Becoming Louisianan

If you come to Louisiana for only a semester, it might be the fall semester and you'll get all you want of NCAA football, but you might miss out on crawfish. If you're in Louisiana for a year, it's pretty difficult to miss out on crawfish season. It coincides conveniently with Lent, because crawfish are God's manna for swamp people.

When you live in Louisiana, you learn by and by how to eat a boiled crawfish. And if you're lucky, you learn how to identify the good ones from the bad ones. The good ones, it turns out, are the ones that are boiled alive. Their tails curl. The bad ones are the ones that are dead before they're boiled, and their tails extend straight and uncurled. (By the way, that is a sort of myth, although it seems by my estimation to be a good test.).

Eating a crawfish entails breaking the arthropod's carapace apart from the tail (actually the abdomen, or in crustaceanese, the pleon). Learning what's best about eating crustaceans from their shell involves learning about the juicy yellow fat which is usually spooned out of the carapace with a finger and ingested with the tailmeat. It's what people are going for when they "suck the heads" of their boiled crawfish. And it's good. It is, as I learned on www.crawfish.com, hepatopancreatic tissue. There it is said that it is, in fact, not fat, but actually, as far as what I can understand from what a hepatopancreas does--metabolizing lipids, we might as well call it fat.

You might think that eating your share of a mountain of vermillion mudbugs in this manner might as well make you somehow Louisianan, but of course not. After you're in Louisiana for a while, you also get to learn how to execute the crawfish boil. You get your crawfish, you wash and purge the crawfish. You use a giant's pot and a Texas sized burner. You use Zatarain's. You boil potatoes and corn and onions and maybe sausage with the boil. You heat it up for so long. You boil for so long. You let soak for so long. And then so long, hepatopancreatic lipids and sumptuous tailmeat.

Purging crawfish means dousing them with saltwater, which makes them empty their digestive tracts. The digestive tract, which has the similitude of a small "vein" running through their tailmeat should be nice and clean. Black full digestive tracts are from negligent purging, and adds to the mud and detracts from the delicate tailmeat and sumptuous hepatopancreatic lipids.

You might think that cooking up a genuine crawfish boil makes you Louisianan. And it helps, but today I realized that after 10 years of a connection with the Pelican State, that I finally took the next step in being even more Louisianan. That was when I went down the bayou with the one-legged father-in-law and his .45. We drove back into a property that his brother has spent 10 years taming. There we harvested wild crawfish from crawfish traps. The .45 was for the alligators. What deserves note is the plentiful birdlife down there--something I had forgotten. But just in our little excursion we saw herons, cranes, egrets, stilts, ducks, ibises. There were some I didn't know. The excursion was actually quite brief. But it was real Louisiana.





And you might think that somehow I'm going to get to the point of calling myself Louisianan, but there a good deal of other labels I would rather attach to myself. Maybe after I buy some land down the bayou and build on it, knowing that it will flood. And I have to make the traps. And I have to get a .45 probably, and go half deaf, or maybe lose a leg or finger. To an alligator would be best, but cancer or a staph infection will do. But I did marry a good old Louisianan, and all three of my spawn have been delivered in this odd state of birds and Republicans.



The thing is, I have as much love for Louisiana as I do for, say, most of the midwestern states combined. And if you throw in the badlands and forests in the Dakotas, that's probably pretty accurate, because there's a lot in Louisiana that really moves me. Today, in Louisiana, was one of the best days of my life, actually. Not only did I have this wonderful adventure, but we had a birthday jamboree of family times and dinosaur delight.

sunflowers, cicadas, ssss

I took on running a gardening club at our new school. What a wonderful opportunity. We have land, a small budget, and a dozen or so interested students. The other week I planted some corn and sunflowers, and they have poked through the soil. Sowing seeds and watching them grow nurtures the soul. Try it if you haven't, or haven't lately. Chime in if you're a so-called old hand.

