Rake & Hoeh in N.O.

I went to New Orleans to see what it means when I say in response to frequent questioning about The Rake, "Elisabeth is living in New Orleans, apprenticing with a woodworker."

This is Elisabeth in the shop!

If you saw her previous entry, this is another angle on her first project, the swan bowl.

Here is her bench, still in progress but soon to be even more magnificent.

She has many projects, and Heinz is preparing for Jazz Fest next weekend so they are supposed to be working hard.

Fortunately I rescued her and we went to City Park my first evening for the free concert in the Park!

Elisabeth with Patrick and Heinz.

We rode bikes all over the place throughout the weekend.  Probably 50 miles or more! Took the ferry across the river.  

So sunny that we got sunburns, a thrill for a Mainer whose yard still had snow two days previous to this!

Earth Day featured a little festival in Louis Armstrong park, with the requisite brass band, lots of happy people.

Then it was Easter.  In New Orleans, Easter - like most things apparently - is about parades and parties!  We saw two parades: the one where the ladies wear easter bonnets and throw candy - 

And then the Chris Owens parade, which is a bit more New Orleans-ish

We hung out some with Elisabeth's first "host," who was supposedly her landlord but didn't charge her anything because she was staying in his vacation rental when it was empty!

Stanley, right, and his partner Lewis and their cool kid Elliot

Then later we biked to "the bayou" to hang out with the roommates for a while, basking in the light breeze and casual background acoustic music with great harmonies played by a random group of people...

On the last full day I was there, We rented a car and drove 20 minutes to a swamp tour that did not disappoint!

Then we drove down to Jean Lafitte nature preserve and went on the boardwalk, another cool place with a bunch of snakes and cedar swamps and wildlife.

On my last night we had a "cajun potluck" with the roommates, and got boiled crawfish and made dirty rice and greens and just hung out.

We did lots and lots of bike riding around the city, and I didn't photograph all the amazing beautiful, elaborately ornate houses and giant spreading live oaks, or the kitsch, clamor and 

debauchery of Bourbon Street; nor the amazing Audubon Insectarium.  Also I forgot to show you her giant, kind of shabby apartment, and I didn't have a camera when we went to Ladies Wrestling Night, nor when we took in awesome live music in the French Quarter....

But I did see all those things, and now I know what The Rake sees on her daily bike rides, and generally what New Orleans is about: in a word, it's about fun.  the motto: (as the song says) "Have fun, while you're still in the pink - Have fun, it's later than you think!"

Sunset on Lake Pontchartrain.

Week 2

Helloooo!
So, I've now been in New Orleans for two weeks, and I thought some people might be wondering what I've been up to.
I'll start with last weekend: On Saturday, I decided to explore the city a bit. I went to Audubon park and admired the live oaks:

walked down Magazine street and spotted this guy snoozing in a jewelry shop window:

 Then I stopped by Heinz's shop to fix up the bike he offered to give me that he has had sitting around in there for the last 5 years or so. So now I have a bike!

Then on Sunday I woke up and checked out a Unitarian Church. It was alright, but not many people were there, and I left pretty much immediately after the service.

Something much more interesting was happening outside my house when I got home. There were all these people milling around, eating and drinking, and some food trucks parked along Broad Street. As I was buying a spicy sausage at one of these carts, something resembling a parade started approaching us from the South. There were two or three floats with not much on them, followed by a brass band and huge crowd of (primarily African American) people walk-dancing along behind. The parade stopped right along the section of road just outside my house and I went over to ask a couple what was going on. Chris and Kristi told me that it was called Second line, and it is a parade celebrating New Orleans Black heritage and culture, or something along those lines, that happens every Sunday between Mardi Gras and Jazz fest around different parts of the city. They walk a few miles every time and the main attraction is the band and the stepping group that dances along in front of them:

I have some videos that capture the atmosphere a little better, but I don't think I can easily upload them. It was really festive and we (Chris, Kristi and I) for almost a mile before peeling off and heading over to their house for dinner, where we had crabs that Chris had bought from some guy when he was fishing the other day:

They live just a few blocks away and also moved here recently, although they have been here long enough to know a lot more about the city than I do.

This week at work I finished my bowl, and you can see my explanation of the process, as well as plenty of pictures, on the Holzworks blog: http://blog.holzworks.com/p/blog-page_20.html. I also went with Heinz and Patrick to work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, helping to install pocket door locks, a ceiling fan, a ceiling lamp, a window and trim, and a baseboard. It was all in all a very interesting week with them and I am enjoying the work and their company immensely.

And I am making friends slowly but surely, with the help of some friends who have connected me with other friends of theirs. Tuesday night I hung out with some friends of my friend Vanessa, Wednesday I went to a free concert in the park with my coworkers, (and ran into a friend visiting from Camden, who had no idea I was here!), and tonight I'm going out to dinner with some more friends of a friend who I have seen a couple of times already (Here I am with Greg last saturday when we went to get Beignets for dessert:

)
and then going to watch Patrick's band play at a bar downtown. Tomorrow is Super Sunday, which is another similar marching parade with people dressed up in Indian costumes. I'll take pictures for you.

That's it from the big easy for now, where it is currently 70 degrees, clear and sunny, with a slight breeze ruffling the leaves of the live oaks.
Stay warm up there ;)

Day 1 on the job/ at the party

 I had a great day today. I got up and went to work/school/apprenticeship thing. My teacher/ boss, Heinz, was there and he got me started on my bowl. After thinking for awhile about what kind of sculptural bowl I wanted to make, I got started with the modeling clay and came up with this:

Then we went and had lunch at a nearby restaurant. I guess it is New Orleans tradition to have red beans and rice on Mondays. After lunch we went to the shop of a renowned woodworker by the name of something I can't remember right now. But he is 78 years old now and made his first dovetails when he was 12. He makes beautiful chests of drawers that sell for tens of thousands of dollars. I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures.

