Category: Weekly Updates

“Puzzle Time”

Monday started typically with an early morning New York Times crossword.  I had a pretty slow time (just over 10 minutes when my Monday goal is under 10 minutes) but did learn something from the clue “Sirius…or Lassie, for example?”  I got the answer “Dog Star” from the across clues and understood the Lassie part – but what about Sirius – why is that a Dog star?  Turns out that Sirius gets this nickname because it is part of the constellation Canis Major, Latin for the “greater dog”.  And interestingly, the expression “the dog days of summer” refers to the period from July 3rd to August 11th, when Sirius rises in conjunction with the sun.  There’s usually some relatively useless information to be learned form the puzzle.

Monday continued with the Board audit committee meeting.  My update was well received, and over quickly – the secret to success with this group is to share only what’s really necessary, keep it minimal, and emphasize the good news.  This was maybe the third or fourth time since March that I’ve worn a dress shirt – albeit for less than an hour and with shorts.

After the meeting concluded I enjoyed a relaxing swim.  First time I’d been in a few weeks and my arms and shoulders ached a bit afterwards – but, as Diana would say, “in a good way”.  Post swim I stopped by the Run-On specialized running store in search of some socks to keep McD’s toes warm on cold morning expeditions.  We’ll see how the merino wool ones that were recommended by the experts work out for her.

Massimo and Luciano enjoyed the pretty sunset view from Gypsy Hill in Pacifica on Monday evening:

We finished up Monday watching “The Undoing” on HBO.  This is a murder mystery starring Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman and set around an exclusive school in New York.  The suspense is building and Hugh Grant may not be guilty.  I’m guessing Donald Sutherland (Nicole’s character’s father and looking like he hasn’t aged in 20 years) was involved along with the sycophantic blonde mother.

The twenty bags of leaves were hauled out for garbage collection on Tuesday morning.  You can see there is probably one more bag still on the massive oak tree.  Evergreen trees are a great idea.

The crew showed up to repair the arbor on Tuesday morning.  They had to build a structure to hold the top part up before replacing the thirty foot beam.  The special jack they had is just the tool we needed last week.

Diana came in laughing as they asked her to turn off Stanley (the pool cleaner) – he was busy showing off his party trick of spraying water on the crew.  The new beam was nicely in place by the end of the day.  Just need to get Santos out to stain it now.  We momentarily considered trying to get up on ladders and stain it ourselves  – that passed pretty quickly.

We passed on Tuesday music livestream night and decided to dive into the new season of “The Queen”.   We were a good way into an episode from a previous series – one centered around the moon landing – before realizing it.  In retrospect it seemed vaguely familiar, but we enjoyed it nonetheless.  Prince Philip’s commentary on the sermon at the local church – “not a sermon but more a general anesthetic.”  And then the kids bouncing around on space hoppers – I think that’s what we called those orange inflatable balls with the kangaroo ears.  Diana says they were “hippity hops” in the US.  I can picture Elspeth bouncing around on one on the back patio.

We adjusted to the new season and got part way through episode 1.  Is Gillian Anderson’s accent a little too much?  Or is that really what Margaret Thatcher sounded like – I’ll have to look at some videos.  I did enjoy the election quote from Thatcher – “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, and don’t count 10 Downing Street until it’s Thatched.”

The New York Times crossword seems to be featuring more music trivia related clues recently.  Here’s one that I enjoyed on Wednesday:

I had a decent Wednesday time – likely from doing it 3 hours later than the Monday puzzle.  Here’s a great song from Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” album:

I was racking my brain to think who the guy on the left of this work video call reminded me of:

Finally figured it out just before the meeting ended.  Uncanny, don’t you think?

I still love the Tintin books.

We watched another episode of the Queen on Thursday evening that had a scene with Princess Anne competing in a horse jumping event.  My mind drifted back to watching Harvey Smith and David Broome challenging each other in show jumping contests with Mum and Dad.  What a great rivalry that was.  Harvey Smith always on the edge of disaster and David Broome so much more composed, but no less competitive.

The Friday crossword and Rex Parker’s blog about it reminded me of a conversation with Clorinda on our last visit.  I know, I know – a lot of crossword talk this week – but I have to find news and interest where I can these days.

Apparently Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome) and his wife were good friends with Clorinda and Sebastian back in the day.  Diana seemed to remember going to visit them in San Francisco.  Clorinda has a few pieces of art by Fuller – they are a bit akin to Jackson Pollock paintings.  He was best known as an architect.

Saturday started with the crossword.  I had filled in the whole of the East but couldn’t get any kind of toe-hold in the West.  Diana to the recue with “Hakuna Matata” – the clue was something about an Elton John and Tim Rice composition.  It still took me a woeful forty-seven minutes to finish.

After the puzzle we had a pleasant morning walk and then endeavored to troubleshoot the aromatherapy unit associated with the steam shower.  It once worked but had stopped producing the eucalyptus scent that Diana enjoys.  I couldn’t find the manual but the online version gave clear instructions on tow to “bleed” the system of any air.  About 20 minutes later we were back in business.

I received these old pictures of Zumie out by the pool.  Not sure what the black plastic thing he has in his mouth is and it looks like he got in trouble for digging on the far side of the pool.  Also looks like he’s just back from his fortnightly trip to the groomer.

