Yay! It finally rained here in New Orleans and the plants drank it up so thirstily that they want more. We broke record highs – it was 104 degrees at one point. This is the first rain we’ve had in a while, atypical of our summers, which usually have a crescendo of heat building that breaks mid to late afternoon with a large downpour – they’re fabulous!
The Feast of St. John coincides with the June solstice also referred to as Midsummers. The Christian holy day is fixed at June 24, but, in the old days, festivities were celebrated the night before, on St. John’s Eve. Or at least that is when Marie Laveau celebrated it, she would attract a large crowd of blacks and whites down to Lake Ponchartrain where she performed her healing ceremony or headwashing. In the same spirit,…
Everyone in the house is having a procedure this week. Wolfie went in to get spayed and got to have her teeth done at the same time, but the good news is that the vet called and said that Wolfie had several large ovarian cysts that were pretty perilous to remove. He said, “She might be acting like a puppy when she heals from this surgery.” Which was great news – Wolfie has had a…
My Croatian family uses words like Bravo Rachel! and Super, all which sound creepy when bohemian wantabes use the same words. But it suits them just fine. I’m trying my best to learn some of their words – which about 80% don’t have vowels – tough on the tongue. In the meantime, they’re picking up a few words around here – bangs, perpetual. My favorite thing is seeing the familiar through their eyes. Like for…
Loca and I walked through the park this morning and it was thick, thick, thick. The summer air in New Orleans is good for this – it slows you waaaaaaaaay down. Somewhere between a crawl and a shuffle, we made our way around the park and watched all the lazy birds hanging out, chilling by the banks of the lagoon. A guy came running by, whizzing by, couldn’t believe how fast he was running in…
I wrote out some parameters yesterday for how to proceed – that includes dealing with my mother, breathing through work stress, working towards physical harmony, preparing myself to adopt a child, and learning how to love, again. The reason I say all this is because the first reaction or action to any of the above is based on 50 years of hard wiring, but the more thoughtful reaction or action could use some tweaking. So…
NYT: QUOTATION OF THE DAY “I like what I do. I don’t deny it.” ROSALIO RETA, in a videotaped confession to committing murders for a drug cartel.
A friend recently lost a relative and she said, “It’s sad. Just like that, she’s gone, they are scraping the body out, and the next thing you do is clean out the refrigerator. Like it was all nothing.” Today they found an elderly black man floating in the bayou. He had apparently been there for a while. Did someone miss him? Was there an APB out for this old man? I’m learning to live with…
Snappy was lasso’d on the bayou last night by a dog walking cowboy and Fish and Wildlife sent over one of their trappers, who tied up Snappy, renamed him Esmeralda (everyone is switching teams around here), and drove him to Lake Salvador and set him free. Apparently Snappy was hot on the heels of two pom pom dogs and the cowboy was doing a good deed by rescuing these nondogs from certain death. Oh well,…
I did get out to the porch yesterday afternoon and we all sat there enjoying the view and less heat as the breeze had kicked up just a little. The light from the sunset was so beautiful, that we decided to get the canoe out and go for a quick ride. T rowed us around the bayou and we watched an amazing sunset with streaks of scarlet, fuchsia, and pale pink. Then we came back…