Yesterday morning, I got stung on the foot, probably by a fire ant. Icky picture past the jump. You have been warned.
Continue reading ‘Ewww. Ouch.’
Archive for the 'Life in Louisiana' Category
The state legislature passed and Governor Jindal signed the Louisiana Science Education Act. According to the Times-Picayune article I linked,
the law…will allow local school boards to approve supplemental materials for public school science classes as they discuss evolution, cloning and global warming.
.
Didn’t these people learn ANYTHING from the Dover case? In a state as poor as ours, with an education as weak as our kids get, what makes the legislature and our “smart guy! Ethical!” governor think this is a good thing?
Hat tip: The sidebar at the Mormon blog By Common Consent. I’d bet my buddy Mark linked this.
My church had its annual crawfish boil today. A standard was set during the first year or two we’ve had these boils, but it’s been a little off kilter the past two years. The year after the storm it was held at a campground, and the turnout wasn’t very good. The following year it was hard to work it in to the annual schedule, so it was on a Friday evening and there weren’t any desserts and the space was really crowded. This year there was a TON of food, and the park was spacious and the kid had a blast playing on the giant water slide. I ate all the crawfish I wanted. Yum….
I also showed a self-professed “crawfish virgin” how to eat them. He was surprised at how little food came out of a mudbug - just the tail meat. We told him you have to work really hard, but it’s worth it.
We got home a couple of hours ago and have been just sort of laying around in a semi-stupor ever since. No need to cook dinner tonight!
Last night I went to a free concert at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans - Selections from The Sacred Compositions, by Duke Ellington.
The concert was very nice, but not great. I’d give it a B minus. Charmaine Neville and Philip Manuel were soloists. She has a wonderful voice, and he was amazing. The orchestra was terrific. There were two main problems: I couldn’t hear the choir, and I couldn’t see the dancer.
The orchestra wasn’t in a pit. The choir had directional mikes, but if the orchestra was playing you really couldn’t hear them. Which was a shame, because what little I was able to hear, when the orchestra was quiet, was just excellent. Because they were playing in a church, the dancer was on the floor, so I could see his head moving, but I couldn’t see his feet. I guess the altar just wasn’t designed for dancing.
The program itself was interesting. Ellington wrote three sacred compositions between 1964 and 1973. He considered the second one “the most important thing [he’d] ever done.” While many critics disagree, I was very impressed with the soulful, swinging nature of the music that still evoked a spiritual feeling.
While it wasn’t a transforming experience, I enjoyed it very much, and I’m glad I went.
The weather is probably not as nice as VegasJoe’s, because we have 57% humidity, but it suits me fine.
In a recent primary-age lesson on keeping our bodies healthy, the Word of Wisdom came up. (For any readers not familiar, the WofW is, in a nutshell: No coffee, no tea, no alcohol, no tobacco. Eat healthy.)
The bit about tobacco came up, and one boy said, “My dad uses tobacco.”
Awkward silence.
“That’s that hot sauce you put on food, right?”
Collective sigh.
It was adorable.
Dear teen-aged girl who stole the really cool stuffed animal my little boy caught at the Mardi Gras parade:
There are many, many bad words I could say, but I will refrain because this is a family friendly blog. However, I am willing to believe in Hell just so you can burn there.
Pretty much every year for the last four or five years, we have gone to the annual get-together of the Southeastern Louisiana Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Group, with the really cool acronym of “SLEEB.” They have dinner the last Friday of January at a Mittendorf’s Restaurant in Manchac, Louisiana. It’s about an hour away, on the western side of the lake next to Lake Pontchartrain (we are on the east side of the lake.) The weekend usually coincides with the Friday closest to my birthday, so it’s my birthday dinner.
I have always enjoyed it. The company is interesting and different. Another biologist’s wife says she calls it “the Biologist’s Ball.” The biologists tell biologist stories, and the non-biologists tell non-biologist stories, and we all laugh at each other.
This year, the restaurant was under new management. We had a limited menu to choose from, and I was disappointed not to be able to order fried shrimp. It was OK, but not as tasty or as much fun as last year.
Maybe for Valentine’s Day, we will go to a place I want to try called La Provence. If we do, we’ll have to save our money!
Today I spent most of the day working on The Kid’s bedroom. Gosh it was a mess. We cleaned out old toys, sorted, organized, bagged and boxed. I posted three different ads on the local Freecycle, grouping the available toys by age group. I found five pairs of excellent jeans, size 7, that I had been saving for when he grew into them. He’s already outgrown them 
DH is going to repair (again) the little bookcase. We still need to sort through books, change the bedding, dust the corners and vacuum. I’d like to get some new closet doors, but that won’t happen tonight.
We had a very nice dinner and blew off the church party. Fireworks aplenty are going off outside.
Here’s to a productive and successful and prosperous 2008 for all of us! Happy New Year!
The Allstate BCS National Championship Game will be held on Monday, January 7th at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. For those of you who aren’t sports fans/don’t care about that sort of thing, or who haven’t already heard already for whatever reason, the contenders will be the #1 ranked Buckeyes of Ohio State and the #2 ranked Fighting Tigers of Louisiana State.
I was born in Ohio, moved to Columbus when I was nine, and lived there for almost 30 years. Saturdays were game days at my house, and OSU/Michigan was more carefully observed as a holiday than Veterans Day. I’ve only been here for five years (going on six), but I have drunk the Kool-aid. I have abandoned my roots. I am rooting for the home team.
Geaux Tigers!
On the other hand, I won’t be devastated if they lose. Whatever happens, my team wins.
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