The alarm on my BlackBerry was set for an hour before dawn so I could slink out of the room and catch the sunrise. I laid it next to my head and passed out on the floor of the hotel room on a pile of pillows and under a swath of blankets. When I woke, Jennifer was standing over me telling me my alarm had gone off.

No surprise I’d slept through it, we know I sleep like the dead. It worries me sometimes, but not this morning — this particular morning I was too excited to be worried. I failed to bring a baseball hat so it was only a clip that held my wild hair out of my eyes and looking somewhat tamed as I pulled on the clothes I’d worn the day before, grabbed my camera bag and tripod and scuttled out of the room.

Wandering through the French Quarter at 6am, I passed a number of bars still rocking strong with their music and voices wafting out into the streets and hovering in the neon. I crossed paths with a few pairs of folks still out from the night before, wearing beads though Mardi Gras expired a week prior…they clearly didn’t get the note from the fashion critics telling them beads were “out”.

Blocks were barricaded off while the early morning trash crew worked quietly on the city, removing boxes and boxes and wheeled carts of refuse from the sidewalks that represented only the last few hours. I’m struck by the fact that the refuse collection crews are constantly at work here - taking away the acrid decay of debauchery that smells remarkably - in invisible, unavoidable pockets - like vomit. (Note to self: look into a bar district recycling campaign for not only Atlanta, but New Orleans!)

What turned out to be five blocks away from the water I got turned around and found myself in dark streets with no bars and no pedestrians and while my tripod makes a fine weapon, I decided not to chance it and hailed a cab. I’d only been here once before, after all, and that was with a Hurricane and Captain & Coke or four in my belly. $2.40 later, I was at the water and the sun was rising. The sky was orange and there was a creepy yet romantic mist crawling up the bank of the Mississippi and onto the sidewalk.

I snapped a few shots before a man I’d noticed shortly after my arrival approached me, my right hand easing into my jeans pocket and on my spray. He asked if I could take his picture, explaining that it was his birthday and he’d left his camera behind in his hotel room. Because, he said; he was trying not to wake his wife.

Had it not been for him, I might not have any pictures from the trip that I really love.

When my time with the camera had been satisfied, I walked a quarter block to a barely populated Cafe Du Monde, grabbed a cafe au lait and a token bag of fresh beignets. Street artists were already setting up around the perimeter of Jackson Square, runners were out on the riverwalk, and I had a skip in my step. I tried to gobble it all up – the silence with murmurs of song, the ornate details in the architecture and their charming balconies, the perfect temperature of the air, the powdered sugar littering my sweater after only one bite and the prospect of another twenty four hours in the arms of this most haunted city.

Viewable here.

Words/stories hopefully tomorrow.

Good conversation is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Word.

I had an ridonkulously beautiful evening sitting around with a few brilliant (and hot, of course) women last night, drinking and laughing and sharing and building great big plans. While I’m not going to share even a fraction of what we discussed, because I’m a dirty, filthy tease; I will provide you with some of the notes for your link love pleasure. Mostly because I just typed them up/emailed them and I’m lazy like that. A copy and paste blog entry is oh so much easier on six hours of sleep than coming up with something - oh - say - original? Plus, today is my Friday which means you should join me in spirit by surfing the net and not getting any work done. Not that I’ll be doing that.

Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/ (previously blogged)
ICE Atlanta: http://www.ice-atlanta.com/
CitiKitty http://www.citikitty.com/
The Daily Coyote: http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/

Oh and PS - I’ve committed to doing the 2-day again, this time with company. Dates: September 20 & 21. Stand-by for fund raising harassment. Linkage: http://www.2daywalk.org/

Next time you see fresh pixels on this page, my almost non-existent, yet remarkably present azz will be in the land of the failed levy.

Today Mardi Gras is being celebrated in New Orleans, and though I’m a little too old to be flashing my jiggly bits for dime store beads, I’m not too old to ingest a hurricane or three and pour myself into a cab at the end of a night in the city with my seester and her friend Liz.

Friday morning I’ll throw a bag in the car, grab the iPod, load up on caffeine and hit the road; landing ultimately in cajunville.

The trip isn’t a response to my previous jumping-out-of-my-skin post and subsequent comments a go-go, but rather is a trip we’ve had on the books for a few months. Said fabulous sister somehow landed herself a free weekend at The Ritz in NOLA, and chose to share it with us. *Yeay* for sisters and girls weekends in exciting locales! Yeay for non-questionable lodging!

Having never been to New Orleans before and having recently been afflicted with a condition commonly referred to as “gottatakeapictureofthatitis”, I’m stoked. I’m stoked to fly by the seat of my pants, and I’m stoked that Liz is an LA native who will make certain I don’t miss any of the must see/do’s, I’m stoked to spend time practicing my writing about a place with such a rich history and a stormy (pun intended) past and I’m stoked that the weather is gonna be nizzzzeee.

