The Baby Giraffe: new orleans

A few months ago I gave myself a few goals that I thought, if obtained, would make me a better adult and a more effective person.

One of those goals was to send out holiday cards for the first time.

I had visions of the Fella and I adorned in our best layers of J. Crew and L.L. Bean, sitting on the festively decorated front stoop of our brand new house with our loving dogs newly quaffed and sitting perfectly by our side, tails and tongues wagging in happiness.

But then I thought, who is going to take the picture? Will I have to buy a tri-pod? Or for that matter...a camera? If not, will I have to pay someone to come take the pictures? Who do I know that lives nearby that I could ask to just drive over and take a few pictures of us? Well, it was all too stressful. Lame, I know.

So instead, I decided to start small. I was going to just pick from a few pictures of the two of us over the last year and upload it to a website of some sort and crop it into one of those readymade templates. And when I saw that Walgreens is having a 33% off sale for their holiday cards for the next week or so, I knew it was time.

But which picture? Nothing is worse than studying pictures of yourself with an editing eye. Yuck. I wanted the picture to have some meaning. I wanted it to be from one of our travels over the last year or so and like I said, I wanted our dogs in it. I wanted to use this picture from our trip to Fredericksburg, TX in March...

But, all you could see was Cooper's starfish. Not very festive. I was going to have to give up on the dog idea, for this year at least.

I had a list of a few others to choose from but there was something wrong with each...

Red solo cups are not classy...

I look constipated...

We were drunk and it shows...

This is the one I wanted but our face kept showing as blurry in the preview of the card, but that is what you get for using Iphone pics...

So, I let the Fella choose and he chose this one of us on my birthday trip to New Orleans in March...

I wasn't nuts about it because I thought it was too much of our faces and looked pretty narcissistic but that is what we went with...and I did love the memory behind this picture. Our large group was running around New Orleans after a night of partying, it had to be about 3am and it was cold. I grabbed the hubby and made him take a quick shot of us because I realized that we had not taken a picture together that evening. This was the result. Makes me happy to think about.

Ok, there is a point to all of this. So I uploaded and ordered the cards, on discount, ready in an hour, they come with envelopes; I was scoring left and right. Feeling pretty efficient and good about my journey into semi-adulthood. I promptly arrived to Walgreens as the expiration of the hour came to a close. I pull out my card to pay and I think to myself to check the cards and make sure the picture is not too grainy. I do so. They look decent for a $14 attempt. I am about to hand over my card and something nags at me....I whip the cards at to inspect them once more....

Wishing you Peace, Love and Joy this Holiday Season, Micah and Sasha.....er, wait. Not our names. Shit. I forgot to replace the sample names with our own. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Welp. Failed that test of adulthood. Moral of this story, stop caring what you look like. Worrying about looking narcissistic is pretty narcissistic. Get over myself, self. It is a holiday card. Not the Declaration of Independence. People will just be happy to see that we made it through another year intact and with the same names our mother's gave us...

Luckily, Wal-Greens didn't charge me and I got to just resubmit my order with the new, correct names.

So, still a semi-score.

Happy for the Holidays creeping upon us,

tbg

Ok so I know I explained my obsession with Halloween here. But when I saw that Helene and Sarah are hosting a Halloween link-up, I had to revisit the subject. So I turned on my spooky fall playlist in my headphones and got to writing.

The point of this link-up to discuss anything Halloween. I mentioned in my previous post that I had my bachelorette party in New Orleans on Halloween a few years ago. It was actually more like a bridesmaids get-away that also included my mother and aunt.

My wonderful bridesmaids flew in from all over for two nights and three days of spooky, drunken fun in NOLA.

NOLA is my favorite place to visit for many reason such as my father’s family is from there, the music, the food and the history. The haunted history epically fascinates me so on Halloween evening we got dressed up in our best vampire duds and took a haunted history tour.

It was easily one of the most fun things I have ever done. Unfortunately because the tour stopped every so often at a bar where we were able to partake in drink deals, we didn’t make it all the way to end of the tour. 13 women drinking a lot make for a pretty rowdy tour group. Long story short…we got kicked out of the tour.

This was our tour guide and she did not especially love us by the end of the evening.

New Orleans is considered to be the most haunted city in America. Some of the more famous ghost stories about New Orleans take place in the French Quarter where many of the buildings are said to be haunted. Today I will play your tour guide to some the most haunted houses in the French Quarter.

