My Two Lives

Happy Lundi Gras, y’all!!

February 12, 2024

(This article contains affiliate links. If you buy something from the links I may receive a small commission for your purchase.)

Tomorrow is Mardi Gras Day in my hometown, New Orleans, which makes today Lundi Gras. The Monday (Lundi en Français) before Mardi Gras used to be a day to rest and recover from the massive parades over the previous weekend. It became its own day of celebration in 1987, and NewOrleans.com has the details on the newer Lundi Gras celebrations.

Tonight’s Parades

Tonight we have the parades for the Krewe of Proteus and the Krewe of Orpheus. You can watch the parades on NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune Parade Cam. They’ll be streaming from The Times-Picayune building just east of Harmony Circle (formerly named for a losing Confederate general) beginning at 5:15 pm Central Time, just keep in mind that it will take some time for the parades to get to Harmony Circle.

Orpheus will have the terrific twosome of Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka as their celebrity monarchs, and I’m going to try to get the stream hosts to shout “Spice up your life!” at Neil. Why, you ask? Because he danced to that song from the Spice Girls in the third 60th anniversary Doctor Whoo special, The Giggle.

Mardi Gras Day

You can stream the Mardi Gras Day festivities from several sources in La Nouvelle Orléans. In addition to several marching groups, there are parades in New Orleans for the Krewes of Zulu and Rex (the King of Carnival) as well as truck parades for the Krewes of Elks Orleanians and Crescent City.

NOLA.com’s Parade Cam will stream Zulu and Rex, and it will be a nice way to watch the major New Orleans parades on Fat Tuesday. Local NBC affiliate WDSU (a sister station to ABC affiliate WCVB, the station I watch for local news in Boston) will add coverage for some of the marching clubs, black masking indians, and truck parades. WDSU will also cover the parades in the surrounding area for a more inclusive day of coverage. NOLA.com’s stream will start at 8 am Central Time and WDSU will start streaming both on their website and the Very Local app beginning at 6:00 am Central Time. (WDSU is a sister station to WCVB, the station I watch for local news in Boston.)

Do you want some New Orleans-esque food for Mardi Gras?

Mardi Gras donuts from Mardi Gras Day 2023 My family has two food traditions for Mardi Gras Day. We start with Mardi Gras donuts, which are similar to beignets but without the yeast. The recipe is super simple with just three ingredients. The picture is the donuts I made for last year’s Mardi Gras Day.

Important note: Once again, I forgot that the recipe I got from my aunt doesn’t include any liquid. I’ll have to correct the recipe in the coming months, and when I do I’ll post the update here. I’ll also write a stand-alone article with the corrected recipe for Mardi Gras 2025, which will be on 4 March 2025.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg
1 teaspoon granulated sugar

Mix the ingredients.
Roll thin and cut into triangles or diamond shapes. Cut a vent slit or two, depending on the size of the triangle.
Fry till crispy in vegetable oil heated to 3500℉.
Dust with powdered (confectioner’s) sugar.
Bon appetite.

They go great with a nice cup of Community New Orleans Blend if you’re able to get it. I buy it from Amazon and it’s the coffee I brew every day. It doesn’t contain chicory, but it’s the coffee my family made when I was younger. You can add plain chicory to get coffee and chicory, but the brand of chicory I used was discontinued, and I haven’t found a new brand I love yet. If you like cold brewed coffee, I can promise you that New Orleans Blend is delicious brewed cold.

Our other Mardi Gras Day food tradition is a simple lunch to take to the parades: fried chicken. Not only is it a great thing to eat between parades out on the route, but you can also have it for dinner if you have any left. Just serve it with a simple salad, and it’s a (fairly) nutritious meal on a very full day.

I could fry up a batch of air fryer wing dings (I need to post that recipe soon), but I bought a tray of fried chicken while I was making a few groceries.

Have a great Mardi Gras and laissez les bons temps rouler, y’all!

One more quick note

Thanks to a nice long bit of jury duty, I’m finally getting some gear for recording demos of some of my songs. I’ll be posting a teaser clip for Somewhere Someone Cares in the coming days to YouTube so you may want to subscribe to my channel at @JMHardin and click the bell so you get notified when it drops. I also post cute videos of Babe, my upstairs neighbor’s cat, so if you like cat videos you may have another reason to follow my channel there.

