46. Where do you go to escape?

This topic actually couldn’t be more fitting for my life right now. It wasn’t until I asked myself this question that I realized it was really what I was doing though.

I can always tell when I am really getting stressed or overwhelmed. The number of pagers I consume goes up. It’s not the same as pleasure reading. It becomes a stress induced mania. I don’t even have to find the book addicting. I can actually find it innately flawed. All the same, I’ll find myself reading for hours on end, even when I don’t have the time to spare, just to be somewhere else for a little while.

At the moment I’m reading Empress by Karen Miller. I’ve found countless typos. The prose is rushed and undescriptive. I’m constantly wondering at the motivations of the characters. That isn’t to say it’s a bad book. It has more to do with myself and my sudden urge to be overly critical. Yet for all these things I take issue with, I’m somewhere around page four hundred after five busy days.

I’ve done this before. The last time I can remember myself reading with such fury was during my student teaching. I devoured every last book I could find. It take much more than an interesting cover to get my into the book. I’d walk up an down the dinky local library rescuing books no one had touched in years for my mind to eat. I’ve forgotten half of the books I read in that time, but the worlds stay with me as vivid as ever. Then, I was running from what I already knew about myself, but hadn’t decided to admit to knowing. Deep down I knew that the degree I was about to go work for two years to get was not what I really wanted from y life. So instead of practicing and making myself into the musician I “should” have been, I read.

I realize now that the decision to set myself up for failure would have no real bearing on the outcome. I never did get to go to grad school for that degree I realize now I didn’t want, but I’m getting off track. Instead of running from what I know but don’t want to admit, I’m now running from the implications of the massive life change I’ve decided to make. I’m running from the fact that I’m having to wait for it to happen.

Each world, well crafted or otherwise, that I can drop my restless mind into is a sanctuary from all of the constant responsibilities swirling around me threatening to drown me at any moment. It might not be healthy, or maybe it is. I guess having a bad book habit is better than I bad drinking habit.

Just like being an addict though it begins to cut into my normal life. Instead of working I think about that world. I think about those characters. I get very cranky if I don’t get to visit them. My husband has a hard time peeling me out of bed during the weekends because of this. As of late, it’s been even worse.

I suppose I feel that when this real world gets to hard to bear that living in another of someone else’s creation can make it easier if only for a little while. I’m sorry to be rambling. I try to stay away from that as much as I can, but in this case it’s because my mind is a tightly wound ball of yarn. Pull on one string and your likely to upset another.

Where do you go when you need to escape? What do you do?

More house selling/moving to another country fun

After deciding that I would wait until next week to do my physical for the JET prgoram, I figured, yay, I can just go home. Not so says the universe. I am home, in a way. The problem is that I cannot get into my home.

Earlier today we had the appraiser come to give us a final price for the house. Fingers crossed, I’m hoping that he appraises it for what we sold it for. We’d like to make a little bit of money. Every little bit helps.

The problem is that when the appraiser left not only did he lock the inside garage door, which we never lock, but he also took the box key and did something with it. I have no way of knowing if he left it on the counter or took it for some reason. All I do know is that the key, the only other extra key to the house by the way, is inaccessible to me. This means that I am sitting outside on my back patio listening to my cat crying to get outside as I type this. My dogs are just going to have to keep holding their little fuzzy legs together a little bit longer.

Where is your husband you ask? He is at a meeting at his school and won’t be leaving for another few minutes. Then it will take him twenty long minutes to get here, depending on the traffic.

Such is life. I’m actually quite amused about it. Shouganai.

44. Describe a room in your house

Since I’m in the process of selling my house right now, I figured now would be a good time to talk about this room. I’m feeling very nostalgic about it and a little bit like I’m going to miss it.

Pleasant pale green walls reflect the light through the one long window, softly. White shelves crawl asymmetrically across the walls. Books tumble or stand tight where they have been packed together by a thirsty mind.

A few have thrown themselves across the bed below. They’ve buried themselves deeply into the plush, golden beigey comforter. Indentations have run together where a devoted reader has switched positions. Comfort changes when you’re too caught up in another world to stop.

Along the other wall two white tables stretch. Notebooks, pens, and paper spill across them in a tumble of half remembered ideas and projects. Blots of inch scratch the surface of a half neglected paper towel. Beside it, a prized creamy white and gold fountain pen rests inches from it’s ink bottle.

