Speaking of which, is the movie any good? I haven’t seen it yet. I hear Rush’s Neil Peart has a bit part in it - would it make me cringe?

But it’s not just that I feel it’s my duty to publicize yummy lunch spots that brings me to report this. It’s also that I saw this sign upstairs of Mandarin House that sorta puzzled me:

Two questions occur to me:

1. What is this “remnant” thing? Google has been of no conclusive help; what hits I’m getting are imperfect matches at best. “Remnant” seems like a weird word to describe Christians in a country where Christianity is the definite majority. Does anyone know what this is? Is it just that they feel that their church is the only real remnant of Jesus’s following? I guess I could call the church and ask them, but for some reason I’m reluctant.
2. And what the heck are they doing with Metairie Park Country Day’s seal? Seriously, take away that sword, and the remaining shield with the red and blue quadrants is the exact heraldic symbol on all the alumni foundation post cards. Or pretty darn similar, anyway. Getcher mitts off my alma mater, you!

It’s wise to carry around a small wad of one’s own toilet paper. This becomes evident towards, say, 4:30 PM. Also, some of that no-rinse hand sanitizer stuff is useful any time of day, since the facilities are not designed with your using those same hands to eat a Creole’s Original Stuffed Bread in mind.

What I already knew:

Catching at least one show on the Lagniappe Stage is mandatory for survival. An hour spent sitting down in the shade of horse box 2B is good for you.

What I’m delighted to come to know:

There is a found poem waiting to be assembled from all the identity declaration T-shirts running around.

I’m a Sure Thing
i am new orleans
I ROCK

Thank you, Stan and the rest of the crew whose names I didn’t catch at the French Market Restaurant & Bar. I stumbled in, tempted by the smell of boiled seafood, at 11:15–just in time for y’all to start shutting down, but the welcome didn’t suffer a bit for that. The shrimp was excellent and the bloody mary was divine. I mean, seriously, that was the blood mary I’ve been pining for. They don’t know about green bean garnishes in Boulder, let me tell you.

(All those pictures I was taking? No people in them! I swear! Relax!)

Thank you, Trombone Shorty, for providing a vibe that could be felt half a mile down the river. Also, I can’t swear I’ve ever heard anyone incorporate a MySpace.com URL in a rap before. Very catchy and effective. You should use the blog space you got there, though.

Thank you, random strangers in the crowd along the Riverfront, especially y’all handing out the sparklers. That was so very, very cool.

I mean, sparklers!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

But then again, life in the city continues, and it’s not all disaster all the time. Right? …right?

Right. I guess. Anyway, I’ve got pics of the Jefferson Parish pumping station safe-houses to share in a post tomorrow or next day. So it ain’t drinking and dancing and biscuits and jelly 24/7, either.

Anyway, last night was a Thursday night. I have a usenet acquaintance who’s been telling me for years that next time I’m in town I need, really requisitely need, to go to Vaughn’s of a Thursday night when Kermit Ruffins is holding court. And when Katrina touched down, one of the laughably out-of-perspective trivial thoughts that crossed my mind–you know what I’m talking about, the less important losses you babble about to distract yourself from the big losses–was, “Damn! I waited too long and now I’ll never get to do that!”

But in fact it is a thing still doable, and my husband and I done did it last night.

So. Vaughn’s is deep in the Bywater, which I am proud to say is a term I am that much closer to using correctly these days. I’m a Metairie native, right? I grew up not knowing a dang thing beyond vague notions of Uptown and Downtown. I have, disgracefully, been know to say “Bywater” and “Marigny” like they were interchangeable terms. Yes, folks, I iz dumb. Less so now, though. I hope. Especially after driving a weird sort of canal/river spiral to try to get to the correct block of Dauphine without blowing a One Way sign on the way there and then, at the end of the night, failing somehow to find Claiborne and instead taking Franklin all the way from St. Claude to the 610. Yay!

But that’s boring stuff. The interesting stuff is at the bar. We got there around 9:45. If you were there, you’d know us as the couple knitting in front of the Rutgers/Kansas State game in the back room. I was the bloody mary and gold ribbon yarn; he was the diet coke and the white bulky wool.

The band didn’t actually start playing until 11:00, but when they did, you knew it. You just can’t hear a live trumpet making with the FUNK in such a tiny neighborhood bar room and mistake it for just another CD on the stereo. Toes started tappin’, butts started shakin’, sufficient space was eked out of the crowded front space for actual dancin’ and everything. Then around midnight the red beans and rice hit the table and I was very, very sorry we’d made plans for an early Friday morning and had to leave. I think I could smell the sausage all the way out to the car.

We’re in town until the 2nd, supposedly. Except I hear that the Denver International Airport is closed for snow again (cf. saga of escaping Denver, 2006-12-23). Which means it’s not entirely unlikely that we’ll be at Vaughn’s again next Thursday with plans to sleep in the next morning. We shall see.

