Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler - Mardi Gras 2020

February 16 marked 18 years of wedded bliss for Alan and me. To celebrate, we took a week-long Norwegian cruise out of New Orleans. It was no accident we'd chosen to depart out of Nola; the city is one of our favorites. Because of that, we decided to head down a few days early and soak up some Mardi Gras fun beforehand.

Unfortunately, when I put this plan together, I'd only performed cursory research (totally out of character for me), and I didn't realize New Orleans is only a direct flight from Boston via Spirit Airlines. Now, I don't know about you, but there are some risks I'll never take, and flying Spirit is one of them. This meant we had a layover in Nashville, and in order to get to New Orleans at a reasonable time of day, we left our house well before dawn. In the middle of a snow storm. Before the roads had been plowed.

Right away, our adventure was turning out to be more adventurous than we'd bargained for.

But all's well that ends well, and later that afternoon we were checking in to the Hotel Monteleone, a place we'd wanted to stay all the other times we'd visited but hadn't for one reason or another. Thankfully, I got a really good deal on it cashing in some reward points to offset the total cost, so we were able to kick off our trip with a little bit of luxury.

After settling in, we stepped out the hotel's front door and into the madness that is New Orleans during Mardi Gras. We'd been before at this time of year, the French Quarter felt a bit different this time around. Maybe we're older, or maybe we were just tired from a long day of travel, but rather than setting out on the same itinerary we've adopted every other time we'd been, we decided to just wander and explore. We ventured in and out of antique stores, marveling at the cost of things, before finally heading over to Pat O'Brien's to meet up with the walking tour we'd signed up for. 

Over the years, we've done a number of walking tours centered around alcohol -- one of our favorites being the cocktail tour in Old San Juan Puerto Rico, and based on the description we'd assumed this one would be similar. Led by a man who was literally in his mid-80s, it was ... not. Not that it was a bad tour, per se, it just wasn't what we'd signed up for. Some of it was better than expected -- a private tour through Antoine's, one of the oldest and largest restaurants in the city -- while our pit stop in a random hotel to hear JFK conspiracy theories (sans cocktail) was just weird. In the end, it introduced us to the a new-to-us absinthe bar and the best damn hurricane we'd ever tasted at May Bailey's Place (one of the first and most notorious bordellos in the red light district and now part of the Dauphine Orleans Hotel), so I suppose it turned out to be a positive experience overall. Oh! And a second line. Gotta love a second line. But with having woken up at 4:00 a.m., we called it an early night around 10 p.m. and made our way back to the hotel.

Day Two

We were very fortunate when it came to the weather for this trip. Almost too fortunate -- all of the clothes I'd packed were for temperatures in mid-50s, and it wound up being very sunny and around 65 degrees. It made sitting outside in the courtyards more enjoyable than it would normally have been at this time of year. And is there any better courtyard than Pat O'Brien's? I mean, the drinks taste like crap, but the environment and the people watching is pretty spectacular.

From here, we walked up to Rampart to meet up with another walking tour group. This was supposed to be a cemetery and Treme tour. For nearly 2.5 hours we wandered around a cemetery somewhat aimlessly. Finally, we walked over to Congo Square, and then on to the Treme area. Got to Treme and bam, the tour was done.  Disappointing, but we didn't let it get us down. Instead, we walked over to the Frenchman Street area and hit up Brieux Carre, a microbrewery I'd read about online. You know Alan and I love finding new beers on our travels, so this was a great way to spend a couple of hours before dinner at Herbsaint later that night.

When we first decided to visit Nola, I was a bit disappointed to see that the "big" parades were taking place in Uptown, so we were quite surprised when we left our hotel to head to dinner, only to find Canal Street closed off and a parade in progress. It was fun walking to dinner along the parade route, and then watching the floats go by through the restaurant's windows. Afterward, feeling in the Mardi Gras spirit, we hit up a few more bars and then eventually made our way back to our hotel with the hopes of getting a seat at its famed Carousel Bar. I'm not even kidding when I tell you people start lining up for a seat at the carousel at 10:30 a.m. (it opens at 11:30). I don't know what kind of karma gods were with us, but we walked in and within a couple of minutes found two seats - where we stayed until last call. 

