To me, New Orleans is about food. Come to think of it, lots of fun things in life are anchored around food :-) . And this time around in the big easy, we got to sample a new restaurant – The New Orleans School of cooking, where the chef (Kevin) leads a class of cooking the meal that you are about to eat, all the while regaling the crowd with quips, history, cooking tips, and local color. It was a great performance, both of culinary skill and a stand up routine, drawing the audience in while preparing a stupendous meal – and I have learned how to make Bananas Foster and Pecan pralines.

While Judy was busy at the conference, I worked through the morning, then went walking, soaking in the soul of the big easy, visiting old friends like Jackson Square, the Bakery down exchange alley, the Ursuline convent. On Sunday, Judy and I continued revisiting old acquaintances – Beignets for breakfast on Royale – and making new ones, discovering another used bookstore, going up and down the river in a paddle boat to the Audubon Zoo.

Stand in Queue again. United tries Continental – but the seat is gone by now. Try all kinds of other combinations, and nothing works – until they find a Delta flight. Move to Delta ticketing, wait in line. Delta rep can’t find the flight. Brief panic moment until they realize that United just had a typo in the flight number. So, I am heading off to Cincinnati. I probably can even make the Firestone 200 Indy car race at the Nashville speedway.

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In the evening, Judy’s brother Jon came in with large Boxes full of documents and funeral books and a genealogy report for part of the family done in 1950, and things like copies of reports from Ellis Island and so on. We have data for over 200 people now.

Stayed up late playing reinstalling windows on Reyna’s computer.

Judy read from the Gnostic Gospels. Fascinating read. Gnosticism’s Christian form grew to prominence in the 2nd century A.D. Ultimately denounced as heretical by the early church, Gnosticism proposed a revealed knowledge of God (gnosis meaning knowledge in Greek), held as a secret tradition of the apostles.

This book talks about a recent (well, circa 1945 or so ago, but recent based on the scale of events) find at Nag Hamadi of a bunch of gospels (Thomas’, Mary Magdalene’s) which was declared heretical and virtually stamped out by the orthodox church by the start of the second century after Christ when the orthodox churches were combined into a “catholic” church and the gospels that did not meet the party line were excised and destroyed.

I learned a lot about the politics of the church in the early years (including how having witnessed the resurrection was a keystone in acquiring legitimacy in the church). The revelations about Mary Magdalene were very interesting as well.

Gnostics focused on the self rather than the community. They were utterly non-judgmental, to the point that they would not confer superior status to any one individual, as the Catholics did with their bishops, but rather they would share the duties of worship leader, hymn leader, deacon etc., and take turns alternating different people through the positions. Women participated in the worship service on an equal basis with men, rather more like modern Protestants than the seemingly misogynist Catholics of that era. The gnostics believed that those who received gnosis, or hidden knowledge, transcended the authority of the church.

It struck me that the forbidden Gnostic gospels were very similar to the teachings of Hinduism (Gnosticism celebrates God as both Mother and Father, shows a very human Jesus’s relationship to Mary Magdalene, suggests the Resurrection is better understood symbolically, and speaks to self-knowledge as the route to union with God, the deity being in all of us, the material world merely Vishnu’s maya, etc). Too bad that this version of Jesus’ teaching lost out politically, I find it more palatable than the conventional teachings.

It was a very fun drive.

We kept two of the puppies, Banshee (named so because she spent the first couple of days of her life wailing like one), and Champ, named for his tendency to be a champion for his family, regardless of the size of the aggressor. We found the other 4 puppies good homes (it was really easy to find them new humans; just taking them to the flea market had people oohing and aahing over them).

There was also the episode of Banshee and Essie taking off for 4 days when they were 6 weeks old, but that is another story (and another set of pictures).

Banshee and Champ can be seen in more recent pictures and you can see how fast they are growing. Four months, and already they are over 30 pounds each.

After about 6 months of actively looking for a house all we had was a near miss – and we were getting very frustrated. We had an excellent real estate agent, and I was beginning to feel guilty about the amount of work she was putting in for us. We had almost given up and had nearly decided to buy a 5-acre plot to build on. We had talked to the builder and even had a floor plan started.

And then our agent called about a house just going on the market that week, so we drove down to check it out – more out of a sense of due diligence than out of any expectation of finding something we would like. And as Judy’s car topped the hill, we saw what you can see in the pictures below and my heart beat accelerated.

This is one of the few houses, which look good from the outside and you don’t feel let down after looking inside. We moved in less than 4 weeks after the house was put on the market.