How's N'awlins?

New Orleans is good :)
By Cayne Miceli

Spring is in her full on glory...
wisteria, jasmine, azaleas all in full bloom...

French Quarter Fest is next weekend
and Jazz Fest will be two weeks after that...

and the city is rebuilding itself piece by piece...
what used to be one freshly painted renovated shop or house on a bombed out street looking tragically hopeful is becoming two and three and six, etc...
In my neighborhood you can barely tell anything ever happened except for the continuing renovations here and there and lots of fresh paint...
even the houses that survived basically intact are getting the once over or the boost...
and by freshly painted I mean bright colors: purple, green, blue, pink, and multi... literally this morning I stopped my car to count 6 different candy colors on the front columns of a single shotgun house... I saw a Baptist church on Claiborne Ave with 3-story columns painted bright purple!

The roads are exceptionally bad (no dirt surfing here - but then we have no hills, only bridges)
and I hear the cops aren't looking for the people swerving, they're looking for the people driving straight into the potholes :)

Things I have seen placed by residents into potholes to keep themselves and others from falling in: the wheel of a car, a door, an appliance (maybe a clothes washer, maybe a dishwasher, not sure), a chair, and two chairs (it was a deep hole, one was not enough!), these are all different potholes...

My drive to work takes me through City Park and since the golf courses are presently closed and not being maintained, they are turning into exceptionally beautiful pasture land graced with ancient oaks... the greens, etc are now looking like Indian mounds.... but then I'm not a golfer and I've always thought golf courses to be an obscene waste of land... particularly because of all the chemicals used to maintain them...

and FREE MUSIC!!!! really really good free music... in the streets.... in the parks... in the clubs...

It's hard here, don't get me wrong...
and even the people doing well are apt to be busted broke,
but I think the lack of money is like a great equalizer that existed even before the storm and it's more true than ever now:

A LOT of respect is paid
and a LOT of value is placed
on what you can DO
rather than what you can buy...

and everything good that comes back is celebrated...

You can dance with your whole body here and everyone approves
and from babies to old folks, if they can stand up they will dance with you :)