A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

I heard Kyle Rittenhouse got bit by a venomous spider. I hope the spider's okay.

The other night David said he couldn't hear the name "Deukmejian" without thinking of the word "Malathion" and I cracked up because it's the most Gen X Cali kid thing I have ever heard anyone say. Deukmejian was governor for a big chunk of my childhood (like 9 years old to the year before I graduated high school), which covered the Mediterranean fruit fly scare; Malathion was the pesticide the state used to eradicate them. I'm sure it didn't cause any cancer or birth defects at all!

Apparently the Norwegian royal family has a royal rapist, dude looks like they put every sneering blond antagonist of '80s teen movies into a blender and this is what came out. If you don't beat him in a downhill ski race from the top of Devil's Peak his dad is gonna shut down the community ski chalet!

The Venn diagram of dudes whining about a "male loneliness epidemic" and dudes who think it's gay to wash their asses is a circle.

Obama's presidential library is finally opening next month. I always said it would be an excuse to go back to Chicago. My brother Rian isn't; we're not that close and his boyfriend hates me.

I'm not under illusions about Obama having been a perfect president--although every president of my lifetime comes across favorably compared to the demented troll currently stinking up the White House. I just really like Chicago, I like to take the train there, and I haven't done so since 2017.

I had fun last night making collages with two elements that came from the same photo:

Saturday I only had to go to the grocery store and got home fairly early in the afternoon. Mom and I split a chicken ceasar wrap I got at the Rouses deli, then I vacuumed downstairs, prepped my planner for July, and took Penny for a walk. It was shockingly nice, after a couple of days of heavy rain. Which we needed, so I'm not complaining. The weekend was sunny and dry, with warm sun but a cool breeze. Nice spring weather is usually just a fond memory in south Louisiana by the first week of May.

We had leftovers for supper, then I watched a couple more episodes of The Expanse and did some collaging.

Sunday I made pumpkin doughnuts for breakfast, put clean sheets on the bed, and read for a while before getting in the shower. I finished London Falling, which felt kind of... inconclusive? I'm not really sure what point Radden Keefe was trying to make with it. Was it about zoomers and materialism? Was it about organized crime? Was it about how foreign oligarchs and their money have ruined London? I mean I guess it was about all of those things, but it never really felt like it cohered for me.

Which isn't to say I hated it or anything, it was an interesting story and he's a good writer. It just felt unsatisfying to me.

In the afternoon I made a baked lime pudding and did some dinner prep, in between drinking wine and reading the next Dave Robicheaux book, Heaven's Prisoners. There was a terrible movie adaptation of this one back in the '90s, which I mostly remember because Teri Hatcher, of all people, pulled off one of the very few decent Cajun accents I've ever heard in film. Most actors don't even try because of how weird it sounds, they just opt for a bog standard southern drawl.

Burke can be problematic for me to read, and if he didn't write with such beauty about the place I live in I might not bother. I've mentioned this before, and he got better about it later on, but the women in his early books seem to just exist to further the plot or to make Robicheaux feel a certain way. This is the book where he pulls a little Salvadoran girl out of a plane wreck and he and his wife just like, keep her? I don't mean they go through the system of fostering/adoption, I mean they just take her home like, "finders keepers". That seems weird!

Her mother has died in the plane wreck, then Robicheaux's wife gets murdered, then like a week later he brings home an old flame, then she leaves, and like, we never get a single word about how the little girl feels about any of this. Robicheaux never even finds out her real name--and she's a toddler, not an infant, she could have told them!--and just starts calling her his mother's name, Alafair. (In his defense, that's a great name.)

There's also a fair amount of playing to the cheap seats. I mean, it's 1987, and people are still using the word "negro" in this book. And I don't mean it was published in 1987, at some point a character in the book literally says "it's 1987". I remember hearing people still use that word here when I was very young, in the late '70s and very early '80s. And they weren't always white people; it wasn't meant to insult, it's just that the south is also little-c conservative, as in slow to change. But by 1987, you would only use that word if you were racist and for some reason didn't feel like you could use the other n-word.

There's a certain amount of pandering to Yankee stereotypes about the south in a lot of media; my favorite example is how Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd constantly look like they've been lightly sprayed with baby oil in A Time To Kill. Air conditioning existed in late 20th century Mississippi, Hollywood. It will always bug me, especially when the writer is southern and knows he's peddling bullshit.