Various pieces of whimsical art rest against the wall smiling inspiration down where words are want to pour. A list, blotted with red ink, stares down at the seat of the author with all the things to say except for said.

This is how the room was at it’s most inspiring. The image of it being so still remains. Now the books have been stacked randomly across the tables. They are ready for a new home, to feed a new hungry mind. Papers and projects have all been sorted through. Some will go half way around the world. Some worlds are so well made that they deserve to travel so that others might get to know them. Others will wait until they can again be taken up.

Change takes with it the cleanly peace of a place, but with it comes momentum and hope for the future. Where once there was a motionless place of peace there is promise of newer things. The emptiness of an emptying house fills quickly with the promise of all the new things waiting in days ahead. Where space is made something always comes to fill it.

The whirlwind life of someone trying to sell their house, make it through the end of the school year, and move over seas.

I realize that my posting is way down. I apologize. I would really like to be writing more, but to be honest, my brain is just fried right now. Even now I feel like I am eeking out these meager words just because the last couple of days have been so insane.

As I mentioned before, I’m now in the process of moving to Japan. Nothing about that process has changed. Unfortunately it seems like everything else has.

First, I have to say that getting fingerprinted is a lot more difficult than it has any right to be. Right from the get go we knew we only have a finite amount of time to get our materials put together and sent in for our FBI background checks. We are relative amateurs at this process.

My husband, being the forward thinking and planning fellow that he is, made a point of calling ahead to our local police station. Honestly when I say local I’m being a bit sarcastic. We have the unfortunate honor of living in a part of Houston sandwiched between other towns. Our closest option was to actually go to the nearest police station in the town where we worked. This was still a half hour drive. I digress.

My husband talked to a wonderfully helpful officer who told us to come in at a specific time and not to worry about getting a hold of finger print cards because they had plenty on hand. They did. Unfortunately the front desk staff didn’t know this, and apparently were too busy to check.

Tuesday we spent a rather uneventful morning being turned away, even though we were told we wouldn’t be, and then referred to a company to get finger print cards, who wouldn’t give them to us and only did fingerprinting by appointment a week later. Obviously that wasn’t going to work for us.

There went my half day off. It turned into a frantic scramble to find somewhere else to get our fingerprints done. We found a place. It was on the other side of town, which in Houston is not exactly a small problem, and we were going to have to drive there during rush hour.

Nervously I made my way through the rest of my day. I rushed out the door and had gotten most of the way into the process of driving through downtown Houston during rush hour when my phone rang. Turn around my husband says.

Officer Dudley, now upswing in my stressful day, was so annoyed that we’d been turned away that she offered to meet us at the door and let us in. She had told them to make sure we got fingerprinted and fingerprinted we got. We also discovered the boxes of fingerprinting cards they apparently didn’t have. Hooray! Mission accomplished.

We went home for an evening of getting our house ready to show because moving over seas means selling your house. I’ll get there in a minute. Everything was going swimmingly until my husband yelled, through the bathroom door, to come out and look at the email on his phone.

The email was from our JET coordinator. Our first names got switched. That meant that my husband was the one on the wait list and I was the one who was in the program. Yay for me, but not so much for the 85 dollars we’d already spent to get my husbands tax exempt form. It also meant we had to redo our paperwork. I was over the moon, and he was understandably upset.

I wish I could say this was the end to my crazy story but no. We came home, got dinner with some friends, and then the dog threw up. He continued to do this until three in the morning on Wednesday. Needless to say neither of us went to work on Wednesday and thank god we didn’t.

Our house listing went up at ten o’clock pm Tuesday during the midst of the madness. I was just sort of waking up on Wednesday morning when my husband’s phone went off. Someone wanted to see the house, at 10:45. We tried to put them off until later, but they didn’t get the memo. So myself, my husband, and my sick dog all went to Starbucks. We attempted to make some sort of plan attack, but that was quickly going to go to hell in a hand basket.

Coffee and a cheese danish helped me feel a little bit better about my sleep deprivation and the overall sickness of my dog. He’s still not entirely himself nearly a week later. We packed up after yet another discussion about all of the things that needed to be accomplished that day. We finally managed to get back into our house. Finally we could clean and eat lunch. I called Officer Dudley and made a meeting time of 2:30. I should have known it was too good to be true.

