Month: July 2020

Week in Review – July 12, 2020

“You’ll Never Walk Alone”

Hello again.  This will be a brief update since I just posted about the last couple of weeks a few days ago, and we’re not off on any exciting adventures right now.

I love this video of Clorinda, my mother in law, puttering around and singing along to a record, completely oblivious to the fact that Alicia is recording her.

We celebrated my Mum’s birthday on Sunday as we do these days – by gathering on a Zoom call.  This was the first time all the cousins had been together, albeit virtually, since the wedding in Cozumel over 3 years ago.  Everyone enjoyed chatting and I left thinking that we should do this more often.

I watched the movie “The Trip to Greece” while Diana was sunbathing on Sunday.  This is the fourth in the series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.  The formula is the same as the last three trips – Steve and Rob travel around, enjoying fabulous meals and trying to upstage each other with humour and impressions.  The impressions are very funny and well done.  The constant fight to one up each other gets a bit tiresome.  The scenery and food, often eaten al fresco by some aquamarine seascape, are lovely, particularly in this time when we can neither travel nor eat those fabulous meals.

I left the Susan Sontag in Austin, probably subconsciously ready for a change of reading material.  So, I’ve started re-reading “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.  I didn’t make it very far through the first time, and I can’t remember why as this is a very funny and readable book.

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.”  Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of this tragicomic tale.  He is 30 years old, lives with his mother, and gets into all sorts of hilarious mishaps throughout the New Orleans French Quarter.

This was Toole’s only published novel.  His mother went to great lengths to convince a Tulane University English professor to read it after his death, and that ultimately led to publishing, a  very positive public reception and a Pulitzer prize.

I’ve always enjoyed the cartoon contest on the back page of the New Yorker magazine and decided to enter my first caption this week.  What do you think?

I had fun with that one and so entered again for the contest this week.

We were watching “Little Voice”, a new series by Sarah Barielles on Apple TV, when one of the characters said, “We all have cracks, that’s how the light gets in.” I said, “That’s a Leonard Cohen quote”, right as the character said, “either Hemingway or Leonard Cohen.”  That set me off on a Cohen listening spree.  What a poet!

Here’s the song of Cohen’s that first introduced me to him.  The finger picked guitar, backing vocals and French verses had me hooked.

And we’ll finish out with one of his last songs, “You Want it Darker?”  No thanks.  Not right now!  I love the Gregorian sounding background vocals.

Please remain calm and kind to everyone.

Fortnight in Review – July 5th, 2020

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.