We watched a sappy Hallmark Christmas style movie on Saturday night.  A country music star comes back home and helps his old girlfriend save the family farm.  Harmless entertainment.

Sunday was very typical – which I think is a good thing.  New York Times puzzle (no help necessary), reading, coffee downtown after McD’s run (tried a new place called “Wattage” which didn’t have any atmosphere at all – we’ll be back to Filtered next week), piano practice, chat with Vince in Phillie, FaceTime with Mum and Dad,  elliptical with early football game, relaxing steam shower, and now watching the Cowboys play the Minnesota Vikings.  Currently winning 16-14 after a one handed circus catch by Lamb.

I dipped back into the excellent “Cool Gray City of Love” by Gary Kamiya (long time San Francisco Chronicle writer) and particularly the chapter “The Front Door”.  This book covers 49 different views and associated stories of the city, and this chapter is about the Ferry Building.  I read that it is modeled after the Giralda, Seville Cathedral’s minaret turned well tower.  The change in the area over the years is fascinating:

“Until 1936, when the Bay Bridge opened, San Francisco could be reached only by water or from the peninsula.  The overwhelming majority of people came across the bay by ferry.  Which meant that the Ferry Building was the city’s front door.”

“In 1913, 60,000 consumers crossed the bay by water twice each workday.  They walked off the boat and up the Y-shaped gangways into the Ferry Building, strolled across its marble mosaic floors, and exited through its massive arches onto the Ferry Plaza.  What greeted them was controlled chaos – and a city planner’s dream.  Streetcars, horses, cable cars, railroads – there was more transportation running around than in a Richard Scarry book.”

I love the Richard Scarry reference and can’t help thinking that mass transit was much more effective in 1913 than it is today.

“The coup de grace was announced in 1958, the same year the last ferry ran.  That was when the first containerized freighter sailed through the Golden Gate.  Container shipping requires space and facilities, and San Francisco could not compete with Oakland.  Just 24 years after Bloody Thursday, one of the world’s great working ports was nearing the end.

And behind the City Front, the brawny man’s-man city that had existed since the Gold Rush was dying too.  Heavy industry was leaving San Francisco.  Factory workers were being replaced by secretaries and clerks.  Skyscrapers for the new financial district were replacing docks and cranes.  The great postindustrial transformation that was to change all American society had begun in San Francisco.  Over the next two decades, it would result in a completely different city.”

This book is highly recommended for anyone visiting San Francisco – great ideas on off the beaten path areas to explore and from where to enjoy different views of one of the beautiful cities.  The chapter on earthquakes that juxtaposes accounts of the 1906 quake and fire with the 1989 quake is also excellent reading

I completed “Goodbye to a River” this week.  As I mentioned, this is part canoeing adventure down the Brazos river, part history of the early settlers and the Comanche tribe, and part commentary on man-made lakes and dams and the changes they foist on nature.

The word drouth appears often in Graves writing.  It is defined as “a period of dry weather, especially a long one that is injurious to crops.”  Initially I suspected it meant something similar to the Scottish word dreich, but that’s quite different.  Dreich means bleak, miserable, dismal, cheerless, or dreary, and I usually associate it with rain or mist, not drought.  Mum agreed that the weather in Scotland on Sunday was quite dreich.

Here Graves talks about the Possum Kingdom dam and other plans to put man-made controls on the river:

“But if you are built like me, neither the certainty of change, nor the need for it, nor any wry philosophy will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that a river that you’ve known always, and that all men of that place have known always back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist.  A piece of river, anyhow, my piece…”

Some of the excellent descriptions of the natural landscape:

“That afternoon I got only to Eagle Creek, still probing uncourageously against weather’s ire.  Rounded grey-stone cliffs stand beside the creek mouth; in the river itself massive, split-away, rhombic blocks twist and slow the green current of a long pool.  Big oaks gone red, and yellowed ashes rose precariously from slanted alluvial soil beneath the cliffs, piles of drift against their boles in prophecy of their own fate; it is on the outside tip of a bend, and in those places the river lays down rich sediment for maybe centuries and then in a fit of angry spate cuts under it and carries it away, trees and all…”

A description of the joy (or suffering) of camping.  I love the “alligator-skin corrugations”:

“On top of the food box alligator-skin corrugations of frost had formed, and with the first touch of the sun the willows began to whisper as frozen leaves loosed their hold and fell side-slipping down through the others that were still green.  Titmice called, and flickers and a redbird, and for a moment, on a twig four feet from my face, a chittering kinglet jumped around alternately hiding and flashing the scarlet of its crown…I sat and listened and watched while the world woke up, and drank three cups of the syrupy coffee, better I thought than any I’d ever tasted, and smoked two pipes.”

I had thought “ken” was a Scottish word for “know”, but maybe not after reading this section:

“The trouble was, I was ignorant.  Even in that country  where I belonged, my ken of natural things didn’t include a little bird that went heap-heap, and a few moronic holes in the sand.  Or a million other matters worth the kenning.”