Holy fuque

January 18, 2024

The court case I’m on the jury for got a continuance to next week, and tonight I could work on my music again in preparation for trying to lay down some demos. My first demo is going to be of my song Somewhere Someone Cares, which featured prominently in my short story He’s With the Band, but I had never managed to work out the chord progression for the chorus or the bridge.

I was a piano player when I first wrote the song, but it really needs a band to play it, especially since the main theme works better on guitars than on a piano. I’ve never had a band of my own, so the song has never been performed. Since it’s never been performed, I’ve never worked out the chords for the whole song. The verse chords are pretty much locked down, although may I need to change one of the B-section chords. I had an idea of what the chords would be for the chorus, but they never felt quite right.

Tonight I pulled out my guitar and folding keyboard and worked out what the chords should be for the chorus. Having all the chords written out, I ran through the solo section and got to work on the bridge. Amazingly enough, the bridge looks like it’s just two chords repeated. I looked at changing the chords for the second line of the bridge, but it ended up just trying to be more complex than it really needs to be. Of course, being a good proggish song, the key changes a bit. Am for the A-section of the verse, Dm for the B-section, straight A major for the chorus, and Dm for the bridge. I guess my love for progressive rock came out a bit for this song.

Now all I need to do is get my computer ready to lay down some tracks and learn how to play it well enough to record them. And, Goddess help me, I need to work on the vocals as I come up with a way to lay them down. I haven’t done any proper singing in over 20 years. Yipes!

And I still need to work on the other song I want to make a demo for. That tune needs a ton of prep work, especially since it may be a hard rock song with a Hammond B3-ish track and some synth tracks to try and pass for a good R&B horn section. Why on earth can I not write simple songs that are easy to do demos of? (laughter)

If you want to get updates on the songs and be able to find out where to hear them, watch this space. I hope to have a demo of Somewhere Someone Cares finished by the time Ncuti Gatwa’s first full season of Doctor Who drops in May.

The latest bit of Babeliciousness is finally online

January 18, 2024

I finally got the video of Babe the kitty, or the “goddamned kitty cat” as George Carlin once put it, is finally up. It’s her proper introduction to the white stuff she saw falling from inside, and she’s definitely not like other felines on YouTube. A lot of cats get into the snow and have a ball with the cold white stuff, but not Babe. Her primary human put her down on the snowy ground, and let’s just say it made for a very short video. She’s usually a very quiet kitty, but she makes her displeasure quite known when she finds the kitchen door closed to not let the heat out.

View on YouTube

Needless to say, Babe was mad at her “dad” for putting her down in the snow and not letting her back in fast enough. And she was pissed at me, her “aunt,” for getting a video of it. Thank the Great Mother she didn’t do what a friend suggested and lock us both outside.

Srmstrong Park in Second Life. Photo from the Second life Destination guide.

Do you like to visit museums?

January 13, 2024

As I read this week’s edition of Highlights from the Second Life Destination Guide, I learned there are more museums in my favorite virtual world than I realized. I knew about the International Spaceflight Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the LGBTQ History Museum and Cultural Center, and Baltimore’s The Peale. But that barely scratches the surface of museums you can visit in Second Life with no admission fee beyond your internet connection and installing a free Second Life viewer (the client software for getting into SL). Plus, you can visit them at any hour of the day or night without having to worry about what you’re wearing. You can be dressed up, dressed down, in your jimjams, or even wearing nothing at all. As long as you’re not naked in Second Life, you will find a lot of places to visit that cover more subjects than many real-life cities have.

There’s even a virtual version of a public park and museum close to my heart from the city of my kittenhood. But alas, the virtual version doesn’t include The Treehouse, a former home of the best radio station in the entire multiverse.

Happy Old Year!

January 13, 2024

I meant to write a post for the end of 2023, but I didn’t get it finished to share it before the year ended. I have jury duty, and I finally got picked for a trial, so my time for doing things online is a lot leaner than it usually is. Still, I wanted to share a few things before we got too far into January 2024.

