Digging out from under it all

We survived Carnival.  There was so much of it. There is so much. Too much.  I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet. But this year feels like one we're gonna have to talk about.  So, more to come soon.  Meanwhile, there is a mess to clean and I'm currently barely alive.   Here is the Krewe of Municipal Vehicles in glorious action Friday night.



Update: Hey I thought we were going to stop making a big deal out of this, by the way.

As life returns to normal in post-Mardi Gras New Orleans, clean-up crews are working to dispose the huge amount of trash generated by the annual carnival celebration.

So far, city and contractor crews have sent around 620 tons of debris to the landfill since the first major parade weekend, according to the director of the city's Department of Sanitation, Cynthia Sylvain-Lear. That's short of the average roughly 900 tons of debris Mardi Gras typically produces as well as the 1,300-ton mark the city notched last year, Sylvain-Lear said.

But there's still a long way to go.

"Our tonnage may be higher this year," Sylvain-Lear said Wednesday (Feb. 14).

Not that I'm complaining. I think trash tonnage is an excellent measure of the size and success of Mardi Gras no matter how insecure our civic boosters seem to get over it.  The process of cleaning it up is almost as amazing as making the mess in the first place. Which is why I try to record a bit of that every year as well.