Here’s what I found about the origin on the internet:

Here’s a fascinating paragraph on how one can tell the origin of cabin builders by the techniques used, based on the type of timber available in home states:

“They left the marks of their origins in the way they built, mainly in their notches.  Deep Southerners from the big-pine states cut simple, vulnerable half-notches and quarter-notches of the kind they’d used with the long, straight, expendable timber of home.  Those flat notches rot out fast, and the examples that are left are mostly on houses that were boarded over a few years after building.  Hill Southerners – Tennesseans and Kentuckians and Carolinians – had the tradition of the peaked saddle-notch, a tight joint suited to quick-tapering mountain hardwoods and good with post oaks, too, since a number of such cabins are still around.  Pennsylvania Germans, apparently, shoved the use of the dovetail and the miter dovetail on into the Midwest, and when you find a house with those corners in Texas, you know that an ancient Ohioan or Illinoisan had his hand in it, or someone who learned from him.”

All that nature writing put me in the mood to watch the documentary film “My Octopus Teacher”.  What an excellent experience – the underwater photography is amazing and the bond formed between the filmmaker and a small octopus is quite unexpected.  Craig Foster went free diving in the South African kelp forest by his home every day at the same time.  This allowed the octopus to become familiar with him and ultimately results in what really does seem like a friendship – with the octopus wrapped around his hand and resting on his chest.  A highly recommended film.

I read a New Yorker article on Adrienne Lenker of the band Big Thief that mentioned this song, “Paul”, as one of their best.  Lenker attended Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship made possible by the awesome Susan Tedeschi.  She studied guitar as a result of an audition that she performed on a Martin acoustic guitar.  Completely self taught and without an understanding of music theory, her first year at Berklee must have been quite a challenging experience.

I read that the legendary jazz pianist Keith Jarrett has permanently lost the use of his left hand.  Reminds me of the book “Every Note Played” by Lisa Genova that I reviewed a year or so ago.  Here’s a tune from Jarrett’s most recent (and perhaps final) release:

I wrote about the music of Philip Glass last week.  This week I found interpretations of his work by the amazing classical guitarist, Gerard Cousins.  Hope you like this one as much as I do:

Here’s your weekly dose of John Prine.  This time a collaboration with Kurt Vile – just beautiful:

I worked on “The River” by Joni Mitchell for the piano this week – one of the hauntingly sad Christmas songs – “I wish I had a river that I could skate away on.”  So many people view this as a classic, happy holiday tune – they clearly haven’t listened to the lyrics.  Here’s a version by Herbie Hancock with Corinne Bailey Rae from his excellent “The Joni Letters” album:

“Timber!”

The week started with another home maintenance issue.  Do we ever get a solid break from those?  Maybe six months between major issues?  This time it’s the arbor over the back deck.  I suppose we can’t get too mad at it since it’s been solid over the seven and a half years we’ve lived here.  I noticed a crack in the middle of the seam and then Diana reported hearing creaking and breaking.  We called a repair company and were hoping they would arrive before the whole thing came down, pulling gutters and whatever else with it.  They made it in time – whew! – and we rigged up a very temporary support with our ladder and a jack.  A sturdier support was applied the next morning and the new beam materials (30 feet wide) should be delivered tomorrow.

By the way, that tree in the background is our sworn mortal enemy.  She’s the one (I’m sure it’s a female) that dumps mountains of small leaves in the pool for several weeks every autumn.  If “we” (99% D) don’t keep the skimmers cleaned out multiple times a day, then the whole pool mechanism gets blocked up and puts stress on the pump.

Are you familiar with Emily Harrington?  No?  That’s disappointing as she’s one of the fiercest women I’ve heard of.  Don’t feel too badly – I hadn’t heard of her prior to this week either.  Harrington made news as the first woman to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite in less than 24 hours.  Truly an amazing accomplishment.  She topped the 3,000 foot mountain in 21 hours and 13 minutes.

Look at these amazing pictures:

Those beds clipped into the cliff face give me the heebie jeebies and almost make me start to feel the dizziness of vertigo.  Just crazy that someone could be comfortable enough to fall asleep in one of those.

Here’s what Harrington has to say about hat nasty gash on her forehead:

“A nasty slip on the 13a Golden Desert pitch almost took my resolve – a deep gash on my forehead left me bloody and defeated. I pulled on again, part of me not really wanting to stay on the wall, the other part gathering courage and flow. I kept thinking “why am I still hanging on?

The next pitch was the A5 traverse, where I failed last year. This time it was not my limit. I fought hard but with flawless movements in the dark. I cried at the belay – it could happen this time….The final 5 pitches felt scary in my current state but I pulled over the final lip at 10:30pm in disbelief.”

If you’re interested in seeing more of El Capitan and free climbing, I highly recommend the movie “Free Solo” that I reviewed a couple of years ago.  I saw it on my month off between jobs and loved it.

A new TV for the master bedroom was delivered on Thursday afternoon.  I had heard comments about maybe getting a bigger screen in there and decided to go big and not have to deal with it again for years.

McD did an excellent job of helping me hoist the behemoth up onto the TV mount – fortunately we were able to reuse the one that was already secured into the wall.  Going to bed is almost like a trip to the cinema now – except that I’m forbidden from eating popcorn in bed.