Day Three

We were supposed to go on another walking tour, but after our late night and lack of success with our two previous tours, we decided instead to sleep in and take it a bit easy. We ended up getting lunch at The Court of Two Sisters, eating outside in the beautiful courtyard. Everything was going great until I took a bite of one of Alan's seafood dishes and started having an allergic reaction. At this point, I'm putting crab on the list of things that will kill me which is a huge bummer since I *love* crab. 

I really wanted to pick up some art on this trip, so after lunch we walked around Jackson Square looking at all of the art on display. Back when Alan was a teenager, he visited Nola with his parents and picked up a Mardi Gras print that hangs in our house to this day. We were hoping to find something similar to add to our (eventual) game room and stumbled upon a woman named Mousie Clark who had beautiful prints for sale. We got to talking about Alan's print hanging back at our house, and she knew exactly which one it was. It turns out that was the last year the artist did them because he passed away and she took up the torch. We bought one, and I can't wait until our kitchen remodel is complete so we can get everything out of our game room and get it set up. I know just the place for this beautiful print.

That night was dinner at Cochon, and instead of taking a taxi over there we decided to walk. I'm so glad we did because we left very early and ended up spending about an hour having a fabulous time at the Krewe of Freret parade. I caught a blow up cow which I gave to a little girl standing next to me, and Alan and I both caught some fun beads.

After an excellent dinner, we passed by the Knights of Sparta parade where we caught even more beads before making our way back into town for a sazerac at Napoleon House (one of our traditions) and another absinthe at Jean Lafitte's Old Absinthe House (where we learned they cut you off after two).

We found ourselves back in our room around midnight, where we started packing up for the next leg of our anniversary trip adventure. Stay tuned!

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Tracing our house's historical roots

In talking with a woman who is a town historian, I looked up more information to share with her so that we can get added to the historic map she keeps.
As previously discussed, Stephen Cross sold the plot of land our house sits on to Josiah Thing, a blacksmith, in 1795. There is no record of a house being here at the time. Historians, architects, and preservationists all agree this house was moved here pre-1800 (likely in 1797 based on other records). Based on the building materials, the manner in which it was built, its style, and an exhaustive investigation into the original paint layers, original construction is estimated to be in the 1760s. There is a theory this was Cross's house that existed on Water Street, a couple of blocks away, and it was sold to Thing and moved here. Right now I do not have any proof of this, but we do know that Cross's house is no longer at its location, and there's no record of it being torn down. One complication we're encountering is there was a fire in the 1800s that destroyed most records, so a lot of this research is forensic.
While I am more than happy to call our home The Josiah Thing House (what a cool name!), Stephen Cross is the much more interesting character with strong ties to the start of the nation's birth.
From The U.S. Customs Service: A Bicentennial History, by Carl E. Prince:

An examination of the much smaller Massachusetts customhouse in Newburyport -- a tiny hamlet on the rocky and forbidding coast of northern Essex County -- reveals much the same phenomenon: Customs employees drawn from the ranks of the town's elite and working classes cemented a close social affinity between customs operations and the merchant community. But the political infighting around lucrative customs appointments could often become brutal, as it did in this home of the "codfish aristocracy."
The Newburyport customhouse was, from its establishment in 1789, enmeshed in the party politics of the Federalist decade. The political turmoil began when the dominant Federalist party ...

... prevailed on (Alexander) Hamilton to appoint Stephen Cross collector. The Federalists assumed Cross to be one of their own politically, but he proved to be a strong supporter of Hamilton's arch rival, Thomas Jefferson. Given the local independence of the collector, his control over the lower appointments of the customhouse, and thus his political leverage, which Cross decided to use for the Jeffersonian cause, the Newburyport Federalists quickly realized their mistake and decided that Cross had to go.
Still, Cross was a formidable local figure in Newburyport. A member of a well-to-do and high respected local clan, he and his brother were third-generation operators of the family shipbuilding industry. That firm had built two frigates for the Continental Navy during the war. Stephen had also held several local offices during the Revolution. He was for many years (including his tenure as collector) a member of the Massachusetts state legislature, and highly regarded by many of his fellow townsmen.