I started sawing out the rough outline of my swan bowl when we got back to the shop. 

But no sooner had i gotten this far than it was time to go check out the st Patrick's day block party down the street. 

Of course my friend Sasha was there painting faces!

He caught me:

And Heinz, to Heinz's dismay:

This evening I had dinner with my landlords, Stanley and Luis and their so. Elliot. And then I played them a couple songs with my guitar. And now I am downstairs in my very own apartment that I get to live in until new vacation renters come on Friday! 

Happy st paddy's day everyone. 

Rake out. 

What a trip

As many of you know, I recently decided to move to New Orleans. Everyone's asking me why and what I'm going to do here, and all of the obvious questions, so I thought I'd summarize, before I give an account of my voyage down. 

In mid-January, I traveled down to New Orleans with my friend Erik from high school and his coworker Aiden, just for fun. Here we are taking pictures of each other:

During that trip to New Orleans, I visited a wood shop where my friend Kaitlyn was doing an internship during her fieldwork semester at Bennington College. I met her teacher, Heinz, and he showed me around his shop and told me a little bit about his business and the apprentice program he is running. Here's an a link to Kaitlyn's section of the blog that Heinz has his apprentices keep. There's also some information about the apprenticeship if you're interested: http://blog.holzworks.com/p/blog-page_10.html. Also here is a link to an article about Heinz. http://www.nola.com/homegarden/index.ssf/2010/09/swiss_woodworker_found_his_cal.html 

When I got home to Maine, I didn't have a job or any goals, and I felt like I wasn't sure what was next in my life, so I started to get it in my head that I needed to move to a new place where I didn't know anyone, because I've never done that and it just seems like something that everyone should do at some point. So I emailed Heinz, and talked to a friend who used to live in New Orleans, who set me up with his old friend and landlord, Stanley, and within a couple days we had it arranged that I would travel down after Mardi Gras.

So now that I've explained that, I'll tell you about my trip down. On Sunday, March 9th, I set out in this cute little thing, driving to Providence to spend that night with some friends from college.

The next morning I set out for DC where I was hoping to spend Monday night. I had just gotten onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and was feeling good after getting out of a 2 hour traffic jam, when my accelerator all of a sudden stopped making my car accelerate. I pulled over and found that I could no longer start my car. I got it towed to this joint,

and took the bus into New York City to stay at my friend Hannah's apartment in Brooklyn.

I was hoping it would be a quick (cheap) fix, but it turns out that this is what happened:

That's a broken timing belt (and chain, apparently), and it would have cost $700 to fix. Sooo I borrowed another friend's car, got everything out of my car, and handed over the title to the garage, receiving exactly zero dollars in return. (That solution may seem drastic, but there were so many other things that could have gone wrong even after fixing that, that it just couldn't possibly have been worth it to fix.) When I got back to Hannah's, I opened the Craigslist NY rideshare page and saw that amazingly, a certain Sasha from the Upper East Side was planning to travel down to New Orleans for the St Paddy's day festivities, leaving on Wednesday or Thursday in his Mercedes Airstream camper van!

So Thursday at 3 pm, having consolidated my stuff as much as possible and leaving the un-essentials at Hannah's, I arrived in Manhattan on the subway. Hannah and I sat in a fried chicken joint imagining what Sasha might look like and how old he might be. He and his girlfriend Svetlana arrived sometime towards 4, and he looked like this:

At exactly 4 we were waiting in line to get into the Holland tunnel. The GPS said something like 19 hours till arrival. "This is going to be easy," I thought.

Well the van didn't really go over 60 mph, and the turbo was dying, so it slowed down to 35 or 40 going up longer hills. Watching the GPS when you are going considerably under the speed limit is a strange experience. It would say 17:50 till arrival, then 20 minutes later, it would say 17:34 till arrival. So then I would try to figure out, if we are losing 2 minutes every 10 minutes, then that means we lose 2 hours on every 10 hours, and then Svetlana would tell me to pull over at the next stop and Sasha would drive and I would go try to sleep and then 45 minutes later, I would feel the van stop. And we would be stopped for what seemed like infinity minutes, and then I would have to add that we were losing 1 hour every 4 hours for breaks. There were some points in the journey where I started to think, "maybe I just won't get there after all,"

And although there was a nice comfy bed up above where I was invited to take naps while Sasha drove, it was a little nerve-racking being up there when the wind would catch the van and it would jerk to the side, or Sasha would look at his phone and veer off course a little bit, and of course the radio had to be really loud so he wouldn't fall asleep.

There was a good stretch in there when I was driving from around 4 am to 8 am and they were asleep and I got to listen to podcasts on my ipod, munch on pretzels, and do things like this:

And finally, yesterday, at 8:15 EST, 28 hours, 15 minutes after our departure, we arrived. I didn't sleep a wink the whole way, which made it all the more miraculous to arrive at Stanley and Luis's apartment and be greeted by unfamiliar, but very friendly faces and be ushered into here for wine, food and sleep:

 It was an exciting trip, for sure. I got to practice my Russian with Svetlana, who spoke almost no English, and I got to listen to Sasha talk about things, and he even invited me to paint faces with him at the St Patrick's day Block party and parades, since that was the purpose of his trip. (I said maybe, then told him today I would do it, but he flaked out. We'll see, maybe tomorrow.)

I'm now in Stan and Luis's apartment while they are away in Mississippi for the weekend. Some vacation renters are downstairs in my apartment-to-be for St Paddy's, but I'll move down there on Monday. I will also head down to Heinz's shop then, and I'll get to really see what's in store for me. 

Missing everyone very much, but excited to see what happens next!