Sunday started as normal with the New York Times crossword puzzle – 21 by 21 squares as compared to the normal 15 by 15.  I finished in record time – almost half my normal time.  The crossword blogs revealed that most puzzlers also had record times – so must have been a very easy puzzle.  If you’re confused by the picture below – it took me 27 minutes and 12 seconds to finish the puzzle and I finished at 6:37 am – way too early to be up and around on a Sunday morning.

My favourite clue: He was told to “take a sad song and make it better”.  Do you know the answer to that one?  Would you like a clue?  Ok – it relates to a Beatles song that wasn’t originally on an album but was recorded during the sessions for the White album.  Still stuck?  The answer is “Jude” as in “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better”.

The TV box was too large to fit through the hole up into the attic – part of our “Team Robertson” activities on Sunday morning.  A small bit of cutting and folding and we were able to make it through.  The family room curtains joined the box up there and some Christmas garlands came down.

After all that strenuous work, it was on to the seemingly never-ending task of cleaning up the leaves from our massive front yard oak tree.  Eighteen bags in all over the last couple of weekends.  That should just about do it – there are very few leaves left on the branches and McD used her new blower to eject most of the stragglers from the flower beds.

I was amazed at the size and number of acorns among the leaves.  Almost three inches in diameter.  Is that normal?  They seem about ten times bigger than the acorns that I’m used to.

Some googling taught me about “mast” years for acorns.  Who knew?  Here’s what I read:

“Like many trees, oaks have irregular cycles of boom and bust. Boom times, called “mast years,” occur every 2-5 years, with smaller acorn crops in between. But the why and how of these cycles are still a mystery.

Scientific research can tell us what a mast year is not. A mast year is not a predictor of a severe winter. Unfortunately, plants and animals are no better at predicting the future than we are.

Strangely, mast years are not simply resource-driven. Sure, a wet, cool spring can affect pollination and a hot, dry summer can affect acorn maturation. But annual rainfall and temperature fluctuations are much smaller in magnitude than acorn crop sizes. In other words, weather variables cannot account for the excessive nutty production of acorns in a mast year.

So what does trigger a mast year? Scientists have proposed a range of explanations—from environmental triggers to chemical signaling to pollen availability—but our understanding is not clear. The fact is, we simply don’t know yet.”

After all that, I still can’t find out if 2020 is a “mast” year or not.  Maybe the reduced pollution from everyone staying home – wait, very few people are doing that here now – had a positive impact on acorn production.

So there you have the excitement and activity for our week – picking up leaves and studying up on acorns.

I watched a very interesting documentary about Philip Glass, “A Portrait of Philip in 12 parts”, while suffering through the torture that is known as the elliptical machine.

The film follows Glass as he travels the world both composing and performing with various ensembles.  I know that his music is a bit of an acquired taste – you have to love rhythmic triplets and somewhat monotonous themes that morph slowly.  Here’s one of the more accessible pieces:

I enjoyed the variety of musicians that Glass collaborates with and the insights into his creative process.  He does have a very impressive body of work with many operas, symphonies, solo piano pieces and others in his catalog.

I didn’t learn a completely new piano piece this week but did record this short video of “Happy Birthday”.  My boss had a milestone birthday on Friday and one of our marketing folks was putting together a video for him.  I spiced it up as best I could and was proud of finishing even though the iPad with the music died part way through leaving me to play by ear and memory – thankfully it’s a very simple song.

We’re looking forward to the new season of “The Queen” this evening.  I’m interested to see Gillian Anderson (Fox Mulder of the X-Files) as Margaret Thatcher.  This series is always so well done.

I finished up “Anxious People” on Saturday morning.  You’ll remember that I loved the beginning two weeks ago and then was slightly less enthused with the middle section last week.  I’m pleased to report that the ending was excellent.  A lot of unexpected conclusions with a heavy dose of kindness and compassion that I didn’t see coming.

As Backman writes a little over half way through:

“The truth?  It’s hardly ever as complicated as we think.  We just hope it is, because then we feel smarter if we can work it out in advance.  This is a story about a bridge, and idiots, and a hostage drama, and an apartment viewing.  But it’s also a love story.  Several in fact.”

I’m pondering whether to add this book to the small section of my bookshelves reserved for my very favourite reads.  Based on the originality of the writing and the excellent ending the chances are pretty good.

I made a solid start on “Goodbye to a River” by John Graves today.  This is a book from 1959 about a section of the Brazos river east of Fort Worth.  But, from what I’ve read so far, it’s about much more than that – there are lots of anecdotes about the Comanche tribe who inhabited the area until the mid 1800s, history about the settlers who first farmed there, and thoughts about how man made lakes and dams forever alter the natural way of things.  I’m looking forward to continuing to learn about the Brazos and the history of the area.

Switching now to new music and discoveries.  The super talented songwriter and musician Chris Stapleton released a new album this week.  I’ve only listened through once and here are a couple of initial favourites:

Here’s a very simple but effective song about man’s best friend:

If you’re feeling a bit tense and stressed, here’s a piece to make you totally calm and mellow:

I continue working my way through the “Long Way Up” series about Ewan McGregor and crew riding electric motorcycles from the southern tip of South America to Los Angeles.  Things are not going well with being able to charge the bikes regularly.  This great song popped up on the most recent episode that I watched from the master bedroom cinema:

And finally another soothing song from an Icelandic artist that I read about this week.  The whole album is very good:

“Whew!  Glad that’s all over.”