His removal by Hamilton for "misconduct" in 1792 was tainted by politics. Cross, whom Jefferson returned to office in 1802, claimed that he had been dismissed for political reasons, and the record bears him out. None of his repeated requests to Hamilton for the specific instances of his misconduct were ever satisfactorily answered. A final demand by Cross for a full investigation into the nature of his misconduct was also turned down, yet he was neither prosecuted nor sued for recovery of public monies or violations of federal law, the usual procedure in this period for customs officials charged with fiscal misconduct. Cross himself claimed that he "gave satisfaction to all [in his office] until Mr. Hamilton ... thought it necessary to destroy [him] by obtaining his removal and disgrace.

!!!!!

I mean, COME ON. How amazing would it be if we could trace our home's history to this man? Mary gave me the name of another women in town who runs the house plaque operation for Newburyport, so hopefully I can sync up with her and get to the bottom of this once and for all.

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On getting older and personal identity

I'm 42 years old. Incidentally, the age my cousin's Ouija board once told me I was going to die in a fiery car crash, so if I seem a bit more on edge this year than normal, I have an excuse. Sometimes - like right now, with my hip bursitis flaring up and a kink in my neck from sleeping weird a couple of nights ago - my body feels every one of those 15,000+ days. But for the most part, my mind doesn't feel any older than say, thirty. 

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Alan and I have been together since I was 18 and he was 19, and we've never had kids. Unlike most of our friends and peers, the passage of time hasn't been marked by our kids transitioning from one grade to the next, and let's face it - we've probably gotten a lot more sleep. (Except for that whole debilitating insomnia thing I had going back in 2012.) We moved in together fairly young, too, and developed a routine that's still pretty much how we live  today. I often think it's because our lives don't look radically different than they did when we were first married that it's hard to fathom the fact that we're coming up on eighteen years of marriage in a couple of weeks (having celebrated our twenty-fourth dating anniversary on Sunday).

So back to that whole personal identity thing. You'd think at 42, I'd have it figured out, but I don't.

There's always this question of who I think I should be versus who I really am. And when you add society's expectations on top of those weighty questions, I sometimes struggle with finding the right answer. I'm 42, and my favorite thing to do in the summer now that we live in a coastal community is to throw on a pair of cut off jean shorts, grab my Kindle and a beach chair, drop the top on my convertible, and head out to the beach with music blasting out of my speakers. And while I love dining at high end restaurants, my favorite meal is a plate of wings, fries, and a cold beer.

When I think about some of my favorite days over the last several years, floating in the lake with my sister and my nieces springs to mind. Or hanging out at the river on the 4th of July with friends up in the Russian River. Or heading out to the bay to BBQ oysters and drink champagne until the sun goes down. (For the record, Alan is there in each of these scenarios. For better or worse, we are practically joined at the hip.)

The thing that's brought this to my mind lately is the question of a new vehicle. I love my Mini Cooper Convertible, but it's really only great to drive about two months a year. I've been talking about trading it in, and part of me loves the idea of a luxury vehicle that's warm and soundproof and has a killer smooth ride. But then, I know in my heart, that's not me. I still have sand in my floor mats from our last hurrah to Plum Island back in early October. I'm not a fancy woman, and despite liking fancy things, I'll never be the person who fits the fancy mold.

And I'm finally starting to realize that's okay. I can be the 42 year old woman who rolls through town with oversized sunglasses singing Miranda Lambert at the top of her lungs. I can be the woman who knows more about beer and whiskey than dudes. I can be the woman who's most at home in flip flops instead of heels.

I can be me.

* * *

I saw an article today with a passage that perfectly sums up how I'm starting to feel about my place in the world and the space I occupy. From Gen X Will Not Go Quietly:

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Kitchen renovation

WARNING: PICTURE HEAVY POST AHEAD

(Ignore the arrows on them though as I pulled everything from my Instagram account and you can't actually scroll through them.)

When we first found this house online, I'd dismissed it because of the galley kitchen and parking situation (we don't have parking at our actual house - it's down the street, about 200 feet away). But knowing that we were going to Newburyport anyway to look at a couple of other houses - including one that on paper was my dream home (it reminded me so much of our first house in Dublin) - I asked our realtor to add this one to our itinerary. 

