I’m finally able to get some exercise again. Swimming seems to be the best bet for my leg and I’ve been amazed at all the data my new Apple watch captures from my swims – total laps and yards, average and peak heart rate, yards of breaststroke versus freestyle, active and total calories expended. I did 1400 yards on Tuesday and 1500 on Friday – picking up the pace quite a bit on Friday as I got comfortable that my leg would handle it. All that technology is great and we currently have a week long competition going between Diana, Alicia and me to see who gets the most exercise and burns the most calories. McD is quite upset that she doesn’t burn as many calories for the same amount of effort – as I’ve told her, it takes a lot less effort to move her little body around than it does mine.
I saw this crazy video of Katie Ledecky balancing a glass of milk on her head while she swims a full lap. What amazing body control and balance:
The nagging and prodding all got too much and I succumbed to Physical Therapy on Tuesday. My therapist, Shenpagavadivu Sathiyamoorthy, 
thankfully goes by Shenda and was very thorough in understanding my situation. She’s probably nowhere close to winning a most vowels in your name contest, but should at least get a bronze star. Taking a baseline of my recovery, she had me walk in the corridor for 2 minutes and noticed that my left foot turns out when I walk and my weight is all on the outside of my foot. I explained that’s the way I’ve always walked since breaking my left ankle in University. She thinks that running in that same way put the strain on my left hip as it tried to compensate for my foot turning out, causing the stress fracture. Interesting. Now we start the exercises to strengthen everything and work on turning that left foot back in.
We’re hoping that the bathroom remodel woes are mostly behind us now. The steam shower installation is complete and all the peripherals appear to be working now. Diana and I had to play a very hands on role in supervising the initial plumber and helping him to correct his mistakes. All that remains is some argy bargy with the plumbing company over how much they would like to charge us for the first plumber 
that didn’t know what he was doing and spent way too much time redoing and troubleshooting his work. Diana will take the good cop first pass at that and hopefully bad cop K won’t need to make an appearance. The bathtub may be able to come inside from the front porch soon.
Will and Christine moved to a new apartment this week – a penthouse in the same building as his old one. He’s quite excited about the 20 foot vaulted ceilings, the extra bedroom, and the mountain view.
I finished “Blood” by Allison Moorer this week and I can’t remember being as affected by a book since Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights”, as you’ll be able to tell by the number of quotes and comments that I’m sharing. The way that Moorer conveys her emotions over the years as she continues to deal with her tragic upbringing is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.
“I call the B-25 Daddy’s guitar because that’s what it is and always will be. It’s a 1964 Gibson. I’ve played it on every record I’ve ever made.”
A guitar as old as me that’s still going strong. Clearly a very good year.
“I keep it out where I, or anyone who comes into my house, can pick it up and play a tune. Daddy would like that, I think. I don’t treat it like a precious thing, but it is even though it’s so scarred.”
Even after the devastating pain and suffering inflicted on Moorer by her father, she still plays his guitar. A great example of the healing power of music.
“Guitars are mysterious. A person can practice playing one for a lifetime and never really figure out how they work.”
“Music was second nature to Mama, while Daddy had to work hard just to be an average songwriter, singer, and player. He probably had more talent for other things – but the desire to make music was deeply in him, even more than it seemed to be in her. He always looked to her for the right chord when he couldn’t find it and for the harmony parts he couldn’t hear. She was just plainly better and more naturally talented than he was. It made him deeply frustrated because she had something he didn’t but wanted badly. He despised the part of her that didn’t treat her talent for music as the most important thing in life besides, of course, him.”
This is an extreme version of the feeling I have with people who squander a natural music talent and ability. I have to work very hard to make something sound half way decent, while so many others can just sit down and do it with zero effort. And that is quite frustrating.
“Daddy’s main disease was alcoholism. But I don’t think it began and ended there. I have more than a suspicion that there was very likely something else going on, something else that didn’t allow his mind to operate properly. Normally? I don’t know what normal is.”
“Was he bipolar? I know he was depressed. His moods swung violently. He was unpredictable. He did dangerous things. I’m pretty certain he didn’t care if he lived or died. He would come up out of the misery every once in a while and when he did it felt like the sun was shining directly on you and only for you. That’s what his happiness felt like. He’d deliver a sweet “That’s my girl” and a pat on the back or the head when he was pleased with you. But that was only every once in a while.”
“He didn’t like competition. Everyone loved her. So he shrank her. He shrank her until she almost disappeared. She decided that she didn’t want to disappear anymore. Then he disappeared her for good. No more speaking too much, no more personality, no more competition, no more chance that she might possibly have a life outside of the one she had with him.”
Hard to imagine someone who wants to shrink their wife. But there are a lot of them out there. Then the story gets worse, in my opinion:
“What happens when you hit your daughter: First, she will bond to you out of fear, mistakenly thinking she has done something wrong and if she can just manage to not do it again or somehow please you, you might not hit her or anyone else anymore. She will even think you will love her properly if she can earn your approval. She won’t realize this is impossible. Then, she will either do that with every man she comes within a hundred feed of for the rest of her life or until she learns not to (this will take much doing), or she will despise them with such vehemence that she can barely stomach one around. Sometimes she will do a combination of both of those things, working herself into a pattern of push and pull. I love you I hate you, I need you I don’t need anyone, that will drive her a little crazy. She won’t understand at first, if ever, why she only attracts other masochists.”
