{ a swoop and a dart }

A Loaf of Bread, A Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter and Other Lost Stories

I just discovered the function in Typepad (yes, the service I've used for 12 years) that allows a search of drafted but not published posts... goodness, I have a lot of them. A Loaf of Bread is still one of my favorite shorts.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

 

April 14, 2008

While looking for something else, I found this, which may well be one of my top ten favorite Sesame Street memories from childhood.

 

November 23, 2009

A post titled "Montie Montana" with NO FURTHER CONTEXT OR WRITING. What??? (I had to google this, and I came up with a cowboy who died in 1998. I have no idea why I might have started but not finished writing about a cowboy I don't remember.)

November 4, 2009

Oh, but I missed this! A partially started Ten on Tuesday post that totally explains who Montie Montana was and why he was on my brain. Among some other random, funny stories. I still hate goats.

1. On two separate occasions in the past two months we've spotted what can only be described as a roving goat mob on Dell Range Blvd., one of the main drags through Cheyenne. The first time it was kind of dusk-like light, but while stopped at a stoplight we saw what looked like 50+ GOATS in the little gully-like backyard of an apartment complex. We all saw it, so we know it wasn't a trick of the fading light. And then yesterday, Bridget and I saw the roving goat mob in a different apartment complex on Dell Range. In broad daylight. More than 50, definitely. Matt's theory is that someone is renting out goats as an environmentally-friendly way to cut the grass at local apartment complexes. I say that the minute any landlord of mine plunks 50+ goats down in my backyard just feet away from my backdoor, I AM OUT OF THERE. The only thing creepier than one goat is 50 of them, all eyeing you blankly while plotting to eat your shoes.

2. On this same trip down Dell Range we stopped at the drive-through pharmacy (!!) at Walgreen's. I remember being fascinated by the magic send-you-your-stuff system at drive-through banks when I was little, and this drive-through pharmacy worked the same way. On the magic send-you-your-stuff machinery, a town called Maineville in Ohio was imprinted as the manufacturer. I am constantly amazed at how many towns in Ohio I've never heard of, even after living there for 22 years. Ohio: state of 8 million small towns. Maineville is northeast of Cincinnati, I already looked it up for you.

3. On this very same driving adventure, I was brought to tears by a set on the Morning Music show on Wyoming Public Radio (which is one of my very favorite things about Wyoming). A singer named V-The Gypsy Cowbell (!!) sang a song her father had written about a famous (but not to me) cowboy named Monte Montana; her father had seen him perform (he was, among other things, a trick horse rider) at his elementary school when he was little. That experience made a huge impression on him, and when this Montie Montana cowboy died, her father wrote a song about him. Years later and after her father died, she heard that Montie Montana Jr. was performing at some cowboy poetry reading in Pinedale, Wyoming, not far from where she was living, so she worked up the song and came down from the mountains to find him and sing it to him in the middle of downtown Pinedale.

Despite the fact that I don't understand Ms. V's name, it was a touching story.

4. I spend more time driving from one location to the next and then back again in a week in Cheyenne than I did in an entire month or more in Arlington.*

April 15, 2010

A post titled "First Sign of Spring: Catkins"

Apparently I used to know what catkins meant but don't anymore because I just now had to look it up. Here's the picture that went with that post (catkins!)

January 25, 2012

Ten on Tuesday—I bet $10 this is the post that I was writing when the computer crashed and I lost part of my soul. Either that, or I have a short attention span and regularly stop lists at four things.

1. Matt and I just finished watching our first DVR-ed episode of Portlandia, which apparently is already in the second season... it was laugh-out-loud funny. I first learned of Portlandia by stumbling across the "Put a Bird On It" sketch somewhere online. Also laugh-out-loud funny. Especially if you are a scrapbooker/crafty type.

2. Juliette is four years old today!

3. The county spelling bee is tomorrow.

4. I ran out of time to get my unblogged stories blogged before Chinese New Year. Ah well. Here's a quick one: in October, I finally, at long last, became a giddy owner of an iPhone. We paid off the van in November (condition) and I also ran five miles** (condition, though it was a few weeks after the purchase vs. before). I love it : )

 
January 30, 2013

Aw, a  never-finished post titled "Missing" about how much I miss these friends of mine. I get to stay with the one on the right this weekend in New Mexico! 🎉 For the record, I still miss them all very much.