We ordered sandwiches and continued to clean. Halfway through a look around of the back yard the dog decided to void every drop of water he’d managed to keep down in the last six hours. He turned into a gushing dog fountain. Since we’d had a call for another showing at four, I was unkindly thankful that he’d thrown up outside. One phone call to the vet later had us and the dog set up for a five o’clock vet appointment.

Three quarters of the way through my Jimmy John’s sub, god they are delicious, I got a phone call. Officer Dudley was done early and on her way to meet me. I threw the lamentable bites of sandwich back in the fridge and off I went. Thankfully our meeting place wasn’t far away. It would have gone a lot more quickly if I hadn’t stopped at the wrong gas station, across the street no less. When I pulled up, she was ready and tapping my door with a pen. Time, I knew I had at least a little time.

Wrong. My phone rang. On the other end was my husband informing me that another showing had been scheduled at three thirty, so back I rushed to get him and sick dog. Packets of materials in hand, we bolted out the doorway before would could catch sigh of the greedy vultures so desperately in need of our house.

A small digression. If ever you need to get something done at all three major shipping companies at once, I highly recommend a Postal Annex. I don’t know if they have them everywhere, but damn they should. They put the real Post Office to shame. That’s where we took our four folders of precious gold paper work to, and sent them off with all the fond wishes of those hoping for no more bullshit than already experienced in one day.

Next stop curtains. At the behest of our realtor, we had been advised to purchase curtains. With the already ridiculous number of showings scheduled, we were a bit leery, but hell what do we know? My husband stayed in the car with the sick dog, just in case he threw up again, and I ventured into the somewhat deserted Super Target. My mission, cheap curtains. I succeeded in getting a cheap, and rather cute, set for under forty bucks. I also picked up diet coke because drinks were going to be in order.

With the coke and curtains safely store, we drove off again for, well at this point, who knew what. The dog wasn’t doing particularly well at the point, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to call and see if we could get the vet appointment moved up. Thankfully, it must have been a slow day because they said yes.

We drove the thirty minutes, the vet was a holdover from when we’d first moved to Texas, to the vet’s office. They took us right and looked over our dog. The diagnosis was dehydration, which wasn’t too surprised considering the fountain he’d been only two hours before that. They produced a bag from the magical back rooms every vet office has and hung it from the ceiling. To my credit my dog was very amiable about the giant needle that they stuck into his side. We waited as the saline solution slowly dripped beneath the skin of our dogs back. What it served to do was to create a strange, leaky, bulbous bulge on our dogs side. Our poor sick pathetic dog now looked like Quasimodo, and to make it worse he was leaking.

He leaked the entire way home. Of course we didn’t find this out until we got to the bar. Since, you know, we’d had another showing scheduled for our house at six fifteen. They showed up at ten to six. That comes later. During our drive home my husbands phone rang yet again. This time, we were glad to see, it was our realtor. I listened to my husband with growing interest as he seemed to get more excited. An offer had been made on the house. Less than twenty four hours into our showing, we had an offer. Apparently it was one worth considering. On a high that only a first time home seller can have, we raced home only to be kicked out by a man and his toddler, remember the early people I mentioned earlier?

To the bar we went. Wednesday was almost done except for the fact that we didn’t get back into our house until seven o’clock that night.

Thursday ended up being about the same. Five more people came to see the house, and two more offers were made.

Friday, we decided to except the offer on our house. Our realtor met us at the same bar we’d been to before and proceeded to pay for our time “signing”. Signing really just meant sitting at the bar, signing the paperwork, and then shooting the shit for four hours about video games. I like to think we might have come out of the experience with a good realtor for next time and maybe even the beginnings of a friendship. I’ve always been to quick to jump to conclusions on that score. At least one other realtor called to bitch about not being told soon enough that the house was option pending. Two other offers were made Friday. The first offer was still that best and it was what we signed. Less than two days later we had a house in the option period.

I’m sorry for my lack of posting, but as you can see it was warranted. Also as a small side note, I’m fairly sure that the person who made the offer drove by, no fewer than three times on Sunday, to stare at the house. The last time the woman, who is eight months pregnant, drove very slowly and stared at us. Needless to say, the lock box key is sitting on our dining room table for the time being. It is still sort of our house at the moment.

