Month: June 2023

“These screws need to come out”

We made a big decision shortly after my last post.  Have you heard?  We’re listing our house and moving to New Orleans.  We love our home, but it’s just so boring and such a long drive to things we like to do.  We’re looking forward to spending time with our friends in the city we love.

It’s been a complete whirlwind since we made the decision.  We hired a realtor, organized a moving company, contracted with a painter, and packed innumerable boxes.  Diana has been a beast with the packing and I haven’t been a ton of help due to my leg surgery – more on that shortly.

On Monday, Diana was upset that the under-sink garbage disposal hadn’t been replaced while she was in California.  I rarely use it, and so hadn’t even thought about it.  Never mind – a quick order from Amazon and I was ready to tackle replacement.  Not having done this before, I made sure to read all the instructions carefully.  The flange from the old disposal didn’t accommodate the new one – ugh.  I just couldn’t figure out how to get the old one off.  Youtube to the rescue – there’s a hidden spring clamp inside the assembly.  Ahh – two seconds later and it was off.  Now it was time for problem number two – the replacement unit is too fat for the space available.  Back to Amazon and a new unit showed up before 6pm.  That was quickly installed and all is working well for now.

I decided to have the screws removed from my femur.  They’ve been in there for over three years and continue to hurt every day.  Enough!  The orthopedic surgeon required several tests to be completed through my regular doctor before operating.  Should be easy enough, I thought.  Never that easy.  Four phone calls later, the doctor had the instructions on what was needed.  So, I got to spend a happy couple of Monday hours waiting for an EKG and some blood tests.

Tuesday brought the final pre-op test – a chest x-ray.  I was all clear for surgery the following Wednesday.

Thursday brought my final pre-op appointment at the orthopedic office.  All clear and ready to go.  We also met with a listing agent who will help us to sell the house.  She wants all the clutter and personalization gone from the house before she has some staging done and takes photos.  So now we’re in mad dash packing and sorting mode.

We awoke on Friday to the horrendous news of a tornado that destroyed much of Perryton, TX.  It arrived with no warning and wiped out big swaths of Main Street and other areas.  Just devastating.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/16/perryton-tornado-storms/

Finn turned 30 a week ago on Saturday.  We took him to Drake’s Old Hollywood in Dallas for dinner.  What a wonderful new place.  Beautiful old school design and wonderful food and service.  We started with lobster escargot – like escargot but with lobster, puff pastry and garlic pesto.  Finn said the appetizer meatball was the best he’s ever tasted.  Diana and Finn both had the Chilean sea bass and loved it.  Then the sparkler topped chocolate mousse.  I think Finn had a very nice time.  He just told us some big news a few days ago – he has a girlfriend that he really likes and they also celebrated his birthday.

We celebrated our 6th (iron) anniversary when we got home – letting Finn have the dinner be just his celebration.

Dr. Neffie (she just completed her PhD) and her fiancée Shaun came over to visit us on Sunday.  Diana made one of her famous meat and cheese platters and we enjoyed some mini sliders from the grill.  I really enjoyed chatting with Shaun – I can see why the Dr. likes him so much.

After a long wait in bed at the surgery center on Wednesday morning, I was finally wheeled to the operating room around noon.  Can you believe the size of the screws that were in there?  Here are before and after x-rays.

Apparently bone had grown around the screwheads, causing the pain that I’ve been experiencing.

Wednesday was also Timmy’s 60th birthday.  He celebrated with his lovely family in Philadelphia.

Diana worked miracles, putting in 14 to 16 hour days of packing and sorting.  The first truckload left on Friday – all donations to the women’s shelter and other charities.  Now on to the stuff that’s going into storage while we show the house.  It’s a lot of stuff, and includes all of the pictures on my office walls.

I posted Penelope for sale on Facebook Marketplace on Friday afternoon, and wasn’t sure what to expect.  Immediate interest.  I showed it to a guy on Saturday afternoon and he seemed very interested.  More to come next posting.  I did find this entertaining picture of the day I bought her, a little over 10 years ago.  She’s been such a good car.

Quite the storm came through on Friday night.  We had several branches come off the huge oak tree in the front yard.  No major damage, thankfully.

Will likes to post about his dining adventures on Instagram.  He tried the Bywater restaurant in Los Gatos and appears to have really enjoyed it.  It’s operated by David Kinch who owned Manresa for many years.

“1 Dead Attic – After Katrina” by Chris Rose was my book this week.  A shocking collection of articles that Rose wrote in the aftermath.  These are tremendously well written by someone who lived through the early days of recovery in New Orleans.  Chris was married to our friend Kelly at the time this was published (Kelly actually self published it and remembers how successful it was financially) and it’s interesting to read her account of the impact all of this had on his mental health and overall physical wellbeing.