July 22, 2013

An unfinished Ten on Tuesday post in which I made it to five things!

New Things We've Done/Seen/Experienced in Louisiana in the last three weeks

1. Purple hull peas. We bought a batch at the Shreveport farmers' market two weekends ago, and cooked them up as directed by the man who sold them to us. They taste a lot like black-eyed peas to us. We missed the Purple Hull Pea festival, sadly, which was a little bit north of here during the last week of June. There is nothing quite like a local food festival.

2. Mayhaw jelly. We bought some at this small gourmet grocery we went to check out last weekend. We were hoping it would be a glorious fish market (it wasn't exactly) but it had some interesting finds. We are fans of oddball berries.

3. Driving in Shreveport. I have driven back and forth to Shreveport 39 times in the last 10 days, not counting the farmers' markets. If you want to learn a new place quickly, register one of your children for a camp on the other side of the town next door from where you're living, or all of your children at a gym on another side of the town next door from where you're living. (More on that soon)

4. Chiggers. Bridget and I were attacked by chiggers last week while we were poking around the lakes on base. I will spare you the horrifying details. Just know this: if you haven't been bitten by upwards of 30 chiggers in one fell swoop, consider yourself VERY VERY LUCKY.

5. Beignets. We ate three orders of fresh mini-beignets at the farmers' market the second time we went. They were very good. Maddie thought they tasted like bananas.

Incidentally, I turned this incomplete post into two scrapbook pages for Design Challenges III.

The chigger nightmare remains among the most nightmarish things we have nightmares about.

August 22, 2014

A post titled "Things My 20th Century Childhood that my 21st Century Children Will (Most Likely) Never Experience"

+ carrying a comb in their back pocket

+ cassette tapes

+ Kasey Kasem's Top 40 on Sunday afternoon

+ rotary phones

+ school rollerskating parties

+ writing notes to friends

+ folding said notes in various forms of note origami

+ being dropped off to shop at the mall (Lerner's, Express, Limited, etc.)

Indeed. I heard The Limited closed all its stores earlier this year, too. End of an era.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

*I still pine for the days of living in Arlington and barely driving a car... three times as much driving now as Cheyenne II, if that's even possible.

**I have not run five miles in a row since.

An Evening With Jack White: The Only Concert In This Summer's Dillow Summer Concert Series

Matt and I have been to A LOT of concerts together over the last 24.5 (!!) years... but I think we would both agree that we have never been to a concert quite like the one we went to last night at Shreveport Municipal Auditorium. Warning: this might be a long one.

Part I: The Venue

I can't do this story justice without describing the significance of Shreveport Municipal Auditorium to music history. As soon as we started reading up on it, it was obvious why Jack White chose it for a stop on his latest tour: this place isn't just part of music history, it is all music history. And Jack White is all about music history.

The building is located in a heartbreakingly rundown section of Shreveport on Elvis Presley Avenue. This road was renamed Elvis Presley Avenue because Elvis Presley made his performance debut on the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium stage in 1954 during a radio broadcast of The Louisiana Hayride radio show, and in 1955 made his first-ever television appearance on the TV version of The Louisiana Hayride. He went on to perform every Saturday night here for the next 18 months (paid $18 a show) until Colonel Tom Parker bought out his contract. The original Louisiana Hayride ran from 1948-1960, and boasted a jaw-dropping list of country, rockabilly, rock-and-roll, and blues greats to include Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Lead Belly, and more. Incidentally, the reason why we've visited the Southern Maid donut store on Hearne Avenue twice at 4pm in the last two months was because of the history here: Johnny Cash endorsed them as the best donuts in the world on air.

On the Milam St. side, the building is bordered by Oakland Cemetery, which is huge—the final resting place of hundreds of yellow fever victims in the 1870s, over a thousand Confederate soldiers and veterans, and sad, unnamed gravesites that say things like "Mamma's Darling: 1887-1888." It is in terrible disrepair. I grew up traipsing yearly through cemeteries across northeast Ohio, and I was shocked by the condition of this place.