Sportsball

I’m still kind of amazed at the fact that my Bois en Bleu, the Los Angeles Dodgers, not only signed Shohei Ohtani but they also won the Yoshinobu Yamamoto lottery. They also got Tyler Glasnow and Manuel Margot, and Mookie Betts will be the regular second baseman in 2024. Unfortunately, between the new signings and the expected return of Gavin Lux, who spent 2023 on the IL recovering from a torn ACL, it looks like Kiké Hernádez won’t be back in Dodger Blue in 2024. Hopefully, his improved performance back in LA will help him get the contract he deserves.

The next cause of worry is super utility player Chris Taylor. If Miguel Rojas is the everyday starter at short and Teoscar Hernández is the everyday left fielder, CT3 could have to go back to riding the pine most of the season. Chris is always to contribute wherever he’s needed, but I’m disappointed that he’s back to being a backup instead of a starter.

And we still have to see what Clayton Kershaw is going to do. He isn’t as dominant as he used to be, and he’s been spending more time on the IL with each season. I hope he gives one more season to LA and doesn’t retire or, even worse, finish out his career in Texas. It’s rare to have a player spend their entire career with a single team, but seeing Kersh in another uniform would look even more weird than seeing Cody Bellinger in a Cubs uniform.

My Die-With-a-T

In the spring, I got referred to a new doctor who put me on the Mediterranean Diet. I quickly remembered a Garfield comic strip from the 70s where he called a diet “a die-wih-a-t.” I told my doctor that the things I would need to get at the grocery store for the diet are pretty expensive for someone on disability, and I was right. While I did pretty well on it for the first few months, but my budget got stretched so thin that it was hard to get the good food I should be eating all month. Grocery prices may still be going down, but it’s still hard to make sure I have decent food to eat all month, and I’ve noticed myself getting less nutritious food to complete menus for any given month. The fact that I’m still a fiend for good fried chicken doesn’t help.

Social Media

I thought I had found a great social media platform to use after Elon Musk bought (and trashed) the bird platform. After the attacks of 7 October, I discovered that my support of the civilians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank wasn’t very welcome there. I refuse to use any platform owned by Meta due to all the hate and BS, so I’m basically off of social media. It’s good though, because it freed up some time in my days for other things.

Second Life

I still need to reopen my virtual t-shirt store in Second Life, and I’m moving my real-life merchandise back to Spreadshirt this year. If you want to keep up with the happenings with my merch, you can keep an eye on things on the Nanci’s Naughties website. When I get my Spreadshop set back up, I’ll announce it there. With the war in the Gaza Strip expected to continue for several months, I’m considering adding the virtual posters I made to support the Palestinians to my real-world store. I really should have done that a few months ago, and I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to make money off the Palestinians’ suffering. I simply want to give people a way to show their support for people who are routinely treated like they’re poop that needs to be scraped off a person’s shoe.

As I wrote in May, I am the proud owner of a virtual bowling center in Second Life, the Pride Lanes Bowling Center. It’s not a very busy place, and I need to look at giving more folks reasons to visit. I tried using a machine to give out free Linden dollars (the currency in Second Life) to get people to go to the bowling center, but they only stayed around long enough to get paid. If you like to bowl in real life and you’re in Second Life, I hope you’ll head over to Pride Lanes and see how much fun bowling in Second Life can be You don’t even need to worry about renting bowling shoes, and I’ve even bowled in high heels without twisting an ankle or falling on my arse.

Kitties!

I’ve loved cats my whole life, but my budget is usually so tight that Abe Lincoln has gotten laryngitis from screaming so much. As a result, I haven’t felt I could be a good primary human to a feline. Earlier this year, my upstairs neighbor catsit for someone in the hospital, and Mr. Jack came down often to spend time in my half of the house. When Jack went back to his primary human, my neighbor realized he really liked cats after always preferring dogs. One of my neighbor’s friends heard there was a pair of abandoned kittens in New York, and the kitties moved in upstairs. It was a brother and sister, Tommy and Babe, but Tommy got too aggressive, so he had to go to a new home. It worked out better because Tommy thrives in his new home, and is loved by everyone in his new building.