Anyway, I made tonkatsu for supper, mostly because Rouses started carrying "pork panko", which is basically just pulverized pork rinds and I really wanted to try them. Verdict: okay, but not worth the money (about double as regular panko), and also didn't get as crispy. I'll stick to the real thing.

Collages completed in the past week:







I should start using more people in my collages. People make them feel more dynamic, and it's also more fun to play with size/perspective.

Seems like everywhere else in the country is experiencing record-smashing heat this spring, while here in southwest Louisiana we've actually had a spring that lasted longer than a week for once. It still isn't very hot, the last couple mornings have been chilly enough to require a sweater. Like it gets pretty warm in the middle of the day, but as soon as the sun starts westering the temps start dropping back into the 70s. It's weird but I ain't complaining.

Saturday Mom was having an early lunch with Ashley, so I just made her some toast and made eggs for myself. I made a chamomile/jasmine/juniper/vanilla blend for the diffuser, which sounds weird on paper but worked. I went to the carwash (the lovebugs have been real bad this year) and the grocery store. After putting away the groceries I made some rice to use for fried rice the next night.

I didn't really have much in the way of stuff to do around the house, so I finished the journal collage page I was working on, then read until dinner. I'm a little over halfway though Joe Hill's King Sorrow and so far I think it's second only to Horns, still my favorite book of his (although I haven't read all of them). I do wish his editor would break him of the habit of referencing his father, I think his writing is best when he's his own man. It's weird that he took all these elaborate steps to hide his identity when he was starting out, down to refusing to meet his agent in person, because he didn't want to look like a nepo baby, only to immediately be like HELL YEAH STEPHEN KING IS MY DAD as soon as everyone knew. 

Still, dude wrote a dragon story that does like, several new things with the trope; that's pretty impressive.

David made hamburgers for supper and afterward I finished Trial 4 on Netflix, the documentary about Sean Ellis. I'd been slogging through it all week. It was good, but it didn't need to be 8 episodes. While watching that I went through the magazine I get as a AAA member and cut out some images for my collage stash; there's usually good landscape photos in it.

Sunday I had planned to make chocolate chip pancakes, but it turned out someone ate the chocolate chips. And by someone I mean David, there was only a handful left in the bag, he probably had low blood sugar or something. Luckily Mom and I both like regular pancakes. Mom is always like "you make the best pancakes!" no matter how many times I tell her it's just the Bisquick recipe. Plus we have an electric griddle, which makes it idiot-proof to cook them consistently. 

After breakfast I did something I felt like I haven't done in months: put on some records and read for a couple of hours. After showering I re-made the bed and washed the sheets, cut Penny's nails, and made lemon blueberry bars. I had another chunk of time to drink some wine and read, then I made fried rice and egg roll in a bowl (with ground turkey). 

After supper I started on a simple collage--not a journal page but an actual collage. I think it needs something else so I didn't photograph it yet, but I haven't made a for-real collage in months and it felt good, like stretching a stiff muscle. Then I read until about 10:30 when I realized I was fighting sleep and might as well surrender. 

I broke my Lenten THC tolerance break a couple of days early, so I had a lazy long weekend and I don't feel a single bit bad about it.

Friday I got kolaches for breakfast, then did the grocery shopping. At home I cleaned and dusted the top  shelves of my desk, and rinsed out the fountain pens I had in rotation for March. I read and finished off my apple pie moonshine. David made catfish for supper, and afterwards I watch the new episodes of Monarch and For All Mankind. If Joel Kinnaman survives this season (seems doubtful) and he's in the final season, Ed should just be a head in a jar a la Futurama.

Saturday I picked up the Honeybaked ham in Lafayette, then chose 4 fountain pens for the April rotation and inked them. I tackled the main surface of my desk, which is a chore I don't do often enough. Like a lot of creative people, I keep a ton of stuff on my desk--the reason you didn't see any cups in my Mardi Gras throw display is I always use them to hold pens, colored pencils, paint brushes, paint pens, and other miscellaneous stationery and art supplies. So I had to take everything off, dust and wipe down, then put everything back in a slightly less chaotic fashion. Some of it was stuff that needed to be put with other supply stashes, like a lot of collage material that I had cut out but didn't wind up using.

