iDrawrin': View from front porch, Dauphin Island

Isle Dauphine Country Club (Emphasis on "Country"), Dauphin Island, Alabama

Unlike any place I've seen, a vintage modernist fantasy plunked down at the far southern edge of Alabama. We spent an afternoon there, drinking beers and cocktails, watching the kids splash in the pool, and chit-chatting with friends and strangers. The strangers consisted of a local family whose son had just finished his last day of fourth-grade at the Island's tiny school and who, starting next year, would be bussed off each morning at 6 a.m. to middle school on the mainland; a heavy-set biker-dude whose many tattoos had started to sag south;  the bartendress Kim, a native Daulphinian who didn't wear a watch but said that if she did, it would have all fives; and two cougar-ladies on the prowl. (The pickings were slim, and the bored twenty-something lifeguard was at serious risk of a cougar attack!)


Umbrella


Sarah drinking a beer. (When asked what kind of beer they had, Kim informed us, all the kinds: Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite....)


The pool was conic, round and sloping down towards the middle.


The main building


Noodles


The pool deck


Handrails


Palm trees and fence

Beer koozie: "If I got smart with you (how would you know)?" Love it. (Though of course, the rebuttal is, "If (I) mis(paren)thesized with (you, how) would (you) know?")

Man in black jacket, the movie

Angry crawfish

Back door mural

Pink house, the movie

iPad drawing #3: Pink house

On the Cat(s) Walk

There's a hilarious pet situation going on around here. I've told you before about Delilah's eccentric going-along-for-walks-with-the-dog behavior. Well, things just got even eccentric-er(-er-er). Now Pearl has joined the fray, marching along with us.* She recently graduated to the indoor-outdoor cat club (having formerly, as a wee lass, remained solely within the sheltering walls of home). And taking her cue from Delilah, she's apparently decided that this is Standard Feline Operating Procedure (SFOP). Now walking Penny is less like walking a dog and more like shepherding an odd interspecial flock. To update our previous rendition:



Good times. Maybe I can start a circus.

* And she's extra all up in everything, being first everywhere, rubbing up against Penny, rubbing up against everything, chirping her hilarious little chirp-meow. (Used to be, she rarely meowed—occasionally, while padding around the house in middle of the night—but since she started going outside, she's become very vocal.)

iPad Drawing #2: I'm getting a turn-of-the-century Sicilian farmer vibe. (Again with the farmers.) Whatchya say?

The Early Bird (Cont'd)

Who knows about birds? Because really, what is the deal with all the hootin' and tweetin' and whip-poor-will-in' and cawin' and all that first thing in the a.m.? What's the functional purpose? Why do they all do it? I'm looking at this little sparrow-ish guy/gal sitting on the willow in front of me (it lives in the nest under our eaves), and when I actually watch what it's doing, it looks sort of cray-zee (like if a person was doing it, they would get tackled and hauled away in a white sleeveless jacket), just sitting up there jerking its head around holler-chirping at the top of its teenie little lungs. What does it aim to accomplish? Is somebody going to bring it breakfast? Is it looking for love? (Are the trees of early morning like some sort of giant ornithological singles bar?) Is this just some sort of primal existential "I am here!"? What's up with that?

A-Draw-A-Ma-Tatin'!

So, the phone-drawing has been tons of phun. But it did have the downside of being wearying on the eyes, all that staring intently at that little screen (a sort of modern day miniature painting?). But I'm very excited to say that I've just upscaled. Literally. As in gone larger in scale. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I've just gotten my greedy fingers on my very own new shiny iPad. (Infinitely obliged to the kindly patrons/family members who helped make it so.) Woot! A brave new world. And below is the very first doodle that tumbled out of my noodle onto its pristine shiny digitized surface:



Why was my first instinct to draw what appears to be a middle-aged organic farmer (or a pensive lumberjack)? I can't exactly say.* But I'm excited to see what this new techno-dealio can do, so let's get a-draw-a-ma-tatin'! Expect oodles of doodles in the near future. Ciao, belli.

* Well actually, yes I can. I just started off drawing some random guy, but his jaw-line was sort of weird looking, so I used the "hair" brush to give him a big ol' bushy beard, thus disguising the flaw. And then once he had a big ol' bushy beard, a red flannel shirt just seemed like the logical next step. And so here we are.

Cypress tree

Sign with hair: "Stop Ahead"

Brrrr!

Whoah, it's cold. I mean like fifty-seven degrees! I'm swaddled in a warm robe and stocking cap. (On my regionally adjusted temperature spectrum, any temperature that starts with something lower than a six is "chilly".) Don't get me wrong: it' lovely. It's refreshing. But it's also freaky. Such things aren't supposed to happen. We'd readied ourselves weeks ago for the onset of summer, sure that temperatures like these were gone until October. So this is just plain confusing. Unnerving. Like I'd almost take the sweltering heat just so I knew what's what.* Hmm.

