Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

February 12, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

How cute is that little Snowman? More like a Snowpile with a hat, really, but still adorable!

In case you aren’t local, or in case you are local but have been asleep for the last 16 hours, we got massively, seriously whopped with about two feet of snow overnight. There was so much snow that fell so quickly that when I headed home (three hours late since the oncoming day shift was all tied up with travel troubles) the snow on the ground was still white as…well…snow, even though it had been hours and hours. In New York City, you see, snow is only pretty for a brief spell before wheels, boots, exhaust and dogwhiz renders it unrecognizable as a natural phenomena. We got several extra hours of “pretty time”. At late as dinnertime Sunday it was still pretty gorgeous in my neighborhood. Slippery and dangerous as all hell, but gorgeous.

So obviously I’m home from New Orleans; I’ve come home to a clean city, a clean apartment and an even cleaner new template! Is this not the best? Come on, it rocks! Most importantly it is oh, so very “me”. One of these days I’ll video the rest of the apartment (you’ve already seen the bathroom) so you can see just how “me” this new blog-look really is. For now, just take my word for it.

The new digs come courtesy of Ginger over at Baby Jane Blogs. She’s a world-class listener who can take a vague design idea and transform it into exactly what you want with the help of her psychic abilities and natural talent. Go check out her work!

I’ve still got a couple of New Orleans videos to edit and post, and they’ll be surfacing this week.

Stay warm, people!

February 6, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

Now that I’ve concluded enduring an 11 minute upload for a two minute video (!!!) you can click here or on the photo for more New Orleans adventures…or misadventures, really. So what’s it like here? Well, that all depends on where you are in this giant, sprawling town. I know it’s really a major metropolis, but being a New Yorker I can be jaded about such labels. As far as I’m concerned, if the metropolis you live in sports tornadoes, bike lanes, salamanders and bunny rabbits: you live in a town. It might be a really big town, but it’s a town. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone.

Anyway, New Orleans can be either be thriving, floundering or failing depending on which corner you are standing on and which direction you are facing. BigB’s house is in a neighborhood called the Bywater which is, from what I can tell, a neighborhood in the throes of transition from “pretty darn unsafe” to “just fine, if you know what you’re doing and keep your wits about you” and now “hip but not too hip, cool but not too cool, and looks rougher than it really is“. It reminds me of NYC’s East Village when I was teenager. Or Bushwick now. Except for the salamanders.

We lose power every couple of days for a couple of hours for various reasons. Tornadoes. Local 5-Alarm fires. Someone at the power company sneezes. Whatever. It’s frustrating, but not the end of the world. Some areas look clean and spiffed up, but suffer from boarded up storefronts and the resulting lack of services. The French Quarter looks lovely, but lacks tourists, and some things close early. Like noon-early, due to lack of staff. Neighboorhoods that were already hurting before Katrina are far worse off now. Whole thoroughfares of grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants, gas stations, hair salons, sandwich shops: gone. Giant avenues with absolutely nothing open go one for blocks and blocks and blocks. Some of the houses on those same streets are occupied, some aren’t. All have huge piles of debris where their front lawns once grew, and the pedestrian islands are still littered with mountains of trash and abandoned cars.

There is a lot of hope floating around. But Katrina is still the number one topic overheard in cafes, on park benches, at Home Depot. “What did you lose?”, “Are you staying?”, “Is so-and-so’s open, yet?”. New Orleans is still dusting itself off, and will be for awhile, but there seems to be an overall feeling that it will rise again…unless you find yourself all alone on your brand new bike completely lost at night in the pitch dark in traffic without a tail-light or your cell phone or knowing your boyfriend’s phone number in a part of town you probably shouldn’t be in even during the day.

Then it doesn’t feel so much like New Orleans will bounce back. At. All.

February 3, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

So after sucking the life out of the local internet cafe’s bandwidth, I uploaded some video and you can click here or on the McD’s picture above for a brief medley of images and sounds from New Orleans, my new second home. As it turns out, my new second home is still quite a mess. There are countless important traffic signals still burnt out (scary when at a four-way stop), whole neighborhoods without power (including ours, although only occasionally), no nearby grocery stores, and few open hospitals. The stores that are open tend to close mighty early. The local Home Depot, which as you can imagine does a booming business, shuts down at 5PM for lack of staff. McDonald’s is offering a whopping $9.75 an hour plus a weekly bonus! Imagine that! A fast food restaurant offering a living wage! Except that because of the shortage of available housing around here, rents have doubled if not tripled. So much for for that.

I’ve wanted so very much to be a video maven while down here, but all these years of not knowing how to drive have finally caught up with me. My boyfriend has to chauffeur me around like a suburban 1950’s housewife. A bike has been purchased, but alas, has not yet arrived. I think today we’re getting a rental from the outrageously busy bike shop, so hopefully, I can scoot around this week and share the sights with you. And, oh, are there ever some sights to see!

February 2, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

There’s no internet connection in the house so to do anything internet related I have to go to the local cafe and hope that the connection doesn’t cut out on me. Which it does, every three minutes. I’m sort of at the end of my rope. I have stuff to do. I have bills to pay, posts to post, banking transfers to transfer, airline tickets to buy, time to kill. I’m on my third cup of non-refillable $2 coffee and even though it is very, very, very good coffee I’m finding myself cursing this entire city over this stupid internet issue which then makes me feel terribly petty and bitchy and spoiled. Apparently Mayor “Open Mouth Insert Foot” Nagin has proclaimed that New Orleans will be fully wired for free wi-fi while he’s in office. Yesterday, that pissed me off–like there aren’t more pressing issues here? This morning I’m like “Well, hurry up and get to it, buddy! You can call this city any flavor you please as long as I can get online reliably!”

Large insects. Failing power. No pizza. Tornados. I’m a little cranky.

January 29, 2006 | Filed under: Uncategorized

Watching this doesn’t require familiarity with the backstory, but it couldn’t hurt. Click here for Part One, where you can find some history on the subject. Click here (or on the picture) for part two. 2:14 minutes, Quicktime.

The big heroes in this tale are the folks at Inko’s White Tea. For those of you watching who may be under the impression that I filmed this to snag me some free tea (which I didn’t), please click here.

“Tea for Two”
Lawrence Welk
American Favorites
Ranwood Records, 1996
Buy it!