Holy crap it’s actually happening!

I haven’t talked about it much mostly because I didn’t want to jinx anything. Earlier in the year I posted about my Jet interview. I have since found out that I am on the wait list, but my husband got accepted.

I’ll be honest. At first, I wanted to feel sorry for myself for not also getting shortlisted, but this means that we for sure get to be together. If I’m a bit slow, it’s mostly because I’m busy packing or getting ready to move.

I’m now in the process of selling the house, all of my things, and finishing out the school year. I will be vigilant and continue to post it’s just going to be a bit slow. I should think that my posts may become a little more mixed between Japan related things and writing things. Look for quite a bit more on the Japan subject as we get farther along in the process of moving.

When I get there, I plan on continuing my quest to finish the 642 as well as talking about my and my husband’s experiences in Japan.

Yay! I’m finally getting to go!

In which I discuss the loveable sometimes absurdity of my husband and his best friend and perhaps the meaning of true friendship.

Yes I know a thousand words. Even blurry though this is it still speaks volumes.

My husband and his best friend, after a bit of liquid inspiration, discovered that we were not going to have enough Diet Coke to complete our Saturday evening. Feeling that it would be slightly irresponsible to drive one of the cars they opted instead for the tandem bike above.

We filled and tested the flabby under-inflated tires. We even pressed down on the tires to make sure there was enough. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. They made it out into the street.

They were set and peddling. The store was only a little ways down the road. Unfortunately mere seconds after I snapped this picture the back tire blew. I would guess that the tire, unused for four years, simply had no other option under the strain of two highly amused and amusing young men. The audible gun shot pop caught not only the attention of the two wives, myself and my best friend, but also the attention of the neighbor and his four sons standing in disbelief in their drive way.

There are moments when the choice to act in a certain way is robbed of you. There was no option other than laughter for everyone involved. Sometimes things are so amusingly absurd that they can only cause happiness. Out there on that street under the cloudy Houston sky we roared. Every person present threw back their heads in breathless laughter. I actually laughed so hard that my throat ached.

The Diet Coke did get bought along with some Doritos and Boones Farm. I still doubt the thinking behind the Boones but in the end who cares. We drank it all the same and then danced to such classic hits as What does the Fox Say? and Vindaloo. Sometimes there is magic in absurdity.

The truly awesome part of all of this comes from two people so comfortable that they can look ridiculous willingly and come out the other side laughing. That really is, in essence, what friendship is. I thought I’d share.

I mean for crying out loud it’s two grown men on a tandem bike.

Jet interview

I know I haven’t talked about this much since I haven’t wanted to jinx myself. Today was my JET interview. I have Japan up there for a reason. Points under blog title.

I think I’m just as nervous now after the fact than I was before hand. I think I answered things well. Thankfully I didn’t get the war tribunal style of interview unlike my poor husband. He got asked how he would explain America’s involvement in WW2 to a Japanese students by an older Japanese man. I’m so glad I didn’t get asked that question.

Mostly I was asked questions about whether I’d go if my husband didn’t get the job and I did or vice versa. I hope desperately that I get to go to Japan next year.

At the beginning of the school year both my husband and myself decided that we’d like to try relocating to Japan. It’s something we’ve always wanted to do. We’ve even talked about doing it before. For some reason this year just felt right. I think because we are both a little put off by teaching here in the states.

We have a few other prospects at the moment but nothing concrete. We won’t find anything out about the JET interviews until April. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

17. Write a list of things to do before you die.

Since I’m waiting around for my husband to do a skype interview, I’m to nervous to just sit here. I might as well be writing. I’m too nervous about his interview to concentrate, but luckily I have a few that I wrote up ahead of time to use. As long as I can keep my cat from walking across my keyboard, this should work out nicely. Well, here’s my sort of bucket list. Oh, before I start the interview my husband is going to be taking might help me scratch at least two of the things off this list.

