NOLA 2013

Oh my goodness, I can't believe I forgot to write about my awesome adventure to New Orleans in January.   I really loved this place, it was amazing, so let us begin.

I arrived there late at night was met in the airport by my daughter and ex husband, with a cute sign she made me!  People collectively said "awe".  It was a cute moment and I hadn't seen her in what seemed like decades.  So the next day she had school and it was bring your ex to work day, and I went into the Big Easy to roam around alone while he went to work at the Hotel Monteleone, he manages Criollo.  More on that restaurant later!
We went to breakfast at The Camellia Grill.  It was great, my first taste of NOLA. 

I headed down Royal street into the French Quarter.  I am greeted by the beautiful sights and sounds of this neat section of the city.  The wrought iron balconies and narrow roadways are so unlike anything I have seen, and certainly older than anything I had seen in the U.S.  I walked down pirates Alley along side the
St. Louis Cathedral l because I really want to see the inside of this old church, but before I did, I got a treat.  I saw a street band playing in Jackson square. Where the church faces in to.  I LOVE this kind of music and hearing it echo from street corner to street corner with all these foreign sights was indescribable at first.
I have some videos I will add later due to technological difficulties they will not process straight to the blog. 
Now first off I would like to point out that old man in the video you cannot see yet, can cut a rug.  I will so be like that when I am old. :) Lastly the band made me come over and sit with them while they played a song which was tremendously fun!

Jackson Square

St. Louis Cathedral

Jackson Square Park

Jackson Square

Interior St. Louis Cathedral

Pirates Alley

Churchyard of cathedral looking into Pirates Alley

The people here are so easy to like.  I really loved the vibe here.  I really have never felt anything like it.  It was like if Portland Oregon were less hipster, more magical, and more European.  In Jackson square the next thing I did was get my palm and tarot and a crystal ball reading by a Gypsy.  It didn't cost much and it sure felt like the place to have it done.  This guy was actually very accurate on many things past and present.  It was pretty cool.  Just to let you know I was supposed to meet my future husband described as tall dark and handsome in Scotland.  Well I only met one tall dark man in Scotland, boy was he gorgeous.  Who knows.  :)  It certainly isn't my last trip "home" to Scotland. 

Here's a video of a band I saw on Royal street (not my video).  Enjoy. 

First off I really love this music and to be able to hear it everywhere is amazing. 

Anyway while on Chartres I visited the Cabildo (Louisiana State Museum), the first time, and enjoyed the display on Mardi Gras.  Read and learned all about this awesome celebration.  I am glad I took the time to stop in and see it's history before I saw the whole thing in action!  Such a rich and fun tradition!  Face it, I am fun so something like this is pretty much right up my alley!!

Oh just me and grumpy cat................................................... :)

Next was me just wandering around here are the pics...and yes I took a photo inside Reverend Zombies voodoo shop my bad.  Got YELLED at. :P  I also stopped by and enjoyed 

Craig Tracy's PaintedAlive Body Painting Gallery.  

I was chilly so I stopped at 

Royal Blend Coffee & Tea House.   

Charged my phone here :)

Then I finished up my self tour by having a drink at the famous carousel bar.

The Carousel Bar & Lounge

We then went back to the house, Gwyn got off of school (which runs until night time there, crazy).  We took a nighttime ride on the St. Charles Line Streetcar.  I would like to begin  by pointing out this streetcar line is the oldest continuously operating railway line in the world.  Riding on these old streetcars was super fun.  

Phew I am tired from just writing day 1!!

The next day Gwynneth and I rode the streetcar and bus into the French Quarter again to have a day packed full of adventure.
Café Du Monde was our first stop here we had Beignets.  These are very popular here in New Orleans.  This place was reported to have the best but I honestly liked theirs the least out of the other 2 places I had them, which I will mention later.   Walked by the Beauregard-Keyes House, went into a visited the Nuns old Coventry and church there, it was so old pretty cool .

This house had a very famous gate of wrought iron that was corn shaped. 

This is the infamous LaLaurie Mansion, center of horror stories and macabre details.  This so interested me I bought a book about it and really enjoyed the read.  This house was owned by Nicholas Cage until he filed bankruptcy.   

<  This is an alley



This is Gwynneth >








We took the Algiers Ferry across the Mississippi River and noticed that we went to the ghetto side of New Orleans so we turned right around and went back.

Then we went for a tour of the history of the haunted side of New Orleans.

Gwynneth and I on the horse drawn tour!

 And here is the famous voodoo queen. Marie Laveau's crypt. The locals come here to make a wish it is told if you make 3 x's in the air and turn around 4 times put something next to her grave as a offering, your wish would come true.We put a penny,a hair clip and a bracelet.