Some gravestones are in better shape than others (like this interesting one for someone named Persia Willis).

Not a living soul was there when I went back today to look around—which made this bird singing loudly seem even more lonely. And a little creepy. It's pretty abandoned out here.

The auditorium itself just reopened since we've lived here, after ten years of extensive renovations. I am a lover of old buildings and downtowns and preserving every ounce of cool history that can be preserved in a place, so I'm rooting for the people with the vision to keep this corner of Shreveport from completely dying. With a history like this one, it is hard to understand how it all faded away in the first place. It looks like an awfully uphill battle from where I'm standing, but I am still hopeful.

It was positively glowing in the ginormous line we had to wait in to get inside last night... well, all 3000 of the people waiting for the sold-out show might have been positively glowing last night because it was ridiculously hot. But the building was at least glowing for the right reasons. If you study the list of stops for this tour, you can see the venues were chosen more often than not because they have some sort of greater, more golden history from a different era—they are not Denver's Pepsi Center, parking $40/car. More on that shortly.

Part II: The Concert

These next photos are used with permission; before the show started, the audience was asked to put cell phones away and experience the show with their hearts, eyes, and ears, and to kindly download the free photos taken by the band's photographer later. I was happy to comply, though I wish *I* had been the designated concert photographer, but whatever. Pictured here: a short tribute to Lead Belly at the very beginning.


Our seats look terrible but they weren't. It was all general admission, and we actually chose to head up instead of down—because the seating is so vertical (check out the people all the way to the rafters!) you can't get a bad seat, and it was actually quite close. And unless we have a special badge and roped off front-row floor section to enjoy the concert (spoiled rotten Cheyenne Frontier Days brats) we prefer not to be on the floor in our advanced age.


Simply put: Jack White is a musical genius. You know how you go to a concert and you hear the songs you're familiar with pretty much as is and that's a very satisfying and fun feeling? That is not the experience you get when you go to a Jack White concert. Instead, you kind of sit there partially agape (or with a strong case of wide-eyed Willis Smiling Disorder) because the songs you know? They are completely reinvented. You recognize them, but they are not the same. They are strange, wonderful variations. Between the brand-new songs not yet released until June 10 when Lazaretto comes out and this mix of stuff-you-know-that-you-don't-know and some really interesting surprise songs, it was a completely original collection of never-before and never-again music.


Here's the set list, for my reference (and yours, if you're interested):

1. High Ball Stepper
2. Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
3. Lazaretto
4. Temporary Ground
5. Hotel Yorba
6. Three Women
7. You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)
8. Ball and Biscuit
9. Before You Accuse Me/Meet Me in the Morning/The Milk Cow Blues/Little Red Rooster
10. Icky Thump
11. Sugar Never Tasted So Good
12. Old Enough
13. You've Got Her In Your Pocket
14. Weep Themselves to Sleep
15. The Hardest Button to Button

Encore

16. Just One Drink
17. Hello Operator
18. Top Yourself
19. Steady, As She Goes
20. Hypocritical Kiss
21. Power Of My Love
22. Seven Nation Army
23. Goodnight, Irene

After comparing notes with the show just before in Tulsa, it was clear that this was a totally different concert—which kind of blows my mind. I mean, I get that when peformance is your job you have to know a lot of songs, but still... that's a lot of music. I was really impressed with how smoothly the transitions between songs went; he hit all the genres and it didn't sound odd or out of place in the least to move from violins and steel guitar and harmonica to screeching guitar and drums that felt as if they might actually launch through the ceiling. He made a big deal about how he chose to come here over Dallas or a second show in New Orleans, and we believed him because hello, he stalked Loretta Lynn until he convinced her to let him produce her next album (Van Lear Rose, a must-have). This is not someone who takes the legends of music lightly.

A few notes: song #21 was an Elvis Presley cover though Matt and I looked at each other kind of blankly, because it's not one we're familiar with. But it was performed with so much edge that you know that Elvis would have been pleased. I couldn't help but imagine the ghosts of musical past floating around that building last night, both a little perplexed at the sound and pleased at how alive it all was.

