I've posted these before, but it's been awhile. I don't have any new ones. We went to a couple of parades this year, but got no really good pictures. Mardi Gras is essentially over for me, though it's only Tuesday afternoon. I do hope to have some really self-indulgent meal this evening--maybe fried chicken. My wife and I are planning to try for the first time to do without meat for the whole of Lent.

She took these two pictures in 2005. 

I really like this one, the clock emblem of one of the "mystic" societies, with the blurred hands capturing the sense of time fleeting. And I note with a little dismay that it was taken nine years ago.

From a rainy night in 2009:

Also from 2009, a standard Mardi Gras feature: a booth that sells very unhealthy food like corn dogs, sausages, and funnel cakes. A funnel cake is a sort of mutant doughnut, strands of fried dough covered with powdered sugar: delicious, and I haven't had one for a long time.

Happy Mardi Gras, and I hope you have a blessed and spiritually productive Lent. I've about decided to take a vacation day tomorrow, and never mind the fact that people will probably think I'm recuperating from a bender. It really gets Lent off to a bad start for me if Ash Wednesday is just an ordinary hectic work day. What shall I read this year? I think maybe Augustine's Confession, which I've started twice and never finished.