David made honey walnut shrimp (except it was honey pecan shrimp) and saffron rice for supper, and afterwards I watched The Testament of Ann Lee, which I have wanted to see for months and I saw it was on Hulu. It was a fascinating movie; mesmerizing even, something I have not felt about a movie in a long time. The Shakers (there is one community with 3 members left) could not have commissioned better propaganda, because honestly, I get it. That sexual energy was going somewhere, and not just into their meticulously crafted furniture. In a world where most people had to toil endlessly just to stay alive, and where sex was something that was usually done to women, for the sake of babies that often died anyway, I can see trading celibacy for that kind of collective ecstasy.

But I'm asexual, which would have been being a Shaker on easy mode.

Anyway, I could probably write a whole dissertation about how interesting it is that a religious community led by a woman was a model of egality, industry, and pacifism, instead of getting twisted into a snakepit of power imabalances and nonconsesual sex like every single one led by men eventually did, but y'all get that already.

Sunday I made cornbread pancakes and bacon for breakfast, remade the bed, and washed the sheets. After showering I baked my carrot cake bars and made a dozen deviled eggs. After years of experimenting with variations I decided I just prefer a no-frills deviled egg. Mayo and mustard, a little pickle brine--I used brine from the pepperoncini jar this year--salt and pepper, a sprinky-dink of smoked paprika. That wheel don't need to be reinvented.

I had couple of hours free, so I poured myself some wine and read. I'm currently reading Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman and I'm not loving it. I get what he's saying about media radicalizing everyone until they turn into literal zombies--the cable news channel that zombifies the Boomers is called "Fax News", is the level of subtlety we're dealing with here. And it's like with The Stepford Wives, is he mocking the thing he seems to be mocking on the surface, or is he mocking the backlash to it?

It feels like both, giving the book icky liberal centrist "But both sides!" feelings. That is just not the vibe for the year 2026.

Also, the prose is banal as fuck: I know it's because the POV characters are very average Americans, but that doesn't make it any less tedious to read.

Dinner was fairly easy, the potatoes au gratin baked while I made the creamed peas. Afterwards I watched the new episode of Dark Winds then read for a while. The book reads fast, I'll give it that, so I'll finish it and afterwards maybe I'll read Rebecca or Neuromancer or something just for the prose.

One of the things I do to "prep" my planner every month is to find out what festivals are happening around the state for that month and note what and where they are. That doesn't mean I will necessarily go, but I have the info and I can plan around the possibility.

Today was the second annual Moonshine Festival in Leesville, which I went back and forth on several times before deciding it was too far; Leesville is in CenLa (central Louisiana) and about the same distance north from Abbeville as New Orleans is east. Maybe if I was going to stay for the whole day, listen to bands and watch the parade and the fireworks (there's always a parade and fireworks) it would be worth it. Or if I knew anyone in CenLa I could overnight with. But I'd probably only stay long enough to taste some 'shine and buy a couple of jars.

If you're going to stay less time at the festival than it takes to drive to it, maybe don't bother: my rule of thumb.

In researching it, I discovered there's a "Louisiana Moonshine Company" in Leesville, so I assume this is their doing. I tried to find if I could buy it locally, but they appear to only sell it directly from the distillery and at one store in Thibodaux. Which is not at all in that part of Louisiana, it's Lafourche Parish, about an hour west of New Orleans, so I wonder why.

Anyway, Leesville is boring as shit, so good for them, I hope it's a success. My friend Hope worked in Army HR when she was enlisted, and they used to transfer people they didn't like to Fort Polk as petty revenge, because the town is so dull. It's the kind of place where people hang out at gas stations.

But that decision left me with a craving for apple pie moonshine, which I haven't had in years. Luckily I knew Rouses carries Ole Smoky, which I think is the only national brand of moonshine? I used to have a stash, because the last time I drove home from Lynchburg, Virginia, I stopped at a liquor store in eastern Tennessee and bought several jars. This was just a year or so after legalization, so it was still difficult to find outside of Appalachia. But several Christmases ago we finished it off, and I hadn't restocked since then. Probably because a jar of Ole Smoky is $25 now?! I think I paid like $9.99 per jar in Tennessee.

