Too tired from overdosing on Nick-at-Nite's Cosby marathon to write anything coherent, I thought I would tell a series of vignettes connected only by the fact that they all happened on my family's last trip (together as a family; I've been there twice since without them) to New Orleans.

The purpose of the trip was to visit my Great-Aunt. This was after she sold her house and moved into an assisted living community, so we were staying at a hotel in the burbs, rather than with her. Although she was experiencing memory lapses from time to time, she still remembered all of us. Even though she got my brother mixed up with one of us girls for a second because he was starting to grow his hair out.

She insisted on sending out for special hamburgers to feed us. They came with a huge hunk of onion on the side, and my brother and youngest sister amused themselves for awhile daring each other to eat the onion. She did, then started gagging because it was so hot. So he called her a wuss, bit into his, and started patting frantically at his tongue too.

Good times. Almost as good as the time we were at Olive Garden and he complained about all the salt and butter on his breadstick, and she asked him if he'd eat it if she licked all that stuff off, and he said yes, so she did, and then he did. Because that's healthy. It's like living with apes sometimes, I swear.

Another good food moment from the New Orleans trip was when we were having breakfast at the little diner attached to our hotel. It had a row of booths abutting the counter, so we were right by the guys preparing our food. We tried to keep our laughter down so that they wouldn't do nasty stuff to our breakfasts, but apparently we weren't quiet enough: Our waffles had little bits of plastic butter wrapper mixed into them. And the unfair part is we weren't even really laughing at the cooks; we were laughing at youngest sister because we convinced her to order the small size orange juice ("You're little! You can't drink that big one!") and when it came it was the size between 'thimble' and 'shot glass'. And we were paying like $2 for it.

Another night we ate at Outback Steakhouse (yep, all that New Orleans cuisine at our fingertips, and we went for Australian cowboy food, Brinker International-style), and middle sister ordered this huge dish of linguine. She didn't finish it all, possibly because there was so much of it, and possibly because I made her drink part of my margarita and she said it made her sick. Regardless, she brought a styrofoam doggie box of linguine back to our (refrigerator-less) hotel room where she proceeded to munch on it on and off for the next three days. It kept getting grayer and grayer and more congealed. My parents must not have known; I can't believe they let her keep eating it. It was just like that Simpsons (my most favorite one, actually) when Homer has the old hero sandwich that he keeps hiding and eating, even after it gives him food poisoning ("Oh...how could I hate you!").

The highlight of the trip (you know, aside from the bonding with my Great-Aunt and the culture and all) had to be the time when I locked youngest sister out of our hotel room. She was knocking and knocking, and I asked "What's the password?" without anything in particular in mind, and she yelled back, "Swordfish!" And the next thing you know, I was out in the hall with her and we were both crawling through the doorway on our knees, she declaring loudly enough for the bemused onlookers at the end of the hallway to hear her, "No, no, this is the way you come out of a speakeasy!"