I am tired and wired. My brain is fried, still. But before I slip off into exhaustion oblivion for a few days, I need to address some...

Rising Tide Randomness

Thursday - Yeah, this is what happened to me on Thursday. In the midst of all the bloviating I mentioned a certain Babble.com article in their series called "Bad Parent" entitled "96 Degrees In The Shade", concerning a mom who took her preschool-aged son to the Burning Man festival. When I saw this in my email and read through it, I instantly thought of two things:

- A number of the commenters on the article had probably never seen Malcolm In The Middle. Then again, maybe they have...

- If taking your kids to festivals of any kind is being a bad parent, then New Orleans has got to be the center of insane mommies, daddies, and guardians. Cases in point - JazzFest, and of course, the granddaddy of 'em all, Mardi Gras. Need I say more? Ladies and gents, taking your kids to festivals in a responsible manner will only be enriching, enlightening, and...yes, fine, ultimately tiring, but in a good way. Don't completely knock it until you've tried it.

Friday - I took one look at the giant poster our printing and swag guru Mominem made by mistake and knew that it needed a giant crane to accompany it. Sheckrastos' lovely spouse Dr. A has given the crane a good home. If anyone else needs lessons in massive origami, please feel free to contact me.

I headed over to Dangerblond's to keep Sophmom from having a nervous breakdown over the name tags and the registration for the conference...and just in time, too, since she nearly had this fellow's blog marked as "barks, bugs, bites, and lizards". Best kept secret about Rising Tide is that doing the registration and the name tags is actually fun - I was also in on it because I like hangin' in faux Metry with the ladies there and because, even though printing out the tags is hard work, the person with the registration has the power of knowing who everybody attending is and how many of 'em are coming. Dismiss us at your peril. We know the secret identities and the skeletons in the virtual closets and we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you.

After helping Sophmom avert potential disaster, I changed into a flowery outfit in honor of this occasion and decided to see how the protest at the Ritz was going. I circled the block, observed a few protesters still hanging on outside the entrance to the hotel, and then unsuccessfully tried to squeeze my husband's car into a potential parking spot on Dauphine Street. I gave up after one too many people walking by just shook their heads in amazement at the exercise in futility that was my sad attempt at parking the car in a postage stamp on the street and headed over to Buffa's Lounge for the Friday night meet & greet. It was there that I got to chat with Cliff a great deal, finally met with Kevin Allman but forgot to ask him why author Patty Friedmann calls him a sweet babboo (I think I finally got the idea anyhow after talking with him for a bit.), met Amy Lafont for the first time as well as Kelly, Allen of unapologetic and Dorophoria, and many, many other people, and got to reconnect with other blogging yahoos such as myself.

A couple of highlights of the party were Jeffrey getting a beer from Clancy DuBos, The City's Inspector General Robert Cerasoli making an appearance at the party and staying into the wee hours of the morn listening to so, so many folks (I left with Maitri at 12:30-ish in the AM and he was still there), Karen and Sarah coming in to Buffa's like conquering heroines straight from the Ritz protest, and the discovery of a little known maze of Jewish Geography that connects E and I faster than six degrees of separation could even think of doing...

...His current employer grew up two houses down from my grandparents' house on LonGuyland, and the employer's younger sister and I would play together whenever I would come to visit my grandparents. The world is only shrinking as I get older, it seems.

More tomorrow about other Rising Tide randomness. The rest of the NOLA blogpocheh are freaking out about the latest storm to develop at the edge of the Gulf, Gustav Mahler.

Jeffrey wasn't aFayed, but now I'm getting disGustav'd. Freaking hurricane season...

Oh, and I really really DO NOT WANT New Orleans to go through again what it went through three years ago just to tank the Republican candidate in this upcoming presidential election. It is not worth having all us New Orleanians descend on columnist Will Bunch's home for a month-plus stay while the levees breach again (suggestion is Ray's). The GOP is perfectly capable of tanking this one on their own without the assistance of an active hurricane season, thanks.

(alerted to this one by E)