I haven't watched the Oscars in years because I think awards shows are pointless industry circle jerks, but Mom likes them and David wasn't up, and I didn't want to make her watch them alone. Anyway, that one made me happy, Madigan fucking ate in Weapons and the Academy rarely recognizes horror movies or bonkers-ass performances--or older women.

Also why is Timmy Chalamet still sporting that awful hair/facial hair combo that makes him look 14 years old. Like Austin Butler refusing to lose his Elvis accent; maybe now that his obnoxious Oscar campaign for the ping pong movie is over he'll finally ditch it.

Saturday I went to Miniso, Michael's, and the grocery store. After getting home I prepped my planner for April; I'm going to need to start deciding on a new one, since I always do a mid-year start. I was thinking maybe I'd go back to Hobonichi, but apparently they're $65 now?! Fuck that noise.

I had some wine and read (currently reading Dead in Long Beach, California, which is fucking weird and I'm not really sure what it's about, but at least it's not boring) while David made rice and smoked sausage with cucumber salad. After supper I watched some episodes of 48 Hours and did some collage journal pages.

Netflix has apparently acquired the archives of 48 Hours--which is great because that means no commercials--and it's filling the Dateline-shaped hole in my heart. I ditched my Peacock subscription because they jacked the price way up so they could show live sports. Um, I don't give a shit about sports, why am I required to subsidize them?? I'm sure there's some other way to watch it, I've just been too lazy to figure it out. Luckily I've discovered that it makes no difference to my enjoyment of the podcast A Date with Dateline whether I've actually seen the episode or not.

Sunday we had bagels for breakfast, then I did some more journal pages and watched some more 48 Hours. I changed the bed sheets, then washed them, then also did loads of clothes and towels. I made a benzoin/sandalwood/bergamot mix for the essential oil diffuser. I cut Penny's front nails and baked potato chip/chocolate chip cookies. (I know, it sounds weird; the potato chips just add crunch and pleasantly contrasting saltiness. The ruffled kind work best, FYI.)

I made some Japanese mayo and put 2 pounds of mushrooms into a balsamic vinegar marinade. I made avocado toast for Mom, then re-heated some leftover fried fish and french fries from Friday night for myself. (In the oven, never ever microwave leftover fish!) I had been craving King's Seafood fried fish all week, so I treated all of us to takeout. I like to shit talk British cuisine, but one thing they are 100% right about is malt vinegar on fried fish and potatoes.

I had a couple of hours to drink some greyhounds and read and play June's Journey. I can't really remember why, but several years ago I started an Oscars night tradition of making sandwiches, and my Studio Ghibli book had a recipe for the sandwiches from Ponyo that I wanted to make anyway, although I decided to use a baguette instead of white sandwich bread. The recipe used back bacon, which is hard to find in the US, but Canadian bacon is basically back bacon that has been trimmed, smoked, and fully cooked. So I used that, but first I fried them in a dry pan, to cook out the water and give them a crisper texture. I used mild cheddar and butter lettuce, and the mayo made with egg yolks and a little lemon juice and dijon mustard. I served them with green grapes, the roasted mushrooms, and a few potato chips. And I had mine with the last Cheerwine!

I watched the Oscars with Mom, then watched the new episode of Dark Winds, then I basically passed out. It was a busier than usual weekend, and I have not been sleeping well, I keep waking up an hour or 90 minutes before I usually would and being unable to go back to sleep. It's not my RLS, that's been pretty dormant lately. Maybe it's because I stopped using cannabis? I guess when I take that first gummy on Easter night I'm going to sleep for 15 hours straight. I look forward to it.

Normally I don't care about daylight savings time either way, and this year I didn't even realize we had gone back on it Saturday night until I looked at the kitchen clock Sunday afternoon and saw it was an hour behind. Which explains why I felt so tired and discombulated when I woke up at "8:15", and why it seemed so dark. More daylight in the evening is great and all, but now I'm waking up in the pitch black and taking out the dog and driving to work in the grey predawn and I fucking hate it.

Also this morning I broke one of my favorite possessions, a large pink sea urchin light. I got it from an Etsy seller who is no longer around, the base is decorated with dozens of smaller shells, and I couldn't replace it for any amount of money. It was one of the things I moved from the windowsill to the cabinet next to the desk; somehow the cord got around one of the casters of my desk chair, and when I pulled it out this morning to sit down and do my makeup, it jerked the cord and smashed the light into the wall. So I am extremely salty about that, and trying to get ready for work in what felt like the middle of the night like I'm a fucking farmer made it worse.

