Archive for Something Elsey

Swamp!

July 28, 2011 Something Elsey One comment

I was in New Orleans last week for Tales of the Cocktail and promoted the book and blah blah blah whatever … I SAW ALLIGATORS IN THE SWAMP!! That is the exciting part! I ended my week of super fun times in New Orleans with a swamp tour. (If you are annoyed by exclaiming or capital letters, stop reading now.)

A shuttle bus came and shuttled my butt from the French Quarter into the swamp land near New Orleans. The tour people can’t guarantee you’ll see a gator out there, so they have one in cage just so you can go home and be all like “yeah, I saw a gator in Louisiana” even if the alligators all hide from you out in the swamp.

I wanted to ride an airboat out there and not a giant tour boat. I picked the small one so I could go really fast and shout things like “Gator up ahead!” without anyone hearing me because the fan is really loud and everyone wears headphones to protect themselves from the noise.

Well, I actually could not wear a headset because it was too big and kept slipping off. When we weren’t going slow to look at swamp things, the boat went 45-50 mph. That is not fast for a car. But it is very fast for a small open boat.

It was raining pretty hard for most of the ride, so a lot of my pictures of swamp land are blurry and crooked. But if you want to know what the swamp looks like, it looks like this. There are also orchids out there. When you try to take pictures of them, it rains even harder and you end up getting foggy pictures of green blurs. So take my word for it, swamp orchids are pretty.

Then I am sitting there and the guide is telling me about Spanish moss and the Lafitte family arguing about a fortune and I see an ALLIGATOR! So I yell “Look, there is an alligator. Everyone look! LOOOOOOK!” because I am five. The grown-ups all look and are impressed by it.

And then, and then! The guide throws a marshmallow in the water to tempt the alligator to come closer to us.

And the alligator eats the marshmallow … just like on “True Blood.” This is the only similarity I found between the show and Lousiana, in my experience. I did not see werewolves, fairies, vampires, panther people, dog people or witches. No one was magical. In fact, very few people even had an accent.

Just in case you think I was zooming to make it look like I was close to the gator, here is the next gator I saw with a bit of the boat in the picture.

They have really long bodies!

Even though they are big and scary, they start out as little babies. The tour company wants to keep the gator population high, because people like me pay them to ride on a boat and go “gator! gator!” and get all excited. So they take the ones under 4 feet and raise them until they’re big enough not to get eaten by the other gators. AND THEY LET YOU HOLD THE LITTLE ONES!Oh, did I not mention that I wore a plastic bag the whole time because it was raining really hard? I did. I don’t care if this is an unflattering photo of a soggy me after a week of staying up late and waking up early. I AM HOLDING AN ALLIGATOR. The End. Or is it? Yes, it is.

10 things Southern Californians need to know before moving to Northern California

July 14, 2011 Something Elsey 3 comments

I moved from Orange County to the Bay Area. I like it better up here. I will break the unspoken rule of keeping Southie out, and give you the secrets no one told me when I first moved here. No one will call you Southie, as it is a thing I just made up.

  1. Northern California hates signs, so you may get lost a lot. Perhaps the signs mar natural beauty. Perhaps signs encourage ne’er do wells from the southern part of the state to move up here. If people can’t find places, they won’t move to them. There is a dearth of signs. Half of the signs that do exist are confusing. North, South, East, West … why is that important to note on a freeway sign? Everyone knows which way Walnut Creek or Santa Rosa is unless they’re some kind of So Cal loser. And even if you know Oakland is east, you may not know that you have to go west before you can go east in certain circumstances but not all the time.
  2. It is not warm at the beach. If you go there in shorts or a bathing suit, you will be so cold.
  3. People have now heard of Orange County. Horrible TV shows that make people think you are possibly horrible have taught people that Orange County exists. So, if you’re from there, now instead of being able to say you’re from that place in between LA (“Boo!”) and San Diego (“I heard that is a nice place.”), you can say you are from Orange County. Awesome. The days of “Oh yeah, where Disneyland is” are over. Read more

Cats are for Petting!

June 2, 2011 Something Elsey One comment

I am frequently confused by advertising. This time it is a billboard around the corner from my house. I like to look at the ad and then pretend to take it VERY SERIOUSLY and VERY SERIOUSLY contemplate what it means. Here is what goes through my head:

1) I pet cats. I eat pigs. Wait. Is that the wrong answer? Are you offering me a starter guide and recipes for EATING CATS? Because I don’t want to eat cats. You are sick. Are those links to cat farms, you jerk?

2) I pet cats. I eat pigs. Is that the right answer? Are you offering me a starter guide and recipes for eating pigs? I already know how to eat pigs. But I guess I wouldn’t mind some recipes. Why did you mention cats? Who is eating cats? Now I am sad.

3) That cat and that pig are friends!

It’s not immediately clear what these websites are for, in the unlikely event that you want to look things up on the internet while viewing this billboard on the roadside. Something about farms? And America? Are they assuming that everyone is weird like me and will pull over, park and take a photo of the billboard?

If you are familiar with slogans of PETA and other such animal rights groups, of course you could guess it was for some sort of vegetarian/vegan/don’t hurt animals thing. Which one? Who knows! Now I have seen a picture of a cat and a pig and everything is different! PS – This must be the cheapest billboard in the area, because it consistently has bad ads. When will the real estate market pick up again so it will be ads for real estate agents again?

« Older Entries   Recent Entries »