“Long as I can see the Light”
Poor Finn was rousted early on Monday so that the house cleaners could take care of his room – they like to start upstairs and work their way down. 
As if that wasn’t a sufficient disturbance, the Designing Twins were over in the morning to review a couple of colour palette options for the kitchen. “We” seem to be pretty firm on using the same hardwood floors that we have in the family room, dining room etc. for the kitchen, and the tile you see here is the leading candidate for the backsplash. (Update from later in the week – that backsplash is no longer going to make the cut – we don’t love it after living with it for a few days.) Diana is heavily focused on closing out most of the kitchen remodel decisions this week. Rachel was scheduled for dinner on Monday night, but the weather turned very ugly and so we’ll have to arrange that at a later date. We were tired and happy to relax by ourselves.
Norma sent me this video of the volcano near Guatemala City spouting on Tuesday morning. Apparently nothing to be overly concerned about. The authorities issued a warning that folks should stay away from the base, closed the nearby Guatemala City airport (since reopened) and that was it.
Finn and I got out for a mid-morning coffee break at Filtered in downtown. We followed that with an exploratory drive to see if we could find the Rye food truck. Mission accomplished – it’s hidden in behind the Tupps brewery over by the old Cotton Mill. We picked up four bags of QuickCrete 
on the way home and then had fun digging a hole and securing D’s fleur-de-lis hose holder much more effectively – it’s not going anywhere now. I’m predicting that a future task assignment could be polishing up and cleaning the fleur-de-lis.
I spent a few happy afternoon hours researching homeowners and car insurance prices. Cars are relatively equal across companies but homeowners varies wildly. I had to create a pretty detailed spreadsheet to track the various coverages and prices to get a good comparison. At the end of the day, we’ll save several thousand dollars for better coverage than we have today – what a racket.
Jose, our superstar contractor, came over with half of the Designing Twins on Tuesday evening to measure the cabinets so that he can start building the new ones. Was that Marcie or Mindy that was here Diana? One of the great things about Jose is that he’s not scared to offer input and suggestions based on all the remodels he’s done over the years – very helpful. And he has pictures of all of them so that he can show you exactly what he’s describing.
We almost forgot to record a Happy Birthday video for David’s 55th. My plan was to do it on the guitar this time to change things up from the normal piano rendition. Quite a bit of hilarity ensued in my office as we (mostly I) tried to get things right.
Continuing with the kitchen remodel theme, McD made a trip with the twins to Nebraska Furniture Mart on Wednesday morning to pick out new appliances. She was pretty worn out on return, but had successfully picked out a new dual oven, under counter microwave, and stove-top. Great work D! I don’t remember all the features of the oven but I do know the doors open sideways rather than vertically, the oven heats up in less than 5 minutes, and there’s a special dual convection pizza setting. Oh, and something that seems particularly attractive – the shelves slide all the way out. It’s starting to seem like this remodel is really on.
In the evening we treated ourselves to the special Kate Weiser chocolates that we had selected on the weekend. My sea salt caramel was amazing. We enjoyed an episode of “This is Us” to accompany those treats. This was a particularly poignant episode with Uncle Nicky traveling from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles to meet his great niece and nephew (named after him). We’ve even got Finn into the show.
Just when things were winding down for the evening, the tornado sirens start wailing. We knew there were storms forecast but weren’t expecting tornados. A quick update from the TV news told us the danger was at least 30 minutes away. The danger passed prior to the arrival of the storm in McKinney. And thankfully we didn’t have to roust Finn and introduce him to the tornado shelter (laundry room).
My second vaccine was administered on Thursday morning. I took Diana and Finn with me, just in case I got some of the nasty side-effects I’ve heard folks talk about from the second dose. We showed Finn the Cowboys headquarters across the street and snapped the requisite photograph. Shortly after this picture was taken, we were able to get Finn registered for a vaccine next week at the Allen stadium.
My after vaccination treat was a trip to the Golden Boy Coffee Co. at the Granite Park Boardwalk. This was a great new find and one that we will put on our coffee shop rotation as the weather gets nicer. I convinced Diana to try the loaded tots from the Biscuit Bar next door – right up there with the Velvet Taco. Next treat stop was around the corner at Taco Deli. Finn and I really enjoyed our lunch – Space Cowboy and Jess Special for me. Diana couldn’t relax and enjoy my treats because she was texting back and forth with the twins about pendant lighting to go above the island in the kitchen. Maybe that’s the last decision to be made before work starts? One had too much blue, one was too aqua, one wasn’t big enough – you get the idea.
On arrival back at the house I went to work on my list and replaced as many landscape lighting bulbs as we had available in inventory – it’s been a while since they were tended to and it’s getting dark outside at night – such a slacker.
Diana reprised her amazing sea bass with ponzu sauce for Thursday dinner. Such a great piece of fish, perfectly cooked and with a completely yummy sauce – thanks D!
