Gail at the parades

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my Mommy is also one mean, lean, bead-grabbin' machine. She knows how to use her walking stick for maximum yield.

Pick at the parades

I would never quite have believed it, but my Daddy is the one you need on your team when it comes down to grabbing beads. He ducked under the barricades and ran out into the parades to collect beads off the street even. The outside daylight pictures here are from the Mullet Point parade. It's not as posh as the other parades. The floats look home-made, there are plenty of bad redneck rock bands playing in the backs of flatbed trucks and a Harley flotilla brings up the rear. But they do throw the beads!

Mardi Gras 2009

I skipped German and went south for some Mardi Gras parades the weekend before Fat Tuesday. Mommy and Daddy (and Rick- I won't even get into that) went to the parades with me and we caught more beads than we could carry and a bunch of Moon Pies too. Here's our total haul from 3 parades piled on Mommy's dining room table in all its glory.

Jenny de Milo

My personal photo-shopper Carrie McGee succeeds again! I was feeling a little Greek this early spring.

Glyphs

For those of you who don't know that I'm studying Egyptology, here's a sample of why my life sucks right now. A group of us from class met on a Saturday to do homework and it took 6 of us about 3 hours to translate 8 sentences. We aren't totally sure this is right either. But here is the translation for this one:

May a funeral procession be made for you, a day of burial
a mummy case of gold
a head of lapis lazuli
the sky above you
offering for you a portable shrine
oxen pulling you
musicians being in front of you.

Ok, maybe it could be smoothed out a bit more, but I believe that's the gist of it.

Alamos Cabernet Sauvignon 2007

Ahhhh, I forget how much I prefer a cab. This one is pretty good. For about $10 it would be hard to beat. Except the Root II beats it and I can never remember to blog that one.
As a reminder for those of you who are new to this. I am a very poor college student who likes wine. I have been experimenting with red wines for about $10/bottle. I don't do white wine because, like Ginger and I always say, it's so hard to remember it's actually wine until you find yourself flat on the floor with an empty bottle. Or else you wake up the next day with email receipts from the ticket to Arizona you bought and don't remember. Which brings me to the breath-a-lyzer keyboard invention, but I should save that for another blog.
As I was saying. I decided to describe and rate these cheap wines so I can remember which ones to avoid in future. You might want to heed my descriptions since I am no connoisseur - I just know what I don't like.
So, this wine is from Argentina. It's a 2007 cab, like I said, by Alamos. It has a strong alcohol smell coming up from the top of the glass - which is usually a good sign. Almost like rubbing alcohol but tangy-er. Not at all sweet or syrupy. Very clear. Ok, maybe a hint of sweet. Like some kind of fruit. Plum maybe. But it's barely there. This wine is in no way disgusting. It's average in a good way. If you want a solid specimen of the cab genre you could do worse than this one. I would buy it again.

Kitchen Gods

But they sit above the stove. They watch over my cooking and I like to think that they keep me from giving myself food poisoning with my awful cooking.

My miniature obsession

Ok, so it's not so much an obsession as just a fascination. I have amassed a lot of tiny things that I can't let go of. I'm lucky I have big window sills in this apartment. The blue parakeets make me think of my Granny. She used to have a blue parakeet named Sweet Sweet. The tiny Juan Ponce de Leon is from a trip to the Fountain of Youth with Ginger. The little ceramic turtle was a present from my Mommy. And on and on it goes...

My Xena Collection...

Due to popular demand, I am posting pictures of my Xena Warrior Princess doll collection. I have the smaller action-figures too, but they aren't as pretty and I don't have them displayed. I wish they had made a lot more of these 12 inch ones. Sometimes I rearrange them or re-position them to have them act out battles, but they don't wield their swords with anything approaching realism.
I have a Barbie collection too, but they are still in their boxes because I keep telling myself that I only got them as an "investment" to re-sell at some point.
Those two in the middle of the top shelf are South American. They should really be somewhere else, but I don't have that much room in this apartment.