And then some more positive commentary on music and innate ability:
“I was always a stickler for details even as a girl, and noticed that someone had hit the wrong chord upon first hearing the recording. When I revealed this to my sister, she looked at me like I had three heads. It was true that I was almost missing the point entirely, but the little things meant everything to me. I’d pick out the smallest details on a recording and would often fixate on them, waiting for them to come around every time I’d listen – a faraway harmony part, a double-time strum on a guitar, the acoustic upstrokes between every spelled-out letter on the chorus of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” The details always connected me to the ground and reminded me that even if everything else around me was too unpredictable to depend on, I could count on the records to not vary. I could trust them, and not a whole lot else.”
Moorer’s records are always impeccably produced and the paragraph above partially explains why. The only record I remember bugging me every time I listen is “Easy Money” by Rickie Lee Jones. The double bass is alone in the intro and quite out of tune – how does that happen? I love the song but the bass always bugs me.
“That I cannot cancel my love and attachment to them is a testament to the bonds, good or bad, of blood. It’s fascinating to try to figure it out, though, and I have a hunger to do so. It’s medicine, a balm for the wounds still healing. I need a balm. Sorting through it makes me tired in the deepest part of myself.”
Talking about her son, John Henry, who has appeared in the background of some Hayes Carll livestreams, and who has non-verbal autism:
“He is here as an angel. He is sometimes of the sort that tests my patience, fortitude, and endurance, sometimes of the sort that ruptures my heart, sometimes of the sort that makes me feel like every part of me that has any good in it will burst through my skin from the way he makes it increase in size. I am here to learn to allow him to redeem me.”
About making music with her “Sissy”, Shelby Lynne:
“The sound of our voices blending as only those that belong to siblings can buzzed through them just as it did us. Our voices are like two halves of a whole, and when we sing together we make one thing. It was electric. My chest and ribs vibrated in that perfect way that notes coming from my toes can make them do. Sometimes I think I live for that feeling.”
The other siblings that come to mind when reading that paragraph:
“I watch my friends and H. with fascination as they talk about what their folks are up to, how they annoy them, how they love them. I try not to cry when H. speaks to his folks on the phone, and cover up my longing for just one conversation that he’s having. I am jealous and I am sad. I am lonely.”
Sometimes simple phone calls are so precious. We don’t always recognize that at the time.
My last quote from “Blood”:
“Guns: I am farther away from them now than I have ever been. The sight of a gun unnerves me – all that shiny metal clicking and clacking, heavy in a hand. Maybe that’s how much fear weighs. It weighs as much as the gun you tote. you think you can ward off your fear if you have one.
I do not like firearms around me. I will cross the street if I see a copy because they carry them. I don’t like the sounds they make, I don’t like the damage they do, I don’t like the power they possess.”
Continuing on the musical front, I heard this great cover of the Grateful Dead’s “West L.A. Fadeaway” by moe. I love the jazzy elements of their jamband sound.
I heard about this NPR listening test that let’s you see if you can really tell the difference in high quality audio recordings. There are 3 choices for different styles of music and each is at a different audio quality (sampling frequency). I got about 70% correct indicating that I really can’t hear high frequencies well enough any more to be able to tell the difference. Put on some headphones and see what you think:
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
Staying with NPR, they put on what they call Tiny Desk concerts – performances at the desk of one of their reporters. Those have obviously gone virtual these days. Here’s one from Lucinda Williams. Such an unabashedly Southern accent and she always has excellent guitar players:
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/894685942/lucinda-williams-tiny-desk-home-concert
And here’s the Tiny desk contest winner for this year – Linda Diaz has such a gentle and smooth sound with a good message for now:
This John Hiatt song just popped up on Spotify as I was writing this post. Listen to Ry Cooder’s slide guitar – Wow!
The bathroom remodel has begun. The designer twins (Marci and Mindy) – identical so it’s helpful that they have different hairdos – visited us to finalize the tile and other design elements. The tiles are actually white, grey and blue, although they look a bit beige in the picture. Believe me, there will be no more beige in that bathroom.
We laughed at the debris under my spot on the couch – including a martini olive stick and a variety of crackers. It really wasn’t as bad as I had expected but Diana was quick to point that there wasn’t a single crumb under her spot. Perhaps she was sweeping things in my direction?
We did manage to squeeze in visits to another two of our favourite restaurants before leaving Austin. June’s is always good and we loved the curried escargot with puff pastry and the bone marrow bolognese. This is the restaurant where I had my lunch “interview” before taking the job in Austin.
We listened to “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” by Gail Honeyman on the drives to and from Austin. Apparently this is soon to be a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. I can’t quite picture that given the Glasgow setting. I highly recommend this book – very unique, entertaining and heart-breaking at the same time. The narrator of the audio book really adds quite a bit with her wide variety of male and female Scottish accents.
I mentioned the Hayes Carll Tuesday night livestreams earlier. He is often joined on those by his wife, Allison Moorer. I didn’t realize she was the younger sister of the equally great singer, Shelby Lynne. They both had tragic upbringings, culminating in a murder/suicide of their parents when Moorer was fourteen. She writes about her upbringing in rural Alabama in the book “Blood”. I’m about half way through this (taking a break from the Susan Sontag tome) now and while the subject is very sad, the way Moorer writes about her memories and how she feels about them in her forties is quite beautiful and moving. Here’s one of Moorer’s songs that sounds like it was inspired by childhood:
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.
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.