Saturday I only had to go to the drugstore and the grocery store, after getting home I vacuumed the rugs and Mom's bedroom, then mopped the kitchen floor. David made shrimp scampi at my request, Rouses has been putting on special locally caught shrimp; frozen, but still really good. And I feel like I haven't had scampi, or any other non-southern shrimp dish, in forever. Don't get me wrong, I love étouffée and shrimp and grits, but I miss things like scampi and calamari and clam chowder.

Afterwards I watched some movie with Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn that David had told me about because Woodley is in the new season of Paradise and he knows I love Mendelsohn. It was just some standard "cops chasing a serial killer" thing, but they were both really good. I worked on some visual diary pages while I did that.

Sunday breakfast was blueberry scones from the Rouses bakery; for some reason I had wanted some sort of pastry for breakfast, even though I usually eat more savory and protein-forward breakfasts. I decided on scones because they tend to not have as much sugar as muffins or danish. They were good, especially after 20 seconds in the microwave. Lots of blueberries. Rouses bakery has never done me dirty; locals like to mock you for eating their king cakes, but I've had expensive king cake from elite bakeries, and it's not much better. Certainly not "$80 better".

After showering and vacuuming my bedroom I got out the Bissell and steamed most of the coffee stains out of Mom's bedroom carpet, I've asked her to please start using a tray to bring coffee back to bed because dear lord. I think she spills more than she drinks.

I was craving a simple yellow cake with chocolate frosting and took it easy on myself with a boxed mix. You can make yellow cake from scratch, and I have, which is how I know it's only marginally better than a good brand (Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines) of boxed mix.

I made Mom and I some avocado toast with bacon, then made myself some greyhounds. The grapefruit this week were smaller than last week's, but also juicier, so it was kind of a wash. I got some reading done; I finished Neon Rain and have moved on to Catriona Ward's Last House on Needless Street, which is very weird and has another unreliable narrator, like most of her books. Several of them, actually. One of them is a cat? ...maybe??

Dinner was some chicken breasts pounded out and marinated in yogurt with garlic and spices--I did that between vacuuming my bedroom and cleaning Mom's carpet--and pan-fried. I got some frozen potato samosas to go with it, and took a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer. After eating I watched the new episode of Dark Winds, did a couple more diary pages (I'm still writing about the last week of Carnival, I need to catch up), and read for a while.

Saturday was at least 80°, then we're getting 3 days of overnight lows in the 30s, then back to 80s. Louisiana is just tossing out random temps like Powerball numbers.

Saturday I only went to the grocery store; I have a few other things that need doing but nothing that couldn't wait a few days. I decided not to tire myself out because I had A Project planned for later that day.

After going home and putting away the groceries and having something to eat, I got started on the Mardi Gras throw display (that was the project). First I cleared off the top of a small cabinet in the corner next to my desk. I keep art supplies in the drawers, and the top was just a litter of stuff that hadn't been put away. I moved some of the stuff that was on my windowsill onto it, then found other places for most of the stuff on the top shelf of my desk. The big plastic tote of inks went under my bed, the unused notebooks went into the closet, and some stuff just got thrown away. I dusted and re-arranged what was left, then moved onto it everything left on the windowsill. Then I decided what throws I wanted out and arranged them on the windowsill.



Please forgive my filthy windows, no one's power washed the house since Phil lost enough of his marbles that we stopped trusting him with heavy equipment. It's on the list of things to hire someone to do, but it's not very near the top.

This is extremely normal for south Louisiana, by the way. Most people's houses will have something like this. It's also just a fraction of my stash, which in itself is a fraction of stuff I've caught over the years. Generally I only keep throws that identify which krewe threw it, and toss generic beads and trinkets.

Also that description makes it sound like it took maybe 10 minutes, but actually it was most of the afternoon. After I was finished I vacuumed my bedroom, and it was nearly supper time so I went downstairs and played June's Journey; I finally found a club that's a happy medium between "2 other members and no strategy" and "group that plays this fucking mobile game like it's their job and berates anyone with different priorities". 

