Blue Dog

 

Blue Dog. You can't live in the state of Louisiana without knowing who Blue Dog is. This pooch is EVERYWHERE! I'll admit that sometimes it gets tiring seeing the spectral blue puppy on signs, Blue Dog Cafe t-shirts, books, and more. A few years ago, much to the artist's chagrin, someone even made Blue Dog roadkill on a street in New Orleans. The photo even made the Times Picayune. Poor Blue Dog.

My little girl Abby LOVES Blue Dog. I've taken her to the Rodrigue gallery in the French Quarter. We visited the gazillion foot Blue Dog in Metairie with Geaux Saints written across his torso. She has Blue Dog books and has even painted me my own watercolor Blue Dog for my office.

Blue Dog is now showing up in a novel that I am formulating in its most primitive stages. In this case Blue Dog will appear in his natural form, of the loup garou.

A terrific blog post by George Rodrigue's wife Wendy tells the fascinating story of how Blue Dog came to be and where he got his name. The Beginning

Sleep Book Marking - A New Reading Disorder?

I have developed a condition...

It is not life-threatening nor does it require any type of medication or therapy. It has been going on for over a year and I find it more funny than debilitating. I am a sleep book marker. 


The symptoms are as follows:

• reading late at night
• lamp light in the eyes
• instances of dropping the book
• blacking out (falling asleep, whatever)
• discovering the next day that you are no longer on the page or even chapter that you last remember. 

I have come upon four scenarios.... 1) Either I truly am jamming my bookmark between random pages and chucking it on the bedside table. 2) My husband or child has been playing a cruel trick on me for over a year. You would think they would get tired of it by now. 3) My cat and/or dog is secretly reading my books while I sleep. In this case, I need to set up some kind of surveillance because if this is the case, we're going to the circus y'all! 4) My bedroom is haunted and there is a phantom hanging around until I fall asleep and then removing the bookmark I carefully placed in my book and slipping it into another chapter. Ghostly chuckling beside the bed for making me feel like an idiot the next day, of course.

At this point I will take the blame for this strange series of events that has been plaguing me for so long, but if I wake up with a different book on the bedside table, I'm calling an exorcist!