Baby Love

I've never had to keep track of when the last was that a stranger called me "Baby" or "Babe" or "Love."  In  New England, this just doesn't happen.  Here in New Orleans, it happens two or three times a day during common exchanges.

I had lunch at Ted's Frostop on South Claiborne today.

Regular readers will know that I don't eat a lot of hamburgers, though I started enjoying them weekly at the Banshee before I left Boston.  I was a little hesitant to order a hamburger at Frotstop but the menu came to my rescue.  My lunch was red beans and rice for $2.99 and a large root beer.  The beans came with some kind of patty on top.  It wasn't meat but, rather, some kind of dark, spicy pancake.  Whatever it was, it was delicious.  I was there a little before noon so it wasn't crowded: me, a pair of cops, a couple of construction workers, and two chaps who looked like stock brokers. No women except behind the counter.  One of them called out to me, "Number Zero Six.  Here's your beans, Babe."

I looked at apartments today.  I asked the realtor after the second one if it was a typical apartment.  "There's no such thing as typical in New Orleans," she replied.  I chuckled and had to agree. 

For the same price that I'm paying in Dorchester, I'll be getting about a third more space.  The lady of the house and I were concerned that we have too many things.  We don't have a lot of furniture, but we've filled up the floor space of our Dot three-decker and neither of us can abstract how much a square foot contains without seeing it.  No worries ahead.

I've seen four different dwellings.  The first was a kind of little, stand-alone house in the back yard of a bigger building.  Nix to that one. The owner of the front house wanted all the yard to herself and was building a hot tub outside the renter's bedroom window.  The second was two stories at the front of the house with access to a long porch in back running along the former slaves' quarters and serving as a fire escape.  Thumbs up for the front porches on both floors.  That was on Terpsichore Street, named after the muse of dance.  

The third was in the rear "slaves' quarters."  It was a nice, if cramped seeming, space but  the porch (it was on the second story) felt very soft under it's peeling paint.  Not interested.  The fourth was half of a "double," that is half of a doublewide shotgun shack up in Riverbend.  That was really nice and I was torn because I like the Riverbend neighborhood and I liked the apartment, which has a skylit loft in the back room, but I would love to have an address on Terpsichore Street.  That, and the park in Coliseum Square is lovely.

We are going to look at some more on Thursday.  I followed the realtor between locations and she took me down a part of Prytania Street I hadn't been on before.  I now know where the Prytania Theater is.  My leader apologized after we arrived at the final destination.  She said, "I've never been on a motorcycle and I realize I just led you down some very bumpy roads."  I said it was no problem.  She saw me jostling around in her rear view mirror.  Maybe she heard me exclaim, "Jeez Louise!" over a particuarly bone-rattling stretch.

I went to library today to read the Yellow Pages.  Employment agencies don't do a lot of outdoor advertising in New Orleans so I wanted to see who could help me find a job.  If anyone needs a medical coder or biller or office manager, let me know.   I'll be available on June 11.