Just before the end, he gave a little speech about honoring the people that come before you: not just the musical legends that guided us all to this moment in music history, but the people that made your job easier for you no matter what kind of job you have; your uncles and parents and grandparents and more, for all that they taught you and for how they taught you to love your own family even more. By this point I was a little sniffly, because it was all just so sappy and perfect.

And then he broke out with "Goodnight, Irene," which is both a lovely and troubled song that Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter (born in Caddo Parish, outside Shreveport) first recorded and popularized as his own in 1933, though it never had the commercial success for him that it did in later years when all-white groups like The Weavers recorded it. He recorded it for the Library of Congress in 1934 while incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola; a person's life just doesn't get more complex and complicated than that. I don't know all the verses, but I know enough to sing along some.

I will be honest: this year here in Louisiana has not been an easy one for us. It's been hard to find our footing, over and over again, and with a few very notable exceptions, we simply haven't clicked in many ways. But last night, singing "Goodnight, Irene" with 3000 other people with the lights up and the amps off and the spirit of Lead Belly palpable, we were the recipients of a gift that could only be experienced at that moment, in that place, with the rundown old cemetery to one side and a bunch of abandoned buildlings to the other. Matt read that Jack White left the stage in tears, and I don't think he was alone.

It's Hard Being a Non-Louisianan in Louisiana

I have many, many stories to share but for now: just this, courtesy of Bridget. Read carefully. Hee hee hee.

 

The Krewe of Harambee Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade 2014

I love parades. I think it's because I've been going to them my entire life, having grown up in the town with the largest 4th of July parade in Ohio. As we were getting ready to go to the parade in downtown Shreveport yesterday, I was thinking how many parades we've been to over the years: all the ones in Stow, of course, but also Christmas parades in Wyoming and Montana, the amazing parades of Cheyenne Frontier Days, the 4th of July parade in Lincoln, Montana when we had no choice but to attend because they closed the road, the Chinese New Year parade in Washington, D.C., St. Patrick's Day in Old Colorado City, The Scottish Parade in Alexandria... they're all so very different from each other. I am rarely disappointed in parades save for a few examples (not a big fan of kid-centric neighborhood 4th of July parades—I'm looking at you, Mountain House, CA and Arlington, VA) and we were downright disappointed at the Independence Bowl parade we went to over Christmas break at the Boardwalk in Bossier City last month because it lasted SEVEN MINUTES (accurate timing, not an exaggeration) and had a higher-than-expected risk for head injury.

So while I have high expectations, it isn't really hard to satisfy me if you just give it your best (and put together at least one hour minimum of parade content). Yesterday's parade was full of completely new and foreign experiences to us: we now know what Krewe means (an organization that puts on a parade during Mardi Gras season); that Harambee means "all pull together" in Swahili; that Mardi Gras is actually a season with many Krewes putting on many parades (when you grow up in Ohio, it's only a day... maybe); that there is a right way and a wrong way to throw Mardi Gras beads at the parade audience (neither folks from Boston College nor Arizona quite had that figured out, though it wasn't an issue yesterday, thank goodness—no near head injuries to report); and that marching bands are very regional in their customs (I knew this already, but it was fun to see). One thing that remains the same no matter where the parade is held: there will be shriners, and they will seem ever-so-slightly mysterious to us.

I was so excited when I clicked the shutter on this photo, because I just knew I caught one of the stiltwalkers at the exact right moment. Matt and I loved the stiltwalkers.

So similar to the marching band uniforms Matt and I wore in high school! The bands were not large, but they were good. Bridget thought the percussion was too loud, and I was sad when the loud percussion marched on. More loud percussion!

This is one of my favorite photos of the afternoon, too—I love this girl's concentration.

You can see more parade photos over at Flickr (just a selection, don't worry, I didn't upload them all).

As I was looking through my photos I observed that my parade photo-taking goals never change: I'm always looking for good shots of the people that make up a parade... and cool cars. Ha. Which brings me to my other point!

