We are…the Three Amigos!
Day Three, we awoke in New Orleans before 7 a.m., excited and peppy and ready to go. Sadly, most of the French Quarter was still asleep, but we found a place to hang out while we waited for them to catch up with us. No matter where you go, Mondays are Mondays.
10:51 pm.. EDT — See that tiny, funny-colored dot at upper right? That’s no space station.
No, the above photo was not necessarily my best attempt at capturing the soul of tonight’s much-ballyhooed “super blood moon” very special astronomical event, but it’s the first one I took when I discovered my Canon PowerShot ELPH 340 HS has a setting called “Handheld NightScene”. The moon is visible in that shot, but wasn’t for long. Here in Indianapolis we’ve been under cloud cover all weekend long, and they refused to let up even for something as unusual as a lunar eclipse, let alone an oddly hued one. I’d describe this as “once in a blue moon”, but I’m not sure which moon color is rarer and I’d rather not spark any sky-science semantics squabbles over this.
I didn’t take the greatest SuperBloodMoon photos of all time, but at the very least, the pics leading up to the feature presentation were the best moon pics I’ve ever taken in my life. For a thoroughly amateur photographer, I’ll take that little victory.
Here’s the best takes on what we saw before the clouds solidified the gaps between each other and ruined an otherwise cool evening. All time stamps are Eastern Daylight Time, and for once I’ve resisted the urge to crop or resize any of them.
Right this way for the light of the silvery moon! Featuring cameos by the color red!
One of the G-rated stretches of notorious Bourbon Street on a Sunday evening. Even Party Central needs its downtime.
There she was at long last — New Orleans!
We reached our primary objective at the end of Day Two, thankfully before sundown. All the post-Katrina tourism resources we consulted in our vacation research (books, travel sites, AAA brochures, message boards with supporting posts from wary New Orleans residents) seemed unanimous on one important message: anyone caught outside in New Orleans at night will be swiftly, repeatedly murdered. Perhaps that’s not the reality, but we weren’t prepared to call Fodor’s bluff during our first hours in town. No matter how long we spent in Alabama or at stops along the way, we wanted to be in New Orleans and checked in at our hotel while the sun was still on our side.
We met our objective, and all it took was a long, nearly featureless drive through an unrelated state, braving the cramped hallways that pass for roads in the French Quarter, and cutting a major stop from our itinerary.
Spend five minutes peeking at Midlife Crisis Crossover and you’ll notice my wife and I do enjoy a bit of travel. We have our annual week-long road trips to other states and time zones, where we can discover new environments and attractions, such as the New Orleans establishment shown above. From time to time we head off to our sometimes annoying neighbor Illinois for geek conventions, and we’ve discussed expanding our scope in other directions. We like spending our respective birthdays visiting other parts of Indiana and seeing other Hoosiers like or unlike us. We may devote a lot of time to screens with entertainment on them, but we place a certain importance on getting out of the house and seeing the world beyond our front door.
However, our family, friends, and longtime MCC followers know our expeditions come with a limitation: we don’t fly. We’ve never bought a plane ticket, we’ve never soared in or above the clouds, we’ve never been across the oceans or even to California, even though we have friends living there we simply must meet before we all die of oldness. By our standards air travel is expensive; the boarding requirements are invasive; you miss all the interesting sights and stops between points A and B; and it doesn’t help that the news outlets love to tell us about all the crashes but they never celebrate the hundreds of successful non-crashing flights that I’m told are theoretically possible and maybe even real.
We’re well aware Superman loves to tell everyone who’ll listen that, statistically speaking, flying is the safest way to travel, but that’s easy to say when you’re so invulnerable that not even actual dying keeps you down for long. For all these reasons and more, we’ve never been in a position to give planes a chance.
Until now.
The southbound road from downtown Birmingham led us up a ridge called Red Mountain, so named for its red iron deposits and the suitably colored surfaces. Atop one particular crest there’s a park centered around what’s billed as the world’s largest cast-iron statue, molded in the likeness of Mount Olympus’ most underrated resident, the Roman god Vulcan.
Right this way for a closer look at the Hephaestus of Earth-2!
If you’re pressed for time, please feel free to pretend this photo of our dog Lucky wearing a bandanna is today’s entire MCC entry, toss him a happy “Like”, and read no further. He’s used to that kind of fleeting attention from strangers.
Welcome to Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 1100th entry! In the grand tradition of comic books and The Simpsons, every 100 entries we mark the occasion as a sort of accomplishment and sometimes celebrate it. Those 1100 moments have been an interesting way to spend the last 3½ years of my internet time, but odds are it’ll take another two or three hundred years of consistent blogging before I stand a chance at becoming a household name. By then I’ll be more renowned for my refusal to die than for any paragraph I’ve ever written.
