Category: the apartment

Love Game

The streak is alive! We got another shoe last night at Muses! Although, truth be told, Paul gets the shoes for us. I don’t think, over the years, I’ve gotten more than two total, if that. Paul is a shoe monster, though, and this year’s is an LSU shoe!

It will go nicely with our Saints shoe.

It is incredibly beautiful today; the high is going to be 80, the sun is out, it’s only slightly humid and there’s a lovely cool breeze as well. There are three parades tonight, and I am doing condom duty at the table this afternoon (again on Monday; with the weekend free for parades and so forth). I hate having to walk home up the parade route; I don’t know if it’s the weather this year or what, but MY GOD is it crowded on the parade route this year. There were so many people out there last night for Muses that the street couldn’t even be cleared for the high school marching bands. I can only imagine what this weekend will be like out there; particularly for Bacchus on Sunday night. We will definitely be out there for Iris and Tucks tomorrow, and will again skip Endymion tomorrow night; I haven’t seen Endymion since we stopped walking up the parade route to the Quarter during it. Saturday night we’ll just hang out at the Lost Apartment and catch up on our TV shows and get rested for Sunday’s all day debacle.

I am so tired already.

Marathon, Greg, not a sprint.

I was so tired yesterday. I had to stock the house since I can’t use the car again until Wednesday (and won’t be able to get to the grocery store until Thursday, since I have a long day on Wednesday) and by the time I got back home I was so tired I could barely function. I did some laundry and the dishes and repaired to my easy chair, desperate to read my Lori Rader-Day novel but I was too exhausted to focus and only got only thirty pages done. Then I walked to my favorite pizza place in the world–That’s Amore in Metairie OPENED A LOCATION IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD–and got us a Chicago-style deep dish pizza…ate two pieces, and actually took a NAP before Paul got home.

But we’re almost there…the finish line is in sight.

Do What U Want

Day Three of Parade season. Looks to be another beauty out there today, with a high of 75 degrees (shorts and a T-shirt, woo-hoo!) and sunny with the usual cerulean New Orleans blue sky. Fabulous. Today, of course, is a shorter parade day; there are only four today, and they are pretty much back to back to back, starting at eleven: Femme Fatale, Carrollton, King Arthur, and Alla, so it will all be over by five. At that time I shall retire back to the Lost Apartment, get ready for tomorrow and a bizarre, slightly abbreviated work week, and watch The Walking Dead.

I am in a really strange place these days. As Constant Reader knows, my mind (creativity, whatever you want to call it) can go all over the place and sometimes can get out of control. This requires me to focus when I am writing; because i am constantly getting other ideas that sound better to me than what I am actually writing. So now that I have nothing on deadline, nothing under contract (edits to come, of course, on a couple of manuscripts) and am free to do whatever I want, write whatever I want…I can’t figure out what to work on. I started a short story last week, have another short story I want to write, and there are a couple that need heavy revision–as well as a couple of uncontracted novel manuscripts that also are in need of revision before sending them out into the world–but it’s also parade season, which makes getting anything done more than difficult. Yesterday I spent some time doing some on-line research about a true crime I heard about that occurred some seven years ago–and, in that Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, I am only about two degrees away from–and I am trying to wrap my mind around how to fictionalize it. It’s a great great story, and the way I want to write it is how the crime affects, and brutalizes, someone who was innocent of the crime but profited from it, nonetheless…but while managing to get a substantial payday from it, also had his life ruined. It’ll probably just end up in the files and nothing will ever come of it.

I did manage to get a cozy worked on last week; maybe a series, maybe not, maybe nothing will come of it, who knows? I also started putting together ideas and thoughts and characters and scenes for a noir I’ve been wanting to write for some time. But as far as actual writing, nothing much.

As for the week, well, Monday is a normal one; Tuesday I am going in late and working late because I have to take a friend to the doctor early that morning; I am going in late on Wednesday because *I* have to go to the doctor in the morning and then walk home because of parades; I took Thursday off in order to run to Costco and the grocery store to lay in supplies; Condom Duty Friday night and Monday; and then it’s Fat Tuesday and we’ve lived to tell the tale of Carnival 2017.

