Did you miss me? Nothing very exciting is happening, shocking I know, and so I skipped blogging time last week. Here goes with the news from the last fortnight.
Before we made the trip down to Austin to start packing up the apartment, Diana finished the Couch to 5K program with a 30 minute run. I’m so proud of my new runner. And she’s still going out every other day even in the steamy, humid weather. You can see that the hot tub is ideal for pre-run stretching.
When we arrived in Austin, I decided to walk with Diana on her warm up and then rendezvous with her as she turned back around to head for home. My leg was feeling great and so I ended up crossing the river at I-35 and walking down the other side for a coffee at the cafe by the rowing facility. After the short break I still had plenty of energy and so walked down to the Lamar St bridge and then back to the apartment. My new Apple watch, a birthday gift from my lovely wife, showed that I had been able to close both my exercise ring and my active calorie ring with the 4 mile walk – woo hoo! I’m back in the game.
The next day my leg still felt great and so I repeated the routine. It was quite a bit hotter and more humid and after 2.5 miles I was really thirsty and my leg was starting to hurt. I did come across this guy with incredible balance and strength:
Rather than call McD to rescue me and suffer the humiliation of that story, I chose to soldier on and walk to the nearest store for a big bottle of water. On arrival at the apartment my leg wasn’t feeling so great at all. You are all correct – I totally over did it – where’s the common sense? Why didn’t I work up to it a bit slower. I honestly thought that after the first day of walking everything was good to go.
I finally made it to the doctor yesterday as the pain really hadn’t subsided very much. The x-ray shows everything is fine and I did just significantly over do it. The doctor was not particularly happy with me. I’m limited to half mile walks for several weeks when the pain goes away. Do you think that I’ve learned my lesson. I know – hard to say.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I helped a guy who bought our queen bed and mattress load it into the elevator and his truck. The guy was recovering from a recently broken rib and so we made quite the pair.
Maybe all of this was just a ruse to avoid having to pack up the apartment and load up the first set of stuff into the car? Poor Diana had to do that all by herself – resulting in some of the most scientific packing that I’ve ever witnessed.
We had a couple of big dog encounters over the last couple of weeks. Rachel brought Pride the Great Dane over to hang out. He’s mellowed quite a bit over the last few years – he’s seven now – but still won’t jump in the back of Rachel’s SUV without her helping him in. What a silly dog.
Then down in Austin we got to visit Wash and Zoe, the Irish Wolf Hounds. Zoe performed her party trick with Diana – and she’s quite a bit smaller than Wash. We had a really nice extended visit with Brad and Josalyn as well as the dogs.
Josalyn had hand painted my name on to a drinking buddy for Brad. She used a toothpick to get fine enough detail.
This is a cutting from a huge agave plant that Brad moved from his house in San Antonio. It will be making the journey back to McKinney soon. They say it’s impossible to kill these plants – we’ll see about that.
We sat on our balcony on the evening of July 4th and watched all the fireworks along the horizon. The downtown river fireworks show with live orchestra was cancelled. We had a great show from about 9pm until after midnight.
Diana suggested that we should visit some of our very favourite Austin restaurants while we still could, scared that we won’t be back to Austin very often and that they could all easily go out of business soon. We started by walking over to Peche for some of their decadent menu highlights – steak tartare, foie gras, and amazing stuffed quail. What a treat. Social distancing wasn’t a problem as we were the only folks in the place at the start of our meal. The owner, Rob, told us he is doing a good take out business and has some decent dine in days.
Our next stop was the patio at Suerte for the ludicrously good suadero tacos. These are the best tacos I have ever tasted – such an amazing combination of flavours. The aguachile appetizer was also very tasty and refreshing. The meal was rounded out with a choco taco.
Our final stop was at Comedor. We tried to sit on the patio, but I was melting and so we moved into a spacious enclosed booth inside. After an excellent ahi tuna appetizer that was just on the borderline of too spicy for McD, we tried the much vaunted bone marrow tacos. These were indeed a treat – you fill your taco with kale and then layer on the bone marrow, the kale intended to soak up some of the fat. We will really miss the creativity and quality of so many Austin restaurants.
I haven’t done a lot of reading lately, but hope to get back to it this weekend.
On the music front, I’m really enjoying the new Bob Dylan album “Rough and Rowdy Ways”. It’s quite something that he’s creating such quality music at 79 years old. Charlie Sexton, Austin native who we’ve seen several times in tiny clubs there, adds some excellent guitar work to the album.
