Blackout

Electronic blackout due to excessive party time coming up. Don't expect to hear from me again until after the 5th. I thought I would start today, but business kept me grounded just a little longer. Not that I'll be totally out of it, but probably only taking the time to deal with things that are unavoidable/necessary. Happy Mardi Gras everybody!

Audubon zoo

Part of my birthday activities was to go visit the zoo. It is pretty good! Not as good as San Diego, but I thought the exhibits were well-designed, and since it was cool winter morning, and a parade day, there were very few people there. If you like zoos, I recommend a visit here, next time you are in town.

I also learned here of the Loup-Garou (werewolf)and the Honey Island swamp monster. Scary fellows, they are...

Parades galore!

So, what's all the fuss about Mardi Gras, Carnival, parades, and the like? Okay, well, Carnival starts immediately after the 12th night of Christmas, and fills the gap until the start of Lent, which is itself determined by the timing of Easter, which is set by both the Spring Equinox and the lunar cycle. Confused yet? Look here, it explains it all.

Starting about 2 weeks before Mardi Gras (literally translated to Fat Tuesday), there are parades. Krewes make floats and costumes and march a several mile parade route. Over the two weeks and around the city, there are dozens of these parades. To join a Krewe is a several hundred to several thousand dollar investment, often involving waiting lists and such. See the schedule to get an idea of the scale of this. Now, if I've piqued your interest and you want to read more, this is a good website to get all your questions answered.

Now then, enough lecturing - here's the pictures! I saw three parades last Saturday - it was quite fun, and they pass just two blocks away from my room.

Finally, here is a short video I took that encapsulates the experience. A large float drives by, one of the costumed people tosses me some beads, and before you know it, the next act is right behind.

These floats are crazy to see coming. The crowd rushes up to the sides, clamoring for cheap trinkets, and you can see them launching rapid-fire at all angles from the float. The crowd does pretty well, and catches probably 70-80% of the stuff, which must add up to tons of material. Sadly, it seems to be kind of taboo to pick up stuff that lands on the ground, which means... well, better not to think of it.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy birthday to me.
Happy birthday to me.
Haaaappppy birrthday, deeeaaaarrr SanchoTramp.
Happy birthday to me.

And so ends what, if I'm lucky, I'll look back on as the worst year of my life (how fitting that it would be a prime number - I've never particularly liked those). But don't worry about that Noah (see Bill Cosby's "Noah and the Ark"), the past is done, and time keeps on slippin', slippin' into the future (see Steve Miller Band).

Heartfelt thanks to all my family and friends for all the good times, phone calls and messages, gifts, food, shelter, companionship, advice, perspective, patience and encouragement. I am a fortunate and privileged person, indeed, to have so many "peeps".

Now, then -it's getting late, and I still have 3/4 a bottle of wine to drink....

Burning the candle at both ends...OUCH!

This week has gone so quickly! As Mardi Gras ramps up, I feel like I'm getting swept into a vortex, and time is going by faster and faster. Today, though I have decided to take a break and recuperate a little bit. The decision was made easier by the 20 minute coughing fit at 3am...Don't worry! It's still just a cold.

I've been pushing myself a bit this week because my friend Sara has been in town for the American Meteorological Society conference, so still getting up to go to work, but also staying out a bit late to hang-out w/ her whenever we had the chance. I learned this week, BTW, that the AMS conference is cursed with bad weather. Ice-storms in Santa Fe, this week, and they had other examples too. If you are ever going on a vacation in January - make sure you don't overlap w/ the AMS! Because of the inclement weather, I've been taking the streetcar - or at least intending too, but I've missed it more often than not, so hoofing the couple miles to Canal Street.

Oh yes, by way of proof, here are the weather observations from the last week:

Don't get me wrong - It's all been very much worthwhile, and very cool to get to hang out with Sara. It'd been three months since I last saw her, but it has felt like longer. We had a good time exploring around, and she graciously bought me a couple really good dinners. Thanks Sara! The food highlight was a rum, carmel soaked and pecan covered bread-pudding dessert. Delicious!

Yesterday was also my first Habitat for Humanity build day! Obviously, the weather was unpleasant, but it was a very satisfying day. For the most part, the group was painting and installing siding on the house. Here we all are at the beginning of the day -Sara was being bashful ;)The neighborhood around this house is alive, but even now, more houses than not are gutted wrecks. It felt very good to see the difference in the house at the end of the day. Maybe I'll get to go back next weekend and see even more progress.