If You Go: Bring cash or a good sense of humor about credit card surcharges. Cover on Thursday nights is $10 at the door. Soft drinks go up from $1 to $1.50 when the band starts playing. Before the band starts playing, do not block anyone’s view of the TV while reaching for the Tabasco.

Better late than never, I s’ppose. There will be blog posts. They will be back-dated. People reading the archives six months from now will hardly suspect the suckage.

For now, just a few thoughts:

• Driving from Metairie (lake end of Bonnabel) to the airport takes under fifteen minutes at 6:00 AM. This is a fact you don’t learn to appreciate until you’ve lived somewhere like Seattle or Boulder, where the area international airport is 30 minutes to an hour and a half away.
• The Morning Call sans ashtrays is a strange, strange sight. And the ability to see clearly all the way from the wall-length mirror on the Severn side of the room to the bussing window on the Causeway side–what with there being no tobacco/nicotine fog obscuring the sight–is just surreal. How exactly did the smoking ban manage to even think about passing in this state? Color me boggled.
• The Creole Carvery on terminal C specifically advertises “overstuffed” po-boys, as though that weren’t the natural state of a good po-boy already. I suppose if you’re an airport restaurant, even if it’s the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, you just have to try harder.

This is here is my Mom’s pet spider. She inadvertently acquired a pet spider a couple months ago. She’s very protective of it. I found this out tonight when I borrowed her car to go pick myself up a Soft Shell Crab Lafitte at the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company drive-through.

“Don’t kill my spider!” she said.

“Your what?”

“My spider. It lives in the mirror. Don’t hurt it!”

I didn’t actually see it until after the sun went down, though. It only comes out at dawn and dusk, whereupon it will spin a brand new web at lightning speed that goes from the driver’s sideview mirror to halfway down the door. When the sun comes up, or when the car starts up, it disappears into the mirror housing, detaching its web as it goes. Or winching it in for later use; we’re not sure.

My mom can’t stand geckos in the house, even though they eat cockroaches. And for cockroaches, she does the popular Eek Eek Eek dance when one crosses the floor. (Who doesn’t?) She has no objection when I catch questing queen ants and smoosh them because, hey, we were here first. No ant hills allowed.

But she has totally adopted this spider.

It’s sooooo cute.

I know this by now. It was only the third nail of Thursday morning when I whacked my thumb, OK? I’ve had plenty of time since then to learn and practice the correct way to hammer a nail.

This, however, doesn’t occur to people who ask me, “Oh my God! What did you do to your thumb?!” when I tell them. Instead, after the obligatory symathy ouch, they tell me about starting a nail off with little taps. Because obviously, with a thumb that looks like that, I need to be told.

But, no. After the one injury, and the difficulties bandaging it, and the way you could tell which two-by-fours I’d worked on by the red smear, I got the hang of that nail-hammering thing really quick. Which was good, because hammering was about all I did all Thursday and Friday. They sent us back to Lacombe to finish assembling foundation frames.

And we darn near got them all finished, too.

There was a rumor of TV crews for Friday, which was why they sent everyone to Lacombe. Straight there, without “circling up” at the church first. However, no TV crew materialized. No one was too disappointed by this; it just meant we got more work done. By the time we started packing it in around 2:30, all the frames had been assembled as far as the two-by-fours went, and there was nothing left to do but bang plywood onto ‘em and position ‘em in the trenches.

In these pictures here, you can see the difference between Friday and Monday. You can also see the empty lots waiting down the block for their foundations to be dug.

300 houses in 3 years. The work continues.

I’ll definitely be back.

Oh, all the people like me just fine. But the little demons haunting all the wires, they hate me.

Monday morning

Mom introduced me to her system on the first night. I was going to be up until ungodly hours trying to meet a Monday deadline (an act of futility, as it turned out; my editor ended up giving me an extension). It was very likely I’d want to go for a walk, or duck out into the store-room for a Coke. So Mom gave me the run-down: password “stay,” password “away,” verbal password for the people who call you up if the alarm goes off.

Mom and Dad use Di Maggio Home Electronics. I can tell you, their products work as advertised….

And I’m not just saying this because I’m fond of the Di Maggio family, what with growing up two doors down from them and all. I’m saying so because the moment I came down the stairs at 5:50 AM on Monday morning, all hell broke loose on like twenty audible frequencies.

What followed was lots of confusion and shouting. I banged on my parents’ bedroom door, convinced that, since it wasn’t the fire alarm and I hadn’t opened the door to set off the home security system, the carbon monoxide alarm was going off. Mom came busting out of there yelling “You opened the door!” I misheard this as an imperative and threw the door open. Mom starts disarming the home security system. “Close the door!” OK, maybe this was some security disarming ritual I hadn’t been shown yet. I close the door. The phone rings. Mom answers and appeases the caller. “Yes, this is Mrs. LeBoeuf, we’re fine, the passcode is [****].”