I picked up Cavallis pizza, salad and arancini for dinner on Friday night. Finn really likes the official Neapolitan style pizza – and he and Diana agree that the Margherita Extra is the best choice. We tortured Adamo with this picture – he’s a huge fan of Cavallis. He’s going to have to bring the family out to visit if he wants some – wait…is that a good idea? Can our house withstand that kind of visit?
Saturday began with a pleasant visit to Duino coffee – the closest good coffee shop to our home. Then it was yard work time – removing the bushes that died in the winter storm – or at least cutting them way back. Diana and Finn made a very efficient team:
Diana is currently out in the front yard removing as many of the dead bushes as she can before tiring out. Finn and I are relaxing and enjoying March Madness basketball – we don’t have the energy to keep up with the energizer bunny today.
We finally watched “Hamilton” on Saturday night. I didn’t realize it was a full 3 hour epic, but really enjoyed all of it. Such a creative and entertaining retelling of very interesting history. The Thomas Jefferson character was my favourite.
We enjoyed these pics of Ollie in Golden Gate park that Will sent this morning:
And then there’s this silly one – poor dog – between the sunglasses and his bedtime popsicles the poor thing doesn’t have a chance.
The NY Times Sunday crossword featured Winnie the Pooh again – and I finished in a new record time.
We enjoyed a coffee at Filtered – very quiet downtown due to Palm Sunday services, and then Finn and I flew the bat kite to remotely participate in the annual Austin kite festival. It’s been two years since we enjoyed that event with the Wahbas. The wind was a bit inconsistent but we did manage to get the bat out to full string length.
I decided that I’m going to require some different reading to break up the 700 pages of Obama’s “Promised Land”. I plan to pick it up again tomorrow.
“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
This is the question at the heart of “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, a book that I picked up during our visit to the Wild Detectives bookstore last weekend.
Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision in the book and, faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
This was a quick and enjoyable read and I’m still trying to decide on my final verdict on how well the premise worked.
Here’s a passage that sets things up as Nora is still living her “root life” prior to discovering “The Midnight Library”:
“She sat down at the little electric piano but played nothing. She thought of sitting by Leo’s side, teaching him Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor. Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
There was an old musician’s cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano. But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all.
Time slipped by. She stared into space.
After the wine a realisation hit her with total clarity. She wasn’t made for this life.
Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she’d imagined she’d be.
Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveller. Glaciologist. Happy. Loved.
Nothing.
She couldn’t even imagine ‘cat owner.’ Or ‘one-hour-a-week piano tutor.’ Or ‘human capable of conversation.’ “
Talking with Mrs. Elm, the librarian:
“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.”
Thoreau, and particularly his Walden book, play a pretty large role in underpinning the book, and I wonder if this isn’t a favourite of the author:
“‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’ “
I enjoyed these thoughts on why social media is so damaging to communities – where people try to have relationships with many, many more folks than is reasonable given ingrained human nature:
“And then he told her about a man called Roger Dunbar at Oxford University, who had discovered that human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people, as that was the average size of hunter-gatherer communities.
‘And the Domesday Book,’ Ash had told her, under the stark lighting of the hospital canteen, ‘if you look at the Domesday Book, the average size of an English community at that time was a hundred and fifty people. Except in Kent. Where it was a hundred people. I’m from Kent. We have anti-social DNA.'”
A very current reference, and one that likely won’t make any sense to someone picking up this book 20 years from now:
“And bloody hell, she looked amazing. Her naturally black hair had a kind of white stripe in it. Vampiric make-up. And a lip piercing. She did look tired but she supposed that was just a result of living on tour. It was a glamorous kind of tired. Like Billie Eilish’s cool aunt.“
A somewhat amazing commentary comparing the number of optional moves as a chess game progresses with life choices:
“At the beginning of the game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, ever dream, every regret, every moment of living.”
At the end of the book, Nora decides to return to her “root life”, live without regrets of decisions past, and finds it to be the most rewarding of all the options she chose.
The main message that Haig is delivering is that one should not dwell on regrets but get on with living the best possible option of our lives. I enjoyed this book as a quick diversionary read but wouldn’t overly recommend it.
I’m a bit over a third of the way through “Breathing Lessons”, Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer winning novel from the 1980s. I love Nick Hornby’s work – starting with the magnificent “High Fidelity” – and read one of his articles where he praised Anne Tyler’s work profusely. That led me to order up a couple of her books.
The book takes place over the course of one long day and features Maggie and Ira, a married couple in their fifties. The characters and descriptions of quotidian events are very well written, but I’m not loving this so far. John Updike’s review for The New Yorker had me expecting something right up there with his “Rabbit” series – this just seems much more lightweight so far. I suspect things will pick up soon, or I’ll be in a better mood to enjoy the everyday happenings.
