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Last weekend, Brian and I attended our first Crosstie Arts Festival. It was so great!

It’s a large festival with lots of artist tents, and the artwork is really excellent. We saw pottery, sculpture, paintings, photography, and many other media all living together in harmony. There was also great fair and regional food, plus this cool train for kids:

We had beautiful weather, too. Good job, Cleveland!

As part of this year’s festivities, the Delta Arts Alliance has an exhibit up at the Ellis Theater on Court Street of Floyd Shaman’s work (Floyd was an incredibly gifted artist who happened to live across the street from my grandmother!). If you are in Cleveland, please go check it out. It is a really fantastic exhibit of amazing pieces from the family’s private collection. Brian and I helped move the work from the Shamans’ house over to the Ellis — it was a very interesting experience to interact with the work in that way (touching, assembling, hoisting, etc.)! The exhibit will be up until May 15. You can stop by in the mornings or call DAA  at 662-843-3344 for an afternoon appointment. Don’t be shy! It’s worth it.

Look at this totally cute flip book that Brian made at school!

Brian is doing a lot of interesting projects in his art classes at Delta State.

This semester, one of his classes is 2-D Design, and they were assigned a project inspired by the work of Chuck Close — the instructor took photos of everyone, then they cut them into little squares, then they hand-drew enlargements of the squares onto bigger squares using various patterns, then pieced them all back together onto a board.

Here’s a close-up of the piece so you can see the squares.

Brian’s final piece was accepted into the student art show:

If you’re in Cleveland, go over to the Wright Art Gallery at DSU and check out the show. It’s there until April 23!

There’s a lot of great work on display. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Brian will create over the next few years!

Meet our new town.

It’s a very different experience for us to live so close to the country…

But there are advantages. Check out our new friends!

We met some people who have an entire flock of chickens roaming around their yard. It was so fun to meet “the girls,” as they are lovingly called!

The couple who keeps these chickens can actually tell which girl laid which egg based on the color and shape. Awesome!

Cleveland has a little downtown area:

We also have a couple of nice municipal parks. When I was a little girl, my grandfather used to take me out to Bear Pen Park to feed bits of Wonderbread to the ducks:

And, of course, we have significant family roots here.

This is the library where my grandmother was the director for many, many years.

She even has her own room inside:

We like going in there to visit with her. She is missed by so many in this town. It’s hard to believe she has been gone for an entire year. I often wonder what she would think about all this business with us living in Cleveland!

Hi everyone. Remember us? Sorry we haven’t updated in so long. We’ve been very busy with some major life changes.

First of all, we bought this:

That’s pretty crazy in and of itself, but what’s even crazier is its location: Cleveland, Mississippi. After being here a few months, Brian decided to attend art school (which he is loving) at Delta State University here in Cleveland, so here we are! We got the house at the beginning of February, and my mom and I went to Austin to fetch all our stuff from storage. Pre-stuff, our house looked like this:

Ahhh… so fresh, clean, and full of potential….

Now, our house looks like this:

Gah!! At first I had these really lofty ideas that we would be totally unpacked and organized in a couple of weeks, but those dreams were swiftly destroyed by the crushing force of reality and the fact that we have soooooo much stuff. Whoops! I’m no longer on a timeline, but someday before we move away, I’m hoping we can actually have people over comfortably.

Anyway, it’s all very exciting because we have lots of space and a yard with room for a garden and a fence to contain my canine sister Trixie when she visits, and I have a new stove and a laundry room and a lot of other fun homeownery things I’ve not had as an adult. We’ll share more about our new home as we slowly (but surely!) get set up!

Also:

Brian and I got married!

We met (at a Starbucks in Dupont Circle) on February 26, 2005, so we decided to marry on Friday, February 26, 2010. Brian had class that morning, so we chose a very simple, very small mini-wedding at the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is another little Delta town about an hour from Cleveland. It was a truly lovely, low-key affair, which was just what we wanted. My parents attended in person, and Brian’s mother, sisters, nieces & nephews, and brothers-in-law attended via Skype. Hooray!

Our ceremony (performed by a Justice of the Peace) was just about 3 minutes long, and then we said goodbye to our web conference guests:

… and went to Giardina’s (the Alluvian’s restaurant) for dinner, cake, and champagne.

Then Brian and I spent the weekend at the Alluvian for our mini-honeymoon and enjoyed the amazing Alluvian Spa and many of Greenwood’s other exciting attractions, including downtown Greenwood:

Note the dentist office with the Coca-Cola ad!

We also visited the Cottonlandia Museum:

And that was that. It was a perfect weekend! Thanks, the Mississippi Delta!

More adventures to come!

Big day today.

This was just a quick trip, but we went off the path a bit to do some exploring. We went up to Bishopville, S.C., to check out Pearl Fryar’s topiary garden — both because my mom recommended it after seeing the documentary A Man Named Pearl and because we certainly couldn’t resist anyone who shares a name with our Pearl. This Pearl apparently has no training in the art of topiary, but he just felt moved to start doing it and suddenly he was doing topiaries for the whole neighborhood and people were making movies about him. The garden is just in his yard and is quite extensive. In fact, his work is everywhere on the whole street:

Then on Pearl’s actual property, the topiaries just go on and awesomely on:

That’s just a small corner of the yard. Amazing!!

After that, we decided to head over to Congaree National Park, home of the continent’s largest old-growth floodplain forest, champion trees, swampy goodness, and so many mosquitoes that they have this sign:

Eek. As you can see, we were pretty safe to go enjoy the park, so we walked for a bit out on the elevated boardwalk through the forest.