* Unnaturally mild temperatures plus all the birds mysteriously leaving the island in Audubon Park plus the big looming mass of water? This whole imminent-rapture business is starting to seem kind of plausible (in which case, I guess things will be heating up soon enough).

Punny Business

Question: What's the punniest kind of business? Which category of business venture is most inclined to have a pun as a business name? Contenders are coffee shops:

• Central Perk (y'know, on "Friends", near Central Park)
• City Perk (same concept, but here in N.O. near City Park)
• Brewed Awakening
• etc.

and hair salons:

• Shear Magic
• Shear Madness
• pretty much any other possible pun on "shear"

Other coffeeshop/salon examples? Other types of pun-prone businesses? We must get to the bottom of this. (Oh yeah, "Bottoms Up". Low-end strip clubs and cheezy off-color bars also seem to like the puns.)

Steam train

Crikey, that's a lot of water! Despite all rational arguments and assurances, the thought of that big hulking surge rolling our way makes a soul jumpy. (You can understand, perhaps, if our faith in the Corps of Engineers is less than boundless.) But nervous nellie-ness aside, wow! Just wow.

Sign in the middle of City Park (in the middle of New Orleans): "BRIDGE OUT 42 MILES AHEAD. LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY." That's a pretty liberal definition of "local".

Jazz Fest Miscellany

Various photos of various things we saw when we went to Jazz Fest this past weekend. They're not really of particularly Jazz Fest-y things (but I suppose I'm not a particularly Jazz Fest-y person, so that works out). Enjoy:


The gals beforehand, hatted and sunglassed up

 
Running shoe-planter, seen on the way to the Fairground


My favorite thing of the whole day was the Double Dutch show in the kids tent.


There was a group of Bywater boho Double Dutchers. They were really good.


Double Dutchin'!

End of the day "time to go home" face

"What Do You Call...?"

Do you want to hear a joke I made up?

Q: What do you call a flying squirrel with no horizontal velocity?

A: A falling squirrel.

Note that I didn't say, "Do you want to hear a good joke I made up?"* Despite—or perhaps because of its awfulness (and hopeless nerdiness)—this joke has found a certain staying power in our domestic conversation, having now been repeated and cited on multiple occasions by multiple members of the family. Feel free to inflict it on others.

* Its creation was prompted by the sight of a squirrel (of the bushy-tailed non-flying variety) falling straight out of a tree onto the street in front of me, momentarily freaking out in panicked confusion, then scurrying to the safety of the curb.

Man in wide-lapel suit. (Non-sequitur: Happy Mother's Day!)

Magenta shoes

Sarah, Sunday afternoon

The Early Bird Gets... the Other Bird

I'm telling you, the early morning bird drama around here^{1, 2} just keeps on coming. Certainly, we see birds of prey in the city from time to time but usually from a great distance as they swoop up high or perch in some distant tree. But this morning, as I stepped out on my balcony, I saw whopping big reddish-brown hawk (or somesuch—I'm not up to speed on the particular regional varieties) perched on the neighbor's fence, a mere thirty feet away, looking utterly incongruous in this urban neighborhood. As it stood there, darting its head around lightining fast but otherwise motionless, I wondered what the heck it was doing here. My question was answered a moment later when it suddenly swooped down and snatched up a mockingbird—tell-tale flash of white wing—that had the misfortune to land nearby. Damn! As it flew away with its victim, a second distraught mockingbird chased it. Damn!

New Orleans Character Watch: Weedwacker Bicycle Man

So I've seen this guy a couple times now around town. He rides a weedwacker powered motorcycle. And I dont' mean he's rigged up his bike with a little two-cycle engine. I mean he's actually rigged the whole thing up to a weedwacker which he holds out to the side in his right hand, gripping the throttle, with the the spinny part (the spin-a-majiggy, the rotor?) somehow attached to the back wheel. Gentle squeeze the throttle: little bit of speed. Squeeze it hard: wheeeeeeeeeee-yeeeeeeeeeeee! (Both times were actually going uphill—on overpasses, pretty much the only inclines we've got in our otherwise pancake-flat terrain—so clearly the things got enough power to get the job done.) And to add a bit of weirdness to the already plenty-weird spectacle, he's got a blinking Jason-style hockey goalie mask rigged up to the handlebars on the front. Now that's personality. (And some weird outside-the-box kind of innovation. Maybe the venture capitalists should be scoping this guy out: Here's some seed money. Surprise me!)