Margo Price is a bit outside my wheelhouse, with more of a Country flavour, but I like her new album quite a bit – good quality songs and production.
Greyhounds is a new band to me that I heard on a playlist this week. Doing some research I discover that they are a song writing duo based in Austin. They have written for and played with several of my favourites – Tedeschi Trucks and JJ Grey included. I’m going to need to check out some more of their music.
Stay kind and patient.
Wednesday was the 3rd anniversary of that lovely day in Cozumel. I found a card with the caption “May the Honeymoon Never End”. It’s funny to me because we didn’t have an official honeymoon and I think McD has given up on it now. We did have a planning session a few months ago but couldn’t come up with anything that we really liked. Some nice flowers took the sting out of the message in the card.
finally a FaceTime with the Wahbas. We finished up in time to catch the last couple of songs from a Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen song swap live stream. Seeing them both reminded me of the night that I broke my finger. Keen was the emcee and Lovett an Austin City Limits Hall of Fame inductee.
I started “Sontag” by Benjamin Moser this week. At over 700 pages it might be with me for a few weeks. It’s described as “The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face”. I can’t honestly remember what drove me to pick this biography, but I’ve started and I’ll do my best to finish. I don’t know too much about Sontag and so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot along the way.
The audio book of “Where the Crawdads Sing” kept us company as we traversed the mountains, mesas, and then wide, flat open spaces to Amarillo. We were most certainly road weary on arrival at the downtown Courtyard – this one is part of the “historic” collection and is a remodeled downtown bank building. It certainly has a lot more character than most. Only in this kind of rural location can you stay in a corner suite with wrap around windows for $102.
My book on the road trip was “All Adults Here” by Emma Straub. This is a very enjoyable ensemble family drama, set in small town Connecticut. Three generations of Stricks play out their lives in quite different fashions, and it’s all very enjoyable and engaging.
There was an issue with Clorinda’s hot water heater that Marco was in charge of remedying. He tried to enlist friends to assist with the replacement – this was unsuccessful but one friend did recommend the Vietnamese sandwiches from Dinosaur’s. I filed that away and we ordered a variety of those for lunch on Monday. We sat outside and enjoyed these on Amy and Adamo’s patio. My portobello was delicious.
hosts as usual and showed us videos of the resident mountain lion and cub playing in their fountain. The wildlife on Gypsy Hill has expanded quite a bit over the last year – deer were the main attraction but now we have added bobcats, mountain lions, and wild turkeys. Really, seven wild turkeys were congregated outside Clorinda’s kitchen window on Monday afternoon. I understand they peck at the glass pretty relentlessly – doesn’t seem like very “wild” behaviour.
On Friday we drove down to San Luis Obispo (home of Cal Poly where Will studied Mechanical Eng) with a brief stop to see Will at his office in the afternoon. It was entertaining to see his face when one of his co-workers told him “Your Dad’s here” – not what he was expecting at all. Will gave us a tour of the school that he’s remodeling and then we were on our way south.
After D’s morning exercise, we drove to Alicia’s house for breakfast. She made us some amazing Bloody Mary’s with crispy bacon stirrers and avocado toast – definitely becoming quite the hostess.
Sunday took us on down the coast to Pacific Beach in San Diego to meet up with Campbell and Molly. Diana found an excellent hotel room for us on the beach at a boutique hotel called Tower 23. The balcony had a great view of all the action on the beach.
Campbell and Molly came over and joined us on the balcony for a while before we went downstairs for dinner at the Jordan restaurant in the hotel. Then they came back upstairs to watch the last of the sunset. I really enjoyed Molly telling us that, having to much time listening to Campbell’s sales pitches and follow up, she could easily tell the story for him. I particularly enjoyed her rendition of “and what have you” – something I say quite a bit.
My fancy new kettle arrived on Monday. It allows me to heat water to the perfect temperature for my fancy new cafetiere – 96 degrees, and also features a “goose-neck” spout for precision pouring. I know people in Guatemala who take the art of preparing coffee way more seriously than this – they have three different setups for different styles of coffee. So I’m not that nuts at least.
The Bakersfield sound is a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950s in and around Bakersfield, California. … Wynn Stewart pioneered the Bakersfield sound, while Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, and Merle Haggard and the Strangers are the two most successful artists of the original Bakersfield era. We stayed just off Buck Owens Blvd and I played a couple of his songs for Diana on the drive.