Finding Your Photo Style is running for a second time starting on February 13, this time with a 7th photographer added to the roster (Alessandra Cave)! The introductory price ends on Thursday, 1/23 at midnight PT, so if you've been thinking about taking it now's a good time to sign up. I'll be running a giveaway for a free seat sometime next week, too. This class is so good for defining your goals as a photographer, no matter what your skill level; it helps you figure out what it is you want to photograph so you can be more confident that you'll get the shot you're envisioning. I highly recommend it—I learned a lot just by following along in the other instructors' weeks the first time this workshop ran, as well as putting together my own content. The exercise of studying and evaluating your own photos to figure out your style (or to strengthen it) is invaluable.

Ten on Tuesday: Random Thursday Edition

1. It's going to RAIN tomorrow, ya'll. I mean, it's not like the Dillows have been keeping track of the days in the mid-high 90s since they got to Louisiana (all of them) like prisoners who tally their time on the cellblock wall or anything... if that were true, we'd know that today is Day #80. But oh, to have some different weather... of course, Maddie believed for a long time when she was little that the purpose of umbrellas was to keep oneself warm. We aren't really good at rain preparedness, so tomorrow might be a bit of a shocker. 

2. Speaking of which: it is heartbreaking to watch the news from Colorado, especially as we've been yearning for some rain to break the heat wave here. We are very much attached to the Front Range, and the devastation is hard to witness. I had family that lived in Loveland during the Big Thompson Canyon Flooding in 1976, and I have vivid memories of looking at a book about that flood at my Grandma Watson's house (she kept it in the blue room) when I was little. If you want to help with flood relief, here is a good place to start.

3. If you say "the blue room" everyone in my family knows which room I'm talking about. It was the room with the air conditioner and all my grandma's fancy dance dresses.

4. Gymnastics is going very, very well here. Pictured: Bridget with an ICEE post-gym on Monday.

5. Matt and I are very excited to receive our Avett Brothers tickets for their Nov 9 performance TEN MINUTES FROM OUR HOUSE. I ordered the tickets vs. printing them myself, because concert tickets are important. Confession: I first heard the announcement on our local NPR affiliate, which I almost missed because they pronounced "Avett" incorrectly. In the last week we heard it pronounced incorrectly four different ways by multiple radio people, and yesterday I broke down and politely emailed the station to let them know that it's an emphasis on the long "A." Sigh.

It will be fun to hear them play from their new album that comes out in October. Makes missing them at Red Rocks this year not quite as painful.

6. I had to replace my nearly 20 year old/second favorite pair of Fiskars scissors (what, not everyone rank orders their scissors?) because one half of them went missing in the move. I have always believed these scissors were defective, and came apart because their mechanism wasn't working correctly, but this was also the same thing that made me love them so much: you'd be surprised how useful this feature is. Matt pointed out last week that they are designed to do this. I had no idea.

I mean, now that I see it and know this, it is very clear to me. Perhaps this should be filed in the category of "sometimes it's best not to say things out loud."

7. Matt and I took a whirlwind trip to Natchitoches on one of his use-or-lose leave days last week (which we think is pronounced Nack-a-tish but keep not quite catching it when people tell us). It was kind of a long drive for a school day adventure, and we had to come back early because leave is sometimes pronounced "schmeave" in the Air Force, but I still had fun. It is the town where Steel Magnolias was filmed, and there is a little star walk on one of the sidewalks. My favorite picture though: this one, which I snuck of this woman fishing while Matt was on the phone. He remembers hearing stories about his grandmother fishing with a cane pole, and cleaning up with it while everyone else was using something more advanced.

Another fact: Natchitoches is also the meat pie capital of Louisiana. I had a meat pie for lunch at Lasyone's Meat Pie Kitchen and Restaurant. I would eat meat pies all the time if only I could get away with it.

8. NPR did a "Dumpling Week" recently on Morning Edition and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to all the stories about dumpling-like foods like meat pies and pierogues and spring rolls and ravioli and whatnot. It is definitely one of my favorite categories of food, which is why I have always been so perplexed about Maddie's utter hatred of all foods of the world that are dumpling-like. I might have written to Morning Edition to comment on this. Heh.