The house I loved was a bust (it was enormous, feeling so much larger than the room count and square footage indicated), and the other houses we looked at just didn't spark our imaginations. You've heard the story of our viewing of this place though - how we walked in and I separated from our realtor and Alan, wandering around on my own, only to meet up again outside and declare that I loved it. What I didn't tell you was Alan really wasn't on board. He hated the kitchen, declaring it entirely too small and needing to be gutted completely. Thankfully, the selling agent had created a virtual tour of the house that I used to help me convince Alan otherwise. It was small, but it was manageable. And besides, I said, we could remodel it in a couple of years. It'll be fine, I said.

(Note: the photos from the listing were significantly Photoshopped to make the house appear to have more natural light than it actually does. In very few cases are the rooms actually the color the listing presented.) 

Famous last words, right?

First off, the washer that was in the kitchen reeked and nothing I did could make it smell clean. And while the dryer supposedly vented outside, it also vented inside. Every time I used it, our appliance garage turned into a steam cubby, and our slate colored countertops became covered in a fine layer of lint (when we brought the cats home from the Merrimack River Valley Feline Rescue Society this became one of Lihue's favorite spots because it was so warm). It was annoying, and we talked at length about us knocking that cabinet down and moving the washer and dryer into the catch all mudroom room nearby. We even called out a plumber to tell us how much it would cost to put in all the necessary pipes.

Little did we know what was coming next.

It's really quite comical when you think about it, but that winter, one by one, our appliances started failing. And not in a "we can live with this for awhile" way either. Our Sub-Zero fridge leaked all over the floor. The fan on our stovetop would freeze up and not work at all (it was one of those models that you could raise and lower and sometimes it wouldn't do either). And then, the coils in our wall oven caught on fire. That was a fun night. The lone hold out at this point was the dishwasher, which I praised for its longevity. And then it too gave up the ghost.

And yes, we could have replaced our appliances, but I priced them out and to get decent models that would fit in the spaces we already had, we were looking at investing thousands upon thousands of dollars into a kitchen we didn't love and had planned to remodel in the future anyway. In the end, rather than dump a not insignificant amount of money into it, we made the decision to call in an architect.

That was its own brand of fun.

It took months for one of them to get back to me. MONTHS. Business is booming right now in our area, which is evidenced by the fact that at one point on our block alone there were four houses being remodeled. Some architects weren't interested in the job, while others told me the budget we'd laid out was nowhere near what we would need to do what we wanted to do. This was a rather upsetting wakeup call since we had a number of friends who'd remodeled their kitchens and our budget was over what they'd spent. Here, however, it was a drop in the bucket of what we'd need, considering we wanted to knock down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to create a much more open area.

Photo from listing
The previous owner used it as her den, while we used it as a dining room.

I wish I could tell you that was our only issue.

Oh, how I wish.

A week before we left for our cruise out of Puerto Rico last year, the pipe burst in our master bathroom, turning what we thought was going to be an expensive kitchen renovation into an enormously expensive kitchen and master bathroom renovation.

Finally, in April, we found an architect who could fit us into his schedule, and then in June, we started demo. Right away we knew we wanted to take down the plaster ceiling in the dining room to reveal the original wooden beams overhead. During demo, we also discovered a few original beams from the 1700s that we hadn't accounted for in our kitchen design which drastically changed the layout and function of the space. We also decided to move the powder room from right off the dining space to the multi-purpose mudroom where we were moving the laundry room, thus turning that space into two rooms that now needed double the plumbing and electricity. The powder room became a walk-in pantry space which was sorely needed since we aren't doing any upper cabinets.

Along the way, we hired a supposedly reputable cabinet maker, and after months of not seeing a final design (during which we were straight up lied to repeatedly about the process), we fired them, putting us with a gutted kitchen and no cabinets to go in it. In October, we found another local mom & pop company and hired them. They started installing our cabinets right after Christmas.

Today, our carpenters are working on trim in this space while we wait for our soapstone countertops and sink to come in, and we continue to cook five times a week on a hot place, a toaster oven, and an Instant Pot. For eight months, we've lived like squatters, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

One of the house's original exterior windows from the late 1700s was hidden inside the walls. We've kept it and are trying to come up with a cool art project we can do with it.

This is the original lathe that was in the wall between the original powder room (now pantry), and what will become our dining room when this is all finished. We also kept this split board lathe. Not sure what we'll do with it either, but we love it.

