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Tin was born blocks away from where Michael Jackson was born, and now lives blocks away from Louis Armstrong was born. I have to say I’m fond of both musicians.

Today, instead of saving the toy trumpet for a Hanukkah gift, we gave it to him and you’d have thought we handed him gold. He has not let this go all day long and he keeps saying trumpet trumpet trumpet and improvising the notes when he can’t get his small mouth to blow hard enough to make noise. He’s got the act down too, as he has been practicing in front of the mirror with his flute or drumstick for weeks now.

Here’s to our budding musician, may he live in a world that does not relegate world class musicians to a hand to mouth existence while blowhards are paid millions to espouse hatred and incite fear (read: the person who I will not mention – starts with an S).

I walked the dogs this morning in the drizzle but that was better than the storm that we had all night which caused the electricity to go out in the middle of the night and made our bedroom feel like we were breathing stale air. I ran across neighbors on their porch because of the electricity, they were reading the newspaper (a vestige of the past) and I asked if the Republicans also took the Senate as the headline of a Times Picayune in a driveway said only GOP TAKES HOUSE. They said we won by a small margin.

Later when the lights came back on, I skimmed the election outcome and saw that the Tea Party was able to make a little noise. Beware of the emperor who has no clothes is all I have to say to those who follow such nonsense – we are not going to have anarchy and we are not going to have libertarians running our government. It just isn’t going to happen. So within the confines of what we do have, let’s make that work.

Frankly, I’m glad Obama now has a few enemies that he can point his long, thin fingers at because I’m sick of everyone pointing the finger at him as if he caused this horrendous global economic meltdown. My neighbors said voters are shortsighted, and I said well so is the rest of the world.

We’re all enamored with the latest gadget, the newest way to consume entertainment, the person or company who seems charmed and able to make zillions of dollars without hardly working up a sweat. It’s all about the zing zang, the now, the latest fad.

But fads don’t last. That is fact. And the tea party will be relegated to the bottom of the news just like Rush Limbaugh was and soon we’ll see that values last and good companies that make products we want succeed, and that a lot of money has never been a metric for success no more than accessorizing yourself with the latest gadget (there is always a better one coming).

Tin and I went to see his nanny’s Day of the Dead art show this evening. He saw her from behind and ran to her but when she turned and had her face painted, he sort of got the willies and backed off, but then he was compelled to keep going back to her. It’s odd to walk into your nanny’s house and see a side of her that you don’t see in her daily life – we know she’s an artist, but you don’t get a sense for her talent when she is drawing pumpkins and black cats for Tin’s wall, and you suspect she has a love life, but suddenly you see a full embodiment of another human in front of you, and what was perhaps even odder was that while Tin recognized her from behind, I didn’t, she sounded hip and cool and mature (we don’t think of this when she is watching our 19 month old).

Just an hour earlier, I had been sitting at my dining table speaking to a friend and neighbor and we were commiserating about stuff going on right now in our lives when I just started choking up about my mom. I told her that I just need to make it through the first anniversary so that I can maybe get out of this sadness hovering over me these days. So when I was looking at the art on the wall and I saw the nanny had painted a colorful and wonderful rendition of Oshun, I bought the painting on the spot.

Tatjana has a Spanish saint that Paloma’s mom Paquita gave her in Madrid – it is Saint Pancracio (a child martyr and his prayer is St. Pancracio, pray for all teenagers that their faith may be as strong as yours, strong enough to lead them through all the trials of their life). She lights a tea candle every day in memory of my mom and of Wolfie and Arlene. Well now I have my own saint, Oshun, who is more an undergoddess than a saint, but how appropriate that the elders in Cuban lore consider Oshun to represent the unseen mother present at every gathering.

Oshun’s elements are moisture, water and attraction and she is a reminder to all of us that no one is an enemy to water. How appropriate for living in the heartbeat of water, New Orleans, and near the bayou.

Oshun is coming home after the show is over. Home where she belongs.

I went and voted today and thought about this whole election process. Is it me or are you just disgusted with the amount of money that is spent on campaigning – from the most local politician to the highest rank, it is really abhorrent to think about the money that is spent.

Do you know what I heard last night in passing when T turned on CNN for a few minutes? That Sarah Palin will make $20 million this year from her speaking engagements. OMG! You could put a chimp in her place and it would be more entertaining.

Something is seriously wrong and I have to say it is NOT Obama, it is the status quo – hemorrhaging cash to say a bunch of nasty stuff about other politicians is just the most base form of public discourse. At the same time, we are all, even Democrats, berating Obama because he is not saying anything. I’d take the strong silent type over this nonsense any day. Meanwhile, public institutions in this city like the University of New Orleans, the SPCA, and every nonprofit that is actually speaking about things that matter are being left out in the rain. Good grief this is the saddest state of affairs I have ever witnessed.

Is it me? Or are you happy that election day is over come midnight tonight?

We went to a fun costume party on Saturday night and we met a pediatrician who told us some very funny stories but perhaps the most memorable was about a mother who said she was starting to feel ostracized because she was still breastfeeding her eight year old daughter. I’m still giggling about that one. But seriously, being a mother is a constant reminder to summon all the patience you can find in your body and then remember all of what you have read – he is not hitting you in the face because he is bad, he needs to learn how to deal with anger and frustration; he is not throwing the block you put on his tower across the room because he hates you, he is learning how to play with blocks AND people; he is not spitting the water back out from his sippy cup for any other reason that he can and he doesn’t understand consequences (like a soaking wet shirt).

