Today is my grandmother’s birthday. She’d have been 22. Well, 88 years but only 22 real birthdays. She was always young for her age. I took Sun, who is named after my grandmother, to her grave last weekend for them to meet. All this family research thing started up again as a result of that [...]
Here are the answers to yesterday’s truths and lies: 1. I cannot drive stick. This is TRUE. Years ago, several friends tried to teach me and a few telephone poles came close to getting hit. I am happy to drive standard. 2. I will not ski or snowboard or skydive. It is TRUE that I [...]
Katie and Greta recently tagged me for two different memes. Neither meme really blew my skirt up. So instead I will follow something Katie recently did on her blog (and it is similar in what Greta’s meme asked). I’m going to list 6 things—4 of them will be true, 2 will be false. I ask [...]
Years ago, I spent copious hours doing genealogy research on my mother’s family. In all, it took five years. I spent countless hours in NOLA’s main library (their Louisiana Special Collections on the third floor is chuck full of great NOLA genealogy information), UNO’s library, courthouse archives, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and cemeteries throughout [...]
Bonerama is playing at Rock ‘n’ Bowl this Saturday night. Rock ‘n’ Bowl is a uniquely NOLA institution. The whole Mid-City area was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and Rock ‘n’ Bowl clamored to re-open as fast as possible. It’s been re-opened for some time now and I haven’t yet been back. That’s going to [...]
This weekend shaped up to be the kind I really like. We took Sun to Storyland in City Park yesterday. I don’t recall any special visit to Storyland as a child, but I remember always finding the place magical. It’s a place designed solely for children–a “fairytale theme park”–where kids can climb on things and [...]
The commercial properties along Airline Highway leading to NOLA were badly flooded in Katrina. One store, AMA Distributors (they sell pool tables, pinball machines and top quality poker chips), put up a plywood wall as they rebuilt their store. One day, this plywood wall got painted white. Then some sketches were drawn on this white [...]
Pete and I attended the Sponsor Party for YLC’s A Streetcar Named Inspire last night. We were there in an “official capacity” for our StreetcarArt.com site. We interviewed artists, previewed the sketches, and meet the YLC folks involved. To read the official account of the evening, click here. We also drank a little wine and enjoyed such [...]
I love the semicolon; it’s my all-time favorite punctuation mark. My love for it stems from the first author to whom I ever really found myself truly devoted, John Irving. In “The World According to Garp,” Irving sings the praises of “the good ole semicolon,” and my love for the semicolon was cinched from my first [...]
I am finally beginning to feel better. My headaches are less, the ringing in my ears is gone, and I have only been through about a fifth of a box of tissues today. And the upswing of having The Death is that I think I’ve lost a few pounds!! So to celebrate, we went out [...]