Every blogger who somehow makes a living off it has their official list of blogging tips that you’re supposed to follow in order to achieve fame, success, impact, and/or income. I’m happy for them and I wish them well as they make lasting contributions to the world at large and change the course of mighty rivers. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, stubborn folks like me keep plugging away at their sites without regard for conventional wisdom, official procedures, or dime-a-dozen “Blogging for Dummies” articles. My approach to the game can be summed up in two words: “low-key” and “counterintuitive”.
Wanna blog like me? Here’s ten tips for how it works in my world, through happy times or blah:
Going into this year’s vacation, we hoped the cuisine would be a highlight at our various stops — be it good ol’ Southern kitchen cookin’, Gulf-sourced fresh seafood, or, really, anything outside of international franchisees. We received our first recommendation from the friendly guide at the Alabama Welcome Center, who insisted that during our road trip we had to try genuine shrimp-‘n’-grits somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line at least once. For lunch on Day Two, I trusted her and gave it a shot.
Low-cost admission, free hors d’oeuvre, big-screen trailers, a chance to support the arts and to hang out with adults. Tonight had all the best qualities we needed in a diversion from the week’s events.
Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland Film Festival, a ten-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and a few animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Several have aired previously at other festivals; three will be making their American theatrical debuts; two have elected Heartland as the site for their world premieres.
In the early years Heartland concentrated on works of pure uplift and positivity, while today their keyword is “transformative” as the breadth and technical proficiency of entries has grown by leaps and bounds. For the 24th annual event, dozens of volunteers screened 1,756 submissions from 96 countries and together culled them to a more manageable 175+ official selections, several of which will be vying for official festival prizes.
My wife and I been fans of the Heartland concept for years, but so far we’ve shamefully managed to attend just one, a 2011 screening of Emilio Estevez’ The Way at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Last May, Anne signed up for Heartland’s mailing list at their Indy Pop Con booth. This week she was notified of tonight’s special preview presentation at the Athenaeum Theatre downtown, at which the Heartland staff announced their official selections and competition finalists, and released the 99%-finalized schedule for 2015. We had the time, we sorely needed to get out of the house, we’d been hoping for a chance to jump into the Heartland experience, and we loved the idea of having more information at our fingertips about our future viewing options.
Among the numerous films coming to Indianapolis in October, the following is a partial list of what jumped out at one or both of us, either during the presentation or in the detailed festival guides they handed us as we exited. Trailers and links to official sites are provided where available. We’d like to see at least a few of these, time and location permitting. Naturally the results will be reported here on MCC.
Photo swiped from a relative on Facebook, date unknown. I have no pics of him on hand. Shots of the two of us together exist but are rarer than mint copies of Action #1.
After I arrived at work this morning, I learned their estimate was off by about forty hours and that he’d passed away shortly before midnight.
The last time I saw him alive was on the morning of our wedding day in 2004. He’d arrived hours before anyone else, including us, because he wanted to congratulate us in private. We spoke for less than five minutes before he took his leave.
We spoke on the phone once every couple years after that, mostly about medical updates. We share a first name, and it’s entirely possible I’ll be sharing some of his conditions in the years ahead.
My preferred method of working through unique events (better or worse, good guy or bad) is to ponder at length in this space, but for dozens of reasons this moment doesn’t feel like the right time for new essays. The first time I tried to string any clauses together this evening, an ostensibly simple, fourteen-word Facebook status took me twenty-five minutes to write, including an extended thesaurus consultation and an editorial review by Anne at my repeated insistence.
Between this and other little signs throughout the day, I strongly believe God’s been trying to tell me to be still and spend more time listening, reading, thinking, and praying for a good while.
The funeral is Friday, but I’ve no idea how the next two days will go, either offline or here on the site. More introspection? Extended radio silence? Deep diving into Scripture? Off-topic distraction? Wish I knew.
Apologies for the disjointed fragments. For now I’m putting my inadequate words away, shutting up, standing by, and waiting to see what comes next.
“Electra” has stood atop the Alabama Power Building downtown since 1926. Her origins lie closer to Greek mythology than to any similarly named Marvel characters.
Our two-hour walk around downtown Birmingham on a Sunday morning took us from Kelly Ingram Park to Linn Park to the Art Museum and to other parts here and there. We also stopped at their bus station because Anne had it good authority that they had one of those smashed-penny machines. I don’t mention those often in our travelogues, but those are a big, BIG thing for her. You’d be surprised how many of our stops over the years appeared on her smashed-penny machine master list months before they appeared on our finalized itineraries. This time, though, either her informant was misinformed or the bus station management hid it in some far-off back room. We weren’t prepared to go that deeply into the heart of bleakness.
We took zero photographs of the bus station, but other curiosities caught our eye as we traipsed around town. Electra up there, for example.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 