We watched a wonderful documentary on our local PBS station (WYES) last night after the parades, called The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which was about gay life in the French Quarter and how the gay Mardi Gras krewes got started. It was really well done; and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know anything about the gay history of New Orleans. I am most likely going to stream it again if it’s available anywhere; if not, I’ll go ahead and buy the DVD. Watching it last night, my legs and lower back aching from being on the parade route all day, I was getting ideas for stories…but was too tired and relaxed to make notes about anything other than the title. I also spent some time between parades cleaning and organizing, and came across another fun book I’ve not really looked at in a while: Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant.

AH, the luxury of time! I am also thinking I need to run by Garden District Books (maybe Thursday) and take a look around at their New Orleans section. I may need to add some Lyle Saxon to my New Orleans library, among other things. I love that people think of me as a New Orleans expert, but the truth is I know very little about my beloved adopted home.

And now, I am going to retire to my easy chair and read some more Lori Rader-Day.

Here’s a Carnival hunk (or two) for you:

Bad Romance

I slept in again this morning. It really is amazing how much stress I was under before, and how removing the stress of deadlines has made such an amazing difference in my life thus far. Of course, this is my first weekend at home after cutting out the stress of deadlines–and also, getting the new car has also made me realize how much stress the old car created unconsciously.

It’s really kind of lovely, really.

Parades start this coming Friday–which is really kind of crazy/scary, you know? I do love me some Mardi Gras, but it’s so exhausting, especially the older I get. Paul and I were talking about Krewe du Vieux last night: “It would be fun to go watch if we weren’t old.” Now I don’t especially think we’re all that old, but I am so old that I don’t want to drive down to the Marigny/Quarter and deal with a crowd of people. Living so close to the St. Charles route has spoiled us, more than anything else; it’s so easy to just walk down to the corner. This coming Friday I’ll have to take the streetcar to work and walk home; next week that will continue with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday parades; Lundi Gras I’ll have to walk both ways because people will start camping out on the neutral ground over the weekend and the streetcars can’t get through. The weather has been gorgeous the last few days; if it’s like this during the parades it will be even lovelier.

Note to self: buy prosecco at Costco. And sippy cups.

The reorganization of the kitchen went extremely well; I just have a couple of drawers and cabinets to finish today before I can relax into my easy chair and read. I should also do the windows in the kitchen; they are filthy and it is beautiful outside. Hmmmm.

Well, let me see what I can do with the cabinets before I get carried away.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.

Million Reasons

I overslept this morning.

It happens, you know? I’d intended to get up this morning, swill down some coffee, and then get in the car and drive over to the West Bank to my car dealer to pick up my license plate, and then go make groceries. Now that I’ve slept in, I am thinking, well, I can go get groceries, and then come home and work on the kitchen, and get the license plate one day before work this week.

This, you see, is how it happens. But I am also thinking that my temporary plate is still good until March, you see, so it actually would make sense, efficiency wise, to wait and go one morning this week, make a list of questions for the guy who sold me my car (he’d explained some things about the car to me the morning I bought it, but of course my mind was completely in I just bought a car mode so I retained none of it), and then stop at Sonic (I love Sonic) on my way into the office.

See? Rationalization is totally key to everything.

And ye Gods: next weekend there are parades. Woo-hoo!

Which reminds me, I need to take a before shot of the bead chest before the parades start.

So, I am going to make groceries at some point, but I am also going to work on organizing and redoing my kitchen as well, which includes the freezer–which is slammed full of things because I’ve just been shoving things in there willy-nilly and now every time I open the freezer door shit falls out. (You have no idea how badly I want one of those refrigerators that has the freezer drawer at the bottom; my goal for this year is to get one.) I also am going to work on my filing–which includes my computer filing–as well as working on an essay for Sisters in Crime on being a gay mystery writer. I was supposed to turn it in for their next newsletter, but I simply couldn’t figure out a way to write it that didn’t sound like whining (I don’t sell more because my characters are gay! Waaaaaaah!), which I absolutely abhor and hate. But I am also looking at this short essay as possibly working out as the prologue or intro to a non-fiction book, part a critique of societal homophobia and how that works/affects gay writers, that I’ve been wanting to write for a very long time, and have attempted to start, organize, and think about perhaps a thousand times.

But this past week it finally hit me on how, precisely, to write such a thing, and how to do it in a way where it not only didn’t sound like whining, but could actually make people reading it think, why, yes, that does indeed make sense and I can see why this is a problem.

One would hope, any way.

So, that’s where I am today. I certainly am also hoping to get some quality reading time in as well with Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things.

And I guess I should get started on my day since it is now past noon!

Here’s Taylor Lautner, in honor of his birthday.