I finally finished the Robin Williams biography this week. The first half was a bit of a slog but the second half really captured my attention. What a tortured and supremely talented individual. I forgot how many wonderful movies he made in the early 90s – “Good Morning Vietnam” being the first big breakout from stand-up comedy to blockbuster movies, followed by Awakenings, The Fisher King and many others. It seems that a lot of people took advantage of his kindness and generosity. Very sad that he couldn’t ultimately handle his Parkinson’s diagnosis.
option was to park and order online for delivery to the parking space – so I worked through that seemingly overly complicated process. When my lunch was delivered to Penelope (enjoying her first outing in weeks) I learned that I could eat on the nice outdoor patio. What a treat this was – the tacos tasted much better than I remember – amazing what deprivation does to desire. The menu was a subset of normal and the “Space Cowboy” mushroom taco was not available. Not to worry, lots of other good options. All the tacos are very simple but quality, fresh ingredients really make these outstanding.
I tested out my new double insulated french press cafetiere (thanks Mum and Dad) on Sunday morning with great results. It looks very cool, makes good tasting coffee, and keeps it warm on the patio for over an hour. I ordered up a kettle so that I can pour in water at the perfect temperature. This has given Diana an opportunity to reorganize the coffee station area in the kitchen. I think that activity is still in progress as I write this post.
Monday was a particularly grumpy day for both of us. Not sure what brought that on, but we moved through it and got on with things. It’s unusual for us both to be in sync with the grumps. The best I could do to cheer myself up was watch the Billions TV show and then listen to the podcast from the creators. There are so many clever references and nuances that I miss without the assist from the podcast.
updates. In the evening we enjoyed a couple of music live streams – Hayes Carll followed by the Band of Heathens, who commented that they were seeing a lot of comments from people jumping over from Carll’s show – similar musical styles I suppose. Hayes was celebrating his first wedding anniversary and showed an album he had purchased on eBay so that he could play his wife’s favourite version of “Stand by Me”. I hadn’t heard Mickey Gilley’s version – quite schmaltzy.
Saturday was a very wet and gloomy day that kept us inside. The magnolias enjoyed the rain and are opening up nicely today. As I write this, Diana is back from her Week 5 run – 2 x 8min segments today. I’m so proud of her for keeping at it – she’ll be doing a 5K very soon.
He’s one of the folks that has a tremendous feel for the music, coupled with ridiculous dexterity. I get exhausted just watching how hard his left hand is working. Joe started with “Classified” by the legendary New Orleans player James Booker. It sounds and looks to me like an incredibly difficult piece to play well. The credits at the end of the show indicated that Joe had a large part in organizing and producing the show.
Jon Cleary, an Englishman who plays piano like he’s a 3rd generation New Orleanian, is another one with a great feel for the music. Jojo Herman, of the jam band Widespread Panic, was a revelation – he clearly has spent a huge amount of time listening to James Booker and Professor Longhair. He had spent some time learning from Dr. John, who passed away earlier this year, and shared a personal video of Mac performing “Tipitina” at the end of the show. “What is a tipitina?”, asked Jojo of the Dr. “Fess (Professor Longhair) told me it was some kind of bird, but I never heard of such a thing.”
The show finished up with my all time favourite, Long Tall Marcia Ball. Excellent as always with a rare performance on a grand piano – we typically see her with her electric keyboard, legs kicking in time to her beat.
our future. We attempted to finish watching “Ford versus Ferrari” after dinner. One of us finished and the other only made it for a few minutes. I really enjoyed this movie and found Christian Bale and Matt Damon to be excellent – particularly Damon as Carroll Shelby – quite different than some of his more typical roles. The tug of war between the GM “suits” and the entrepreneurial and freewheeling Shelby/Ken Miles collaboration was well depicted. What beautiful cars Shelby made.
My first book this week was “Travels with Charley (In Search of America)” by John Steinbeck. I hadn’t heard of this work until it was cited by Stephanie Land as a big reason for her desire to explore Missoula, Montana. I thought maybe the descriptions of that territory may convince McD to give it a try. Or at least that overly optimistic child living inside me thought so.
All the time at the pool this weekend allowed me to finish another book – a fast paced mystery set in Paris during World War II. “Three hours in Paris” by Cara Black tells the story of an assassination attempt on Hitler when he pays a quick visit to attend a mass at Sacre Couer in Montmartre. The sniper is actually an American from Oregon who is recruited while living on a UK Army base in Stornoway with her Scottish husband. Her attempt fails but she does kill the leader of the German Navy by accident as Hitler ducks. The cat and mouse pursuit of Kate through various Parisienne neighbourhoods by the German forces is well written and keeps the pages turning fast. I recommend this as a good pool or beach read and a good one for those that have visited Paris to reminisce over.