David made fried catfish for supper and afterwards I watched (on his recommendation) Predator: Badlands. It was goofier than I expected--I mean that positively--Elle Fanning plays a synth who has gotten cut in half, and there's a fight sequence where her torso and her legs are independently fighting other synths (there are no humans in the movie). It's also the first time a Predator (or Yautja, as they apparently call themselves) is actually a character and not just a mute antagonist.

I also got out the ear seeds I bought a couple weeks ago and decided to put on the stress/anxiety configuration. I want to try the insomnia one too, but this one was a little more simple so I decided to start there. 



I am of course highly skeptical, but I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring "traditional" remedies, provided you also take scientific ones. This was $10 for 1,200 seeds, so it was something I could afford to try. They're still on, two showers later, too.

Sunday Mom was going to meet Ashely for lunch, so I didn't make a big breakfast, we just had toast. I made myself a bacon and tomato sandwich for lunch (we didn't have any lettuce) since I didn't have any bacon with breakfast. I have a typical American's obsession with bacon but am under no illusions about how unhealthy it is--particularly once you pass 50--so I only have it on Sundays.

In the afternoon I baked a batch of dog treats, vacuumed the rugs, made ice, and washed my sheets and a load of towels. Grapefruit is still on sale, so I made myself some greyhounds and read. I finally finished Endymion last week and have moved on to Joyce Carol Oates' Fox. (Weirdly, the only other Oates novel I've read is Foxfire.) It's about a middle school English teacher who grooms and molests a series of his female students and then gets murdered (? unsure yet), and it's told from the POV of characters who range from "deeply unpleasant" to "actual fucking monster", so it's not exactly an easy fun read. But sometimes literature isn't! I can take a lot if the prose is excellent; the reason why I gave up on a A Tiny Upward Shove is that the writing just wasn't good enough to justify the stomach-churning subject matter.

Dinner was ramen inspired by Ponyo from my Studio Ghibli cookbook.



Is there a trick to peeling soft-boiled eggs without them coming apart, because I went through 6 eggs to get 3 usable ones. 

I didn't make a dessert since I had to bake dog treats, so I got some pistachio cannoli from the Rouses bakery. After supper I watched the new episode of Dark Winds, then read for a while before bed.

Apparently I almost met Linda Hamilton. Lori and Jeremy have this friend couple they do a lot of stuff with, Saints games and Carnival parades and such, and Linda Hamilton is their friend. They're neighbors in Algiers--Algiers is such a low-key neighborhood for a movie star to live in--and NO has been her primary residence for a while because her oldest kid and first grandkid live there. Lori and Jeremy have met her at least once that I know of, when the 5 of them went to a game. Lori likes her a lot, she says she's very nice and funny and not at all like a weird rich out-of-touch movie star.

Anyway she wanted to come to Iris and Tucks, but they went to something the day before where one person recognized her and it started a chain reaction of people mobbing her for selfies, which sounds like my personal nightmare, and I guess that killed the vibe. Too bad, I was going to tell her about the time I was a Pinkerton and every single day for several years one of our site managers would call and say "Are you Sarah Connor" in a terrible Austrian accent every time I answered the phone and I had to pretend to find it funny. You just know people yell that at her on the street.

Fame sounds like absolute hell to me and I honestly don't know why anyone aspires to it. Unfortunately there's no real way to opt out of it if acting is what you want to do with your life, and you're successful at it.

But it was a fabulous weekend. I left straight from work on Friday night and made pretty good time; Google maps took me in via the Westbank Expressway, which has a lot of traffic lights but avoided any serious traffic jams. I was in time to see most of Krewe of Hermes, then Krewe D'état and Krewe of Morpheus. D'état had a pro-ICE float that everyone boo'd; they are generally known for having shitty political messaging anyway and if they weren't between Hermes and Morpheus probably the only people that would turn out for them are their fellow causeway runaways (a NO term for people that talk shit about the city from the safety of their North Shore 'burbs but still treat it like their personal theme park). I would be surprised if even 10% of that krewe actually live in the city.

I got one of Morpheus' signature throws, a decorated sleep mask.

Iris and Tucks are day parades, so we made breakfast at the apartment instead of going out, then made the signs. This year Jeremy had a backboard that said "She'd <3 a" with the heart in red glitter and outlined in LED tape lights, then he made different foamboard cutouts of whatever the signature throw was that he put on with velcro, so he could just swap them out. I colored in the sunglasses (Iris) with glitter while they finished the toilet plunger (Tucks), then we went down, where Mike and Patrice (the friends that are neighbors with Linda Hamilton) were holding down our chairs. The weather was perfect for day parades: low 70s, low humidity, a good breeze, and just overcast enough.

