Happy Hollie Day

Ms Hollie & I celebrated her birthday in low-key fashion. We went to the Broadmoor Library, then to one of our favorite Chinese restaurants (Green Tea) to pick up some take out. Ms H was in a bubble tea mood - she'd seen on their website that they have them now. We liked the food but Ms H was unimpressed with the bubble tea - she hoped for the pineapple to be more smoothie, rather than chunks. (I wonder if the guy behind the counter just made it wrong?) Anyways we'll try bubble tea from somewhere else another time.

We have a couple of DVDs to watch over the Holiday season.

Entresol Speakeasy

Colonial era buildings in New Orleans sometimes had an extra story called an "entresol". The ground floor of buildings in the old town was often given to commerce, with living space upstairs. The entresol was between the two, serving as warehouse space - sort of an attic in the middle rather than top of a building. They were often short in height, sometimes with ceilings too low for taller people to fully stand up in.

Some old buildings constructed with entresols have been modified to raise the ground floor ceilings or otherwise rearrange the interior to effectively eliminate them. Other enteresols have been long blocked off, but some others have continued still in use.

The Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street is an example; the entresol story here has the half-circle windows made to look like fan lights over the ground floor doorways.



I dreamed that a friend had opened a bar in the entresol of an old building - a speakeasy, since it couldn't be up to code, as it was a particularly low ceiling only about 4 feet tall, and people had to be hunched over in there, had no windows, and it was only accessible via twisty dark corridors and old narrow staircases.

My friend tried to encourage me to patronize his place. I begged off, pointing out that it would be too difficult for me since I hobble around with a cane. (Sometimes in dreams I walk with a cane, other dreams I'm more mobile and lythe like yesteryear.) Really that was in part an excuse, because even in nimble youth I might have gone once just to look at it and never went back. There are fans of dimly-lit spooky bars in New Orleans, but I was never one of them. Indeed I've never been much for bars in general except when one happened to be the place where good live music was happening.

Back to my dream - I expressed skepticism at my friend's business model of a hard-to-get-to and hard-to-be-in bar, but he argued that in Venice there are bars that can only be reached by boat that have flourished for 200 years. I thought that analogy unconvincing but decided not to argue and wished him well.