I’ve become Babe’s “aunt,” and she’s gotten the run of the entire place. She comes down several times daily to see what’s happening downstairs, and I spoil her with treats and toys from time to time. Her primary human doesn’t have a climbing toy upstairs, so I built her a cat condo from cardboard boxes. She now has several places to get a nap, and she loves having a maze and a higher place to sit.

I’ve started posting some videos of Babe to my YouTube channel, and I have a video of her getting introduced to snow that I need to get online. Many felines like the snow, but Babe isn’t one of them. I was surprised at how fast she turned around when she got off the porch.

Music

As I said in May, I started working on a pair of songs I had written years ago. Life got in the way, and neither song has a demo recorded. I finally worked on the second song again last month, and the chord progression for the song’s intro reminds me of the solo section of Del Shannon’s Runaway. The melodies are very different, but the underlying chord progressions are similar. I hope I can share it before it’s time to celebrate Pride Month.

My computer

Last month, I did something terrible to my computer and had to do a clean install of SolydK Linux. I’m not saying what I did because I’m not sure what I did, but I was losing available disk space at a prodigious speed. Having to do a clean install of my daily work computer wasn’t a great thing to have to do, especially since I had to get into Second Life every day to get goodies from advent calendars.

I finally reinstalled some software to record demos of my music, but I still need to get fully set up for recording. The plan is to write an article on what I installed once I have something musical to share with it. I still need to get some gear to make proper recordings, but with my tight budget, I plan on seeing what my current setup can do. I’m going to see if I can use my Fender Mustang Micro headphone amp and my phone to record some guitar tracks. I miss making music, both from the creative and production sides. I was a recording engineer when I lived in New Orleans, but it was hard to get a job at a studio with all the students in Boston when I moved up here in 1989.

What does 2024 have in store?

I hope I can be even more productive in 2023 than I was in 2023. Once the trial I’m on the jury for finishes, I’ll be able to create a decent working routine. I hope to give you more reasons to visit My Two Lives in the coming year. There is a whole heap of question marks ahead of us between the US elections, the war in Palestine, and life’s seeming predisposition to throw more on our plates than we thought we could handle. Remember, you’re better than you think you are. You’re worth more than you think you are. You’re more loved and appreciated than you probably know. The more the haters want to put you down, the higher the possibility that they’re trying to keep you from knowing the full value of your being on this planet.

My desk set up for working on music. Description abut what is in the picture is in the main text of the article

This feels nicely familiar

November 9, 2023

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I’ve been enjoying Joe Jackson’s The Duke, an album of music written by the great Duke Ellington, since 2015 or so. I was listening to it recently and decided I wanted to learn the guitar part for the song Sharon Jones sang, “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But The Blues / Do Nothin’ ‘Til You Hear From Me.” The guitar part is simple enough that once I figure out what’s being played, it should be easy to get under my fingers. But first, I have to work out what “Captain” Kirk Douglas played.

My music work area

Since I’ve been playing the piano off and on for well over half of my life and I’ve only been a guitar player for a few years, it’s easier to work out the music on a keyboard. That means setting up my musical workspace, and since I was doing that I figured I’d get a picture. Please pardon the mess around my desk. The song is loaded into VLC on my laptop with my Artek Bluetooth keyboard and staff paper ready for action. My Carry-On 49-Key Folding Piano & MIDI Controller is ready to plunk out notes, and both Clara the Strat and my Type 10 TARDIS (my amp) are close by.

Why so familiar?

I say it feels familiar because it takes me back to the days when I would spend hours writing new songs or classical compositions. When I was a singer/songwriter I’d have a legal pad at the piano so I could write chord progressions for lyrics I’d written, and when I was studying classical composition I kept a pad of staff paper close by to notate what I was composing. That was years ago, and it feels like another lifetime.

I have a nice mug of Tazo Zen tea and a plate of cookies for while I work. Before anyone fusses at my eating cookies while on the Mediterranean diet, they’re sugar-free cookies from The Swiss Colony. As you can see, I only took three cookies, which the tin says is one serving. Of course, as my family likes to say, they definitely taste like more.

Get working, you!

