Testing twitter. This is a twittish test.

…but we’re doing it anyway.

I received a complaint from a reader this weekend, saying that he didn’t subscribe to hear crap about my daughter, etc, he wanted stuff about New Orleans and suchlike. Initially slightly miffed, I realized that really, he was right.

I’ve gotten pretty far afield here. What started out more about the city and the business has become a catchall, and after some careful consideration, I’ve decided to split the blog down the middle, ’cause I want it all.

Rather than just reducing the scope of things, here’s the breakout:

Here I’ll keep things more specific to New Orleans, holidays, cemeteries, etc.

There I’ll keep everything else. (Yeah, it’s a long name, but it’s from a Louis Armstrong song, so it can’t be wrong.)

I’ll keep a box on the sidebar if you want to take a quick peek at what’s going on on the other side of my world. There might be some overlap, I’m not sure. And I’ll be pulling some of the posts from here and relocating them over there, so if something’s disappeared, that’d be why.

And as always, comments, complaints or whatnot to: tconrad @notablyneworleans.com (Just take out the space before the @.)

Alison came home miserable yesterday, announcing she had to do a school blog on a presidential candidate, and they werew randomly assigned. She was given Sam Brownback, who she’d never heard of, and once she reviewed his platform, she was not on Team Brownback.

But she had this thing to do, dammit, and she was gonna do it if it killed her. She found this quote from him about how people shouldn’t count him out because he’s like the tortoise in the parable. So this is now the banner for her Brownback blog:

So I’d been thinking about getting an African Grey for a while now, and my b-day was coming up, so I dropped a few hints to Charlie, which were well received- likely even anticipated. There happened to be a bird show coming in about a month, so I figured that’d be where the deed would be done.

Except that after dropping my daughter at the airport I noticed a place that specializes in birds that I must’ve passed a hundred times, but since it really didn’t apply to me until this very moment, it just never registered. I figured, what the heck? I’ll stop in, get to handle a bird or two, make sure this is something I’m really interested in.

The place is just off a major commercial road in the area, in an old cinderblock building. I parked and went in, expecting, with a name like Birds Unlimited to find…well, unlimited numbers of birds.

Not so. Walking in, there seem to be unlimited cages,foods, treats. No birds. Except for this woman, Joann. She’s no more than 5ft tall, and there’s definately something avian about her; thin, wrinkled, sharp eyed, she immediately knows me for the novice I am.

Most likely against her better judgement, she points to the far corner of the store where the actual birds are. I tell her what I’m looking for as we enter the room, whereupon all hell breaks loose. Everything from three massive macaws down to dozens of teeny finches make an unbelievable cacophony. I wince, barely managing to not cover my ears.

“Greys?” she says. “No greys right now. (pause) Well there’s this one over here, but he’s already got a deposit on him, so I can’t let you handle him.” She brightens. “I’ve got a brood I’m hand raising now, they’ll be ready in about six weeks.” Hmmm. I was really hoping to get to see (read:play with) one today.

“Well,” she says reluctantly, “there’s this one.” Read More→