I drove down to Lower Greenville Avenue (just north of downtown Dallas) for lunch with my boss on Monday.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed the Blue Goose patio.  The sour-cream chicken enchiladas were just how I remembered them – best in Dallas for sure.  It was very sad to see the empty building that used to house the fantastic Grape restaurant across the street.  The Lushers sold it just prior to COVID.  Diana and I (and many others with us) have enjoyed so many fabulous meals at this French bistro, including our first dinner together in Dallas.  The chicken liver pate, homemade Boursin cheese, charcuterie, lamb tartines, mushroom soup, best burger in Dallas at Sunday brunch, steak frites, mussels, and so many more delicious flavours are no more.

There was a loud blowing noise overhead as I sat on the patio on Tuesday that had me a bit spooked.  Then I realized there was a hot-air balloon trying to land in the back yard.

We were warned that election results could take a while (maybe weeks) and things were certainly too close to call in many states when we went to bed on election day (Tuesday).  On Saturday I went out for a walk with Diana in the morning, then we worked in the front garden, gathering leaves from our massive oak tree.  By the time we headed back inside the result had been declared with Joe Biden as President-elect.  This is certainly not a political blog at all but I can’t help sharing a few artifacts from this week.  First, here’s James Corden recapping the four years of Trump in 3 minutes.  I think this is exceptionally well done:

This poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco beat poet, owner of the excellent City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, and father-in-law to an interesting character that worked for me at AIG, has a direct and timely message:

And finally a cartoon that I couldn’t resist posting:

That’s the last of the political content.  My only other comment is that I’m relieved that Diana isn’t moving us off to the Virgin Islands for a few months to avoid the fall out from a different result.

Saturday continued with the removal of the family room curtains and rods.  We’ve never really liked them and decided to see what the room looks like without them – very bright and open but lacking something at the top of the windows.  The sconces look even more ornate and outdated without the curtains – that’ll be the next project.  I was just informed about the best website to shop for replacements.

Meanwhile, in California, Will was celebrating his 32nd birthday.  Is it even possible that he could be that age?  What would you guess would be his chosen way to celebrate?  If you’ve listened to him wax on about his racing BMW then you’ll have a good idea.  Yes, he took the race car to the racetrack.  Seems to know what he’s doing as he posted the fastest laps of the group he was with.  Of course if you’re going to the track you have to look the part – including a custom made helmet that matches the colour scheme of your car (shown here in a photo shoot in some fancy video recording studio).

Sunday started with hanging all the art and pictures that we brought back from the Austin apartment.  You are correct – it has taken us just over 3 months to get around to this project – we had ruminate on all the possible locations for the pictures.  We found a good home for all the pieces and they are all perfectly level.  Diana had some excellent mounting tools that made the task quiet pleasant.

The wind picked up in the afternoon, blowing mountains of leaves from the tree in our neighbours’ yard into the pool .  Not to worry – pool girl D has been busy scooping out leaves and emptying the skimmer baskets all day.

As I post this, the Cowboys (2-6) are beating the undefeated Pittsburg Steelers (7-0) with their fourth string quarterback who is playing his first NFL game.  Hard to believe and likely won’t last – but one can dream.

I watched a BBC documentary on the original Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.  This was really enjoyable with Oldfield demonstrating various bass, guitar and keyboard parts.  Tubular Bells was the album that started Richard Branson on his way to creating the Virgin empire.

The commentary on how the initial theme changes from 7 beats to 8 beats per bar in alternating bars, capturing our brains as they work to figure out the difference versus a constant 7 or 8 beats per bar which would become monotonous, was quite interesting.  I can remember listening to this album in high school and being sucked in right away – something completely different and original.

I haven’t quite finished “Anxious People” by Fredrik Backman yet.  Last week I raved about how much I was enjoying this creative book.  This week I’m not quite as enthusiastic – still really enjoying the writing and the development of the crazy cast of characters, but things are starting to drag a tiny bit.  I’m looking forward to the ending and will have more to say about this next week.

In the music department here’s a tune from Tubular Bells III that I enjoyed revisiting this week – really good guitar that sounds great in the new shower:

I watched the first episode of “Long Way Up”, a new documentary where Ewan McGregor plans an electric motorcycle expedition from the southern tip of South America to Los Angeles.  The trip is expected to take 3 months and I’m interested to see how things unfold with brand new model electric Harley Davidson motorcycles and all that could wrong with that.  The show started with this song from the Stereophonics – a very underappreciated band:

And finally, a Dylan song from the “Infidels” album, produced by Mark Knopfler in 1983 (apparently one of Joni Mitchell’s top 15 songs):

“Same Old Routine”

Another week in the books and nothing very exciting to report – working from home on Teams video calls from my office most of the day every day.  Auntie D did get invited to join Luciano’s Zoom school call before we left Pacifica.  The forty degree temperatures on arrival in Dallas were a bit of a shock after the gorgeous California weather.  The puffer jackets are out again.