I need to get to work, but I wanted to share a picture of my musical workspace. The picture serving as my laptop’s wallpaper is the Palestinian (Not Hamas) Lives Matter flag I made for Second Life. You can see the three signs I made in the Nanci’s Naughties store on the Second Life Marketplace. And before anyone bitches that it’s anti-Semitic, it isn’t. If Black Lives Matter, so should the lives of Palestinian civilians.

There’s a new Pride group on Boston

June 1, 2023

It was announced in February, but I just got the memo that there’s a new group organizing an LGBTQ+ Pride parade and festivals in Boston.

The old Boston Pride dissolved in 2021 after complaints that it felt LGBTQ+ folks of color weren’t being fairly represented. The new group, Boston Pride For The People, will have its first parade on Saturday, 10 June, and it will be followed by two festivals, one on Boston Common for everyone and a fest at City Hall Plaza for folks 21+.

I loved volunteering with Boston Pride, and I’m looking into volunteering with the new group next weekend. I won’t be posting if I volunteer and where here, but my friends can get hold of me to get the info.

Visit the Boston Pride For The People website to get all the info.

What one backlash took away, another backlash gave back

May 23, 2023

On 19 May, I wrote about the fact that the LA Dodgers revoked their invite of the Los Angeles chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Dodgers’ Pride Night events on 16 June and rescinded the award they were going to give the “Sisters” for their work within the community. It turns out that there was a huge response to the team’s decision, and yesterday the team did a 180° turn and re-invited them to the Pride Night event and will give them their reward after all.

The change was pointed out to me by someone on Counter Social, who posted a link to the story from ABC7 News in San Francisco. Their story includes this tweet from the Dodgers which includes this graphic.

LA Dodgers 22 May 2023 statement on reinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night

I’m glad the Dodgers changed their mind about including the “Sisters” in their Pride Night festivities, but they shouldn’t have been disinvited in the first place. Especially when so much of the initial complaining came from people outside of the state that don’t support the in the first place anyway like Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL).

You can read the story on the ABC7 News website, and the LA Daily News has an article on it worth reading as well. The LA Times, my favorite media resource on Dodgers news, has a great article on it, but it’s behind their paywall so you may not be able to read it.

LA Dodgers cave to “Christian” backlash against LGBTQ+ Pride Night

May 19, 2023

Yesterday I learned there was some bad news for LGBTQ+ fans of the LA Dodgers. News came out that the team was revoking their invite of The Los Angeles chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to participate in the annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night celebration and canceling the award the group was to receive for their work done in the community (per USA Today).

Why were they changing their mind? A group of conservative Catholics said the charity group was “anti-Catholic.” Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who probably doesn’t support the team in the first place, joined the chorus suggesting the Dodgers were unfriendly to the church. Interestingly, I can’t find this announcement on the LA Dodgers’ website, and the folks at Dodgers Nation didn’t cover it either.

The backlash was swift. The “Sisters” said they are going to keep serving the community, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said they won’t participate in the event. The Los Angeles LGBTQ Center revoked their invitation to participate in Pride Night, saying

Buckling to pressure from out-of-state, right-wing fundamentalists, the Dodgers caved to a religious minority that is perpetuating a false narrative about LGBTQ+ people.

They went further and suggested the team either reconsider their decision against the “Sisters” or cancel Pride Night completely.

We call on the Dodgers to reconsider their decision, honor the Sisters, and bring the true spirit of Pride back to Dodgers Stadium. If the decision is not reversed, we strongly encourage the Dodgers to cancel Pride Night. Any organization that turns its back on LGBTQ+ people at this damning and dangerous inflection point in our nation’s history should not be hoisting a rainbow flag or hosting a ‘Pride Night.’

It’s disappointing that this comes from the team that broke the color barrier in major league baseball when they signed Jackie Robinson, an event that was just celebrated by the team a little over a month ago.

I grew up being a fan of the Amazing Mets, but as a high school student in 1976, I became an LA Dodgers fan. After moving to Boston in 1989, people asked me why I didn’t root for the Red Sox, but I told them I was sticking with my Bois en Bleu. When the Dodgers signed serial hater and unindicted sexual predator Trevor Bauer for the 2022 season, I boycotted my team, saying that Bauer shouldn’t be allowed to wear the same uniform as Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax. I started paying attention to the Dodgers again as the postseason approached and was called a bandwagon fan but I explained that I had taken a stand for women Dodger fans.