The cicadas are chiming in nowadays. The summer is here as far as Haiku is concerned (part of the often not-understood richness of Haiku involves season words--like "cicadas", which depict the particular season). Even if you otherwise despise bugs, you gotta love cicadas.

There was a third item I was thinking to blog about. It started with an "s" sound, but it wasn't sunshine or sunburns, seasoning or spices, sofas or settees. It wasn't sacrifice or cease-and-desist orders, and it wasn't suicide or citizenship. The subject escapes me no, but I can tell you it wasn't Saturn, or sex, or singing, or sonnets, or supper, or Cesium, or cymbals, or citadels, or CDs, or psychology or psychiatry or similes or smiles.

Maybe it had something to do with interviewing at some other schools, which I have done recently. Maybe it had something to do with going to the children's museum, which we did last night. Maybe it had something to do with Bonnie's new blog we talk dinosaur. I can't recall.

It could be that it was about Annie walking backwards, because she seems to like to do that nowadays, step step step. Or it could be about watching an extra baby (a coworker's baby) in the house, which is on the list of current news at the Becker household. It could possibly have been about the website houstongasprices.com (they also have it in your area) which is currently listing gas prices lower than $3.40 / gallon in the Houston area! But I don't think so. Nothing has struck a chord with me yet.

It could have been about the painted lady butterflies emerging from their chrysalises, or about our new costume fun, or about all of Bonnie's latest crafting activities. Or about planning a trip to Austin, or Louisiana, or renting out our Sparrow house finally... hmmm.....

Alas, I think I shall have to leave the title of this blog with an ssss, until the subject comes back to me, if it does at all.

my recent animal identification

We found a mole cricket the other day. The thing was (--and it's not like I have ever seen a mole cricket before; it actually took some investigating to learn about them) this mole cricket was so fuzzy. And they are not small insects, either, at about 2 inches long:

Unfortunately, I am not having as much luck identifying a strange bird I saw the other day.

I wish you all the best in your animal identification quests.

less cholesterol, more owl and cat

It turns out a deciliter of my blood contains more cholesterol than the average American's, at 224 milligrams. Bonnie helps bring down the average though, you bet. I don't know the breakdown of good and bad, or triglycerides, and this sure wasn't a fasting cholesterol reading, but now you know, and so do I. In Houston, at least at the blood bank where Bonnie and I donated some of our life serum, they reveal cholesterol levels after you donate blood.

The weather has been agreeable lately. I could go for more of the outings like we had a weekend or so ago when we went to the arboretum and had a hike. Last weekend is when I got some manure for our school garden. This weekend I'll be doing some planting.

Most of you probably read your share of blogs. Sometimes you even read blogs about blogging. But today you are in for a treat, because I am going to blog about blogging about blogging. Sure, there's a niche for blogging about blogging. But I think it's best when weblogs just focus on what the weblogger wants to say, and not deal with how they are going to say it. Having said that, blogging is sometimes not as easy as keeping a journal. So anything goes, really. Bonnie started a new soon-to-be-released blog, but she doesn't know what to say. And to her I say, just say what you want to say.

On the other hand, I could do to read a few blogs about blogging. More pictures, more dialogue. Less cholesterol, more owl and cat.

driven up the wall

As many of you probably know, goats and I go way back. So I am delighted to catch the pics of these goats scaling this steep dam:







Maybe the rest of you saw these photos last fall when they first came out. I'm generally a few months behind on my internetting. Anyway, the Alpine ibex deserves a few moments of your internet time.

houstonians, May

Well, well, well, May. I wouldn't exactly say you were in like a lion this year. At least not in Houston, Texas, birthplace of Beyonce, who might dance the same moves as Lady Gaga, but with much more refinement. Houston also produced Dan Rather, Renee Zellwegger, Anna Nicole Smith, and Wes Anderson. As for you, May, you produced about 1/12 of the human population, including Blessed John Paul II and Bob Dylan, not to mention some dear loved ones. Anyway, May, we need the rain April neglected to leave behind. So bring it on, yo.

We are carrying on, in our household. In fact, I don't have anything else to say, really.