Last night, T and I were sitting in the living room trying to get a grip, a reality check that we have started the terrible twos and that there is no turning back. On a daily basis we are being confronted with new intonations of the word no, as well as new reasons to use the word. All of it is surprising to us who just months ago had a pretty sweet boy who occasionally was cranky.

But I read this quote and I had to smile because the pediatrician’s wife told me point blank at the party to be present in their lives, it goes by so quickly and ain’t that the truth:

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.  ~Christopher Morley

We’re in the midst of some weather transition and it is perfectly aligned with the time change this weekend. We’re not lamenting an end to summer, but we are to this weekend, which was so breathtakingly gorgeous, it was hard to get inside and stay there. As a matter of fact, when I got back from my therapeutic yoga class on Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t force myself inside so I got my neighbor to sit out on her porch and we observed the goings on with her binoculars. You can’t live on the bayou and not have binoculars at the ready.

This morning the sun was piercing through a thick layer of clouds, which made for a spectacular sunrise and then there was a strange exposed type light as I walked the dogs to the park. It seemed otherworldly as if someone had forgotten that night turns to day and it had paused at dawn.

I was regaled in the park by one of my fellow dog walkers who told me a tale of embezzlement and dirty deeds in her workplace and wanted to know my professional opinion (interesting), and then the dogs and I got back home just as a few drops started to fall. It is late in the afternoon and the raindrops are still plink plink plinking down the side of the metal roof.

We’re headed to the beach this weekend and the temperature is supposed to be in the 40s at night! Nothing like sweaters on the beach!

Jonathan Alter: “Logic can convince but only emotion can motivate.”

When I first became in charge of directing others’ work, I read a few books about leadership, not a lot, not Business School 101, but more like who are the good leaders and who aren’t – one tip I remembered is leaders lead by offering hope – and one thing I do know is that when you’re not hearing hope, you’re hearing the opposite.

With All Saints Day we have moved into the period of our darker selves, which will end around May day when we move back into the light. Dark is not necessarily a pejorative term here, you could think of it as your inner self, your cave, your interior. The dark quality of this period is usually countered with the candles and lights you encounter in nearly everyone’s religious holidays during this season. But it’s also a good time to home in, and get squared away with your innards and now that we had a day to let our skeletons out of the closet, maybe giving that closet a good house cleaning is in order.

I spent Sunday in therapeutic thai yoga the counterpart to acrobatic yoga and afterwards, I felt like some inside things had shifted enough to the light, enough to make me want to continue the process.

This is our time for rest, repose, nesting, cocooning, and I’m looking forward to the coziness that the season offers.

We opened the partying season with Halloween here in New Orleans and now visitors beware, we now begin the every day is a reason to celebrate period in New Orleans that will not stop until next summer. So be prepared. Aside from Voodoo Fest, Voodoo on the Bayou, Krewe of Boo, Voodoo Festival, and everyone and their mother throwing a party for some reason or other and everyone costuming because it was the first opportunity to do so this weekend – we have launched the season in style with WWOZ calling themselves WW Ozzy and everyone putting on the dog in some twisted fashion.

On a macro level that is, on a micro level we began Saturday morning in a time out because Tin is 19 months old and everything seems to rattle him and send him into a tailspin of no’s, but a nice long bike ride to the lakefront seemed to soothe the savage tugs inside of him. Saturday night, a Serbian friend was in town and we all went to a costume party in the warehouse district – we decided to make the entire weekend PIRATE WEEKEND:

Sunday morning we got up determined to start the day better and so we put on costumes from the get go, but Tin was having none of it, he abhored the very mention of costume and would go running into his room with the lights on his shoes that his Uncle bought him signaling a meltdown.

Someone had stolen a jack o lantern off of the front porch and smashed it down the block, it brought up the sore subject of when one neighbor’s pumpkins were all stolen and thrown into the bayou, or when the other neighbor had jack o lanterns going all down the stairs and someone smashed each one and I decided not to go into that negative place because one year someone carved all of my pumpkins and surprised us every day – so life is not all about the stupids, sometimes it is about the stupendous. We forced little Tin into a half-ass pirates costume and stopped short at the sash that made him go into a tailspin yet again and we headed to the French Quarter:

It was a huge success as Tin is obsessed with his Goodnight NOLA book and we saw all of the things that are in that book as well as in his Great Beignet book – we saw the Steamboat Natchez and walked up right as it was rolling out into the Muddy Mississippi with the paddle wheels churning round and round, we saw St. Louis Cathedral and the big clock, we saw Cafe du Monde and beignets and pralines, and we even saw a few Ralph and Roxanne’s (roaches).

Tin was just amazed by the band playing in the French Market cafe, and mesmerized by the silver man who handed him a lollipop, and then the coup de grace was the busker on the Moonwalk who let Tin touch his horn as he played the blues (Tin drew such a crowd of tourists who wanted photographs of the little boy and the old blues playing musician that the guy’s tip jar started filling up – I winked at him and said, he’s good for business, eh?):

At the end of the day, we didn’t make it across the bayou to the Fortier Park kiddie trick or treat fiesta, nor did we make it around the corner to the court where they were projecting the Saints beating the Steelers, but we did sit on the porch of the LaLa with two jack o lanterns that survived and we handed out candy and enjoyed the trick or treaters who did come by.

Argh, such a night.