It is interesting that the theme so far seems to be about lifetime regrets – similar to “The Midnight Library”.
I revisited one of the great albums this week – “Rejuvenation” by The Meters from 1974. A huge does of classic New Orleans funk. Every song on this record is excellent. Here are a couple (and I’m leaving off “Just Kissed My Baby”, “Hey Pocky-A-Way”, and “Africa”).
I read that Eric Clapton stole a lot of his early 70s work from this one. George Porter’s bass towards the end is like a true solo instrument:
I really like this version of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” by Pressing Strings:
And finally, a unique version of one of my favourites:
The end is less than two weeks away for me now. Stay patient, safe and kind!
Diana and I started Monday with a run in the beautiful weather. I completed the 20 minutes of running that finishes out Week 5 of Couch to 5K and am excited to move on to Week 6. Only 2 more weeks after that and I’ll supposedly be ready for our first joint 5K race. I am going to need to improve my speed quite a bit if I’m hoping to cross the finish line at the same time as McD. Diana found an interesting race for us – the “Run for the Rose” in McKinney. It comes with a glass of sparking rose at the finish line, snacks from Zin Zen and Sugarbacon, a commemorative champagne glass and a medal. Sounds perfect for at least one of us.
We put Finn to work in the afternoon and he made a good start in painting the pool room. He had to cover up all the dirty prints form Alicia and friends, and the kids that lived here before us. Painting the entire wall ended up being the more efficient process.
Diana lost interest a bit as the documentary continued, and so she and Finn whipped up some delicious lemon bars from a recipe that she uncovered from her archives at Finn’s request. You can tell it’s pretty serious business.
We couldn’t resist stopping into Kate Weiser’s chocolate shop while we were there. So many other places I had planned to put on the itinerary had closed – Bolsa (although opened under a different name) and the amazing charcuterie place from the Lucia guys (opening soon as a larger Lucia) – so it was good to see the chocolate shop still in business. Patty’s favourite cupcake shop next door was also doing a very brisk business. The chocolates and Easter eggs from Weiser really are works of art – those “Chick-a-dees” on the left really are edible chocolate. We have several eggs to choose from on Easter Sunday. And individual candies for each of us – key-lime pie for D, salted caramel for K, and strawberry for F.
I enjoyed this gaggle of turtles that Diana snapped on her virtual walk with Alicia after breakfast. Gaggle – is that the right term for a group of turtles? I’m pretty sure it’s not even close. Let’s check. A bale, turn, dole, or nest is the correct term, with a bale and turn applying exclusively to turtles. Who knew? We’ve never seen even a single turtle by that pond before. It’s like walking along the river in Austin with bales (see how I quickly incorporated my learning to try and reinforce it) of turtles everywhere.
This was a relatively quiet week overall – mostly just working at home. I met our friend Vinod for lunch at Brio in Southlake on Monday. It was nice to catch up as I haven’t really talked to him in months. We used to see each other every day in Austin and Vinod would always come by my desk to check in at the start of the day. In all the years that I’ve known Vinod, I’ve never seen him with any kind of facial hair – apparently his wife has given the new goatee a maximum one month lifespan.
Amy and Ray were in town to do a final pack up for their move to Santa Fe. Diana is really going to miss her workout buddy. We enjoyed one of McD’s excellent meat and cheese platters on Thursday evening and had a great visit. The ladies seem to be enjoying my music selection in this picture. Finn hung in there with us for a couple of hours before heading up to bed. He says the music didn’t keep him awake – I hope that’s true.
Scottish night on Saturday consisted of haggis, meat pies, shepherd’s pies, mashed potatoes and baked beans – all the classics. We did torture Finn with the piping in of the haggis and reciting of a portion of the “Address to a Haggis.” He didn’t think he’d tasted haggis before and quite liked it.
Thursday started with a big milestone – I received my first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine. The process was very efficient and I didn’t appear to suffer any big side-effects – just a wee bit of dizziness in the afternoon.
I just received my renewed passport (no European mention and back to the pre-EU blue colour) on Monday and so, coupled with the vaccine, should be ready to travel again in a month or two.
The three of us went for another run when I got back home. I decided to attempt Week 5 Day 1 even though my legs were still quite sore from Tuesday. Finn was a real trooper and did it as well. I was totally worn out after that, but did convince Finn to take on a crepe myrtle trimming project. Doesn’t he look like he’s having an absolute blast with the project. He did a great job on 3 trees and then had to attack the cleanup – always the last fun part.
I finished up “The Moth and the Mountain” by Ed Caesar. The adventure story should have been very compelling but I really struggled to stay engaged. Caesar is a reporter for the New Yorker magazine and the book felt more like a very detailed research article than an exciting story of flying around the world and attempting to climb Everest. Too much about Maurice’s letters to friends in England than real story telling.