I have to feel it’s appropriate that two innings after Freddie Freeman hit a grand slam for his 300th career home run, the Cardinals scored 7 runs, including two home runs, to put the game out of reach. I’d say Karma showed Freddie some love but made sure folks knew she wasn’t happy with the team’s ownership.

When I heard about the latest idiotic move by the front office, I told a friend that it’s making it hard for me to support my Bois en Blue. As of this writing, Pride Night is still on the LA Dodgers’ promotional calendar, although you have to look for it because it doesn’t show up on the team’s game schedule.

The LA Dodgers 2023 Pride night on their Schedule and Promotion & Giveaway pages

I’m pulling back on my support of my Dodgers, and unless things change, I’ll find a way to join the protest for Pride Night even if I am about 3,000 miles away. I’m sick of so-called “Christians*” and their hate forcing folks to turn their back on LGBTQ+ folks, essentially giving us the middle finger. It’s time for us to fight back, and if we get in trouble for it, Let it be “good trouble” that makes a difference and not just clutching at pearls.

—–

*Aren’t Christians supposed to be welcoming and showing God’s love instead of making us want to do anything but be a part of their community?

I have pretty being busy lately

May 15, 2023

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I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while, but that hasn’t meant I haven’t been doing anything. After getting new web hosting from Namecheap, I moved My Two Lives to a different product within the Namecheap family. The new product allows hosting for not only My Two Lives but also my Second Life store, Nanci’s Naughties, and due to having way too much on my plate, I just got Nanci’s Naughties back up this week.

Sports!

Some people know of my love for tenpin bowling, but I haven’t visited a bowling center since I was in Guam with the Air Force in 1987. Being on a fixed income makes visiting a bowling center in Boston difficult financially, so in March I decided to see what options are available for virtual bowling in Second Life. I found the Bergson Bowling System, which does more than let me bowl inworld. It also lets people lay out lanes for their own use.

Rather than just setting up a lane for myself, I created a bowling center anyone could use. It’s the Pride Lanes Bowling Center, and you can find out more about it at PrideLanesSL.online. Pride Lanes has a tent at this year’s Second Pride, and I’m working on some merch that will connect Nanci’s Naughties, Pride Lanes, Second Pride, and global LGBTQ+ life. Once it’s available I’ll announce it over on the Nanci’s Naughties website.

I’m making music again

When I bought my Squire Stratocaster back in 2020, I knew I wanted to work on an original song I got the idea for in a practice room at the Longy School of Music back in 1996. It started as a cool riff with a soul gospel feel, and it became a whole bluesy song in late 1999, but it’s more of a guitar song than a keyboard song, so it just got tucked away in my proverbial drawer. When I got my Strat, I knew I wanted to develop the song, and last year I started working on a demo for the song. The demo still isn’t finished because I never get enough time for playing my guitar, but now that I’m getting things off my plate I hope to get back to working on that soon.

Early this year I was thinking of a Christian rock song I wrote in the early naughts. As an ex-vangelical I won’t use the lyrics anymore, but I love the music I came up with for it, so I’m going to put together a demo on BandLab. I’ll publish the song on BandLab for someone to write new lyrics for and use. Of course, there’s not enough time in the day to do everything, and my brain can play the guitar a hell of a lot better than my fingers can, so it’s another song that’s going to be a work in progress for a while.

Et cetera

There are many things going on in my life that I won’t talk about here, and with warmer weather arriving in Boston I hope to spend more time outside this summer, even if it’s just out on my porch. Yes, I’m a big old homebody, so I tend to stick around Château Hardin unless I have to make groceries, run an errand or five, or go the medico folks. But that works pretty well for me since I’m also a huge night owl, and I’m usually going to bed when the morning news folks are getting up. There are also days when I’ve kicked myself because the sun is going down as I’m going to bed, but the only problem there is that by the time I get up I’ve missed most of the daytime.

I’m going to leave you with a meme posted by someone last year on a social media platform I used to use. It’s something I need to remind myself of every now and then, and I’m not the only one who needs it.