Starting with the story of the Haunting of the Octoroon Mistress, 734 Royal Street.

The history of the Ocotoroons is fascinating and heartbreaking to begin with, but the story of the Octoroon Mistress really resonates with tourists due to its' "romantic" origins. Here is a little background from Wikipedia...

“The term Octoroon is used for people in New Orleans in the 1800s that were 1/8 black, 7/8 white. These octoroons were known as freed blacks. They received the best education and were often very wealthy. Masked balls were used as a way for rich Creoles to obtain an octoroon mistress.Because of their different social statuses, octoroons and Creole men were not allowed to marry. This became an issue because these women often fell deeply in love. The house at 734 Royal Street is haunted by the ghost of a beautiful octoroon named Julie. Well, Julie was head-over-heels in love with the man who “kept” her as a mistress, and she wanted nothing more than to get married. One cold December night during a ball, he decided to make a sort of dare. He told Julie that if she could prove her love for him by standing naked on the roof of the house all night until dawn, he would then marry her. He did not believe that she would accept this challenge. He went back downstairs to enjoy the ball. The next morning the he went to Julie's room to check on her. He was surprised to find her room empty. He immediately rushed upstairs to the roof. When he looked outside he saw his mistress huddled near the eave of the roof, frozen to death. The octoroon mistress is said to haunt the house she once resided in. Some people say on a cold and damp night you can see her figure pacing on the rooftop waiting for her lover to return."

Here is one of the pictures I took on the tour.

Notice the glowing entity on the far right roof? It appears in all of my pictures I took of this house on that night Spooky eh?

Next stop....

The LaLaurie House, 1140 Royal Street.

If you have been watching this season of American Horror Story then you will be somewhat familiar with perhaps the most gruesome and famous of French Quarter ghost stories.

Built in 1831, the three-story home belonged to Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his wife Delphine. Delphine was a very popular New Orleans resident. She would often throw fantastic balls at their beautiful home. She was highly esteemed in society for her charitable work among the sick and the poor. She was said to be the most beautiful and influential French-Creole woman in New Orleans. She and her daughters were among the most fashionable women in the city.

This was a time in American history were it was common to own slaves and Madame LaLaurie was not an exception. She had dozens tending to her home and her family. To make matters worse, she treated them cruelly. Although slavery is cruel in and of itself, there was actually a law in New Orleans at the time that forbade slave holders to treat their slaves cruelly. Of course it now seems absurd to think that there was a way to own slaves in a non-cruel fashion, however, Madame L treated hers in such a way that despite her good reputation, people began to complain to authorities about just how cruel she seemed to treat her slaves. She was soon fined and her slaves were taken away to be sold at auction. She then persuaded friends to buy her slaves and then sell them back to her.

In 1834, when a fire broke out in the Lalaurie residence, firemen smashed open a locked interior door and came upon a scene surpassing horror. They basically stumbled upon a torture chamber. I won’t go into all of the horrible details. Just Google the story if you want to know the extent of her madness. She disappeared and nobody knows for sure what happened to her. The house has had trouble retaining an owner since these horrible events. Nobody has owned the house for more than 5 years. There have been hundreds of accounts of terrifying noises and sightings at the house. Nicolas Cage owned the home for a while but lost it when he went bankrupt.

You could not pay me to party up there. I got a seriously eerie feeling standing outside this house. I worked up the nerve to run over and touch its’ walls the night of the tour but since then refuse to walk past it on the same side of the street, even in the daylight.

I will leave you with a little more light-hearted story. My favorite bar in New Orleans is Jean Laffite’s Blacksmith Shop, 934 Bourbon Street.

The building is one of the oldest in New Orleans and one of the only left with the traditional French architecture due to multiple fires in the Quarter. The Pirate Jean Laffite is said to still haunt this bar. Here is a little background on the building, the haunting and the pirate himself. This building is beyond cool. Not only is it a great bar, it is the longest running bar in America. If you go you MUST have a VooDoo Daiquiri for me. They taste like kool-aid but lordy they pack a punch.

I personally have never felt any strange auras while in the Blacksmith Shop but a good friend of mine who writes over at The Peacock Pad recently took this picture.

How cool is that?

If you ever get the chance to go to NOLA on Halloween don’t hesitate. It was one of the coolest experiences I have ever had. The people hold nothing back as far as costumes...