b.rox

As abruptly as it began, work on our house is stopping for a while. Mark and Tony, the carpenters, will be working on one of Mike’s houses tomorrow. Hopefully they will be back at our house in a week or two. In the meantime, the plumber might come by to do a little demolition. Mark [...]

Red Cross came through and gave me accounts Now I’m at your town getting golds in my mouth I got this New Orleans bounce track off a compilation CD which was given to Xy by one of her students. I can’t ID it, and of course that’s driving me crazy. Googling the lyrics gets me [...]

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I live in New Orleans City Council District B, which includes part of Mid-City, the CBD, the Garden District and Irish Channel, Central City and Gert Town, most of Broadmoor and a little bit of Uptown. [PDF map] We have six candidates running for this council seat in the next election. The League of Women [...]

The carpenters are going great guns on our house. The termite damage and the rot are more extensive than I realized, so they’re essentially replacing all the supporting wood on the lower level, from top plate to sill and everything in between. (They’ve kept the original sill in some place, actually.) This involves using a [...]

I was just feeling overwhelmed by how many, many New Orleans blogs have appeared since Katrina. Then I got bitten by this viral linking campaign from Link Think New Orleans. So I suppose I should say a thing or two about myself. I started this blog a couple years ago, and then filled in some [...]

Oh, by the way, my counterpart J has started a blog, with Day, documenting their efforts toward the erection of a new domicile. It’s at — where else? — j.rox.com.

Mayoral candidate Virginia Boulet spoke for about ten minutes at a neighborhood meeting I attended last week. I really liked what she had to say. She talked about issues and little else. She didn’t indulge in any of that self-aggrandizing prattle that politicians often use as a substitute for actual substance. She seemed intelligent and [...]

When Xy came home from work yesterday, she saw a man on the street who gave her a “nasty look.” He was headed between our house and the next. Xy entered our front door; I was at the opposite end of our long hallway; she told me to look out back. I went out the [...]

The meme seems to go something like this: In our state, officials use third-grade reading levels to project the number of prison beds that will be needed in ten years. Do a Google search on prison-beds third-grade or prison-cells third-grade and you’ll get a couple hundred results. Xy wanted me to find an authoritative reference [...]

We’ve been getting a little bit of “buzz” regarding our latest episode. Nice write-ups on Metroblogging, Three Bed Two Bath, and quite a few others. But the sweetest one is on Marathonpacks, which appears to be a kick-ass music blog. Thanks, y’all. Update: A review, quite funny in its own right, at Adrastos.

I was happy that work had begun on our house at long last. But I was also anxious and unsettled for the last couple days. Now I’m feeling better. Much better. Not sure exactly why, but I think it’s a combination of several things. I found the lost item I was looking for, a picture [...]

Helpful rebuilding hint: If you have any possessions you’d like to keep, remove them from the area before the demolition crew goes to work. Yeah, most of our stuff downstairs was ruined in the flood, and put to the curb months ago. Those few items not ruined got moved upstairs — except for one or [...]

Though I toyed briefly with the stage name “Stupid B” when I was the vocalist for The Submersibles, I have no connection whatsoever with the recently apprehended “B Stupid.” Just a point of clarification, in case anyone was confused.

Ho hum, not much new to report… except that work is finally beginning on our house! I had just about given up on ever hearing back from Mike. I last spoke to him in January, I think, when he gave me an estimate to rewire the house. Then I asked him to coordinate the entire [...]

The Sav-A-Center in our neighborhood finally re-opened last week, and I went shopping there for the first time Saturday morning. There’s a write-up at Metroblogging that sums it up nicely. It may not seem like much, but it provides a huge boost of confidence for the neighborhood. Most of the other big supermarkets in the [...]

I recently got an update to our homeowner’s policy. It’s something like a hundred pages long. Past updates were only a few pages. I’m supposed to wade through all this legalese? I’d have to hire a lawyer just to find out how badly we’re getting screwed. A quick glance reveals there’s a “trampoline exclusion” and [...]

Well, ROX #93 is finished at last. You can watch it online if you so desire.

Intrigued by a post over at e-mail from NOLA, I took a tour yesterday afternoon of a few local fast food joints, all within a few blocks from our house. Billy K’s Seafood: debris removed McDonald’s: cleaned and gutted Burger King: cleaned and gutted Rally’s: untouched and stinky as hell None of them are open, [...]

If you’d like to be apprised of new posts to this weblog, you can now subscribe (through a plugin I’ve installed) and you’ll get an e-mail whenever I post something new. Alternatively, you can subscribe via FeedBlitz. The difference is that with FeedBlitz you’ll get an e-mail sometime within 24 hours after a new post. [...]

We got a call from Crystal, one of the girls who used to live across the street from us. She is now living in Houston. She was in town for the weekend, and wanted to visit. Xy has been missing the girls, and so she was pretty excited about the reunion. Yet, somehow, it wasn’t [...]