From Christy of Menomonie, Wis.: " 'Cabin Fever' is a BB category about unpleasant air travel, but this submission is about another experience of extremely unpleasant travel.

"One of our most memorable trips took us to New Orleans in December 1975. Hubby had a conference, and I tagged along, so excited to be going to the Big Easy. The flight seemed long, but the cab ride from the airport to downtown New Orleans was endless. We were booked at the Fairmont Hotel, considered one of the city's fine old establishments at the time. We were expecting a luxurious room for the negotiated conference rate, but the clerk escorted us to a closet-sized room with barely enough space to walk around the bed.

The little treasuresReports LYNNE of Shafer: &quot;Earlier this week, you printed a &#8217;favorite aunt&#8217; photo and a &#8217;matching handmade
The little treasures

Reports LYNNE of Shafer: "Earlier this week, you printed a 'favorite aunt' photo and a 'matching handmade outfits' photo. This picture from 1954 fits in both categories. My favorite aunt made matching leopard-print pillbox hats, purses, and accessories for the two of us -- so stylish! I don't know what happened to most of the items, but my granddaughter has the drawstring purse -- a fourth-generation treasure. She thinks it's very special, because it was made by her Great-Great-Auntie Bea, who is 93."

After much haggling over a room reassignment, we ended up in a slightly better room (so we thought).

"The first two days went very well: hubby at meetings during the day while I was shopping and sight-seeing, followed by evenings in the French Quarter, listening to jazz and Creole music. We sampled oysters, gumbos and huge Hurricanes in giant stemmed glasses.

"Then, on the third day, hubby became deathly ill at his conference and retreated to our room, where he lay in agony all day. I was sure it was food poisoning (oysters) because if he wasn't prone on the bed moaning, he was head-in-toilet retching. The only nourishment he requested were chocolate malt shakes, which I could get at a drug store nearby. I made many trips for those shakes, which he promptly returned to the toilet (or close to it) almost immediately after consumption.

"Our upgraded hotel room was across the street from a department store where the Christmas display featured flashing lights and music by Alvin and the Chipmunks. 'Christmas, Christmas, don't be late...' looped loudly and continuously all night long, making hubby's pain even worse, he declared. Hotel drapes could not mask the blinking holiday bulbs or 'OK, Simon? OK, Theodore? OK, Alvin? Alvin? ALVIN!!!' Neither one of us slept all night.

"By the next night, hubby felt slightly human again, and he did not want me to miss our dinner at Brennan's. I had a wonderful seafood etouffee, and he chewed ice cubes, unable to eat more than a few bites of his entree.

"Early in the morning of our final day, we were preparing to leave when we discovered that our return airline tickets had been stolen from the room. I had hidden them in my copy of 'Helter Skelter,' and they were gone. Oddly, an expensive piece of dictating equipment that hubby brought along was untouched. A frantic call to our travel agent provided some relief, but only if we got to the airport two hours in advance to pick up replacement tickets. Knowing that the ride to the airport would take at least an hour, we rushed to the nearest cab, only to find that there is no such thing as an early-morning rush in the French Quarter. Delivery trucks blocked every street, and I swear some of them were horse-drawn; they were that slow. We barely made it to the airport on time.

"The flight home seemed even longer, but we finally made it home to discover that our basement had flooded and the pilot light on our furnace was extinguished, leaving the house pretty chilly on that December evening.

"I said earlier that this trip was memorable."

Our birds, ourselves

NativeDuluthian: "Al B's mention that ducks can survive Minnesota winters as long as they have open water and food [BB, 1/14/2014] made me want to expand on that a little bit, based on an experience I once had.

"As long as ducks (and geese) have open water, they have a place they can go where the temperature is guaranteed to exceed 32 degrees, regardless of the air temperature. That's good enough for them.

"In the 1980s, I worked in the Western Life Building at the intersection of I-94, I-694, and I-494 east of St. Paul. That's the big building that has the cantilever facing toward the southeast. (The reason for the cantilever must be the subject of a future letter.) The building has a very pretty formal pond in front, unfortunately not visible from the freeway. That pond had an unanticipated problem. Algae formed during the summer, and by Fourth of July the pond would be covered by an ugly green scum. The environmentally friendly solution was to position a pump on the bottom of the pond. The pump drew air through a hose and bubbled it to the top of the water. This added oxygen to the water, and the green scum did not like that. It actually worked. In the summer the bubbles added to the beauty of the pond, and in the winter it kept a round hole of open water in the center of the ice that expanded and shrank with the outdoor temperature. At January's coldest, the hole shrank to about 6 or 7 feet across.

"I've lived in the Twin Cities area for 50 years, and there was a winter in the early 1980s that was the coldest in my memory. In the fall preceding that winter, a pair of Canada geese decided to make their winter home in that hole in the ice. There were days in January when those two geese sat in that water, and they were happy as a pair of clams. The air temperature was minus-25, and the wind chill was minus-60. Steam rose from the open water like a boiling pool in Yellowstone.

"The geese had open water, but no food. The Minnesota Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, came to their rescue. The scuttlebutt had it that there is a law on the books that says, in essence, if you do something to create open water where open water would not naturally occur, and if some migratory waterfowl chooses to spend the winter on that open water, you are responsible for the feeding of those birds. The Western Life Company, being the law-abiding and responsible corporate citizen it was, fed those geese. Every day a man from the Maintenance Department would carry a pail onto the ice and approach the hole as closely as he deemed safe. The two geese would swim to the far side of the hole and then hop up onto the ice. The man would toss a pail of corn onto the ice, getting it as close as possible to the open water without much corn falling in. The man would leave, and the geese would dig in.

"When spring came, those two corn-fed geese looked like they would make an excellent Easter dinner. Of course, the Minnesota Legislature came to their rescue once again."

The Permanent Family Record

ML of Shoreview: "Mom of Many in Mendota Heights' son didn't know how to use the dictionary.

"About once a month, during dinnertime, someone would bring up a word no one was familiar with -- so, being a curious person, I would get up and pull our 4-pound Webster's off the shelf (amidst much groaning from the others at the table) and look up the word, and we would choose which entry fit our conversation.

"A word I specifically remember looking up is 'bituminous,' from the French bitumineux or Latin bitumineus; it is the asphalt mixture used for paving city streets.

"I also enjoy using, because you can select the little speaker button to speak the word -- which can be helpful when looking up cacophony."

Hardware downtown

Charlotte of Inver Grove Heights: "Subject: Memories of Seven Corners Ace Hardware.

"I worked there for a season in the '80s, in data entry, and I remember some fear when I saw the VERY steep steps leading up to the room where we had the computers and did the data entry. Those steps were scary for someone not used to rickety old ones! I overcame that fear and loved that place.

"After I told my fellow hikers last night that S.C.A.H. was closing, one of them told a story of when she was working at St. Paul Companies. They had an I.T. guy she worked closely with who would dress in plaid shirts and rarely wear a tie, except to meetings. He went out to lunch one day and brought an axe back to work with him. The security guards wouldn't let him in with it. They called my friend and said that they had this guy at the front desk who was dressed like a lumberjack and swears he worked there and knew her. She said that she was sure it was him, but she had to go to the front desk to verify that it was him so the guard would let him pass! He didn't want to leave the axe in his car, for fear that it would be stolen!"

Band Name of the Day: Ugly Green Scum

Website of the Day, from Double Bogey Mike: Lutheran Airlines, at