Filed under: tidbit
Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately. Things are busy here because we’re smack in the middle of Mardi Gras. Two and a half days left!
Um let’s see. Real quick: we still have and enjoy our jobs. The cat is fine. The weather has been beautiful even when it gets below 40°, which is rare. Yes, I’m rubbing it in. We still love love love our house and neighborhood, aside from a few crime incidents (but those happen in every neighborhood down here as far as I can tell). We love walking to the grocery store almost every night to pick up just what we need to complete dinner, and the opportunity it gives us to say hi to all the cats and dogs in the neighborhood.
Mardi Gras (season, not day) can be incredibly taxing. To paraphrase what Jonah said last night, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” There is at least one huge parade every day from Wednesday (three days ago) until Tuesday, and the closer you get to Tuesday the more and bigger the parades get. We’ve seen … oh, I’ve lost count already, let’s see … Krewe du Vieux, Oshun, Pygmalion, Druids (maybe), Babylon, Muses, Knights of Chaos, Hermes, Krewe D’Etat, Morpheus, and part of Endymion. I think that means that so far we’ve missed about six or seven. Each of these parades lasts somewhere between 30 minutes if you’re lucky or two hours if you’re not, so as you can see we’ve spent a LOT of time standing on St. Charles Ave with our hands in the air. We’re probably not going to Bacchus tonight because we’re worn out – even though if we did go we would get to see Val Kilmer.
Anyway, the parades are great fun, and yes, they’re family friendly, at least in the areas of town in which we watch so no, we haven’t been showing any kind of skin. You get to meet up with your friends, stand on the street, make new friends, and occasionally catch one of the hundreds of thousands of strings of beads (or other goodies) raining down from the sky.
Our living room floor is covered in beads right now and that’s not counting the ones that Casey used to decorate the fence outside. We now have a huge stack of extra plastic cups (the krewes throw cups, not sure why that one started) and more useless toys and gizmos than we have any idea what to do with.
So … uh … yeah, that’s it. I figured I should check in and say hi, but I don’t have anything to report other than the fact that Mardi Gras is in full swing, we have yet to have any reason to go to the French Quarter and watch the drunken tourists, the rest of our daily schedule is disrupted because it’s hard to drive across town without hitting a parade, it seems, and it won’t be over until Tuesday at midnight.
I have two more days off of work and then life will finally return to what passes for normal down here. See you then.
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hot diggity! i’m glad you two are enjoying mardi gras. the rest of us are counting on you to fully experience it since we be can’t be there.
Comment by liz February 24, 2009 @ 9:10 am