On my list of things to see/do/ingest/take pictures of/experience: French Quarter, Bourbon Street, beads in trees and other leave behinds of “Trash Wednesday“, étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, po’boy , ride a riverboat, visit a fortune teller, go on a ghost walk/haunted history tour, stay up past my bedtime and listen to some live jazz, *do not throw up*, hug Jennifer a lot, laugh till my belly hurts, listen to Liz and jot down the hilarious and brilliant things she says, make sure to get another bat-face picture.

With a list like that it wouldn’t seem there’s any room for spontaneity, but I assure you: there will be.

Anything in particular you think I should see/do or not see/do?

Can. Not. Wait.

At Abbott Loop Elementary in Anchorage, my brother was two grades ahead of me. He and his friend Jeff were the first class of students to go all the way through (1st through 6th grade) the recently formed and somewhat controversial “optional program”. Our classrooms were in a lollipop shaped off-shoot, separated from the main body of the school, and joined/separated by the library at the base and a breezeway on either end. “The Pod”, as it was called, was six classrooms that were really three classrooms. They could be joined or separated by moving walls and in practice, we were coupled into three classes with two teachers for each: 1st & 2nd grades, 3rd & 4th and 5th & 6th.

Our classrooms didn’t have doors, the students had cubby holes where our pencils and papers lived in “tote trays” with our names taped to the fronts. There were couches, tables and chairs in the rooms - but no desks. We weren’t given grades, instead we were passed or failed - we got smiley face stamps on our papers when we’d done well, or red marks when we didn’t. We called our teachers by their first names.

In third grade, one of my teachers was Kathy McCord. She wore silk blouses and pressed slacks, fashionable kitten heels with peep toes, and always had on a necklace with a leaf pendant that very much looked like and probably was, an actual leaf that had been dipped in gold. I think I asked her about it once and she said she got in Hawaii, but I could be making that up. She had beautiful jet black hair with specks of gray, it came to the middle of her neck in perfectly formed just-came-from-the-salon 70’s curls. She had dark skin and perfect bright white teeth we got to see a lot, because Kathy was always smiling.

Third grade was a hard one for me, mom was sick and I was a mess of a child. I talked with my hands flailing, told inappropriate jokes during Show and Tell, and was really generally an obnoxious little troll starved for attention. Kathy was patient and kind and tolerated my misguided energy like a saint. I wouldn’t have the same luck in fourth grade…but I digress.

One afternoon after Kathy had handed our tests or homework back to us, I found marks on mine indicating wrong answers. I walked to her and prepared for debate, standing next to her as she sat, holding my paper. I attempted to justify my answers and convince her that my logic would wondrously make a wrong answer into a right one.

She’s sitting in her chair listening patiently and trying to explain what I didn’t want to hear, and I’m standing on her left side. I was about as tall standing up as she was sitting down…and I loved that about her. She wanted to be on the same level we were.

I was getting more and more animated and flailing my hands about as if they could communicate better than my mouth when *THUNK*. The pencil I’d been holding in my right hand was now firmly planted in her left eye.

She let out a yelp, pulled the pencil out and headed for the hospital. Janet someone-or-another who lived in my neighborhood and was in the class above mine said something horrible to me about it. I don’t remember what it was exactly, only that she missed the fact that it was an accident and made me hate her.

Kathy was fine - the pencil hit the white part of her eye and didn’t cause any long term damage. She always had a spot there, though, where I got her.

A few years later when mom became more ill, Kathy took me to dinner and shopping. She took me to Harry’s and we sat at a quiet table where I ate a burger and she talked to me like a grown up. I bought a dress, a hat and hose that afternoon. My first pair of hose.

There were a few other outings with Kathy, but I started growing up - finding independence/rebellion, and she had her own life - a divorce and two grown boys that had issues of their own.

Many years later on a visit back home I tried to catch her at the school to say hello, but she’d transferred to another program across town. A few years past that, I got a letter in the mail from one of my childhood girlfriends mother.

“I thought you’d want to know” the note said. I unfolded the slip of paper enclosed, ashy colored and clearly cut from the local newspaper. It was Kathy’s obituary.

I regret never having told her how her energy made a mark on me, how the interest she showed just may have been the little bit I needed to keep me on the crooked and narrow. How the chunk of love she gave made a difference and ensured my survival.

I still think about her regularly - she’s always in a maroon blouse with a scooped neckline and black trousers. She’s slipping a finger in the shoulder of her shirt to adjust her strap (she did this regularly but it wasn’t until years later that I understood it). She’s wearing that wonderful necklace, smiling, and glowing like an angel.

Me? I’m still the kid who stabbed her teacher in the eye with a pencil.