Our major non-work activity was swapping out internet providers and ditching cable television.  We made the switch to all internet with YouTube TV and should have done it a while ago – much better speed and quality at a lower price, and available on any device anywhere there’s internet.  I know I sound like a commercial but we have a great picture on our outside television for the first time.  Diana wrestled with getting the new internet service set up and I handled switching the older televisions over to Amazon firesticks.  The thing that irritated her most was the $10 fee that Spectrum tried to charge us for doing a “self-installation”.  That is a bit nuts.

Our only outing was to downtown McKinney for coffee on Saturday morning.  Filtered coffee shop has a new outdoor seating area that’s set up to look like a beer garden – I think they plan to serve beer outside from a new counter area.  There’s a new Cuban restaurant next door that we’re looking forward to trying – I’m hoping they have good empanadas.  Diana commented that she doesn’t expect to see the kiddie seesaws that were set up on the concrete next time we visit.  They’re just waiting for a kid to tumble off and bump their head on the unforgiving concrete.

Our friends Wash and Zoe, the Irish wolfhounds, made a trip to Colorado for Wash to have some specialized surgery.  Here they are seeing snow for the first time:

And here’s Zoe bouncing through the snow at high speed:

Wash’s surgery went well and he should be back home to Austin soon.

Halloween was a non-event and we didn’t see any kids out at all.  Coal Porter did make an appearance in New Orleans.

I started reading “Anxious People” by Fredrik Backman and am loving it so far.  Such creative story telling and a unique approach to language.  Backman became famous a few years ago with “A Man Called Ove” and I think I’m enjoying this book even more.  The humour and clever language are all the more impressive when you consider that everything is translated from Swedish.

The story starts with a bank robbery gone awry and police interviews with each of the witnesses.  Jim and Jack are father and son on the local police force who get frustrated when a special hostage negotiator from Stockholm is engaged:

“After talking to the negotiator Jack was even angrier than he’d been the last time he’d had to speak to a customer service representative at his Internet provider.”

I think Diana and most of you can probably relate to that feeling.

Two icons of the Texas music scene passed away this week – Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joe Shaver.  Born Ronald Clyde Crosby and raised in Oneonta, New York, Walker cut his teeth busking and hitchhiking through the American South after going AWOL from the National Guard. He took the stage name Jerry Jeff Walker in 1966, and released 36 albums through his career, including his best known, “Mr. Bojangles”.

Jerry Jeff is considered a Texas musician although he originally hailed from New York and was a big part of the Austin music scene that centered around the Armadillo World Headquarters.  Here’s one of my favourites:

Billy Joe Shaver is known as the grandfather of “outlaw country music” and his songs were covered by the Allman Brothers, Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley and, of course, Waylon Jennings.

Here’s the late great Bugs Henderson singing “Why Can’t I Write Like Billy Joe” – I remember him playing that at Dan’s Silverleaf many years ago.

And here’s my favourite Shaver cover – Joe Ely doing “Live Forever”.

I discovered a new band that I like very much – The Greyboy Allstars.  What a great rhythmic feel – similar to The Meters.  I read that they were formed in San Diego and include the amazing Karl Denson on saxophone – once saw him in the tiny back room of Le Bons Temps bar in New Orleans.  I’m looking forward to listening to much more of their music.

Stay calm and patient whatever this crazy week ahead brings us.

Sunday was a bad day for football with both the Cowboys and Saints losing pretty close games.  I had anticipated a more severe Cowboys beating by the Seattle Seahawks, and as usual us battered fans were treated to moments of brilliance amidst the overall error prone performance.  This was the first football Sunday with the new TV unit and all the audio components fully installed and functional.  I’m really happy with Diana’s design and how it all turned out.

While I was enjoying football, McD was hacking away at bushes with her new power tool – please keep a safe distance!  That’s actually the neighbours’ side yard beside our driveway that’s she’s attacking.

I watched the movie “Youth” during elliptical exercise time.  Starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, the movie tells the story of two friends on the verge of turning eighty, vacationing at a resort in the Alps, and looking to each other for support as they face momentous career landmarks, realizing that time is no longer on their side.  Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, to say this is a quirky movie would be quite an understatement – just flat out weird in some places.  It was a pleasant distraction from the boredom of aerobic exercise.

On Friday we loaded up and made the all day drive from McKinney to New Orleans to visit the Ogans for a few days, prior to all caravanning over to the Florida panhandle for a week by the beach.  The drive was relatively leisurely with a stop at Athena in Shreveport for some fantastic Mediterranean cuisine.  We were amazed at the quality of everything we ordered in this unassuming restaurant.  The hummus was some of the best we’ve had.  Our second stop was in Opelousas for coffee prior to arrival on Webster Street around 7pm.

Saturday began with two laps around Audobon Park for Diana and me – the weather was gorgeous and perfect for a nice long walk.  This is the least humidity I remember experiencing in New Orleans.  In the afternoon we made a short visit to the French Quarter with a stop into Cuban Creations for a cigar and a drink.  Bourbon Street was very quiet with the majority of bars and clubs shut down and all boarded up.

