Months ago I set up drafts of four blog posts that would run here during my moving month. It's now moving month, and that never happened. They never got written. Blogging takes time that I'm devoting to other pursuits.
Wait, what?
IT'S MOVING MONTH! Less than 3 weeks to go before moving back to Brooklyn!
Packing time's a-wasting, so I'll just make these two announcements:
Two of my best friends, Karin and Therese, flew to Louisiana last Friday. Unfortunately, they happened to visit at the ugliest time possible. Following a recent deep freeze, this normally lush and florid state was bleak, and could have doubled for the set of The Road: yellow lawns, drooping brown plants, mostly leafless trees. In what's left of our once- pride-worthy back yard, banana plants are frittered and mighty elephant ears are poached.
It was an appropriate stage for a most gothic visit.
Thanksgiving came and went, and so did visiting family members. But for me, the big new experience this holiday weekend was going shooting. On Friday, Butch and his former ROTC cohort Gene took the hubbs and Butch's daughter Emily and I for a post-holiday visit to the shooting range.
You may have seen bumper stickers saying, "Keep Austin Weird." There aren't any such mottoes about Louisiana, and that's because weirdness in Louisiana is about as endangered as nutria. On Saturday, Kara and I went to experience some genuine Louisiana weirdness at the Frog Festival in the self-proclaimed Frog Capital of the World, Rayne.
We laughed, we made rude comments amongst ourselves about genetics, we wondered if perhaps we had licked some hallucinogenic frogs.
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:
Early on Saturday, I departed with friends Kevin and Alicia to observe some Cajuns in their natural habitat. First we went to the Zydeco brunch in Breaux Bridge, which was amazing. Not the brunch so much, because due to a crazy mix-up we never had any food: it was the dancing. It was more than the dancing, really.
While the three of us agreed the band wasn't music we would listen to on purpose at home, they were part of something larger here, and I couldn't think of a more rocking show I'd been to all year. The dance floor was packed with revelers, the floor pulsed with their steps in time, and it wasn't yet noon. Here's the thing: collectively it seemed there was something more in the room than just sounds and people moving in time. Like, isn't this the transcendent feeling you want from a musical performance or any kind of mass gathering, really that hardly ever happens? Yes.
I hope I'm not overstating the Zydeco brunch, but I wouldn't want to understate it either.
Here in Baton Rouge, it's a new school year. The hubbs and I have approximately 250 days left in Baton Rouge, not that anyone has an online countdown bookmarked or anything. In addition to a general resolution to make self-promotional efforts or write on every one of those days (because to paraphrase bff ecs, you can't get mad about not getting jobs you never applied for), I've come up with a few more specific resolutions.
In homage to a hand-written list on a paper towel found in our then-new residence two years ago, I present my goals for the semester. Or really, for the school year. (If you're unfamiliar with said list, click the link to see it or the next bit won't make as much sense.)
The sad part about this is I started this post on September 5 but we were out of paper towels, so I had to wait til we could afford to go grocery shopping (don't ask).
Each Labor Day weekend since moving here, the hubbs and I have been captivated by the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival (which, if you haven't heard, exists). The foremost draw was the insane name, and with encouragement from their effusive website, we also hoped for new and unusual culinary adventures. Since hubbs was probably on hour 200 of his school/studio week come S&P Festival time the last two years, it wasn't possible to go sooner. But we were finally able to make it this year because it's totally SENIOR YEAR.
The name Shrimp and Petroleum Festival conjures either an image of shrimp struggling in an oil spill or simply a giant question mark. But! Petroleum and shrimp are the industries of Morgan City, where the festival is held, and word is that shrimp are drawn to offshore oil rigs, which is probably about as healthy as it sounds.
Very well. We made the approximately 1-hour drive southwest to Morgan City, along levees, past rickety fishing camps, past a sign urging drivers to not do wheelies in the parking lot.
Continue reading "Down by the Riverside: the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival" »
When the hubbs and I found a free local publication called Town Favorites, it was a tough blogging call. The contents seemed to embody the opposite of the name, what we don't like about Baton Rouge-- the rampant use of purple and gold both graphically and sartorially, and numerous examples of sub-par efforts best summoned by the phrase "bush league."
It didn't help our senses of goodwill that when we happened upon this publication we had just paid too much for the worst falafel sandwiches either of us had ever eaten, akin to deep-fried balls of sawdust. (That was at Roman's Cafe, BTW.)
Town Favorites was the sort of thing I would've had a field day with on this blog two years back when we first moved here. But now...eh. On the other hand, this type of publication is found everywhere (I used to intern at one as a college lass) and I would find this fail-fest entertaining wherever it was published. After some internal debate, I decided to provide just a minimal selection of noteworthy items.
Included above, mostly to torture design professionals, is one of the most visually offensive ads. The purple and gold, the wedge flip flops, the nuclear radiation glow around everything, the combo of the curlicue font with the Mary Tyler Moore font. To twist the knife in designers' wounds, the boutique's website is all in Comic Sans font.
Now, juveniles among us, get ready to gasp.
The news that Sonic Youth was performing July 12 at Sloss Furnaces, a rusty old haunted industrial site, quickly became a must-see event, even though it was two states away. Both the hubbs and I have lost count of the number of times we've seen SY, but both regret missing the time they played inside the footing of the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally we had a comparably dramatic setting to see them.
Kevin, the hubbs and I embarked on the scenic route to Birmingham on Saturday, via Highway 61.
