Them dudes on the float rappin about LSU. Aw yeah.
This weekend was the first real weekend of parading in New Orleans — and the kid’s very first Mardi Gras parades. I took them to a parade Saturday night uptown, me elli and graham. It had been raining earlier in the day, and was even still a little misty as we were leaving the house. But by the time we parked, which was surprisingly easy, it was a really nice night out. A bit chilly, but I’m all jaded on the cold now. So we stayed long enough to fill up a bag with beads and cups and stuffed animals, until graham had to potty. Then home to bed.
Today, Sunday, it was really nice out. It’s kinda hard to gauge how long a parade is going to take to make its way along its route, so I guessed a bit wrong and caught just the end of the first in back-to-back parades uptown this afternoon. But we were there for the whole second one, this time with kim and the baby, who both had a great time. It’s really kinda ridiculous how much stuff people on the floats throw to very small kids. Graham can barely catch anything as it is. Elise is really getting into it, though — chasing after floats, grabbing stuff from under people’s feet… It meant a lot to finally get to take them to a parade, Elise especially. I’ve been talking to her about Mardi Gras since she was born, listening to the Meters and Professor Longhair, telling her how much fun it is and how one day we’d get to go. And here we are! And they DID have a ton of fun…
But man, we went to a parade in Metairie tonight, who knows which one. When I was in high school the Metairie parades were the place to be. It was probably cause we thought we’d see a lot of girls there or something. Not that I ever talked to girls before I was 16. But it was full of all these white gangsta wanna-be 16-20 y/o dudes drinking mickey’s and pullin up they pants. We got there like 2 hours after the parade started and thought maybe we’d missed it at first. But we were catching it a good ways down the parade route, so we parked and walked to hang out and wound up waiting for half an hour or so for the parade to come. Then by the time it got to about float 16, the parade just stopped. The driver of the tractor pulling the float even got down and went and hung out with the other tractor drivers or something. Who knows. We just sat there wondering for about 10 minutes, then decided it was too late and cold and we’d just had too much Metairie. So we went home.
No parades tomorrow or Tuesday that I know of, but Wednesday night there are 3! uptown, yay! Happy Mardi Gras!
When I thought I was going to be looking at houses in Slidell I thought things would be easy. I’d only need to see a few houses – they’re all ranches, it’s just a matter of which one is flatter. You know. But then the shift to looking uptown threw a wrench in things. I was driving until 11 pm Saturday, criss-crossing down every street writing down numbers. Today Elise and I drove around for hours, checking out the list of places I made from Latter & Blum’s website, figuring out which ones to call. In the end we only wound up actually going inside one place, primarily because realtors don’t work on Sunday.