Highlights today: Hurricane season officially opens. Got our driver licenses, got our new plates, opened a bank account, and I acquainted myself with my new Target when I bought cleaning supplies for the new house.
Highlights tomorrow: Move into and sleep in new house.
A couple things I noticed today:
Do you know that the people of New Orleans have been living without magazines for months? They simply have not been getting them in the mail and I guess that local stores didn’t have the up-to-date mag.s either. It seems kind of like Hawaii when my parents lived there in the 1960s: in Hilo the television shows aired a week or two after they aired in the mainland. New Orleanians have been getting, if at all, their magazines about a week behind the rest of us. Weird thing is, while some Americans may try to disassociate with what happened down here (“that couldn’t happen here”), unlike Hawaii, we’re still attached to the mainland down here. And yet we can’t catch up on celebrity gossip very easily. I can’t find a damn People magazine and Brad and Angelina just had their baby and I want to read about it. (Alex and Julie, save this week and last weeks’ mag for me, please.)
Trees:
Phil and I had to drive to St. Charles Parish to get our DMV stuff taken care of because the lines in and around New Orleans at the DMV can take all day. As we were driving to Hanville, which is “across the river”, I was admiring the green on both sides of the rode. The trees were pretty. Then all of a sudden, I’ve seen this before in Louisiana, the trees changed and I was looking at what seemed to be giant sticks stuck in the ground with thin, light-green moss draped over them. I don’t get that. Phil suggested I have my sixth graders next year figure that one out for me.
Chicken and the Levy:
By the end of our stop at the Hanville DMV, we were famished. Popeye’s seemed like a good solution, so we asked for directions and made our way to the closest one. It was a strictly takeout or drive-up Popeye’s and there was a sign just inside the door that said, “This car isn’t big enough to hold all that Popeye’s flavor.” It took Phil awhile to understand the meaning of this, as he will not eat in our car and believes no one else ever should. Once we got our chicken we had to choices: eat in the car like normal people or sit on the levy, which was across the street from Popeye’s. Phil chose the levy, so with new Louisiana driver’s licenses in our pockets, we sat on the top of the levy and ate some really good chicken and avoided getting too hot by drinking ice cold root beer. And I thought: I live here. I really live here. And this levy is just a seat right now.
Talkin’: Phil saw a vanity plate in Tennessee that read “B-R-I-N-G I-T”. “Look,” he said to me when he spotted it and then he read it for me, “Brang et!” He keeps repeating this whenever I, or anyone else—including bank personnel and bad drivers, try to mess with him. Today he told me to go “git” something and later he announced that he was going to “fetch” something. After years of working to rid himself of his Southern accent, it all comes back so naturally for him.
By the way, there has not been one hurricane that hit New Orleans in June in 150 years (Times-Picayune, front page today). Why then is June still condisided part of the season?
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