Things I’d like to do…

Not be a teacher, Have a job that I don’t necessarily love but also don’t dread going to every day, Publish a book, Publish a bunch of books, Have people actually read said books, Create worlds people other than me would want to live in, Be wildly successful at something, Learn Japanese, Live in Japan, Play lots of video games, Own a pure bread corgi, Find a cat my husband doesn’t hate, Read at least a thousand books, move back to Michigan, Spend more time in Prefon, Own a Victorian house, Spend as much time just sitting watching nerdy movies on the couch as much as possible, doing things I’ve yet to even think of, Add more things to this list

I’m sure I can’t even dream of the things I’ll want to do in five or ten years. I hope that I at the very least I know myself well enough now that a lot of these thins will still matter to me in the future. I know that I will change because that’s what growing up is all about. I guess I just hope that this person living inside me at this very moment is the same person I get to grow old with. I rather like her and hope she’s here to stay.

New Orleans for a weekend.

You’ll have to forgive my absence over the weekend. Well, I suppose you don’t have to, but it would be very polite of you to do so. My mother gifted my husband and I with a prepaid trip to New Orleans. Frankly I was having a good go at having fun this weekend, so blogging didn’t really come to mind. That being said I felt like it was a weekend to be written about. If you are looking for tales of drunken debauchery, you’ll have to go elsewhere. This has much more to do with the Universe testing my patience and sense of humor. Also, to make up for my missed posts, I’ll be trying to post a few extra this week.

Friday

Houston to New Orleans is, under normal circumstances, a reasonable drive of about five hours depending on traffic. Traffic is a key word for the beginning of my story. It’s a finicky beast at best.

To get to New Orleans you must drive through the city of Baton Rouge. It’s a fairly good sized city that houses Louisiana’s darling university, LSU. The interesting, and in this case unfortunate thing, is that there is only one readily available place to cross the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. That particular bridge is four lanes wide, two going in one direction and two going in the other, and most major highways dump onto this four lane bridge. I don’t just mean dump. I mean within a mile there are two major interchanges smashing all of the other people trying to get to the other side of the river. I’m not sure why everyone goes into the city during rush hour, but hey, I don’t live there.

Our lovely gps gave us several time saving suggestions. The amount of time they saved us amounted to less than ten minutes. Inevitably each “short cut” lead back to the same congested highway. There was no escaping the time sucking beast I10 had turned into. Every time we turned back to it there were bumper to bumper cars waiting for us. Eventually we gave in to the sardine highway.

After about an hour in Baton Rougue, we managed to make our way outside of the city. Surely there could be no more delays. Everyone who was trying to get to New Orleans must surely be there already in a haze of drunken bliss. Not so, said the universe. Ten miles from our destination, a hotel looking more and more attractive by the second, for no reason I can think of still traffic again slowed to a crawl. Red lights flashed, and those he weren’t paying attention caused those who were minor heart attacks.

We crawled down I10. Like toothpaste through a tube we squeezed into down town. With relief we made it to our exit. We then had to cross three lanes of traffic in a right turn lane on the left side of the road to get to the turn lane no more than one hundred feet up. Since this apparently is common, there were no issues.

Finally we had arrived. The valet came and took our car. It was whisked away to the safety of a parking place somewhere. I fished the reservation information out of my purse. I’m always paranoid that I’ll forget things mostly because I often do. When the family of five had finished checking in, we stepped up to the counter.

A woman with her hair piled at the very top of her head eyed us with the disdain only common to the service industry. I gave the name and the paperwork. Unfortunately, even though my mother told them to put our names on it our names did not appear on the reservation. With a twist of her upper lip we were informed that she wasn’t supposed to let us into the room unless our name appeared.

It must have been a great inconvenience to her personally, but eventually she relented and checked us into our room. Gratefully we took the elevator up to our room. The room I have no complaints about. It had a massive bathroom and a massive bed. Sleeping in it was a bit like sleeping in two separate beds. My husband and I had to roll across the cavernous expanse just to snuggle, but that happened later.

Famished and tired of being cooped up, my husband and I struck out into the garden district where our hotel was located. We were a bit put off by the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone wandering around. I suppose they all must have been stumbling around Bourbon Street. Turned off by the lack of other wanderers, we didn’t make it very far.

Waiting under blazing neon lights was Igor’s Bar, game room, and laundromat. And no, they weren’t kidding about the laundromat part. Inside, a small collection of locals was bellied up to the bar drinking and smoking merrily. The ceilings were low and wooden. Christmas lights curled around slot machines and faded red light bulbs lighted a closed in seating area just to the side of the door.