Here’s an online summary:

“Celebrated as a local classic and heaped with national praise, 1 Dead in Attic is a brilliant collection of columns by an award-winning Times-Picayune journalist chronicling the horrific damage and aftermath wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2006. “Frank and compelling…vivid and invaluable” (Booklist), it is a roller coaster ride through a devastated American wasteland as it groans for rebirth. Full of the emotion, tragedy and even humor—which has made Chris Rose a favorite son and the voice of a lost city—these are the stories of the dead and the living, of survivors and believers, of destruction and recovery, and of hope and despair.”

Here’s a quote about New Orleans:

“The experience of everyday life here is magnified by emotional intensity and creative reverie, yet also reduced by the heat, humidity, and altitude to its most basic and primal elements: Food, shelter, and the Saints.

You can regulate our smoking and regulate our music and – hard to believe this day has come – you can even regulate our go-cups.

But you cannot regulate soul.  You cannot legislate funk.  And you cannot pass an ordinance that makes us ordinary.  

The best things about us will never change.”

So well said!

“If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.”  Judy Deck.

From the article “The First Time Back 9/7/05”:

“Riding my bike, I searched out my favorite places, my comfort zones.  I found that Tipitina’s is still there, and that counts for something.  Miss Mae’s and Dick & Jenny’s, ditto.

Domilise’s po-boy shop is intact, although the sign fell and shattered, but truth is, that sign needed to be replaced a long time ago.

I saw a dead guy on the front porch of a shotgun double on a working class street, and the only sound was wind chimes.”

From “Life in the Surreal City 9/10/05”:

“There are men and woman from other towns living there in tents who have left their families to come help us, and they are in the park clearing out the fallen timber.  My fellow Americans.

Every damn one of them tells you they’re happy to be here and every time I try to thank them, on behalf of all of us, I just lose it.  I absolutely melt down.

There is nothing quite as ignominious as weeping in front a soldier.

This is no environment for a wuss like me.  We reporters go to other places to cover wars and disasters and pestilence and famine.  There’s no manual to tell you how to do this when it’s your own city.”

From “Don’t Mess with Mrs. Rose 2/21/06”:

“I’ve always had a particular fascination with people who steal stuff that obviously belongs to kids.

Anyway, my wife, she’s like me: a little raw.  A little roughed up by all of this.  With all that can go wrong around here on a minute’s notice, she’s in no mood to let her day be ruined by a punk, a bad guy, part of the problem.

So she unfurled a bloody tirade against this guy, who may or may not have been armed but was so stunned by her fury that he babbled some lie about “That guy said I could borrow it” and she continued with her furious but rather persuasive diatribe.

She grabbed the bike.  He got off and walked away.

“Moseyed,” she tells me.”

That would be Kelly, and I do not mess with her.

I have many other dog-eared pages, but that’s enough for now.

Here’s a beautiful, relaxing piece of music:

And I think that’s a good way to end.

Coexist peacefully, with kindness and compassion for all!

“Silly doves”

This has been a very quiet week at home – not a lot to report on.

The only interruption to my peace was from the idiotic doves that seem to come and visit every year about this time.  A few years ago they built a nest on top of the patio speaker above the door.  They attempted to reprise that stunt while we were gone.  I ultimately had to take the speaker down as they just wouldn’t give up on dive bombing in to take their spot atop it.  Undeterred, they decided to try the other speaker.  So annoying.  I took that speaker down as well and have had the ceiling fans on all the time.  That seems to have done the trick.  They can no longer perch on the fan and have their meetings about where to try and nest next.

I did venture out a couple of times.  First for lunch at Mexican Cactus and then for Sunday lunch at Tacodeli.  Their migas royale platter is so good, and a great value.

Massimo and Luciano had their final baseball game and are quite proud of their medals.  Sweet pictures, and I’m confident they were back to beating up on each other a few minutes after these were taken.

It seems the weather in Pacifica has been pleasant, even suitable for D to sunbathe on Friday afternoon.

Speaking of sunbathing, Anne just sent a picture of her new backyard pool.  Denny must be so pleased.

Diana and Alicia hosted Will, Christine and Adamo’s crew on Saturday evening.  Will took Adamo and the boys for a spin in the fancy BMW M2, and they watched the whales at sunset from Adamo’s home.  I hear that Alicia made some yummy tacos.

My book this week was “Foregone” by Russell Banks.  Sadly, I have not heard of Banks, who has published many well reviewed books.   The good news is that I have a lot of new titles to explore.  Here’s the online summary:

“At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.”

I haven’t quite finished the book yet, and have really enjoyed what I’ve read so far.  The structure of the tale, bouncing from present day to memories in alternating paragraphs kept things interesting.

Another discovery – “China Girl” by Iggy Pop.  I read that Bowie and Iggy wrote this together, and this version was released before the massive Bowie hit.  It just needs the wonderful Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar licks.

My final discovery this week:  Songhoy Blues is a desert blues music group from Timbuktu, Mali.  Very interesting sound.

And closing out this posting with this gorgeous song from Ry Cooder.

Coexist peacefully, with kindness and compassion for all!