Hi! My name is Mike McHugh, I’ve been a chemical engineer for 30+ years. My current home is Lake Charles, Louisiana, but I originally hail from Baltimore, Maryland (or as the natives there say it- Bawlmer, Mur’lin, hon). So I’m what they call down here a “Damn Yankee”- the kind who come here and don’t go back.
I came here in 2003, a few months after our plant manager in Baltimore called all of us into a meeting and essentially told us that half of us wouldn’t have jobs there after the end of the year. Well, needless to say I didn’t make the cut. But there was a nice job waiting for me in Louisiana.
So, here I am. Anxious to meet new friends, we joined every club there is to join in Lake Charles- a boat club (we don’t even have a boat), the Buccaneers, the Parrotheads, and a Mardi Gras krewe, and probably a few others I forgot I joined but we still send in dues payments for.
Earlier this year, I got the urge to start wriring, and this led to a regular column in the Jambalaya News, a biweekly free newspaper started by some friends of mine. This column, called “The Dang Yankee”, is this transplant’s lighthearted view of life in Southwestern Louisiana, and the paper can be picked up free in locations throughout the city and surrounding area. You can also read back issues on the paper’s web site, which appears in the links on the left side of these pages.
Road Kill Gumbo was born of a desire to expand my writing into some other venues. Don’t know what in the world led me to doing this via a blog; I didn’t know blogs from frogs. Oh well, there’s a first time for everything, I guess.
I hope you enjoy these pages. Feel free to leave a snide comment or in some way add to the humor. Wise guys and gals are always welcome!