Back in action

The cold lingers, but I've feeling much better and could not sit around anymore. So, I've some stories and pictures to share with you.

I went to see the Krewe de Vieux, on Saturday night, which kicks off the Mardi Gras parades. Starting next weekend, there will be at least one a day until Feb. 5. It was a pretty impressive sight. Several thousand people crowded the parade route on either side - dancing, yelling and watching. The parade itself was small floats, pulled by mules, and followed by several dozen costumed, dancing Krewe members, and each contingent backed up by a 6-piece brass percussion band. At one point, the music was good enough I actually found myself wishing I still had my old instrument and former skill at playing it. I saw the parade three times, because it makes a loop in the French Quarter, and the last time I was perched on a 4 ft. tall window ledge. It was fun to see people's reactions on the sidewalk as they passed by and realized those happy feet on at their neck height belonged to me (generally surprise, then concern, or "right on!"). A picture of me at the end of the night with my "flair".

On Sunday, I wen to the Audubon aquarium, which I thought was really good - surpassed in my experience only by the Shed Aquarium in Chicago. They've all kinds of cool animals and exhibits, including jellyfish, seahorses, penguins, sharks, turtles, and other stuff. I got to touch a ray in a "petting" tank. Yep - they feel the same on you hands as they do on your feet. No fear of getting stung here though, the barbs have been removed. Mostly, I'll let the photos I took speak for the experience...



Then, I went to play ultimate frisbee, with a group I saw playing last week. Dude, I am very far out of shape! But, I hung with them, and it's a mellow crowd, so all was good. I am sore all over today from the running.

Today, I went to Bayou Senette State Park. Not a very impressive looking place, but it was relatively quiet and got me a little bit of a nature fix after two weeks in the city. I'm having fun with the Flickr badges, here's another one!

www.flickr.com

A lost week

Hello out there? What's going on with everybody? Lemme know how you are spending the three-day weekend, eh? It's been a pretty quiet week. I've been doing not much of anything, as I've been going to work, and trying not to be sick the rest of the time. A pesky, nagging cold fought back last Monday or so, and I've been trying to get over it all week. I think I'm on the upswing again, though. So, all-in-all, I think this has been one of my most boring weeks yet on my trip. The two-a-week soccer games fell through, since one was rained out, and another a scheduling conflict got us booted off the field. :(

I'm getting the hang of New Orleans, though. It really is not that big - smaller than I thought it was. Smaller than San Diego. Hopefully I'll be up to a lot this weekend. Aquarium, zoo, soccer, ultimate frisbee, a day at a state park, maybe some fishing... I went to a NO Hornets basketball game tonight. It was disappointing - college ball is much better, except possibly, for the cheerleaders. It's too bad the Bobcats got blown-out. I wanted them to take the Hornets down a peg for leaving Charlotte several years ago.

It's rainy and dreary out -I think I will pack it in early one more night, do some reading (Wow, that's a novel thought!) and figure out the rest tomorrow....

Socccer! soccersoccersoccer

soccersoccersoccersoccer!

Can you tell the highlight of my day was finding a soccer game to play in? Actually, it's a congenial group of guys that play a couple times a week, and they invited me to join their practices - so I really found about as much soccer as this old body can take on a regular basis. It's a middle-aged soccer team, mostly Irish, there aren't big egos out there, and they know what they are doing so it's skillful play. Just what I was hoping to find! I like to think they know a player when they see one, as they also invited me to join them in league play, even though I did not do a heck of a lot in the 20 minutes I had.

Oooooh man, am I out of shape. After the game I was hacking like a smoker, tasted blood in my throat, and my lungs were burning. That's hundreds of alveoli, being forced to stretch further than they have in a while. Kind of like putting cold hands under warm water, except in your lungs. Doesn't help that I'm just getting over a cold - Wed-Friday nights were pretty much spent sleeping as much as possible. Still, it was a short session so afterwards, I took a jog around the adjacent Audubon Park, which I estimate at a 2.5 mile loop. Now I will be a slug the rest of the day..

I saw a swan in the park while on my jog. They are bigger than I remember! It was neat to watch the interaction - I think the bird was curious about the kid throwing bread at it. It glided in very close, as if to get a really good look, but did not bother to eat the bread thrown right in front of it's face. When it circled back out a little further away, it started eating again.