All the pics above are from cemetary no.1

Next was Mardi Gras, :) Due too Superbowl being in the city this year I was lucky and it was split into 2 weeks so I was here for Mardi Gras "Comes Early"  This was the adult parade, we were not aware it would be SO Adult. Anyway it was crazy and funny. 

So here is an interesting fact.  In NOLA on your birthday you walk around with a pin on your shirt, people will notice it and stop you and pin money to you.  This custom stems from a custom of letting slaves do this on their birthdays to try to earn enough money to buy their freedom. 

Lastly, Gwynneth got to eat a fancy pants dinner from her Daddy at Criollo.  

Also we visited A day parade the next day for children.

We also visited City Park which was pretty cool, it has a really neat sculpture garden and I saw a black swan, never seen one before sadly she was nesting and her lifelong mate had drowned cause unknown. We had really good Beignets here!! At the cafe in the park.

 City Park Sculpture Garden

We ate for free at  Hare Krishna Temple, I love Indian food.  Thank you so much to the folks there for serving us such a great meal!!  Hare Krishna!!

 I ate so many places, and had so much amazing food while in NOLA that I gained about 6 pounds haha it was crazy!

 


 

Best photo bomb ever on Bourbon Street!  :) 

Well I am tired someday I will add the zoo...yes I went there too.  I also went many more places but for now...yes this will do!

Well....
I have to get in the habit of writing regularly.  Now if I could only figure out how to get myself to do that!
Whats new?  Well nothing I am still the same walking talking disaster haha, yes more insight, more everything, same confusion of finding balance or having a clue as too what I actually want in this life.
I want FUN.
Haha but is that what I need?
So I have a current love affair with the band New Politics so between them, Muse, OkGo and everything else I love I am really feeling it.  Also I am pretty sure New Politics should marry me. :)
This post is likely to be bit all over the place as I am fairly certain I am in the middle of a manic panic week!

Kelly and I sang this song at karaoke a few weeks ago.  It was a CRAZY night.   

Okay so what is the EXCITING news?

New PC. 

Specs: 

Intel i5 3570k 3.40 GHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2G Boost. 

Need a solid state drive but will get that in good time.... so I can play games on high quality!!  This is awesome.  How about a pic?

Woot! There it is!  Woot!  There it is! 

Had a few friends help me out build wise and bequeath to me some games such as my all time favorite MASS EFFECT TRILOGY!   

Bought Skyrim for the PC and the difference is very...noticeable, unfortunately the game still bores me after a bit haha.  I have a date to play Boderlands 2 will be nice to see how it handles that game as well.  

I did order a new Emerson 32" TV to use with this as well.  Will be nice for movies and such.  I really need to spend more time gaming and writing and reading, back to basics.  RESET. 

Let go.

I want to talk about moving on, forgiveness, growth.  Remember that holding on to anything hurtful just hurts yourself longer.  It will still hurt but I swear it will feel better faster if you let go.

Update : no surprise since I felt it coming, my relationship status is single again and I feel the need to maybe update education or open a business as well as move again. Let's see where this takes me!  Exciting!

The gentle art of letting go

What can that mean? Well I am not sure  at the moment. I just feel the winds of change. I'll always answer their call. I'm in a transitional status. I am in a state of change, a time of appraisal and adjustment. I customarily have a huge change every 3-7 years. Sometimes it's drastic and craziness and sometimes it is more subtle but it is always towards growth, strength and closing chapters left unsatisfactory.
I sometimes abandon everything and change direction completely. The best part is that it's always a surprise, not necessarily a success, not necessarily a mistake. I will continue to believe that fate and my ability to create the life I want will pay off. Stay tuned!

Writing my ass off.

WARNING THIS POST IS FULL OF SELF LOVE TO THE HIGHEST HEIGHTS IMAGINABLE:

I feel so accomplished tonight, I seriously wrote and wrote.  I finished my blogs on EDC, SCotland, PAX 2013, and tried to even do a little clean up, read my past posts and laughed my ass off.  Why?

Yes I am the guy that can laugh at his own jokes.  Pretty damn hilarious, I am also the person who thinks -ma f: at the end of a fucking command at the DOS prompt is funny because it turns the command into a fucking question in chinese!

I am ALSO NOT A DUDE BUT A WOMEN.  I know, it  keeps getting more and more awesome.  I honestly just do not know how in the hell most people in this little fucked up world get along with out knowing me.  I think I am hilarious.  WARNING WARNING self braggart ahead:

I absolutely refuse to pack any more awesome into this package, in fact I doubt it can even be achieved, I mean.....lets be fair.  I am intelligent, because I says so.  I am beautiful because makeup says so.  I am funny because I laugh at my own jokes.  I am FUN because I go where the fun happens and if it isn't very fun I will make it so!!  I am dark and twisted and best of all I am a bit of a elitist bastard just to keep it interesting.

