I'm back!

Sorry for the long stretch between posts.... I guess (for once), I had nothing to say!

We went to BR over the long weekend, and a few things struck us as we drove around those familiar roads.

1. There is not a square mile in BR that does not have some sort of construction going on. Buildings, new houses, turn lanes being added, new condos, new retail shops. Just amazing.
2. "They're grinning when they're winning." And by this, I'm referring to all of BR and LSU. Being National Champions in football surely does not hurt the economy of BR nor retailers peddling LSU logo merchandise. While at TigerMania, we overhead the owner telling a friend that just in January, his website alone had sold over $4 million worth of merchandise. And January was only about half over then. Yowza.
3. Traffic is still horrendous. The interchange at Siegen and Bluebonnet is nice and moved us through quickly, and the split of Range Ave. in Denham Springs also gets you through pretty quickly. But the rest of it is still ridiculous. No change there.
4. Yep, seafood costs less in BR than in Dallas. We got bigger, better Gulf shrimp at restaurants for less money than up here. We even considered $11.99/lb for Louisiana crawfish tail meat a bargain, since it cannot be gotten for love nor money up here.
5. Mardi Gras is alive and well. You forget when you're living in South Louisiana that the whole country does not celebrate this holiday season. The majority of Americans have probably never tasted a king cake, or even knows what one is. And you forget that purple, green, and gold actually look good together.
6. Pine trees. We didn't realize until we hit middle Louisiana on I-49 that pine trees are few and far between in north Texas. I suppose they require a great deal of water, something we do not have much of here. I kind of missed that year-round green.

It was just fabulous to see family and friends again, and get caught up on what children are doing and how jobs are going. Even though DH reads The Advocate every morning online, it's fun to hear what's really going on from people who live there. As Paul Harvey would say, we can get "the rest of the story."