Under Construction: Stuff on my mind

First of all, I think I'm going bald. My hair is falling out all over the place which is really starting to annoy me on a number of levels. Obviously, I'm going to look more than a little strange if I don't have hair and perhaps more importantly, remember how I mentioned that our floors here aren't exactly the easiest things in the whole world to keep clean? Well, this certainly isn't helping matters any! Do extreme heat and/or humidity cause hair to fall out, does anyone know? Or just a climate change in general? Whatever the reason, even Zack has noticed and it's just gross!

In other news, Zack and I have been married for one month today! (Cue cute/sappy wedding pictures).

That old "time flies" adage has certainly been true for us...I mean, I can hardly believe its been a whole month since the wedding. In some ways it feels like yesterday and in others, so much has already happened since then that it feels like a lifetime ago and Zack and I have been married for a hundred years (and I mean that in a good way) and are now just an "old married couple." We've done a whole lot in a very short amount of time when I think back over the past few weeks so I guess it only makes sense that the wedding seems so distant. We were fortunate to wind up with such great photographers though, who captured the whole day on film--well digital "film"-- for us. Frank and Sara and their assistants were amazing to work with, and I'm sooooooo glad that we ended up using them because now we've ended up with over 3000 pictures of our wedding day to remember it by. Not that we're going to order prints of all 3000 you understand, but the point is that they captured every last detail and second and minute of the day, even the things that Zack and I never actually saw, so we can always go back and look at these pictures and remember what an incredible time it was for us. The big chore ahead of us now is sorting through all of these pictures to decide which ones we do in fact want to order. And let me tell you, it will not be easy to decide!

Let's see...what else? Oh! Zack and I went to the zoo this weekend! Zack has been dying to go since we very first started talking about moving to New Orleans back in the Spring so Saturday we, along with all the other six-year-olds in the city, visited Audubon Zoo. Supposedly before Katrina this was considered one of the worst zoos in the country. Since then though, they've apparently done just a massive amount of renovation and it's now thought to be one of the best. I'm no expert on the subject but it was definitely a nice zoo! There were lots of animals to see and it was one of the cleanest zoos I've ever been to--not even the elephant cages smelled, which I think is saying a lot. Zack's favorite thing we saw was the white alligator, closely followed by the Roman chewing candy cart (more on this is a sec) and mine were the sea lions. They were great! I don't think there is a goofier looking animal on the whole planet than the sea lion, except maybe a walrus, but we didn't see any of those. They're so agile and graceful in the water and then they get out on land and they're these lumbering, clumsy-looking, burping machines. I think my favorite zoo story though, is about the penguins during Katrina. I haven't seen any statistics but I think they were able to evacuate most, if not all, of the animals during the storm. They got sent to zoos all over the country to stay until their homes could be rebuilt. The penguins apparently ended up in a zoo out in California and when it was time to come back to New Orleans, the powers that be decided the best way to transport them was to FedEx them back to the zoo! The thought of putting a penguin in the mail is hilarious to me.

Now about the Roman chewing candy cart; there's this old guy down here in New Orleans who has a cart and a donkey and just drives around the city all day every day selling homemade taffy out of the back of the cart. This business has supposedly been in his family for generations and he's one of those little oddities that make this city so unique. It's kind of a big deal to find him because from what we're told, he can be a bit elusive. The moral of the story as Zack sees it, is you absolutely have to buy some taffy on the rare occasion that you do come across him.