Iris is the krewe I most wanted to see this year, and I really wanted one of their decorative sunglasses. I had caught a couple pairs that had their name on them but weren't very elaborate, when a hand-decorated pair with lenses shaped like butterfly wings landed between me and another woman. We both reached for them, and she said I already caught a couple pairs, you take them. We'd been talking to the people around us and fostering community, which encourages people to share and not hoard everything they catch. You don't need a dozen versions of the same throw, pass them around! I caught another pair a little while later with heart-shaped lenses and I gave them to a cute little girl behind me who was so happy.

Tucks was also fun, and I got a decorated plunger and a toilet brush, but I started to really hit the wall towards the end. 42 floats is a lot of toilet jokes, and by then we'd been out for about 6 hours. Having the chairs helped, but still. You have to stand for every float or you'll never catch anything so it was still a lot of standing, and getting out of those camp chairs is also a little painful when you have suboptimal knees. We had planned to maybe see a little bit of Endymion, but we were too pooped to even get something to eat out. We had some cold fried chicken they had got from Brothers the day before and then went to bed pretty early.

Endymion kinda sucks anyway, it's like the tourists' idea of a Mardi Gras parade and the crowds are always very aggressive, and the krewe itself is pretty mean. Like they throw a lot of stuff, but they'll aim right at your face and laugh about it.

I headed out shortly after noon on Sunday. At home I unpacked, did a load of laundry, changed my bedsheets, and once I'd untangled all my beads I put them in the shower and ran scalding water on them for a couple of minutes. (When I was showing Mom all the throws I caught--literally 2 grocery totes full--Penny immediately seized the poop emoji plushie I caught from Tucks and claimed it as her own. Seemed fitting so I let her keep it.) I got us pizza for dinner--Amore Pizza brought back the muffaletta pizza!--since obviously I wasn't going to the grocery store or cooking.

After supper I wheedled one of Mom's hydrocodones out of her because boy was everything starting to hurt. My knees, obviously; but also my calves--I think I was a little dehydrated, I kept getting cramps--my shoulders from constantly raising my arms and waving them around, and my neck from craning my head upwards. I put on the Netflix version of Unsolved Mysteries and plugged in my hot glue gun, because the plunger and brush from Tucks had a lot of little not-very-well-glued-on elements that came off when they threw it. Luckily they had both been in plastic bags, so I still had all of them.

I had a great time and it was really fun to see some different krewes; next year I think I want to see Krewe of Cleopatra, another women's krewe.

My signature throws:



And the Tucks throws once I fixed them:





I caught them from different floats so it's neat how much they match, with the Carnival colors, the beads in a spiral, and the same foil strips.

I now have enough throws I want to keep that I have to clear off a space for display. I think my window sill will be the best place, but the drawback there is it's where I keep the orrery I assembled, and that thing is huge. There really isn't anywhere else to keep it, unless I clear out a different space. The top shelf of my desk, maybe? A lot of that is stuff I don't necessarily need out and could keep in the closet, like my tote full of fountain pen inks and all my unused notebooks.

The first place I saw the video of that MAGA chode getting his butt whupped by a pack of teenagers in Texas was Al-Jazeera's TikTok. So while I approve of those kids banding together and proving that "100 duck-sized horses" is deadlier than "1 horse-sized duck" in the "which would you rather fight" scenario, it was a sobering reminder that the rest of the world is gawking in amused horror while we self-destruct.

I mean, I get it. I guess I don't take it personally, I didn't vote for him. Whatever stereotype of an American the rest of the world currently despises, it's not anything that's ever been close to who I am.

Well, I do love ranch dressing. Y'all got me there.

It's 72 degrees and dry today. A couple more days like this combined with a good drenching rain, and clover will frost the lawns and wild mustard spring up in all the coulees.

Autumn was always my favorite season in California, and I expect if I ever leave Louisiana it will be again. But while I'm here, spring is my favorite because I just love to see winter's drab browns and greyish-greens get replaced with a Technicolor palette seemingly overnight.