Wig Wam

The gals made this lean-to out of ginger I hacked down from the side of our house. Cool, huh?

Carrot Cup (or Half-Cup, More Precisely)

I will suggest that this demitasse fits nicely with our Nature Week theme. Mmm, carrots.

Streetcars and Trains and Buses That Go

Nature Week

Hey, guess what, guys? It's nature week (mostly-ish) here on Slimbolala. Stay tuned. It'll be very exciting. Birds. Trees. Other natural stuff. You're going to love it. I guar-awn-tee.

What Did the Hen-Duck Say to the Drake? Uh, Huh...

Mardi Gras Indian, Late Afternoon

Paul

June — yellow house, blue windows, red shutters

Babies!

Green sequins and white sneaks

Zulu, the K-Doe Baby Dolls

Whole Lotta Mardi Gras

And so Lent has arrived. Thank goodness. And it's time to start sorting through the oodles of Mardi Gras pictures I took. My brain is slow and fuzzy, and I doubt I'll achieve any sensible ordering or structure. Just expect to see lots of photos of lots of bands and sequins and silliness and such, rolling out here over the next lil' bit. Woot!

Clouds, Mardi Gras morning

Ducks and clouds, Audubon Park

Battle of the Bands: Cohen Strutting Their Stuff for Sophie Wright

Another of my favorite parts of Mardi Gras and the school bands is the interaction of the different squads before the parade gets underway: the scoping out, the ribbing, the showing off. As Sophie Wright rolls down the route, Cohen puts on a show for them:



What a hoot.

Walter L. Cohen High School

Happy birthday, Miss June Frances! Eight. My goodness. June's a Mardi Gras baby. I remember being with Sarah in the maternity ward and hearing parades rolling down St. Charles. I arranged for there to be a full slate of parades today to commemorate the occasion. (Seriously, today was the busiest parade schedule I can remember in a while — something in the neighborhood of a dozen-plus hours of near-consecutive parade.)

St. Aug's Marching 100

Dudley High

Mardi Gras is one of my favorite times of year, and one of my favorite things about Mardi Gras is the school bands in the parades, and one of my favorite things about school bands are when they do one of those "breakdown" types of things (I'm sure there's a term in the marching band parlance, but I don't know it), not playing a full song, but instead doing some call and response shouting and keeping a good beat and busting out some good moves. Last night I saw one my favoritest band breakdowns ever. And I caught it on video. Dudley High, from Greensboro, NC,¹ tearing it up:



I love all the different phases, from the truly spectacular early part with the whole band hollering and moving, to the instrumental breakdowns, to the quiet coordinated shuffle in the middle, to the high-jumping shenanigans of the drum corps as they roll out.

¹ I adore our hometown bands, but they march in several Mardi Gras parades every year and have these parades down to a well-honed operation. Some of the best spectacles are put on by out-of-town bands who are super-psyched to be here and who feel like they've got a little something to prove.

McDonogh 35 checks out Warren Easton's drums as Hermes lines up

Ducks in a row

Clouds. (Yeah, I'm on a bit of obsessive cloud thing lately, but they're pretty damn amazing these days.)

Ah, Muses!

So Carnival has been being going, but now things really kick off. Muses tonight, on of the perennial best parades (and the weather looks to hold, not luck the nasty rain that drenched last nights parades). Woot! And then it's Friday and then Saturday which rolls right into Sunday. And it used to be that Monday was a quiet day, but not so anymore. And then of course there's Tuesday, the big day. And then Wednesday, when we pick up the pieces and try to embrace some Lenten sobriety. Five days. Off we go!

June, Marie Grace, Elizabeth, Felicity, and their respective pets. (This photo just kills me. June's big goofy grin and the hilarious arrangement of the various participants — so very June.)

Teeny-tiny adorable little baton (and pom-pom) girls. Every year, I experience a visceral thrill the first time I hear a school marching band coming down the street — the drums, the horns. It's the Pavlovian stimulus that tells my brain, Mardi gras!

Sundown, clouds over the Bywater as 'tit Rex fixes to roll. (I like the expression "fixing to" do something. Another one of our exotic vernacular tenses: not quite the present but not fully the future either — not being but fixin' to be. What do you call that in Latin?)

X marks the spot: I saw this pair of criss-crossing contrails out the window today, distinctly resembling the letter "X". It could have been a coincidence, but I like to think this was the first letter in an extremely large-scale skywriting endeavor (perhaps spelling "Xoloitzcuintle"), the rest of which was out of sight beyond the horizon.

We were playing a little family game of Scrabble this past weekend. It was a reasonably dry and pleasant morning. This was my set of letters at one point: "R₁A₁I₁N₁E₁E₁E₁". And then, later, it was rainy. Whoah! Are my Scrabble tiles predicting the future? Freaky.

My morning coffee (on this morning-after-the-night-before — which was a hoot, by the way): A Will Rogers Memorial demitasse. Lovely, non?

The Dieners Debut, Saturn Bar, Tonight!

So Mr. Adam and I have rather sneakily been assembling a happy-hollerin' down-and-dirty good-times little rock 'n' roll duo. We call ourselves the Dieners,¹ and we've been practicing and everything. I think we sound pretty good, but the proof of that is in the performance-pudding, and the first course of that pudding is being served tonight. Which is a metaphorically overwrought way of saying that tonight's our first gig.

Tonight! Gig!

And it's with other cool bands (cool bands!), Kay Swiss and the Keddz (ain't that a helluva name?), who are also debuting² (and whose members include our  beloved Mary T Keddz, née Bruiser Mary), all followed up by the Lushingtons, who are not debuting but have, on the contrary, played many fine gigs before (and whose founding members met at a Bruisers gig). (So you see, though the Bruisers N.O. may have ceased to be an active band in any "actually playing" sense, we're apparently turning into a collective. (Wanna join? Bring a tambourine, and you're in. Guaranteed.))

The whole shindig kicks off around 10-ish-ish. Come on down and have a heaping helping! (Of the performance-pudding. Again, that whole overwrought metaphor thing.) Woot!

<sup>1 There's a complicated footnote about the name, but I'm feeling to lazy to explain it right now. I'll save it for the glossy press kit. (This is merely a footnote about the absence of the footnote which would be here if I was making more of an effort.)

2 It's like a debutante ball. We should all be wearing tuxes and gowns and get our picture in the Living section.</sup>

Sunrise