Dinner on Saturday was at Patois – a short walk from Chez Ogan.  We’ve been here several times over the years and always loved the food and ambience.  This is the restaurant that was featured on the Treme HBO series with the female chef inspired by Susan Spicer.  Even with very few tables, due to density restrictions, the menu was still pretty extensive.  We started with pumpkin and crabmeat soup (bursting with flavour) and chicken liver mousse.  I couldn’t resist a fancy meat pie as well.  Denny and Anne shared some of the crabmeat gnocchi and crab claws they chose with us as well.  It would be easy to have a good meal of a couple of appetizers.

Denny and I both had the beef short rib special – so much amazing flavour again.  I made an omelet with my leftovers this morning.

We’re currently debating where to go for brunch and Saints game watching.  No firm conclusions have been reached.  It’s a process with Anne involved.

I finished “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri this week – a recommendation from my Mum.

Lefteri was brought up in London and is the child of Cypriot refugees.  The Beekeeper of Aleppo was born out of her time working as a volunteer at a UNICEF supported refugee center in Athens.

The book begins with the violence of the Syrian war starting to ramp up and destroy normal life  in Aleppo:

“Things will get bad.  We all know it, don’t we?  But we’re trying to continue living like we did before.  He stuffed a dough ball in his mouth as if to prove his point.  It was late June, and in March of that year the civil war had just begun with protests in Damascus, bringing unrest and violence to Syria.  I must have looked down at this point, and maybe he saw the worry on my face, for, when I glanced up again, he was smiling.”

Nuri and his wife Afra resist leaving Syria when it would have been dramatically easier than their escape ended up being:

“When the trouble first started, Dahab and Aya left.  Mustafa convinced them to go without him.  As his fears began to be confirmed, he very quickly made plans, but he needed to stay a while longer to see the bees.  At the time I thought he was being too hasty.”

A description of a simple act of kindness that says so much more about the horror than any description of conflict could:

“A middle-aged woman knelt on the floor next to another bucket, full of water.  She was going to clean the faces of the dead men, she said, so that the women who loved them would recognize them when they came searching.  If I had been one of the dead men in the river, Afra  would have climbed mountains to find me.  She would have swum to the bottom of that river, but that was before they blinded her.”

Both main couples in the book lose children through the conflict and much of the story is dedicated to showing their differing reactions to the loss:

“sitting down at his desk, he opened the black book and wrote:

Name – My beautiful boy.

Cause of death – This broken world.

And that was the very last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead.”

Finally, and almost too late, Afra agrees to leave Syria with Nuri:

“‘Nuri,’ Afra said, breaking the silence, ‘I’m done.  Please.  Take me away from here.’  And she stood there with her eyes moving about the room as if she could see it all.”

In an email from Mustafa to Nuri:

“Spend your money wisely – the smugglers will try to get as much out of you as they can, but keep in mind that there is a longer journey ahead.  You must learn to haggle.  People are not like bees.  We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realize this now.”

Mustafa adjusting to British behaviours:

“Apparently queuing is important here.  People actually form a single line in a shop.  It’s advisable to take your place in the queue and not try to push your way to the front, as this usually pisses people off!  This is what the woman in Tesco told me last week.”

Nuri enjoying the simple pleasure of a cup of coffee during his journey to England:

“and when my coffee was brought out I savored it, sip by sip.  I never thought I would be sitting down somewhere, next to other families, drinking coffee, without the sound of bombs, without the fear of snipers.  It was as this time, when the chaos stopped, that I thought of Sami.  Then there was guilt, for being able to taste the coffee.”

“‘You’re lucky you’re rich,’ he said.  His eyes in the mirror were smiling now.  ‘Most people have to make a terrible journey through the whole of Europe to reach England.  Money gets you everywhere.  This is what I always say.  Without it you live your entire life traveling, trying to get to where you think you need to go.”

As I was reading a passage where Nuri finds a bee in the English boarding house garden that has a genetic defect and no wings, my Spotify playlist was serving up “Beeswing” by Richard Thompson with the lyric:

She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away

Weird how coincidences like that happen – or are they really coincidental and not something more?

“I know that Mohammed will not be coming – I understand that I created him, but the wind picks up and leaves rustle and there is a chill in the air that gets beneath my skin, and I imagine his tiny figure in the shadows of the garden.  The memory of him lives on, as if somehow, in some dark corner of my heart, he had a life of his own.  When I come to this realization, it is Sami who fills my mind.”

Mustafa and Nuri finally reunite in England:

“In my pajamas and with bare feet, I go down the stairs, and standing there, with the full light of the morning sun behind him, is Mustafa.  And the memories flash before my eyes – Yuanfen, the mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths – and our apiaries, the open field full of light, thousands of bees, employees smoking the colonies, the meals beneath the canopies.  It all flashes before my eyes as if I am about to take my last breath.”

“And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home.”

In the Author’s Note at the end of the book:

“I met Dr. Ryad Alsous, a refugee living in the north of England, who had once been a beekeeper in Syria.  He taught me a lot about the life of bees and how they are a symbol of vulnerability and life and hope.”

“The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a piece of fiction.  But Nuri and Afra developed as a result of every step I had taken beside the children and the families who made it to Greece.  I wanted to explore the internal conflicts, the way memory is affected, the way were are with the people we care about most in the world when we have suffered so much loss that we are broken.  I wanted to set forth the idea that among profound, unspeakable loss, humans can still find love and light  – and see one another.”

