shall pass, well sometimes I feel as if I have lived a thousand lives just inside a week and they are all in the construct of my mind. No really. It’s like I feel exhausted from the journey I’ve been on that culminated yesterday late afternoon in me going through some photographs of my mother for a memorial book I’m trying to put together and coming across one of…
T quoted some figure that a very small percentile of the people in the U.S. cook their own dinner. This came up because Tin’s nanny said she had never seen a family who cooked as much as this one. Here is a sample of the last week’s fixings: Indian spinach and lentils Arroz con gandules (courtesy of Puerto Rico) seasoned with Turkey tasso rather than ham Croatian stuffed peppers and zucchinis Redfish with kaffir lime…
This is Jimmy Carter’s speech delivered July 15, 1979 – I was going to highlight all the things that have not changed, but then realized NOTHING HAS CHANGED except for the worse – 9/11, the great Federal Government Levee Failure of 2005, the 2008 recession: Good evening. This is a special night for me. Exactly 3 years ago, on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the…
Imagine you are not the child, that you are the parent, or that you are both – the child and the parents – now imagine that you are the caretaker and the one being cared for – whose zooming who? It’s hard to say around here. When I look at this Fab Four that were lounging around the backyard today, I was thinking to myself – all of you are riding on my coattails –…
So the columns have been sanded, sterilized to stop the mold that got in from the breakdown of the finish, and now the hardware has been replaced and the holes have been plugged. Don’t ask what this is going to cost. Basically the design was to expose the metal hardware but in doing that the metal bolts created an open gateway into the wood and so removing the bolts we found everything had rusted meaning…
This has been a slogging month – October – not what I expected it to be – there have been panic attacks, heart palpitations, depression, sadness, anxiety, computer death, dress death, and so on. But right now here is the state of the union – I’ve got a 30 day heart monitor to record what the cardiologist thinks is arrhythmia, I’ve got a brand new MacBook Pro 15″ (which I’m still trying to get wired…
My computer died this weekend and the road to recovery has been long. A third party adapter ordered through Amazon that failed. A trip to Apple after many phone calls to the tech support yielded an official Apple adapter. Then I got home and the computer failed again. Then a trip back today to understand that my computer purchased in December 2004 (really?) with its new hard drive that was installed in June 2007 is…
In the evening, when the day is done, and we are getting ready for bed, there is a little reading, a little music and a lot of running around. Tin had his drumstick and was watching Trombone Shorty and imitating him and being a sweetie pie to Mama – even budding musicians need a little Mama loving.
I used to work with a guy who called everyone a gone pecan and this afternoon when I went out to take a walk and shed some of this overdrive happening in my brain, I saw my neighbors in the empty lot picking up all the dropped pecans. I remember my grandmother had a pecan tree where we used to gather pecans too. Then I walked by my other neighbors’ house and they were speaking…