ALSO, I am actually pretty damn compassionate and caring and understanding. 

Oh I am loaded with imperfection too which if you ask me just makes me more interesting. :)  

TEE HEE

Just kidding (or I am I?)

LOVE. RESPECT.

PAX PRIME!

PAX PRIME!

Why do I do all the fun stuff? Wth!? Why doesn't anyone else do it? Well someone has to do it, it might as well be me!  Excuse me, Robert and I do all the fun stuff!

In PDX right now waiting for connecting flight to Seattle then let the fun begin! Meeting Rob at Chinatown, let's do this!

Soooo now I'm exhausted and heading back home. So let's talk about PAX. I must say either arrive really early or late but on time sorta sucks because it took about and hour of walking around in little diverted lines to get in. We got in about 11 and didn't see any swag bags, I think we just missed them. I am not extremely upset but would be curious to see what was in them.

Excuse me for a moment while I dry up all the water I just spilled down the front of me on the plane.... Yeah I'm graceful.

Okay so first thing through the door we are given caffeine pills from vivarin! Weee. We grabbed guides to PAX and are greeted by darkness, mayhem, excited people, and yes games. But i can't really honestly remember what I came across first without the guide.

Saw this cute little guy at Wolfenstein display outside the Bethesda booth.

 

TWITCH had a huge booth they were giving away Tshirt, but you know after getting my XL Nvidia shirt I sort of felt I was good on XL shirts for the day. :/  At any rate this is a pretty cool website and a great way to share and watch people playing the games you dig. 

Oh yes the GUNNAR glasses, hey that reminds me, I forgot to get a pair. Dammit! B) 20% OFF oops. 

Robert had a death grip on my arm (he does that when dragging me around, I don't know why, but sometimes I have bruises later).  I guess he doesn't want to lose me or is afraid I am too wiley and hard to herd around if he doesn't hold on tight enough. :) We dueled it out at the comcast xfinity exhibit, I was Batman and he was Green Latern....yes I made the coolest moves!!! 

Well what do you think about Titanfall?  They are REALLY pushing it, we didn't really look into it much so I don't have much of an opinion but the display was cool.

Hey the meat team made a crazy cat lady game!!!  Here... I am ass, the cats ass!  Actually this game looks like it will be pretty cool and has a lot of flexibility as to what it will BE to the player and I look forward to playing it! Coming soon via Steam, ios, and android!

So I stopped off at the Nvidia booth scored a shield shirt, and some keyboard keys, also got to demo Assassins Creed Black Flag.  It seemed okay but I don't accept change well and this portion of the game was about taking down two other pirate ships, while steering and aiming, then taking out the defenses of a castle.  It wasn't thrilling to me, I wish I had played a different portion. 

So, and this is awesome. We stopped by the Cards against humanity booth, I knew it was a game but little more, so we go in and I ask Robert to explain the game... Yeah he sucks at that. "It's a party game, and you draw cards." Ohhh no shit?  Cards you say!? Needless to say I skipped buying them since the women at the booth said "there are cards on the table" when he asked them to explain the game. Okay good job guys! Anyway I read what it was about online and I must say it looks like an amusing party game anyway, Rob says he will buy it most likely.

Oh the table games! I saw the coolest thing ever! Well on a scale of... Wow I never thought I'd see that anyway. So Terry Prachette's The Witches game... Yeah I'm not kidding. I didn't have much time to check it out and know nothing about the game play but.... The Wyrd sisters are the makings of a fun board game, I just know it!

Oh we tried the oculus, we never did do it at the booth but tried one on a flight sim at another booth for a college somewhere and it was pretty cool, but very bulky it will be interesting to see where this goes I will keep my eye(s) on it. 

I had a ton of fun at the indie megabooth as I had expected that I would because I just love the spirit and love poured into indie games. The ones that really captured my attention were; 

Foul play - a delightful little bash em up game but with the twist of pleasing the audience with your performance, clever, British, cute!  Available on STEAM soon.

Tengami - A breathtaking dark Japanese adventure book game in the style of a pop-up book, the art is amazing. You get to navigate this mysterious land solving puzzles and secrets.  I really look forward to exploring this.  Wii U and Ipad I know for sure but I believe was coming to steam but can't promise hey it isn't like I wrote all this down!!

Charlie Murderer - was a awesome classic 4 player bash and smash em up game.  I loved that you could pick up ANYTHING while playing, I was killing zombies with other zombies heads and arms, tires, trash cans, ANYTHING I could grab.  This was really fun! XBOX.

Other games that I look forward to playing is a zombie survival RPG called Dead State looks cool didn't have time to actually play it. 

Dragon Fin Soup is another pretty promising looking RPG from The Grimm Bros. Don't remember the platforms for this one. 

Also a really neat looking game I played for a second was Beatbuddy, very visually cool, I couldn't figure it out in the time I had :P available on steam. 

