Good for your body, and it's good for your soul

If you're not from Louisiana, you probably don't know that's a lyric from "Hey Pocky Way."

Even though Jake Allbritton told me he did not like parades, I knew that he had not been to a parade in the time he has been with me, which is almost three years now. Too bad he cannot stay home by himself, because I certainly dragged his ass to New Orleans for Lundi Gras to catch two parades - Proteus and Orpheus.

I should mention here that while I was working at Mardi Gras on Saturday night, I may or may not have informed Mariska Hargitay that we were best friends, had been for fourteen years. She thought this was funny enough to laugh from her belly and agree with me, but apparently not true enough to give me her phone number. It's okay. We know what we mean to each other. She recognized me from her parade float - smiled, waved and threw at me once, pointed and threw at me a second time. Then I got to hear Landen behind me say "That chick from Law and Order knows Nell!"

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

It has been almost six months since my last post. We have experienced a hiatus on this blog while we went through some things. Things that I was not ready to talk about here, and I did not know how to write without talking about it. And because life is a sequence of beautiful and awful events, things are still going down over here. It's almost time to talk about some of them. I have to figure out the appropriate way to talk about others. I'm going to talk about all of it, because the stories are good, because writing them is cathartic, because one day I want my boys to read them and know the hard things we have done.

Also, while I'm still thinking about how to talk to the Internets again, I'm going to give the blog a facelift. When I bring it back, you will know what the hiatus was for, and we will start to discuss it, slowly, in pieces, then.