Colleen Kane

Here's to Late Bloomers

You might recall Tomatoey, the sizable heirloom tomato plant that traveled in a moving-truck cab from its prime spot of full sun on our Baton Rouge deck, to become the centerpiece of my fire escape garden here in Brooklyn.

The fire escape gets considerably less sun than our deck in Baton Rouge, or as my hubbs sometimes calls it, "back home."

And so the esteemed Tomatoey was less forthcoming with fruit once he landed here. The dozen or so tomatoes already in progress ripened into succulent specimens, and then...nothing. Plenty of blossoms, but for months, they turned out nothing. He even yellowed and I nursed him back to full green, and still: zip.

I couldn't help seeing Tomatoey as an echo of our lack of job-hunting success thus far in New York 2.0.

The First of the Last Vistors

My dear friend and former roommate Amanda, known to nearly 100,000 YouTube viewers as Flight Attendant, came to visit for a few days. She's the first of a series of visitors who will come during our last six or so months in Louisiana (!). So now that we have to show the place to fellow Northerners, what did we show?

For one thing, we met LSU mascot Mike the Tiger. It looked like this:

I Make the Salads that Make the Young Girls Cry

Above is a sign I've been meaning to photograph for probably about a year now. You know, just in case any of you need it.

Below is another one.

 Which driving school would you rather: "ALERT," or another local school called Angelwood? The former has the classic misused quotation marks, negating the word they're trying to emphasize, and the latter name contains a word for someone who used to be alive. Neither instill much confidence, driving school owners.

Venturing Out

I was hoping I'd have some good job-related news to share by now, but no word yet. Also, looks like we're going to be staying in LA this summer, rather than going to Brooklyn or elsewhere while the fiance interns as we'd planned. Facing that reality was, to say the least, disappointing. So I'm starting up that project I proposed for the photography contest: Main Street, Exiled: Disappearing Downtowns. I hope to make lots of day trips to add towns to that blog this summer.

While this summer will surely be an inferno, I have a quick jaunt to California to look forward to, hopefully a quick visit to NYC next month, followed by our wedding in June. And for now the weather here has been gorgeous, perfect hammock-lazing weather. This weekend the fiance and I took our bikes and a picnic to a state park. We drove through a settlement of fishing camps to get there, like the one above. Most of them had whimsical names painted on signs hung by the road, so while I didn't see a sign for the polka-dotted number above, I'm going to assume it was named Dots Landing.

Walk on

It's another odds n' sods Monday here at BaRou is the New Bklyn.

Isn't this the cutest teeny cayenne? It's growing right now in our garden pepper patch along with habaneros and jalapenos. 

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So, I joined Twitter like I knew I would. It was a combination of keeping up with my faraway pals and some vague notion of self-promotion. (I hear they hand out staff writer positions as rewards for quality pithy twitters.) Here's my profile if you want to follow.

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Now an account of how it's apparently weird for me to walk in Mid-City Baton Rouge.

Dawg day afternoon

So like, there was another game or something on Saturday? I got an international call from ecs Friday night, and I mentioned that we were going to tailgate on Saturday. She said, "Your social life involves sports now," and I had no comeback for that. Yeah, I guess sometimes it does. Not really my decision. This time, two members of our gang were not new to Southern college football tailgating, but were new to the LSU experience, so they were rather wowed. I was no longer phased.

BFD. Why wouldn't there be a purple and gold stretch limo with sporting scenes airbrushed all over it?

Friday roundup, moodswing style

Yesterday morning I was awoken by a knock at the side door from Butch, who doesn't live anywhere near Louisiana and who I wasn't expecting in town until Saturday for the Georgia game. All this minus coffee = confusion, but he again came bearing Yeungling (which is how you should arrive if you might be waking someone up), saying I've been sounding down lately so he thought this would cheer me up. I like the way he thinks.

But while I had been rather down lately, which felt like it was something physical over which I had no control, meanwhile I'd had an upswing, and again I'm wondering if it's something in the air or what. It's too early to even mention but (here goes anyway) I've been improving health & diet-wise, keeping up more with the house, and somewhat reclaiming mojo writing-wise, which are all contributing to a better overall outlook. With the wedding is coming new era; I'm going to get rid of a lot of this old crummy stuff I've accumulated for years, and before long we'll get new nice things the way people our age should have. (I'm aware that there's such a phenomenon as bipolar disorder, but this swing is not extreme enough.)

Meanwhile I'm inclined to post about boring little happinesses, like how pleased I am by the basil growing Gangbusters in the window even after a pesto harvest. This was the kind of Stepford blog I used to rail against, but you know it won't always be sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows on my blog.

World-in-Terlet Friday Roundup

For the love of all that's good and holy.
It's:
NUKE-
LEE-
AR
!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please. Wouldn't it have been the best if that was one of Biden's rebuttals? If someone can articulate for me why they would vote for a candidate who does not know how to pronounce the world "nuclear," when they heard it pronounced correctly five seconds earlier, please state your case right now.
The fact that President George W. Bush does not know how to pronounce this word is not a valid argument.
Because I just do not understand. I'm really getting bummed out by defenders of Palin. Do they really agree with her that dinosaurs coexisted with humans 6,000 years ago? D U M

Grow your own

Totally grew this and then totally ate it. Picante.

Three less eggs to fry

I probably shouldn't post this for the preverts of the world to read, but the f recently departed for Europe for an unspecified amount of time. So far since he's been gone, I'ts been a pretty action-packed couple of days. I've been hit on by a stranger, cowered in fear at a potential home invasion, gone on an unintentional shopping spree, and gotten almost no writing done. Sorry, feminism, sometimes I can be such an unproductive girly girl.