I really loved Congaree even though we only spent a tiny amount of time there. The air was sooooo fresh (thanks, trees), and there was this lovely balance of silence and lots of thriving forest activity sound (woodpeckers, squirrels, falling leaves, etc.). Plus we got to see a bunch of cypress knees:

The next day was Halloween and we spent most of it at the wedding (which was, after all, the point of this trip). Look at this beautiful location:

We had a great time reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. Plus, the bride and groom left on a boat as we all stood on the pier ringing tiny wedding bells. So lovely!

We headed out the following day and didn’t make very many stops because we had some lame, rainy weather (the worst for a meandering road trip). However, we can always make time for a giant Solo cup:

I mean, come on.

So! We are back in Cleveland, Mississippi, for now. Further bulletins as events warrant!

Hey, y’all. We’re on our way up to South Carolina for what is sure to be a delightful weekend including a lovely wedding! This is going to be a quick trip, so we each packed one tiny little bag and shared a garment bag and that’s it. Quelle différence! Packing, getting into our en-route hotel (a lovely Ramada Limited in Douglasville, Georgia), etc etc etc is a million times easier without a stuffed-to-the-gills Pearl. She’s got room to spare this time!

We’ll update more when we have more fun tales to share. Today was just driving; the most interesting thing we saw was a bowl of Halloween candy at our hotel’s front desk.

We had so much fun today at Avery Island, home of Tabasco!

This is one intense, Tabasco-loving place. Our adventure began at the Tabasco Visitor Center, where we were treated to a few small exhibits and a brief talk and video explaining Tabasco’s history and how it is made.

Okay, between you and me, I’ve never been that big a fan of Tabasco, and neither has Brian. But how it’s made is really interesting! First it starts with these peppers:

They are Tabasco peppers and they are grown there on Avery Island and also in South America (where there is a similar climate and they can grow year-round). They save seeds, though, so even the South American peppers are originally from Avery Island. All the peppers are hand-harvested, and workers are each issued one of these:

That is le petit bâton rouge, a stick painted the correct shade of red for perfect pepper ripeness. When the peppers match le bâton, they are harvested, then they are ground up along with a small amount of salt (also from Avery Island; there is a huge salt mine underneath the island — allegedly the salt mine is as deep as Mount Everest is high) into a “mash” :

The mash is then placed into these white oak barrels to age (at this point, at the South American pepper farms, the barrels are transported to Avery Island — all Tabasco ages at the warehouse there). The barrels are topped with a thick layer of salt from the island and allowed to ferment. The salt layer allows gases to escape without letting any impurities in. They sit there aging for about 3 years!

Another interesting aspect is that they are a no-waste company (which they reminded us many times!). When the barrels are no longer usable, they are chopped up into wood chips for cooking and sold in the extensive on-island gift shop.

Anyway, after aging for 3 years, the mash is then strained, mixed with vinegar and more salt from the island, and placed into another barrel where is it stirred intermittently for the next 28 days:

And then, finally, it is bottled and sent all over the world!

We got to walk through a wall of windows into the bottling plant; they were bottling the jalapeño variety that day. Yay!

The original Tabasco flavor is the only one that goes through the aging and everything, by the way.

After all that, we visited the gift shop where we could sample a bunch of products. They had all the Tabasco flavors, of course, but also some products made with Tabasco, including chili and ice cream. Brian tried some Tabasco cola, and I think the pictures tell the whole story:

We also learned that the word tabasco is actually from a Native American word meaning “land of hot and humid,” which quite aptly describes the climate on Avery Island. Check out the steam on Brian’s glasses and the camera lens from this photo snapped on our way out of the chilly, air-conditioned gift shop into the Tabasco-like outdoor climate:

Now, that was a lot of fun for one day, but it wasn’t over yet!!

The dude who invented Tabasco, Edmund McIlhenny, has spawned generations of family members who remain heavily involved in Tabasco sauce production. They select the best pepper plants and still own the company and live on the island and everything. But seeing how they are all zillionaires due to the wild success of Tabasco, it’s no wonder that some of the McIlhennys have chosen a slightly different path. One such McIlhenny was Edmund’s son Edward, who ran the company from 1898-1949. He did a good job of managing Tabasco, but he also pursued his other passions as a naturalist and conservationist, and he established Jungle Gardens on Avery Island as a refuge for the snowy egret (the refuge helped pull the snowy egret back from the brink of extinction). Jungle Gardens also contains many interesting exotic plants, a nearly 1000-year-old Buddha statue, and a lot (and I mean A LOT) of these:

YAY! I love an alligator. They are so cute! These are just little ones, too, so they are not very scary, although I’m sure they could hurt you if they felt like moving, which they did not because it was nine million degrees out. We didn’t see any snowy egrets because they had already migrated south, but we saw some other exciting birds:

And some really large bamboo:

After all that, we finally headed north toward Jackson, Mississippi. We have family events going on for the next few days, then we’ll be regrouping. Stay tuned!

We made a couple of exciting stops on our way from Houston, Texas, to New Iberia, La.

First, we stopped at the Fire Museum of Texas in Beaumont, Texas, because it has this:

That is the world’s third largest fire hydrant (it’s 24 feet tall).

We continued on I-10 to Louisiana!

We then visited the Frog Capital of the World, Rayne, La.

We had dinner at Prejean’s in Lafayette before heading down to our Days Inn in New Iberia. We have some exciting things planned for the next few days, but we may not have internet until after the weekend… so don’t worry if you don’t hear from us. We’ll be back!