9. Last weekend Gracie and Bridget went to a birthday party at a local party center for a little girl down the street that they know from the bus. This place had batting cages (!) so after the party, I turned in a few tokens so I could hit 90 pitches. After a kind of scary slow start (0-10) I immediately regained my ability to hit a fast-pitch. Gracie and Bridget could not have been more bored. But whatever. It was reaaaaaaalllly fun. Though five days later, my hands still hurt. The last time I batted for real (I am not counting the stupid slow-pitch league I played in for one summer in Montana) was 1991. Old lady.

10. There's still time to enter the giveaway for a spot in Design Challenges if you scroll down!

East Reservation, Barksdale AFB

There is a mysterious gate at Flag Lake that we've been wanting to open, so I stopped on Thursday to get the combination so we could go exploring this weekend. Turns out the gate combination changes every night at midnight, which the lady who gave me the combo neglected to explain, but some friendly security forces guys explained it to us and let us through yesterday. Doesn't that sound like the premise of a Stephen King novel? Eeek.

It was good to see pine trees. And other bits of nature we've been missing dreadfully. If you're so inclined, you can click on the collage to see more pictures over at Flickr, which I am trying to figure out after they went and changed it all.

Angry Bee

School has been in session for one week today, which means one week of wearing uniforms for the Dillow girls. Despite a summer of looming dread about them (and a very unfortunate conversation at Maddie's school orientation that got us all riled up about the whole principle of uniforms in the first place) the first day of school went OK.

Note: I am not a believer in ironing children's clothes. There is A LOT of ironing involved in school uniform wearing, unless one stands at the door of the dryer ready to pounce on the contents within 4.2 seconds of drying completion, and even then it's not a guarantee that the items will be passable without ironing. And you might guess how good I am at pouncing on the contents of the dryer within 4.2 seconds. But I digress.

Maddie is not a believer in khaki pants (it is written in her DNA; she has inexplicably been this same way since she was 2, when she refused to wear her cute embroidered-on-the-knee khaki pants from Target) but is otherwise doing OK overall. I think it's because she's so tired from having to get up at 5:45 am—she has no energy to grumble about it too much. She'll wear the long shorts and capris, and is hoping to make it through the winter without needing to purchase a pair of long pants. We'll see.

Gracie, who I thought for sure would be the most affected by uniforms, is hanging in there, mostly. She struggles terribly with the tucked-in-shirt rule, and I've caught her messing with the seams of her socks a few times—a guaranteed warning sign for clothing/sensory stress for her—but we're trying to just ignore it and hope she'll manage it on her own without it becoming a big deal (best practice in her case). She is in her uniform clothes for less than three minutes after school.

Bee, in front of the Seabees building at Barksdale AFB, July 2013

And then we come to Angry Bee.

It has been building for this one, the more tired she gets (and getting up before 9:00 am makes this one very, very tired).

This morning I told her to get a move on, and get her uniform on before breakfast. She was not interested in wearing said uniform, but I reminded her it is not an option so cooperate. Or something to that effect. Five minutes later, she was not yet downstairs for breakfast. Three minutes after that, she was still not there. I went upstairs to monitor the uniform-putting-on and she was sitting on her bed, in her pajamas, arms crossed, frowning with such power that her face will surely be sore today.

If she had been a cartoon, she would have had steam coming out of her ears and maybe a cartoon ring through her nose, like an angry bull.

If she had been a Norman Rockwell painting, she would have been painfully adorable in the midst of her angry snit, forever recorded as the little girl fuming in her flowered pajamas.

But if she were a real girl, it would have been 7:10 and there would now be 20 minutes remaining to get dressed, eat, brush hair, brush teeth, put shoes on, and get out the door.

Bridget has such a long and storied history of being good-natured that it catches us off guard when she isn't. As in, we don't really have a game plan for what to do when she refuses to put on her school clothes. With Maddie, we can just tell her to get over it—and she'll either get over it, or she won't get over it but will still do whatever she needs to do anyway. With Gracie, we don't really have a game plan either, but at least we know by now how to steel ourselves for any number of a hundred adverse reactions to things (or sometimes, no adverse reaction at all. It's all a big mystery).