The original design for this space called for a large island. Ever since having one at our place on Leinster Road in Dublin, I've coveted another one. Unfortunately, with the discovery of the beam on the left of this image, our wall of upper cabinets that would take the kitchen space into this room had to be scrapped, leaving the island floating off on its own with no relation to the rest of the space. The other problem was its size in the room. I have a thing about long, skinny islands (I hate them), and the size of this one pinched the walkways around it. To make this work, we were going to have to make it about six to eight inches narrower, and pull it back into the kitchen. We ultimately decided it didn't work, which meant it was time to get (even more) creative. We'd basically thrown out the architect's drawings by this point, so what was another audible?

In the end, we swung it around and pushed it up against the wall and beam, creating a large peninsula in our kitchen. Sitting there on that sweltering July morning, we realized that it was perfect. I kind of felt like a heel since I'd told our architect I hated peninsulas and not to be bother showing me one (he did anyway, and I dismissed it out of hand). I wrote to him to issue a mea culpa immediately.

Framing goes in for the separate powder and laundry rooms.

When it came time to turn our bank of two window into three, our carpenters discovered a lot of rot from the mid-1990s renovation of this space, and had to tear out the majority of the wall and rebuild it. Not exactly part of the plan either, but you do what you have to.

Our makeshift kitchen as we prep for a week away in Maine with my family.

Deciding on cabinet paint colors. Our original pick was Newburyport Blue from Benjamin Moore, but it was a bit too "royal" blue for my liking, so we investigated going with a creamier beige. Revere Pewter - also BM - was a contender for a long time until I brought home a can of Hale Navy and said, "Nope, this is the one."

 Insulation, drywall, and plaster were the next three phases of the renovation. Everyone warned us about how awful the insulation would smell, so we boarded the cats for the day at the vet and I spent a couple of hours working out of a coffee shop. By the time I returned home at 5:30, the insulation was up, and it didn't smell at all how I'd feared. Instead, being a soybean based product, our house smelled a lot like fried tofu from a Chinese restaurant. For several days. What I didn't anticipate, was how badly the plaster was going to smell. Thank goodness it was still warm enough to open the windows because it really did a number on me.

I struggled mightily when it came to choosing floors for the laundry room and the powder room. I wanted something that felt organic and would look good against our antique floors, while also feeling a bit special. Oh, and it had to be (relatively) inexpensive because a lot of my flooring budget was going into the master bathroom penny hex tile. In the end, I found these 18x24 slate tiles at Home Depot, and couldn't be happier with them.

Getting electricity hooked up in this space in November was a game changer, and really made it feel like things were moving toward the finish line. We even moved our temporary kitchen into here and cooked Thanksgiving dinner, eating it on our patio table that we'd brought indoors.

The day our team started re-installing our antique floors for refinishing was also another turning point. We'd lived with the Adventech for months, and I'd forgotten what having floors did for a space. 

I was astounded by how different our floors looked after being sanded with one coat of varnish. They're covered now until the end of the project, when our amazing floor guys Rob and Matt will come back to finish them up. I love how amazing they look, and we're not even finished. Seeing the wood grain again after stripping away varnish that was hundreds of years old has breathed new life into them.

On December 30, we woke to freezing temps and a snow storm. After everything we'd gone through to get cabinets in the first place, I had very little faith that our install was going to happen. Then, around 11 a.m. I saw this truck pull up in front of our house and a crew jump out. I literally cried tears of joy. It had been such a long and arduous process to get to this point, and it was a huge relief to see it finally happening. I can't speak highly enough of the folks at Curtis Cabinetry in Georgetown. From the very beginning, they have been a joy to work with. Our cabinets are beautiful, and the team who did the installation was great. It's never easy having someone you don't know come into your home - much less for days at a time - but Taylor and the rest of the guys were warm and respectful. If you're in the North Shore of Massachusetts and are looking for kitchen cabinets, I strongly recommend you give them a call.

The former powder room begins its new life as a pantry.

And this, my friends, is where we are today. Our countertops are being fabricated, and our appliances are just waiting to be picked up. I can hear our carpenters in the other room working on trim. I get so happy every time I look at this picture because it's more than I could have ever hoped for. But even more so, it's exactly what we wanted for this space.

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