Oscar Party 2007

My Oscar Party invitation for 2007.

South Beach Views

Here's a short movie I took when I was staying at the Albion Hotel in Miami Beach back in October. I woke up early and the recorded the view from the window at sunrise. I love the way the pastel colors of the buildings are enhanced by the pink light of morning.

New Year, High Resolution

So, I didn't go into all the gory details, but suffice it to say that I returned from what was supposed to be a fun holiday trip thoroughly demoralized. Nothing cheers a gal up like hearing that your boyfriend of two months still loves his crazy ex, and then enduring a 9-hour car trip home with him. Anyway, I decided to try to use the abundant pain I was feeling to motivate myself anew to tackle some projects I'd been wanting to address for some time. The confluence of late nights at the office and online bill pay had meant that there were a lot of paper bills and account statements that had been paid or otherwise dealt with, but that never had been filed. These had formed an onerous mountain of paper that needed to be sorted through, but the prospect was daunting. I had tackled it at various times, but only gotten part way each time.

Then along came the January Ice Storm of 2007, when I was stuck inside for three days, along with my visiting mother, who provided immeasurable moral support and advice. I ferreted out all the piles, separated out paper to be recycled and envelopes to be discarded, put everything into folders, and made new folders where needed. The project was 90 percent done after the intitial three-day push, but I still spent January's remaining weekends creating and filling more files with the papers that defied initial categorization, and my mom created a little card and correspondence file for me that helps me remember all the kind things people have done for me over the years.

It's hard to describe the feeling of freedom in knowing that there are no more bags of papers lurking in corners somewhere, waiting to jump out at me just when I think I've got things straight. Now my file drawers are so full that I need to remove some things and create an archive, but at least now I know where everything is. What a great feeling!

New Orleans, New Year, Inauspicious Beginning

I received an invitation from my friend Misty to visit her in New Orleans for New Year's, so I decided to drive over for the weekend. The drive over was one of the scariest experiences of my life, since it was raining hard the whole time, and flat out pouring more than 50 percent of the trip. Still, my companion and I made pretty good time for leaving at 6:30 on Friday, and a bit after 3 in the morning, pulled onto Bourbon Street where her apartment is. (She lives on the quiet end of the street, further into the Quarter, needless to say.)

Just driving over the overpasses into town sent chills down my spine, since the last time I had seen them was on television during Katrina, when desperate people were stranded on the highways around the Superdome and bodies were floating in the water. Some houses on Esplanade still bore the tell-tale pie markings, evidence that the house had been searched for survivors, but most had been repainted and repaired, and some were even decorated for the holidays. Still, New Orleans has always been like Venice, a dying city that has borrowed time from the surrounding lagoon, and that has spent its precarious days steeped in vice and hoping for one more sex-and-alcohol-fueled night's reprieve from watery oblivion.

I should have known better than to expect a different outcome when accompanying a heavy drinker to New Orleans for New Year's, but I guess I was in a charitable mood for Christmas. The entire city, with its 24-hour booze cycle and ever-available to-go cups is like a giant enabler for alcoholics. As it turned out, there was rather too much wine-fueled confession for the trip to be very pleasant for me. But I did enjoy seeing the city again, and the way that at least some of the culture had returned--not to mention a lot of the bad behavior.

There's an air of desperation on Bourbon St., with its perpetual smell of stale beer and cigarettes, and the way that pop hits only tangentially connected to the city's native blues and jazz blare from bars advertising "big ass beers" to go. All of mankind's worst faults are on prominent display, while corpulent tourists with decades-old hairstyles stagger from bar to bar, holding fluorescent drink cups filled with over-sweetened ethanol, and wearing vulgar t-shirts loudly proclaiming their shortcomings.

We took the ferry over to Algiers on Saturday, and waited out the rain in a bar for a couple of hours--the way a lot of time is spent in NOLA. Misty and I tried Abita, I think.

I revisited Cafe Du Monde, which was as crowded as ever, and as sticky with powdered sugar residue. We speculated as to how many pounds of sugar they go through every day, seeing as they pour about a quarter pound on every serving of beignets. Still, yum.