All this to say: it's all very character-building, this putting Dillows girls in uniforms business. Ironic, since the Dillow male in the house has been wearing uniforms without complaint since 1990 : )

2011 Wrap-up, Part III: The Inadvertently Unblogged Stories

IIIb: Flash Flood in Louisiana

Last March Matt and I went to Barksdale AFB for a week-long course for new commanders and their spouses. It was less vacation-like then one might think as a.) we were in separate classes from 7:30-5:00 the entire week b.) except for the day I came down with a deathly case of... food poisoning? Stomach flu? I was the only one there who got it, so who knows. Aside from that one lost day where I slept about 13 hours in a row in the daytime, we had a good time—the course was interesting, we got to eat out a lot like grownups with grownups, and there was plenty of BBQ and peach cobbler available throughout the week.

One night, however, was a little scary.

When we set out for dinner after a day's worth of class, it looked like this from our hotel. We stood there kind of in awe for a few seconds because it was just so green. And rainy. These are things we don't see in March in Wyoming (or April, or May...) Of course we didn't have umbrellas, so we just made a run for the car. The little itty-bitty rental plasticar. A Nissan Versa. This is important as the story continues.

We were headed to a restaurant called Ralph & Kacoo's, which was on a list of "you should eat there while you're in Louisiana" places someone told us about. I had my camera with me, even though Matt suggested I leave it in the hotel room that night (foreshadowing) because that's what I like to do. We set out on some sort of highway (details are sketchy by now) and the rain which was a quaint little sprinkle when we left the base started turning into—and I am not even kidding—Niagara Falls. The lightning was pretty awful, too; so bad that every time it flashed we were momentarily blinded and my Willis Startle Reflex let out an "OH My Goodness!" This is exceedingly unhelpful to someone trying to drive through the center of Niagara Falls in a Nissan Versa, by the way.

Just when we thought it couldn't get worse, it did. I kept repeating to myself the old wives' tale that we were safe because of our rubber tires. The rain was falling so hard by this point that it was as if we were out to sea just left of a major hurricane; and oh, did I mention that neither of us had any idea where we were because we are not from Louisiana. At this point, we decide we are lost and try to exit the interstate/highway to turn around.

Until we see the car at the end of the exit ramp floating in what looks to us like 129 feet of water. The man whose car is floating sideways jumps out and runs away clutching a cell phone; he is dressed in what looks like a restaurant server's uniform. His car is floating, and we're just kind of on the exit ramp. All I can think is "I am going to DROWN and my CAMERA is going down WITH. ME. WHYYYYYYYY DIDN'T I LISTEN TO MATT!!!" [Ed. note: that is in there for his benefit. Mostly.]

So. At this point Matt is trying to brainstorm ways we can float over the 129 feet of water and make it safely to Ralph & Kacoo's, wherever that might be—and I am testily encouraging him to BACK THIS VERSA UP. As in, get back on the strange interstate/highway, the one we were lost on to begin with. Because at least it isn't a fast-growing lake.

I won that one.

So, we back the Versa up. Have you ever backed up a car on an exit ramp in the midst of a storm of biblical proportions in a state you've never been to before? When you were already lost? And, might I add, extremely hungry? It is safe to say that we were both pretty shot nerves-wise at this point.

We get ourselves turned around on a more level exit ramp and work our way back through Niagara Falls until we think we are where we need to be. Except now roads are getting blocked because there are other 129 feet of water spots forming. We get lost in a rough-looking neighborhood in Shreveport for a bit while avoiding the road block, and then finally see the neon sign for Ralph & Kacoo's across the way.

This better be some good food, is all we were thinking.

And here she is, our sea-faring vessel. We did not drown or capsize or perish in any other manner that night, so I suppose we must begrudgingly thank Nissan for the Versa's... something or other. Chutzpah?

The food was fine. Perhaps not worth what we went through to eat it, but all in all, a good meal. And you could buy alligator heads in the gift shop, which is something we do not see every day. Or any day, actually. Louisiana is something else.

: )