My husband and I got a local brew and took a seat. We’d seen signs that promised fried food and burgers. The kitchen was more like a cubby at the end of the bar. The one bartender seemed to be managing it all. We watched the bartender hopefully. Surely someone would order something. We just didn’t want be the first ones to ask.

Two beers in the sound of sizzling rose in the distance. We looked at each other and knew that only one thing could fix this farce of a trip beginning. Two words. Chicken nuggets. I made the last of my beer disappear, so that my husband could order a mound of salty fried goodness, fries, and beer. He came back with the addition of a shot of Jameson, which I sipped like a dainty priss much to his amusement. I like it just in small doses.

When the steaming pile of nuggety goodness arrived we didn’t wait long. Plastic was ripped unceremoniously off of the two sauce packets. Honey mustard and sweet and sour sauce. No two sauces could have been better.

Stuffed and finally feeling like our trip was finally getting into the swing of things, we made our way into the hotel bar. Behind the bar a great mound of a woman wearing a black smock that was working very hard was wiping glasses. Another bartender, tall, rail thin, and wearing a beard that matched his smirk finally waited on us. My husband, ever the whiskey addict, ordered a rusty nail, and I ordered a Creole coffee. Both were delicious and enough to send us crawling to bed.

Japanese is a bit of a hobby of mine now also my husband’s as well. We are currently mounting a job hunt to get ourselves to Japan, so every spare moment we are practicing something. We just didn’t realize how convincing we were until the mound on legs walked back over and asked us quite pointedly where we were from.

With an amused giggle I replied that we were from her. She seemed dubious at best but let it go. After some chit chat about the small nothings of life bartenders want to know about, we found our way back to our room for the night.

Saturday

I woke reaching across the bed chasm for my husband’s hand. When we turned to face each other, we smiled. A California king bed is a wonderful and ridiculous thing. If you ever want separate beds, but like your significant other too much to be apart a California king will do it.

Hunger finally forced us from bed. I had been to New Orleans before, but my husband hadn’t. There are very few things you must do when in New Orleans besides eating local food and getting uproariously drunk, but one which many can agree on, drunkard or not, is Cafe Du Monde.

With a roll of quarters in my purse, we boarded the street car. A ten minute ride got us just to the other side of the French Quarter. Using my experience from the last time I was there, I managed to get us to the fabled fried food eatery. As was expected on a sunny Saturday morning in a tourist town, the line stretched down the block. Perhaps it was stupid of us not to look further, but what’s done is done. We got into the line. It was moving so why not.

Halfway through our wait I spotted another line off to the side. I would later discover that this was the to go line. That plays an important part of the story. What we didn’t realize was that the line we were in was the table service line.

A little more waiting got us to the front of the line. We had the pick of an entirely packed restaurant. No one seemed to be moving anywhere in the restaurant. The only thing moving regularly was mountains of powdered sugar.

Then from across the tent I spotted some people on the move. I took off down the aisle like a shot with my husband in tow. Too bad someone else, who hadn’t bothered waited in line, had also spotted the table from the exit. With a pair I wish I had, the woman plopped down into the seat as I set my purse down on the chair.

“Really,” I said in utter shock. Not a single word escaped her. She simply stared me down as though I were the offender. She simply sat and waited for me to go away. Before my husband had a chance to cuss out a perfect stranger, we left the green and white tent. The nerve of some people right?

Starving, and now cranky for other reasons, we made our way through the throng. All we’d wanted was a damn beignet. I’ll just save you some trouble and the boring read through of another line. We didn’t get one.

What we did get was some more beer and fried pickles. It was truly the breakfast of champions and in true New Orleans style it came with street performers. Half way through our settling sense of relief and first drink a pair of all night partiers wandered in. One had scraggly unwashed hair down to his shoulders. He kept referring to his nearly incoherent friend as party rock. He bellied up but thankfully drank nothing. Party Rock ambled around and ran into a few things.

A man in a fuzzy white and black bear jacket out of Fargo sat hunched in the corner eating his breakfast and ignoring all of it. Just another morning in The Big Easy right?

We escaped with half a beer in hand and made for the street car. After seeing how packed it was, we elected to walk the two miles back to our hotel. We had a lunch reservation, courtesy of my mother, at one o’clock. Even walking we had plenty of time to get back.

The walk was one of the few things that was uneventful. We made it back to the room. I wanted to put my coat in the room and so did my husband.