We watched the fireworks in Jackson Square, surrounded by a motley assortment of college kids, hippie slackers, young professionals, and millionaires in diamonds and mink coats--a melting pot, indeed.

Twins' First Christmas

I went to my mother's house in College Station for Christmas. She has a new kitten, Eliot (after T.S. Eliot), who is very feisty and playful and loves to climb things--and people! When my brother and I were little, we used to have two Christmas trees--one with unbreakable ornaments, many of which had been made by us or our friends, or teachers at school--and one with glass ornaments, some of which had belonged to my father's family when he was little. It was a "breakable" tree all around, since the garlands on the tree were glass beads, and even the tree skirt was decorated with glass-bodied animals. One year, our cat, Macheath, climbed the breakable tree while we were at the Christmas eve service, knocking it over and breaking a lot of the ornaments on one side. After that, it was "We Two Kings of Orient Are," among other losses. In order to avoid a similar tragedy this year, my mom decorated the tree solely with french-wire bows. Here's Eliot, that bad boy, perched in the Christmas tree:

This was the twins' first Christmas. When my brother and his wife came over, my mother and I were in the kitchen working on dinner, and we put a blanket on the floor so that the twins could play safely while we watched. There are pictures and home movies of my brother and me playing on a blanket in that same corner of the kitchen from thirty-hmm years ago! Then we all moved into the living room to open presents. The twins, being too young to rip open wrapping paper, had to watch while their parents opened their gifts for them. Then we propped the gifts on their tummies, so they could better appreciate them. Here's Jack with a soft "book" behind him and another toy.

Sam was pretty tired, and slept through most of the proceedings. From when he was first born, I thought that he reminded me of a character in a children's book, but couldn't put my finger on what it was. I found the book while doing my Christmas shopping this year, and it's "Harold and the Purple Crayon." I propped it up next to sleeping Sam. How cute that Sam's wearing a blue onesie just like Harold!

Long Time No Post

When you put something off, even something fun, it can acquire the weight of a prison sentence, which in turn encourages further putting off. The whole process can be very off putting. But after repeated comments from a friend, who today claimed that anyone who might at one time have been interested in what I write here had long ago lost interest due to my not posting for three months, I thought I had better post something, anything just to break my non-posting habit. So here it is, a post about not posting. And an outline of my future posts, in which I would like to go back and fill in the last few months and write about what I have been doing.

The initial procastination began because I felt I should be preparing for ACL Fest by listening to the bands that would be playing so that I would appreciate their sets more. Then the fest itself was time-consuming and exhausting, and shortly after that I took a week-long trip to Florida, which trip did not start out nor unfold as planned, and which was accompanied by quite a bit of unnecessary drama and sturm und drang, although it was worthwhile overall.

I promptly came down with a bad cold upon my return, and spent the whole weekend in bed, emerging only to attend the Rolling Stones concert here, which was lots of fun, and at which I took lots of photos and a few mini-movies. I know I can post the photos on Blogger, but I'm not sure about the movies. I'll probably have to use YouTube, which has been swallowed up by Google since I last posted.

Work was very busy after that, and then, even though I got a flu shot, I came down with a really bad cold yet again, and this one kept me in bed and coughing for a whole work week and over a weekend. It's really rare for me to be sick enough to miss work for four days in a row--in fact, I don't think I've ever missed that much due to a cold. I seem to have shaken the cold now, but a neck/back/shoulder problem that was bothersome but not terribly painful except when I coughed or sneezed suddenly came to the forefront, and I finally admitted the severity of the problem and went to see a physical therapist last Friday. I did the exercises he gave me, and it did improve the problem; the trick now is to keep doing them and prevent a relapse. Simple activities such as sleeping, driving a car, and sitting at my desk at work all seem to exacerbate this feeling that my left arm is out of joint and needs to be popped out or back into place. It's that feeling that it's almost right but not quite that's really frustrating and excruciating.

I have a North University Neighborhood Association (NUNA) meeting tonight, and I've had to miss the last several meetings due to work conflicts, so I had better go to this one. À demain, tout le monde.