February 27, 2010

February is drawing to a close and what a wintery one it has been.  Although, I must admit I thoroughly enjoy the fact that we are actually having winters again and not just extended autumn weather.  I love the snow piling up outside as it makes the change over to spring weather with the green sprouts that much sweeter. 

It has been a while since my last post as Jo and I took a short vacation to New Orleans.  We headed down last Saturday and came home on Tuesday.  We had a wonderful time, especially as this was Jo's first visit to NOLA or the Big Easy (you would think one name for your city would be enough).  The food was phenomenal - we even tried a crawdad Po'Boy.  The highlight had to be our order of red beans and rice which was a plate of beans with some rice thrown on the side.  Fortunately, this came the night we went to the piano bar at Pat O'Brians and enjoyed the music and drinks - especially the drinks, started with Hurricanes and moved to Sazeracs.  So by the time we got to dinner we could really see the humor in the dish - well we could pretty much see the humor in anything by then as the Sazeracs were flowing pretty freely at the bar. 

We stayed at the Elysian Fields Inn which was a great B&B Inn near to the French Quarter and several restaurants.  We would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a nice place to stay that is a convenient walk to music and the main tourist destinations.  The other highlights of our trip were eating beignets at Cafe La Monde (fried dough with powdered sugar - hard to go wrong there), seeing the Mardi Gras museum which corrected many of my mis-perceptions on Mardi Gras (for instance, I thought it was one parade, turns out it is 11 or so and they all happen before Ash Wednesday - no two are allowed on the same day - that's Jo at the museum in her Mardi Gras finest), and a fantastic WWII museum that Joann patiently spent many hours in with me.  Lastly, the Insectorium - think aquarium except for insects - was a great stop and really made both of us enjoy the fact that we live somewhere cold enough that our insects don't get to be the size of small mammals.  There are some really cool colored bugs and some really large bugs in this world - as long as they choose to only live in museums for me to see, we'll be ok.

Unfortunately, like all vacations, we had to come home on Tuesday.  We hit major rain at all of our return destinations, but no flight delays amazingly.  The big event once we were home is that on Thursday it was finally time for me to go under the knife and get my shoulder repaired.  I had arthritis between my collar bone and shoulder blade removed, the bursa in my shoulder shaved (I'm sure there is some fancy medical term for that), and a couple of minor tears in my rotator cuff repaired.  The surgery went remarkably well - ok I was asleep for all of it so I'm not exactly sure how it went - and I've been recuperating since.  There hasn't been as much pain as I expected although I have to pretty careful in how I move my arm.  Jo has been dutifully trying to care for me although I'm not the easiest person to care for since I don't like feeling like an invalid.    I'm planning to be back at work on Monday and with any bit of luck back on the road running in 2-3 weeks.  Not too much planned this weekend due to my shoulder although our nephew Chris is visiting tonight since he is in town from New Hampshire to see a show at the casino.