Last thing we saw at PAX was Epic playing PAX players in a head to head battle of league.... It looked like Epic was going to lose for a bit but they won. I really wasn't very engaged because the announcers mic was turned up so loud it hurt my ears and made me a tad grrr, oh that and I was pretty wasted, tired. 

Things I did not get to do that I wish I had at PAX?  Well try out The elder scrolls online, but it would have eaten half the day so I will just wait, possible reason I may never do it?  Play to pay is not rad. 

We also did not get to the actual assassins creed or Watch Dogs exhibits. :( 

Did not get to the main Oculus exhibit. 

There were a lot of things we did't have time to get too but I am glad we got around to as much as we did. 

So the last thing we did that was awesome was game. FREEPLAY PC FTW!!. So we played Team Fortress 2. Almost got to play a little Borderlands 2 (finally) but we were informed we had run out if time.
Fun fact while gaming they were blasting knife party so I had one ear free to rock! Lol.
Uhn tiss uhn tiss uhn tiss.....
Oh Btw and maybe I am just being a judgmental pricks here but WHY IN GOD'S NAME WOULD YOU GO TO PAX TO SIT DOWN AND PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME LIKE BEJEWELED?!!! First off, huh? Lol this girl was next to me when I was playing Team Fortress 2 playing bejeweled. Lol yeah I just.... Why? I mean you could stay at home on Facebook and play yourself a nice game of farmville.
Lol yeah people never cease to confuse me! Rob and I had a hard laugh at this.

Ok so clearly one day at PAX is limiting but you know what's worse? Zero days at PAX. :)

But the fun did not cease no no no, because when we left the hotel what was outside the door? The Elder Scrolls food truck experience. YEAH TOTALLY FREE! I love free, and it was pretty fun, especially with the random dudes behind us, they were pretty entertaining as well. I would have never believed you if you would have said, "one day you will eat elder scrolls ice cream with a wooden spoon." yet this very thing happened! I scored a free pic of me and Robert, a free keychain bottle opener and a beer cozy sporting the Elder Scrolls Online emblem. So it took about an hour in line but hey, it was free!

My swag (and stuff I got) the magic core set and game pad were bought; the artist whom I bought the pad from was RK Post a Washington based artist it was only 20.00 it is AWESOME. He has facebook and all that jazz look him up.

p.s. I AM AWARE THERE ARE SPELLING ERRORS and caps lock accidents, I wrote this on my Galaxy S3 on an prop airplane @ 11 pm so give me a break!  I tried to keep it sounding fairly intelligible.  Just be a peach and look past the errors.  kthxbai.

EDC EDC EDC!

Hi I am a little less head in the clouds now that it's a few weeks back in the real world. The best feels and fun are fading into the background as life returns to its baseline of work, stress, oh and reality.
It creeps back up on you slowly like after any life altering trip will. I wish with all the power of the universe I could live in the eternal wonderland of play but that is not practical, I bet it would even feel like everyday life if it were the norm.
We as humans tend to take the world and all its wonder for granted if it's presented to us daily. I am well aware how gorgeous today is, how beautiful the flowers and sights are, but I don't thrill over it, heck I don't even care if I am busy being stressed out about a deadline at work or getting dinner or the dog walked.
I said at the time, "I won't miss EDC, I'll just appreciate the experience, no reason to be bummed out later. " which made perfect sense at the time...but weeks afterward I yearn to return to this magical carefree land of happiness and awesomeness.

Scotland grumpy cat review

I  think I actually summed it up pretty accurately when I was sitting in the airport. But of course there's much more to a country than castles. I had always pictured Scotland in a particular way and I don't know I guess maybe I had expected it to be a little bit more magical because of all the romance around its history and the way our family talked about it but the end of the day it kinda reminded me of an area Southern Oregon. I really must say that I enjoyed the Perth and Kinross area which funnily enough is where my family came from.
I accidentally ended up doing a little bit of Genealogy while I was there and was able to confirm some of the families and also was able to find out what clan we were, and we're actually mostly closely related to which was the Ogilvie s even though the family kind of started leaning toward the MacLachlan clans for years this is boring so I'll skip it besides saying that it was kind of exciting to find that out.
It was also funny to me that certain areas really seem to have an embedded vibe or feel to them to me so some places seem very ominous and negative um especially over by a the Campbell lands there's a lot of clear cutting going on in that area which bothered me, and  everywhere else for the most part was pretty decent except the very last place I stayed which was an amazing castle called Carberry tower and I was absolutely plaugued with nightmares all night long and it just screwed up my sleep the night before I left.
I generally try to avoid writing anything in this blog when I'm feeling tired because I don't tend to have my light hearted in silly point of view about things so I think I'm just going to go ahead and stop this for now.