And it was great.

Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival.  A crowded streetcar ride, a short walk, lots of music and people and good food smells.  We ate hot dogs and burgers in the city park with hundreds of our fellows.  Jack washed the park sculpture with a wet wipe, and we tried not to cringe.  We wandered through vendors and stands.  We heard music.  Jack slept on my chest as we hiked to the streetcar stop, and further slept all the way home.  We crashed on the couch and ate frozen pizza for dinner, spent.

A glorious day in the city.

I put up a few pictures, at the end of the album above!

I have pages and pages to read for my 8:30 Contracts class tomorrow.  But just now I am watching our cat sleep luxuriously on the dining room table, our short-legged dog fervently and persistently testing all vantage points around her to see if now can I reach? Here?  Can I reach here?  How about here?  Can I reach her now?  Cat cat cat cat cat cat reach the cat cat cat cat can I reach here?  Etc.

I am myself enjoying the heavy-limbed ache that is the fruit of a punishing gym routine.  I feel stretched out, well fed, and pleasantly exhausted.  Today has been a day well-lived.  The air conditioner next door loudly whirs.  A distant siren wails, tinny and removed from me.  My son snores, and the cat.    Contracts beckon, but I hold the subject off for a few more minutes, and paint in my mind's eye the memory of a Tuesday night in my first year of law school, mundane and yet lovely.  Few are the nights when I comfortably exist in my immediate circumstance, but this is one of them.

It is hot in this house.

Patrick has gone to church without us.  I am hacking and nose-blowing my way through the morning, relying on Ms. Tele Vision to be babysitter.  Jack watches Disney froth, Virgil runs from couch to couch, bored out of his mind, and the cat is sprawled on the cool tiles in the back hall.  She has the right idea.

I can't wait for the cooling month of October.  We're wilting down here.

Along with my hair, my clothes, and my lovely potted plants that I dragged all the way here from North Carolina, my blogging inspiration is falling flat.  Sorry.  I hate to just throw out status updates, but the well has temporarily run dry.  My old stand-bys just aren't doing it for me.  It's hard to wax poetic on my love for my son when I just want him to take his hot sweaty little body OFF ME RIGHT NOW, go play, leave mama to blow her nose in peace.  I lack the energy to search for pretty pictures of places I've lived for Five Environments.  I Drink Your Milkshake is on temporary hiatus, although we will most likely be moving again, and I'll probably revive it, ooh la la.  I can't have any more angst about whether or not I should go to law school, and now that I'm in it I don't find it to be too terribly hard.  I could bore you, as I do my husband, with stories about some of the outrageous cases we read . . . but, as I mentioned, it would bore you, so why waste the energy typing?  We don't have cable so I can't discuss what's on tv.  Gawd.  I'm not bored, but I sure am boring.

I'll come up with something.  Maybe we should turn down the AC a couple of degrees . . .

Late wakeups.  Coffee and magazines, Jack still in bed.  Adult quiet for a few blissful moments.
Up, dressed, in the car.  We leave our urban home, looking for Nature.
We find her, dear god, Nature with all her enormous spiders and enormous flightless grasshoppers black as night and enormous alligators rolling, trolling through bayou.
A hike, one with no change in elevation, on life-saving, elevated boardwalk, as the calculating reptilian face ponders our toddler's chubby legs, dangling from the Ergo baby carrier like Tantalus's fruit - deliciousness, just out of reach of his jaws.  Thanking, again, the builders of the elevated boardwalk, which intervention saved Mama from having to tussle with an alligator.
Then he is asleep, face planted in the middle of Dad's sweaty back, as we rumble through the tropical, spideriffic forest, steamy, swampy, hot, heading back to the parking lot where I shake out my hair.  No spiders.  After, we stop for gluttony at Sonic Drive In - grilled cheese, burgers, fries, tater tots, and ice cream shakes to finish it off, all this without even having to step out of our car.  I spoon tiny bites of ice cream into Jack's baby bird mouth.
Home, naps all 'round.  A little laundry, a little tv, early bedtime.
In the night, lightning, thunder.  The dog frets, the baby cries.  I pull him out of his crib and into bed with me.  A chubby arm around my neck, wide glistening eyes.  Nestled in the curl of my body, he sleeps.