My job is good, will be easy to do and will pay the bills - hopefully I'll be able to find something a little extra I can do for the charity. They run three free health clinics for the poor here in the NO area, and are funded by an order of Cathlolic nuns.

Saturday I spent volunteering at the Habitat ReStore. Oh man, that warehouse is only barely separated from a junkyard. There is a roof overhead, and volunteers line up the junk in rows every weekend... I exaggerate somewhat, but I think there is a lot more that could be done there, with some vision and a little extra labor.

I guess a lot actually happened this week - what a disjointed brain dump that was! Finally, here's a few new pictures I took in the French Quarter.

www.flickr.com SanchoTramp's New Orleans photoset

Back to Work

Well, the big news is that I have found some work for the next few weeks to pay the bills. I've also signed up for several volunteering days, but that won't happen for a couple weeks yet. I'll be doing admin stuff for The Daughters of Charity. Pay is not great, but it should cover my expenses while I am here, which is all it needs to do. I am happy that the outlet for my work will be a charitable institution. Is it still charity if you are working for $10/hr, but are trained for work that pays $30+/hr? Man, just yesterday I saw a job solicitation that fits my experience very closely, and pays $110K! I gotta admit, the $$ had me tempted for a little bit...

Anyway, time also catchup on some back story also:
I took lots of photos out of my window while driving into New Orleans, and made a collage from some of them. I left the angles all skewed, cause I think it reflects the haphazard and slightly disorienting nature of my experience, trying to take it all while steering straight. It's all so clearly money-driven. The casinos and hotels and tourist attractions are all fine, but sooo many homes and outlying neighborhoods still languish is a state of neglect. It seems to me that most of the surface problems here are simple to solve, but there is just not the money to make it happen. It's pretty clear the city doesn't have the funds either. Just two examples from yesterday - I saw a City Hall Annex condemned, and a huge city golf course that used to compose the northern half of City Park just utterly abandoned.

Now, I am tired and will go get some rest. Maybe it's the 25 miles I've biked over the past couple days, maybe all the mental effort of all the setup operations I've been doing here, maybe still leftover from Monday night/Tuesday morning. Doesn't matter - gotta be at work at 8am tomorrow!

P.S - you may notice ads on my blog page now. Just an experiment - I'll get a kickback from Google when people click on them. If they get too obnoxious, I'll get rid of them. If you have the time, stick it to the man and click on them...

Championship night

whoooee! What a full day yesterday! Agenda items included finding a place to live for the next month, watching the Sugar Bowl, and partying with 50,000 of my "friends" in the French Quarter.

The day began simply enough, taking a jog and shower in the state park, after calling and mapping all the listing in the Sunday paper of rooms for rent. I scheduled a few showings, ate lunch, and headed into town.

3 hours later, I wimped out a little bit on the housing part. I decided to rent a place that is not the cheapest I found, but is in a safer and more convenient neighborhood. Now I'm on the hook for $175/week. But it's an easy bike or trolley ride to downtown - even walking it is not bad. Big room with a private bath - it should be a good home base where I don't have to drive all the time. The alternatives where in neighborhoods where I and my truck would really stick out and I did not feel very safe, and I would necessarily have to drive or take cabs everywhere.

Having finished that, including moving in my stuff and getting a certified check to pay in advance. I turned my attention to the big game, now only 2 hours away. Nothing fancy here - I just rode the trolley to Canal Street. After watching the first half with some friendly Buckeyes, the game was starting to look bad, so I walked over to the Superdome. Now, it took me most of half-time and the third quarter to get over there and find an opportunity, but I was successful in finding some security personell getting slack and a gap in the fence of the smoker's corral. In I went to watch the 4th quarter! Wow, what an impressive sight and sound! It's the noise that is impossible to convey. Exciting stuff, and OSU had a chance to make a game of it, but alas - it was not to be..

After the game, I walked with the crowd and the bands back to the French Quarter, where I took in the spectacle for another three hours. Crazy, crazy, huge crowd. Police on horseback, beads and drinks everywhere, all kinds of music blasting from every bar and restaurant. All good fun to people-watch, drink, and enjoy the music. But around 2am, my night ended when I either did not drink enough, or drank too much, and let my guard down. It really hit me that everybody out there was there with somebody. Their friends (at least, they started out that way..), couples, classmates, etc. And this made me feel very lonely, amidst all these people. And that was it, once that feeling gets in, I can't break out of it on my own. The choices for guys like me become drink to numbness, strip clubs, or go home. I'm not really a person for the first two choices, so I walked home.