Then everything’s quiet. I finally say, “So what the hell was that?” And Mom’s like, “What do you think? You opened the door!” At which point I get mad. “I did not open the door!”

“…You didn’t?”

“No! All I did was come down the stairs!”

“Oh. Sorry. Your father must have armed the system for ‘Away’ when he left. That turns on the motion detector.”

So, yeah. Di Maggio Home Electronics works as advertised. But sometimes their customers don’t.

Monday Evening/Tuesday Morning

After my first day on the job with East St. Tammany Habitat for Humanity, I spent the night with an aunt and uncle in Covington, the ones in the neighborhood of the St. Tammany Regional Heart Center. I don’t see much of my various northshore relatives when I’m in town, so avoiding a cross-Pontchartrain commute this week was a good excuse to do something about it.

We had a great visit. I got a tour of the post-Katrina renovations, which were astonishing and elegant. (Quick: why is hurricane season like Christmas? By the end of it, you’ll have a tree in your house. However, the branch of my family to get a tree in the house was also the branch that enjoys an anaesthesiologist’s salary.) My aunt cooked us an excellent dinner. I gave her a quick tutorial in the use of Microsoft Word. Lots of gabbing happened.

At bedtime, I was not taught how to disarm the security system. But I was advised that one existed, and that they arm the motion detector at night on purpose, and I shouldn’t go downstairs if I wake up before them.

Next morning, I didn’t even move towards the stairs until the kitchen-puttering noises around 5:45 AM told me it was safe.

Wednesday Morning

Tuesday night I spent at the home of a different aunt and uncle in Covington, this time off Highway 40. Like I’ve mentioned, their daughter was in from New York, and I never get to see her, so we hung out a bit. Plus my grandmother lives with them. I think for once I’m getting the requisite amount of visiting done this trip and nobody’s going to complain.

We had a huge dinner. Practically everyone in the family showed up. Mom came up from the southshore. My aunt and uncle, the ones I stayed with Monday night, came over. My grandmother and my aunt visiting from Georgia came home from their shopping trip. Gumbo happened in vast happy quantities.

What with one thing and another, it’s probably understandable that no one thought to warn me that this house is protected by electrons too.

Wednesday morning I tip-toed through my grandmother’s side of the house, trying hard not to wake up anyone. I’ll admit I noticed the home security controller box on my way to the door, but I figured it mustn’t be armed. If it was, I would have been told about it, right? I opened the door.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Oh shit. I hurried over to the box. Instructions appeared to be identical to the one at Mom’s house. But I didn’t know the passcode.

Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

I knocked on my grandmother’s door, but by the time she woke up enough to answer me, all hell had broken loose on an 18-decibal level.

Whee.

Wednesday night/Thursday morning

Which brings us to Thursday morning, the ostensible date/time of this post.

Wednesday afternoon, soon as I got in, my uncle met me at the door. “So have you been told the passcode yet?” Yes, I had. He told me again, just to make sure. Plus at least two different but related mnemonics for it. I was set.

The rest of the evening was taken up with hanging out in front of the TV, driving for snowballs, eating dinner, getting to see another cousin and meeting his girlfriend, yadda yadda yadda. Fast-forward to late night. Everyone’s gone to bed and I’m falling asleep on the sofa. I turn off the television and the light, and I curl up into unconsciousness.

Some time later I’m awakened by a sound:

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Oh now. What now?

Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

Oh, crap. I get up, run to the front door, and hastily disarm the security system before it can yell at me. Whew!

I couldn’t have been asleep but for another ten minutes before the beeping starts again. I run to disarm the thing again. I go back to sleep.

It beeps again.

After the third repetition of this song and dance, I’m convinced that the motion detector is sensing me downstairs and doesn’t like it. I retreat upstairs and sack out on the couch up there.

The mystery is resolved the next morning, when I sneak out the house again at my usual stupid-early hour. I disarm the system, open the door, put my stuff on the porch, and rearm the system for “Away.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Oh. I get it now. It uses the same sequence of beeps after arming the system–to let you know how long you have to escape the house–as it does when the alarm is about to go off. What genius thought this up? I’d been having an arm/disarm tug-of-war with my grandmother last night. Boy, I must have really confused her!

Sitting down on the porch to put my muddy shoes back on, my back to the closed front door, I hear the alarm reach the end of its sequence. It gives a perky little chirrup and shuts up. And I drive back to Slidell.

The way I figure, every possible combination of outcomes I could feasibly undergo has happened by now. From here on out, where paranoid electrons are concerned, I think things should get less eventful.

Wish me luck!