After our Week 4 Day 3 run on Saturday I had some muscle pain and didn’t think too much of it. It subsided on Monday and so I did 30 minutes on the elliptical – bad idea. Now it’s pretty painful and as a result I haven’t been able to run or do much exercise this week. Don’t worry – McD has made up for it with very consistent and vigorous workouts. Maybe I should try the universal cure recommended by our Commander in Chief this week:
We grilled the rib-eye steak from Rye on Monday evening – the first nice day we’ve had in a while. Diana did a lovely job since I wasn’t up for moving around too much. The perfectly cooked steak and grilled vegetables were a real treat. And we have plenty of leftovers to enjoy all week long.
The Tuesday New York Times puzzle made me laugh with a clue “__ Gatos” next to a clue with the answer “Elroy”. How does that happen? I’m always pleased to finish any day of the NYT puzzles in less than 20 minutes.
A text from the Ogans on Thursday morning alerted me to “Jazzfesting in Place.” This would have been the first weekend of Jazzfest in New Orleans (canceled for 2020) and the local radio station, WWOZ, put together a line up of broadcasts from prior years in the same schedule format as the real deal. Apparently the food vendors are set up all around town offering to go treats. I wonder where my favourite Mrs. Wheat’s pies is located? Nothing to worry about – they have a website and I’ve ordered up a sampling of pies for weekend 2 of festing in place.
Snooks Eaglin was the stand out for me on Friday. I was reminiscing about seeing him at the original Rock ‘N Bowl with the Ogans and Sean a few weeks before he passed. Those crazy fingers flying over the fretboard. I set up some jazzfest photos on the patio to put us in the mood. Diana enjoyed the show from her “home office”. Anne is setting up a festing in place party on their courtyard. We laughed when she said Denny would only go on Friday or Sunday because Saturday was too busy.
My book this week was “Maid” by Stephanie Land. This seemed particularly relevant as we see so many low paid workers struggling to survive in an economy mostly closed down. My eyes were hugely opened by Land’s story of survival as a single parent and house cleaner.
Music on Monday night came from Eric Lindell. It was Sheri’s birthday and she and Sean were also watching from California. It felt very vaguely like going to a concert together, as Lindell performed in his bathroom (he noted that, as is typical, that’s the room in his house with the best acoustics). The show was good but not anywhere near as much fun as seeing him at One Eyed Jacks, Carrollton Station, or the Kessler.
Music continued with the regular Tuesday night Band of Heathens Good Times Supper Club show, from their homes in Austin. Gordy and Ed trade off on songs, the rest of the band shares cocktail recipes, favourite albums, a classic Grateful Dead show archive recommendation, and even reads a portion of Shakespeare. Quite the eclectic hour and a half of entertainment.
With all this time on video calls, I decided to spruce up my image with behind camera lighting and an adjustable tripod for my webcam. Diana finds it all quite entertaining.
Week 4 of Couch to 5K concluded on Saturday morning. Diana was really pushing me, pulling ahead on several occasions. I had to wait for a “hill” to catch back up again. The picture of our route is a bit fuzzy, but we covered a solid 2.2 miles – our longest yet.
The quail turned out well. I’ll make a slight adjustment with the next batch to make the quail meat a bit rarer – I think 8 minutes instead of 10 in the oven. The black cherry sauce set off the quail perfectly. The meal kit is for a family of 4 and we always seem to get about 2.5 meals out of it.
We may have created a monster out of Clorinda, Diana’s Mom, this week. After a few years of trying, she’s now sufficiently bored that FaceTime is appealing to her. She ends the session each day with “See you tomorrow”. We’re practicing patience as she wanders off for several minutes at a time, returning to be surprised that we’re still there. That’s Andy, her amazing neighbour, photo bombing. He was helping Adamo to install a new vanity.
My book this week was “Deacon King Kong” by James McBride. Set in a public housing project in the late 1950s, this story features a crazy bunch of characters. McBride was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2016 “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America”. There’s certainly plenty to reflect on in this novel about the struggles of citizens living in public housing and working low income jobs. I enjoyed the story and particularly the development of a number of very interesting characters as the plot unfolded.