Weekend Coffee Share: A Good Time Was Had By All

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m fairly exhausted because I spent Friday night and all day yesterday helping my brother move back to Mississippi from Louisiana. It was nothing like my own moving fiasco in June. It went smoothly but it still required me to spend a night away from home and a whole day doing physical labor.

My brother, our dad, and I hit the road around 6 on Friday evening for one of the southernmost points in Louisiana. Since we had to go through NOLA to get there, we picked up the Little Jedi on the way. He spend the night with us and helped us load the truck yesterday. I don’t get to hang out with LJ as much as I’d like to, so it was good to have a few hours with him. He’s quite a good Spanish-speaker and I am not, so we got up to some linguistic antics Friday night.

Packing and unloading the truck wasn’t bad, as I judge these things. It took three hours to load and an hour-and-a-half to unload. The drive was pretty scary, though. My brother reserved the smallest panel truck U-Haul rents for the move, but when he went to pick it up, the only trucks they had available were the 1500-cubic-foot behemoths, so we had to come home in one of those.

I’m talking about truck that’s rated for 20,000 pounds and has a 30-foot-long cargo bay. Just to give you a frame of reference, the usable space on an 18-wheel flatbed is only 42 feet long. Needless to say, bringing that thing through the middle of New Orleans with its six lane traffic and curvy bridges was interesting, but we made it without incident.

And I’d tell you I am looking forward to October. I’m hoping I finally get to have a good month where everything runs smoothly and I have the time to get my blogging back on track. This last summer was the most difficult one I’ve had in years, and September was a little better, but still not great — that’s one reason I’ve been off the blogs so much lately. But maybe things are settling down. I certainly hope so.

Then I’d have to finish my coffee and run, because one of my grandson’s goldfish died this weekend, and I have to get ready for the funeral. And if the weather holds tonight, we might just get to see a lunar eclipse with a full moon at perigee. That hasn’t happened in almost 30 years, and won’t happen again until 2033, I am told. So as much as we need the rain that’s moving in tonight, I hope it holds off long enough for us to see this eclipse. Either way, we’re busting out the telescope at moonrise and looking at some craters.

Happy Sunday! Don’t forget to add your coffee post to the linkup at Part Time Monster and share it with #WeekendCoffeeShare on Twitter.

A serious question for all you readers . . .

We’re maxed out on features at the moment, but I have a couple of ideas for occasional posts I want to run by you. I haven’t put my history and international law geekery on display up to this point. I could do that if people showed an interest in reading such posts, though. So here are two ideas:

1. Historical moments as campfire stories. I’ve not studied history, but I’ve read tons of it. I know about lots of historical incidents. The idea of this post would be to write a short post straight out of my head that tells a story, and try to make it  either suspenseful or funny. I’d publish with the disclaimer that you might want to verify the facts, because I’m telling a campfire story. I’m thinking about things like The Second Defenestration of Prague, a brief history of Rock and Roll, and Andrew Jackson’s hi-jinks in New Orleans in 1814.

2.  I have studied international law. I’ve briefed famous cases and written a master’s thesis on the development of international human rights treaties. I have a thick notebook that explains the history of international organization from 1648 to 2005. I’ve got so much international law stuff, I discussed building a twice-a-month international law blog with a friend when I first started blogging just to put it out there. Sadly, we both ended up having too much to do, and never got back to that conversation. I could write all kind of short, plain-language international law posts. I could explain things like just war theory, preemptive military action, how international treaties work, etc. in non-academic language.

If either of those interests you, let me know. Neither will ever turn into a weekly feature unless they become insanely popular, but both are things I’d enjoy writing about once or twice a month.

Music!

Randy Newman is a national treasure. The President should name him poet laureate sometime, and eventually, one of his pianos should be preserved in the Smithsonian. Listen to this while you read the rest.

You can read about the Great Mississippi flood of 1927 at the wiki, but really that should be your starting point. There are lots of lessons packed into that episode of our history.

The reason I think he should be the poet laureate and have his piano preserved in the Smithsonian is that he writes about stuff that matters, but he doesn’t let the fact that he’s being serious get in the way of making you laugh or cry, as appropriate. In my mind, that’s exactly what artists are supposed to do.

I’m working on something for tomorrow, but I feel like I haven’t been posting enough lately, and I’ve been wanting to share this one for awhile. Enjoy!

Roundup: #Friendly #Bloggers

So, I passed out early last night and didn’t write anything for today. Here’s a roundup of recent posts from my “Friendly Bloggers” Twitter list, and a a few remarks explaining what that list is all about.

CompGeekHolly has some thoughts on the appropriation (and misappropriation) of works from the popular culture for use in advertising. It includes a fabulous discussion of a Big Brothers/Big Sisters ad that uses The Hunger Games in a way that makes you wonder if they know what the story is actually about.

Our friend Lyn at Lazy Lady had a nice post earlier this week from New Orleans Comic Con with a lot of awesome photos.

My Wild Surmise reflects on Valentine’s Day, dorm life, and Walter Egan, and wins this week’s award for most amusing headline.