Are You Ready?

Like most of the rest of you, we've spent the last little while prepping for the holidays. In the Adventures in Cooking department, we practiced making our own lasagne noodles and the resulting lasagne was both beautiful and delicious--hope the holiday company likes pasta! Our biggest Adventure was our first trip out of town, leaving Squeak in the capable hands of Karen and Phil next door while we drove across the low country on the way to the casinos in Biloxi.

A favorite part of that drive is the stately Pascagoula River, which is ecologically significant as the only virtually "unaffected," that is un-dammed, river emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Could that be why it is so breath-taking?

The Beau Rivage, our home base in Biloxi, was ridiculously decorated, as these photos demonstrate. (What you can't see is the incessant xmas music, which fortunately did not extend to the casino floor.) On the advice of Susan and Charlie (serious gamblers), we visited a different casino, the Imperial Palace, which lacked the glitz of the Beau, but made up for it in the looseness of its slot machines and its down-hominess. And the food was certainly no worse. Asked by another patron at a blackjack table, one of the dealers opined that the clientele on Christmas Day fell into two camps: early in the day the casinos are populated with folks who have no family; late in the day, crowds of people who are sick of their families appear.







Most of our time away, this part of the coast was completely socked-in with dense fog, and there had recently been snow in New Orleans. This last phenomenon was explained by our bell-hop as a consequence of the first Vietnamese congressional representative having been elected in the state of Louisiana.

Where the carts go at night.

Squeak appeared none the worse for wear when we returned home (to the beach for the first time!), but we did learn from Karen that the one time she tried to pet our dear kitten, she hissed.