So, on Wednesday the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles nearly destroyed my will to live.  I'll spare you the narrative, I'll merely give you a smattering of details and let you paint the picture:

Notary needed.  No notaries in banks here, but per the teller there is one at Wal Mart. 
No notary in THIS Wal Mart, you gotta try the another Wal Mart. 
There's, like, 40 in the immediate vicinity.  Sigh.
Address wrong on the website
Driving all over a town where you aren't allowed to make any U-turns (even at lights with green arrows!) trying to find a place that no longer exists
20 minutes on hold on the phone to ascertain correct location
Condescending DMV lady on phone
Lines worthy of Disneyland - lines full of people waiting to take a number so they could sit and wait some more
Overzealous security guard
Son and husband left standing outside in the heat to wait, due to overzealous security guard
People leaving after waiting 2 1/2 hours because it was going to be another 2
Impossible to get there with the right paperwork
No one will tell you what the right paperwork is until you stand in a 4 hour line, and then they  make you stand in it again after you go home and get the right paperwork
Strong incentive to break the law and just forget it
Leave for the day empty handed and grumpy

On Thursday, it redeemed itself.  I found  better office with nicer people, who told me (after I took a number and waited 20 minutes) I had the wrong office but I could go to this other one 5 miles away, where I went and took a number and waited an hour.  But after an hour I was helped by a nice person, who did all of my needed items in less than an hour, and with no eyerolls or condescension or personal phone calls (unlike the sewer and water board, where I was subjected to one half of an extremely heated cell phone conversation between the rep helping me and someone with whom she was not pleased.)  Then she told me the camera at this location was broken and I would have to go back to the first office to have my picture taken for my license. 

But at that office they didn't make me wait in line again.  So there's that.

Also, I know ALLLLLL about the terrain underneath the Westbank Expressway.  I could give tours of that place.  Which would be helpful to fellow out of town drivers, since most of the street signs have faded in the sun (or have been knocked off) so you just sort of have to guess the right direction.  I knew the DMV was near the police station, so eventually I followed a cop car around til he went "home" and that's how I found it.  That and signs to City Maint. Off., which I correctly deduced was also near the DMV/police station/hell.

After my wild success, I returned home with the special treat of McDonald's double cheeseburgers in hand, and we decided to further celebrate my victory against The Man by calling it a day and going to the Aquarium of the Americas.  At the start of this Aquarium (of which we are members, so we should be spending quite a bit of time there) it has one of those aquarium tunnels where the fish swim over your head and all around.  Jack was beside himself.  He was at turns scared, thrilled, and kept screaming DOG!  DOG!  It took us half an hour to get out of the tunnel, he was having such a great time in it. 

There was plenty of space to run and plenty of stuff to touch and nothing pointy or heavy to pull on himself, so we obviously loved it too.  Go, my child, go forth and wear thyself out.  After several hours of us saying "Fish!  Fish!" and him saying "DOG", we were all worn out and headed home.  Then in the car, I said "Did you like the fish, Jack?" and he finally said "Thish."  He said it twice.  I got it on video.  I have proof.

Now we're home, and I have only a few days before school starts.  I have this ambitious reading schedule, but I've sort of abandoned it for two reasons: (1) I have read a LOT already, and I don't want to be sick of reading before I even start, and (2) there are some things to get the house in order that I need to do.  I am stocking the freezer, making more bread, organizing photos, I swept and mopped the whole house (not an easy feat, I tell you!), and doing every other little thing that I think will need doing between now and December.  I'm battening down the hatches, yo!

Added some more pictures to the above album.  A few exteriors.  I may upload our aquarium video below, too.  You are awash in media today.  But don't get too used to it . . .