BaRou is the New Bklyn

Friday: OMG LOST Finale! (No spoilers)

Just have to say: OMG LOST. Please don't put any spoilers in the comments, my lovely commenters. I just had to vent some of the pent-up suspense and anxiety and emotions from the finale. OK, done.

I've been working overtime this week so when I go away I won't feel guilty (ha ha ha, as if) or at least not have to stop at Internet cafes to work. My faithful companion Coopy's been working hard, too, as you can see here. I hope he enjoyed that Playgirl he's resting on.



(I pledge that when I'm off on adventures there will be less pictures of pets and creatures that have invaded the house, as has been the theme of late. )

Old times here are not forgotten

This Sunday, the New York Times ran a travel story titled Driving Back Into Louisiana's History, which covers the new African-American Heritage Trail. One quote in the piece grabbed me:
“The whole state of Louisiana really is a museum.”

Don't I know it.

On Friday, Amy, Jonathan and I saw The New Orleans Bingo Show play at Spanish Moon (along with a whole different crowd than I've seen there at the indie shows). To clumsily paraphrase Jonathan, it's like the band takes the New Orleans music tradition and lovingly filters it through modern genres.

The BaRou Experiment

Morning all--Typepad is starting a new interface with a percentage of their users and seems to have lost the intro front-page parts of my past few posts since the new interface began. Guess what, Typepad, PROBLEM.
Lemme try to reconstruct that intro quickly. Grumble.

This first week of relative isolation has been another busy one full of lessons, challenges, and surprises.

For one, I wandered into the living room the other night and rested my chin on the sill of a high open window. That cat has an odd gait, I thought. It was a raccoon. Oh, the suburbanity! I haven't seen one of those since Jersey. I watched him make his silent rounds from yard to yard.

I  was not expecting nature to be so in my face (and in my house) when I moved down here. So far Little Pink has been the unwitting host to a lizard, colossal flying cockroaches, dragonflies, fleas, spiders, uh...various colors and textures of mold I've never seen before. I wouldn't be surprised to find an alligator squatting in the tub one day. Maybe that's what was pounding on my door the other night.

Anyway here's the latest indoor visitor.

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.

Friday Roundup, buggin edition

Thankfully, enormous flying cockroach season here in Little Pink was brief, and now we're on to dragonfly season.

That dragonfly isn't the only insect Coopy's been trying to chomp lately. He has been absolutely tormented by mutant fleas for a month now, maybe even longer.

So far we've tried Frontline (these mutants are immune), Advantage (immune), yelling at the fleas really loud, feeding him garlic, putting on a flea collar, washing and spraying all bedding, drenching him in a natural pet & bedding anti-flea spray, flea-killing shampoo, and this:

Within the hour after swimmy fun time, he was scratching again.

Not letting him outside is not an option. (You try sitting here all day while he's scratching the door.) I looked at the yard and indoor sprays on the PetCo site, did a little Google-aroo, and learned their active ingredient, permethrin, has been classified by the EPA as a carcinogen. Wow, how is this still such a common active ingredient?

So departing from that site, I found one natural solution where you introduce nematodes into the yard, which eat the flea larvae. Once I get over the slight ickiness of distributing literally 5 or 10 million critters that eat other critters, this seems much preferable to bombing everything with toxic chemicals. Has anyone tried this tactic?

And then maybe we can just have the dog hang out in a baby pool out there all day?

Weekend, part two: we're really not in Brooklyn anymore, Cooper

On Sunday, the f and I went on some errands that took us near the new hunting/outdoors superstore Cabela's. So we decided to have another cultural experience. Starting in the parking lot, Cabela's did not disappoint.

Weekend, part one: crawfish carnage, part two

This weekend was jam-packed full of activities, one of which involved buying a vintage Louisiana food-themed trivet, and not realizing I'd purchased a souvenir of this place until afterwards. Immediately after that, it was back to being gobsmacked by the ever-expanding local usage of purple and gold.
Later, a very special birrrthday paarrrrty, which was another crawfish boil.

Friday Randomness Roundup

I haven't updated good old Abandoned Baton Rouge in almost a month, but yesterday I finally visited a site I've been meaning to hit for ages: D-Jay's School of Beauty. Do check it out.

I also became an even more official Louisiana resident, of course to my dismay.

 

Boil and Trouble

So I had the opportunity to attend V-Day V to the Tenth this weekend in New Orleans. I.e., a bunch of women, some of them super famous such as Oprah, talking about their vadges (or in the case of Oprah and her disciples, their va-jay-jays). I decided not to go for a few reasons: 1. My friend who was supposed to go didn't go, B) I was not on paid assignment, and B.2) At this point, I've heard enough women talking about their vadges. No need to go out of my way to hear more if not getting paid.

Instead, I did something I'd never done before: I went to a crawfish boil.
Hi, I'm Colleen Kane. I used to be a strict vegan! Then I ate delicious cheese again. (No regrets.) Then I moved to Louisiana, and now apparently I will eat cockroaches of the sea boiled together with various items such as sausage. (Regrets, I had a few.) Here I am being menaced by a giant crawfish. After the jump, thousands of his kinsman, slaughtered and devoured!Won't you join me?

Open letter to the Swayze

Dear Patrick Swayze,

I'm very saddened to hear of your current medical condition of pancreatic cancer. But I'm writing for an extremely selfish reason today, to let you know that you are not allowed to die. You can't die because you are the last remaining constant in my life, and if you do die, I will have nothing keeping me from going completely adrift.

Let me explain. In the past year, I have moved from the part of the country I've lived for over three decades to a part of the country I never intended to live in. I moved away from the community of friends and associates I've collected for the past decade and longer. I went from being a New York City magazine editor to having to consider various demeaning local part time jobs. But at least I still had my trusty VW camper van, Wolfgang, right? Wrong! After ten fun years, I had to give up old Wolfgang last fall. In a way it's better that he never had to be here in this parallel universe, I suppose. But at least I still know what I eat, right? No, after more than a decade of not eating any animals I started eating some fish and general crap I never would have eaten before moving. But at least I still have clothes I like, right? No, I actually want to donate most of them to the Salvation Army. At least I still have my looks? I never had to make an effort to lose weight before while I was on a fourth floor walk-up. Now I do. But at least I still have my cat, Gypsy, right? Well...kind of. I've been attributing my 13-year-old cat's incontinence odd behavior lately to her being a teenager (her favorite band is Fall Out Boy), but the truth is probably that she's entered doddering old cathood. But at least I have my bff the fiance, right? Actually, I saw a lot more of him back home, and when I do see him here, he's typically at 25% or some other small percentage of normal personality, with no end promised to that for another two years. 

So in conclusion, Patrick Swayze, if you could just walk off this pancreatic cancer and say "nobody puts Baby in the corner" and go back to tai chi and tearing out the throats of evildoers, like normal, if you could basically just continue being alive, that would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Patrick. You're the Swayziest.