I suppose I could have lasted longer, had I really gotten into the party, and been super-outgoing and trying to pick up women, or something. I guess my heart's not really in being that way. It does not help that I don't really fit in very well with the people that are out there. All the people my age are at home with the kids, or dancing with their beau, or just tending the bar. So I meet college students, or older people of means that are here on vacation - but it's hard to connect more than superficially with them, and like I said before -they're all here with some other group. I saw some of my contemporaries on the way home, drinking quietly in bars, playing video poker, having discontented "conversations" into cell-phones.

Ah well, such is life. I can't be too hard on myself, since I'd only been in NO for 36 hours. And I had 6 hours of fun, to only 1 hour of crappiness. So it was a good night!

Now to get on with finding a way to pay for these luxurious digs, and finding some fun people to hang out with a month from now at Mardi Gras!

The Big Easy . . .

What an oxymoron - because it looks hard to me.

I got to New Orleans today, and I'll have lots to write about here, it seems - I bet I could fill two pages just from the afternoon. My head is swimming with all the learning that comes with a new town. Here's the short version: Tomorrow, I'll be looking for a room to rent, storage for my things, a job, volunteering, and joining the party after the big game. For the record, I'm rooting for Ohio State, but won't mind tooo much if LSU wins, because that will be a better party. Tonight, I'm resting up at Fontainebleau State Park, across Lake Ponchartrain from the city.

Man, this town is crazy. The French Quarter is party/tourist central, complete with street performers, open containers, party buses, etc. But just blocks away, everything is falling apart, and practically screaming at me to watch my back and my step. I can't recall seeing anything equivalent before in this country. Around dusk, I had one older woman kindly greet me on the street, followed by "be careful".

Virtually everything west of Biloxi, MS is new, under construction, damaged, destroyed, or vacant. It looks like everything was touched by that hurricane. Piles of rubble are not uncommon outside the city center. Even within 1/2 mile of the French Quarter, I saw houses still tarped and marked w/ the red "X"s from the search and rescue aftermath. I'll write more about the destruction and this dichotomy later on, and add pictures.

Anyway, it's a lot to take in for this country mouse - I expect it will take a little while to find my feet here. Let the learning begin!

On the road again, . . .

. . . on my own again. I woke up this morning with "butterflies" in my stomach. That same feeling you get before the start of a big game or jumping off a cliff (yes, I really have done that). That feeling you get when you're about to do something you've never done before and you don't know how it will turn out. If you've done it, you know what I'm talking about.

Wish me luck!

Now for the hard part

Props to my immediate family, Tias, Columbian cousins, and my Tio Frank - I haven't seen many of them for 10+ years, but I was welcomed like a prodigal son. I had a great time getting to meet them (again) and just hanging out. It's hard to have a bad time with such generous, fun-loving people. E.g. - the New's Year's Eve party lasted until 4am. It was a super Spanish refresher also - my language skills have atrophied greatly over the last 10-15 years. It was a great couple weeks!

So far, this has been a pretty fun trip, but really, I've been mostly coasting. So, now comes the hard part. Since Mid-October, I've only spent 3-4 weeks truly out on my own. Time enough to be significant, but also a lot of time essentially mooching off friends and family. I plan to head now into territory where I don't know anybody and really see how sustainable this lifestyle can be.

I am currently on a train back to NC*, where I will recoup my truck and possessions from Dan and Andie's house, and head to New Orleans, post-haste. I hope to make it there in time to join the celebrations surrounding the BCS championship game (Jan. 7). Then, I'll be looking for work and volunteering opportunities. I am curious to see what it looks like now, and I have an idea that there is still a need for old-fashioned sweat and muscle there.

Let's go see, eh?

*An aside here to answer some comments- I got to Florida by hitching a ride w/ Dan Hartmann, who was taking a cruise from Ft. Lauderdale. I left my truck at his house. He lent me his car while he was on the ship - that is the car w/ the canoe on top.

This year is starting off with a bang! In other news:

My deadbeat tenants were evicted yesterday! From what I hear, it could have been worse, but mostly they left behind trash and filth (including a dead goat carcass in the garage), not damage.

Congratulations to my friends Phil and Danielle, who are new parents as of yesterday! Danielle delivered a beautiful baby girl.

Congratulations to my friend Dan, who just accepted a job offer, and will be moving to Boston!