Finally have a place I'm staying.

Sorry for the lack of posts...but now I realized the HH could come out any day with an announcement that there will be a tour of Bywater in my blog...and there is none.

So here we go--photo happy!

Bywater is a funky little neighborhood that attracts artists, hippies and, shall we say, free thinkers. A current campaign is to "Ban the Ghost", ie, stop the greying over of graffiti. They contend that street art is better than a vast grey wasteland.

The neighborhood officially begins when you step over the tracks and are greeted by a sign made by Dr Bob, a Bywater artist known for his funky signs that proclaim "Be Nice or Leave." Apparently we don't go quite that far in Bywater. We do, however, have no qualms about making fun of people. This sign is directed at the morons who fly down our street at 50mph trying to beat a train that stops two blocks down--and stays maybe two minutes.

I travel home through Marigny and cross the tracks into Bywater. It's longer but much more relaxing. This is a shot of the church tower across the street, which kindly reminds me each day that 6am is the official end to my sleep. The next landmark I pass is the highly opinionated Two Sisters landmark, which first told us that the surge wasn't working, and now lets us know that it's time to impeach Bush (or perhaps another who fits this description). In case you haven't figured it out, the neighborhood is quite liberal, and there are Obama signs, stickers and such in nearly every other home.

I then continue on to Bywater BBQ, home of the $3.95 breakfast--formerly $3.5o. It buys eggs, bacon/sausage (or black beans, thanks y'all), grits/homefries, and the most delicious biscuit. $2.50 gets you a Bloody Mary or mimosa. The boys miss me--the Farmer's Market job means I can't make it by the 10:30 deadline. Sad.

Sometimes if I feel like being with people or watching a baseball game or the Hornets playoff games, I wander up to Markey Bar (No, Dad, never at night, never alone).
at least everyone treatIt's my local, it's cheap and everyone knows my name...no, not really buts me like a long lost friend.

Other Bywater essentials:

Life is slow paced. Sit on your porch. Have a beer. Use your legs to move. Cars are used as a last resort, not a primary mode of transportation.


Color is good--the more cacophonous the combo, the better. The only rule seems to be that your double shotgun needs to be painted the same on both sides. The two story house reminds me of a hostel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.

In Bywater we're on a ridge, so much of the neighborhood received less flood damage than many parts of the city. Still, residents are proud of their Katrina marks, and often paint around them so that they stay fresh. This one shows that the home was checked on 9/6/05 by the TXI unit and no entities were found.

Well y'all...thanks for sticking with me on my Bywater tour...hope you enjoyed seeing my tiny corner of the world where I've made my home.

You know the night life is just not for me

I'm back! I have energy! The nausea's gone! There's still pain in my abdomen/pelvis so I'm sure that I'll be seeing quite a few more specialists, but compared to how I felt last week I can handle this pain.

So once again, I've done more on Saturday morning before the city awakes than most do all weekend. First stop, always the market. Veggies! Veggies everywhere! Ok, enough with the exclamation points. Since I'm reading Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food, I decided it's time to try a summer minestrone. The only minestrone I've ever made was a Rachael Ray recipe--not the best example, I've learned, and probably why I hated it. A thirty-minute meal does not lend itself to the process of creating true minestrone, which needs a base, than the veggies that cook for a long time, then the tender veggies. Pasta and beans are cooked separately. For this minestrone I need onion, carrots, a leek, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, beans and spinach. Save for the beans and the leek, all available at the market--and I hope to find a leek at the neighborhood market. Also from the market today--broccoli, strawberries and pork roast. A side note--Amazon.com's search engine lists How to Cook Everything Vegetarian right under The Art of Simple Food when searching, which is odd when you consider that Alice Waters is by no means a vegetarian, and does not advocate a vegetarian lifestyle, but rather a local and sustainable one.

So it was market, then post office, then home to take the car in. We needed to cross the Industrial Canal into the lower 9th to find someone to pull the door panel off. When approaching, I noticed the bridge looked something like this:
Granted, the boats going through looked a bit more modern, and there was pavement on either side, but the way the bridge rises and appears remains the same. The most interesting part though was that, once I'd fought the panic of not being able to roll down the window on this eighty-degree morning (I figured out the control still functioned while dangling from the panel), I hit the button for classic rock and House of the Rising Sun was on the radio. So here I was, Saturday morning at a well-known NOLA location, listening to lyrics about the city while barges traveled from the lake to the river.

After leaving the car in the capable hands of a man who appeared to have lost almost all of his vision, we were pretty hungry, so it was off to Bywater BBQ, where Craig was shocked that I wasn't having a Bloody Mary and that the Pope was now accepting of aliens. After receiving the royal treatment in the form of $3.95 breakfast, triple berry jam, and concerned questions about my health (probably need to know when I'll be partaking of the $2.50 Bloody Mary again) we walked a couple more blocks to the Bywater Art Market, the best in the city in my obviously un-biased opinion. There we added to our collection of cemetery art with a black and white photo taken on infrared film, which causes greens to show up as bright points of white. Unfortunately Kodak doesn't make this film anymore, since the art (and smell...mmmm) of film photography is clearly dead. But the photo is cool, even if it ignited a debate as to which room is the living room. We have a living room, an open bedroom, a real bedroom, a kitchen, bath and laundry room. How one of those other rooms could be mistaken for the living room is beyond me.

I hope to wander the neighborhood this late afternoon with the camera. I've realized it's about time I share the quirks and wonders of Bywater with my readers.


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