Liralen's Adventures Through Life

We started around the apartment, because the Garden District of New Orleans is a beautiful place, full of live oak and local businesses. The Trolley runs through it all, from east to west and back again, and both Saint Charles to the north and Magazine to the south are filled with businesses, restaurants, and coffee shops. Our place is between the two and we could walk as we needed between them. Saint Charles has the trolley that heads downtown and to the French Quarter and a block away along it is a little grocery store that's perfect for vacationers. The picture on the far left is the local Market. It's got a lot of prepped food, beautiful produce, and a lot of high end foods and a whole second floor of alcohol. The middle picture is one of the local magnolias. the one on the right is John while we wait for our beignets from the Vintage Cafe, which has a few beignet, wonderfully brewed coffee, and wasn't all that crowded. They double as a bar, for the evening festivities,...

A lot of the land between Pine Bluff and New Orleans is flat. It's really flat. Nearly all of it is scrubby, old forest that has been cleared for farming. There are farms all over it and water everywhere else. The roads turned from being twisty curvy things to being completely and totally straight. The neighborhoods were amazingly poor, the ones that we drove by often had houses that had completely caved in, were missing glass or  Vicksburg, Mississippi was the site of one of the big, final battles of the Civil War. The city was under siege for months, and the battleground is nearly all retained as a memorial. The park is enormous, with marble markers for nearly all the stages of the war, with markers from a great number of the states who were involved. Lots of the old battlements, trenches, and gun placements were all still in place, with markers for the states that people were from or the leaders of the divisions that were there. There's also one enormous dome erected by the...

Vera was wonderful and baked us a full breakfast casserole and we sat with Phyllis and her to eat a very hearty breakfast with fresh fruit and fresh coffee and a lovely conversation. They then took us over to Linda's, we got to take a photo all together, and then John and I went off with Linda to explore the local wonders.  This is a cute little one-lane bridge that they like to nickname their "Golden Gate Bridge". It's actually all-wood planks, which had been recently updated, and it was actually a lot of fun to drive over. You just had to look to see if there was anyone coming the other way before going on, but anyone on the bridge had right of way. This is Rogue's Manor, owned by an eccentric local who had put a lot of time and money into the place, and was trying to sell it for a few million dollars with no takers. It's gorgeous, huge, and half the windows were missing from the tops of the ornate towers. There were huge planks from old old trees in the yar...

The most remarkable thing about Kansas was that we were able to beat the Freedom Train to Topeka. Image our surprise at finding out it has been staying in Salida the same night we were. We beat them out. And ran fast until we reached this: This is a campsite by Table Rock Lake on the border between Missouri and Arkansas, where the land went from flat farms to hills and trees again. These are all oaks in winter, and the campsites were closed for the season as they're expecting snow in a few days, but for today it was beautiful. We ended up at the house of a cousin of John's father George, Vera and had a lovely dinner with her and her daughters, Linda and Phyllis. It was wonderful. And, miracle of miracles, my crown stopped throbbing too. I'm so grateful. Vera is Ukrainian descent, just like George was, but she has a lot of ties to the old culture and recent events have hit her hard. So she was very happy to see us. We'd been following each other on FaceBook f...

I've decided that if I'm going to blog about a trip, now it's only going to be the highlights and pertinent details of the day instead of doing the exhaustive and exhausting list of Everything that happened and Everything we ran into and Everything we did... That said our start to the trip to New Orleans almost didn't happen this time around. A week ago I'd had to have a crown replaced because a cavity had crept under it, and the bite just wasn't working. I'd already gone back once to get it fixed and was in considerable pain last night and despairing. I usually need a couple of weeks after a crown to get the bite to work again. I don't know why, exactly, but they never seem to get it right at the very first, other than one really lucky time. But John called them this morning and they had an early morning Emergency slot and they fit me into it. The bite got adjusted again and I asked for the Big Guns of something to get the nerves to calm down. It's ...

This post is in response to someone that really wanted the recipe for my Mexican Beef Stew, which is actually a recreation of a stew that I had in Gallup, New Mexico, at a Mexican restaurant that was a family-owned little place that made its own nearly everything, including fluffy flour tortillas and a fairly standard Mexican restaurant menu but for a single item. It was lovingly placed in the MIDDLE of the second page, and had the mother's name attached to the stew. I'd never had Mexican beef stew before and ordered it, anticipating chilies or other things, but instead got this delightful brothy beef stew. There was obviously tomato in the broth, but no chilies that I could detect, no corn, no beans, just huge chunks of super tender beef, carrots, celery, potatoes, and the long, long, long simmered ghosts of onion chunks. Mexican Beef Stew from Vergie's Restaurant and Lounge Here's a picture of the original, just so you have a good idea of what I was talking about. ...

I saw Black Widow last night, and the thing that stuck in my head was "The bones of her origin were dreamed up by 20-something young men who had no access to ANY post-menopausal or actual women who have had a hysterectomy."  All those times that society has labeled "hormonal" are actually when we're OFF the hormones from our reproductive system. So you take all those out, and you get women who are "hormonal" ALL THE TIME, who can't sleep, who have brains that will NOT work, and who are in pain all the time (from dry eyes, dry other bits, bones that won't heal (imagine the osteoporosis on those Widows))... My brain threw its hands up that that point and said, "You just TRY to make a post-menopausal woman do what you tell her because you told her to, and you will Rue The Day." SPOILER AFTER HERE * * * * * * * Which, I guess, at the end of the movie, is what happened. xD I cheered no less.