The little light should have flashed green. That’s what’s supposed to happen when you use your room key. The key word here is supposed. With a half an hour left to find our way to the restaurant we decided we didn’t have the time. We would check on the key, ask for directions, and be on our way.

Thankfully there was no one else at the front desk. We asked politely why our room keys didn’t work only to be informed that it was because we were supposed to checking out today. The travel gods were truly laughing by now. Dismayed we told her that couldn’t be right. She looked through and nodded. Apparently booking a two night stay as two separate nights is a thing. Right then and there we had to re-check in for our room. The best thing we got out of the hassle was two free drinks and breakfast. Thanks for that at least mom.

With a little time to spare we made our way to The Commanders Palace. It was a testament to the elite set from about fifty years ago with a turquoise and green awning. Once inside, we were whisked across a comically confused room to our seat by the wait station.

At first we didn’t know what to make of it. It was part pretentious full dinner service and a rich child’s birthday party with balloons at every table. There were white table cloths, two forks, two spoons, and a waiter who seemed to think we already knew what we were having two seconds after we sat down. The fact that we didn’t posed no problems. Garlic toast and water could certainly solve that.

In quick succession drinks and our three course lunch was ordered. Then we noticed the birds and the tassels. In opposite corners the wall had been papered with a gentile powdered pink. Hanging in neatly arranged rows were tassels the exact same powdered pink. Whatever held them in place glistened under fake candle chandeliers with gently waving orange light bulbs. They wiggled loosely like flickering flames.

The rest of the restaurant was a respectable blue with a swirled damask pattern and birds because well, you must put birds on things. Except, not all of the birds were painted on. Some were in fact plastic and stuck to wooden dowls. My husband and I were thoroughly amused.

Amongst the confused finery we enjoyed the sounds of a well rehearsed jazz group. The trumpet player was a big white guy pretending almost convincingly to be Louis Armstrong. Things were settling to pleasant until someone requested Deep in the Heart of Texas. The restaurant erupted into timed clapping and well rehearsed lines from Elementary days. Texans do like New Orleans.

Our food was delicious. I had turtle soup and quail. My husband had and absinthe oyster dome and eggs benedict. It was all very good. We also greatly enjoyed some poor soul the table over with a misguided hairdo and a girl who only seemed interesting in letting him touch her fingers.

We paid and we escaped across the street to a traditional cemetery. We had a lovely walk. Then we went back for a nap before venturing back to Bourbon Street. We went, had our hand grenade, and then escaped back to the garden district. However, we didn’t get to do that before being stuck on the street car for thirty minutes. At this point we were ready for just about anything. We couldn’t do anything other than find it funny.

Dinner was the last chance the travel gods had to laugh at us and laugh they did. The place was the Blind Pelican. The food was amazing except that none of it came together. I’m not trying to be negative. The service issues were more than excusable. My husband received his muffaletta. I’m not an olive fan but it was great.

The obviously over worked waitress came, after forgetting to check on why I didn’t have a beer yet, to inform me that the reason my food was taking so long was because they had run out of the bucket of oysters.

Damn. No worse luck was ever had. You mean to say that I get to have, gasp, freshly shucked oysters on my po boy? The world is to cruel a place to exist in.

My char grilled oysters came and then were no longer there. They disappeared so fast they may not have actually existed at all. Needless to say if the appetizer was that good I couldn’t wait for my sandwich.

When it came on crusty french bread. The bottle of hot sauce had barely touched the table before it was being put to good used on my light golden oysters. They were creamy and crunchy and everything I’d hoped they would be. The side of cheese grits, an after thought at first, turned out to be a treat that would forever ruin store bought grits. They were just enough creamy and just enough chewy. I could have licked the small plastic cup they came in.

Thoroughly satisfied and amused by the side show presented by the waitress yelling at her manager for trying to tell her she had to be there until closed, we settled up and moved on down the street back to Igor’s.

I can’t say that it was a perfect trip. Seven hours to get somewhere running a circus of errors can be frustrating. Once I decided to just sit back and enjoy the show, I no longer saw the inconveniences as anything more than a serious of stories to relate later. Make lemonade. If you choose to add the vodka that’s up to you.

 

Wow I didn’t think this would end up being quite so long. Let me know if you’ve also ever had a laughably ridiculous travel experience.