Yusuf/Cat Stevens has just re-recorded his classic 70s album “Tea For the Tillerman”.  I’m not really sure why – the original is wonderful and I don’t hear anything meaningfully better in the new version.  Take a listen on this video of  “Where Do the Children Play”.

I got a bit optimistic in my piano piece  for this week.  Always having enjoyed the chromatic sound and triplet rhythm of “Firth of Fifth” by Genesis, from the 1973 album “Selling England by the Pound”, I thought I could tackle the introduction.

I don’t even have the first page really down yet, so will spare you my performance.  Here is an amazing performance of what it could sound like:

In other music news this week, the Band of Heathens were all together in Austin for the first time in months and broadcast a great sounding show:

“Bathroom Completion!”

I just watched the the craziest Cowboy’s game against the Atlanta Falcons.  They fumbled 4 times in the first quarter and were losing by a large margin – a completely futile performance.  I was watching while doing my elliptical workout, otherwise the hour would have been a total loss.  Then, amazingly, they got it together and started making circus plays like this Amari Cooper catch:

A last minute touchdown, recovered onside kick, and successful field goal led to a 40-39 win.  The Cowboys never win close games like this.  Wow!

On an even more positive and important front, we received a picture of our Australian friend Stan’s new grandson on Monday – Henry Stanley.  Stan used to work with us at AIG and moved back home several years ago.  A couple of years ago they found several large tumors in his brain and he was diagnosed with 6 months to live.  The doctors involved in that diagnosis clearly didn’t know Stan like we do.  We had a FaceTime with Stan on Saturday night and weren’t sure what to expect.  He popped right up and recognized me straight away.  Full of his usual kindness, positive energy, and humour, he participated in a delightful conversation with us for over 30 minutes.  What a treat to see him in such good spirits after a long battle that he appears to be winning.  His short term memory is compromised but he still has all of his older memories.  As we discussed the impact of COVID on schools and universities, Stan used the term “staccato learning” to describe the starts and stops of online versus in school learning – not a term you would hear from someone who’s brain isn’t alive and very active.

Diana completed her first official 5K running distance this morning – actually over-achieved at 3.25 miles.  Even after that she still had a lot of pent up energy and decided to start consolidating all CDs, cassettes, and DVDs from their various locations in the house to the newly redesigned family room TV/stereo wall unit.  I installed shelves that she couldn’t reach and dutifully retrieved mounds of CDs from my office closet.

Out in smoky California, Finn was out and about in downtown San Jose with his new girlfriend, Amanda, and sent me this picture with some Panda art.  He’s a huge fan of pandas and also still too skinny for my liking.

This was the week that we lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Notorious RBG.  What a huge loss that is for the nation at this trying time.  There are a couple of great documentaries readily available on her contributions to the Supreme Court, and I enjoyed the interview with Bill Clinton on CBS this morning as he remembered the reasons that he nominated her:

The “Good Time Supper Club” with Band of Heathens on Tuesday evening included a video of them covering “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, with special guest Raul Malo of The Mavericks.  Ed was playing the slide intro part and I thought to myself, “Self, I might quite like to have a try at that.” So I purchased a Dunlop bottle top slide overnight from Amazon and started to give it a try.  The Might Orq slide that I have  doesn’t work well for getting way up high on the neck – 21st fret and beyond.  I hope to have some video on the guitar to share next week.

Oopsy!  I almost forgot to include some of the most exciting news from the week.  After 9 weeks and 2 days, the bathroom remodel is essentially complete.  We’re waiting on one last piece of glass to seal in the steam shower area – but can use the regular shower now.  The master bedroom was reoccupied on Friday night and we’ve used the new shower, with fancy sound system and lighting, a couple of times now.  It’s excellent!  Here are the long awaited pictures:

We’re both exceptionally relieved that the project is complete and very pleased with the results.

I’ve had the sheet music for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” around for a while but for some reason have never given it a try.  That was remedied this week as I worked on the first couple of sections.  I’m going to need a break for a week or two to work on something else, and will try the remaining sections after that.  Here’s my attempt.  Do you like the new elevated camera angle?

I finished reading two books this week, and my reactions to them are almost polar opposites.  The multi-week slog to complete Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” left me tired and frustrated.  On the other hand Phuc Tran’s “Sigh, Gone” (he’s a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Sai Gon in 1975) left me in awe of a beautifully crafted and written biography.  Warning – now I’m going to go on a bit of an extended ramble about the two books with some quotes that I particularly enjoyed (or didn’t in Larson’s case).

My first big question on meeting Erik  Larson would be, “Do you nae ken that Scotland and Glasgow are not part of England?”

“Over the next two nights the Luftwaffe struck Clydeside, the region encompassing Glasgow, killing 1,085.

Joseph Goebbels, writing in his diary on Saturday, March 15, exulted.  “our fliers are talking of two new Coventrys.  We shall see how long England can put up with this.””

Ok, you’re right, that’s a quote from Goebbels, but there are a number of other passages where Larson uses “England” when he means the “United Kingdom” or “Britain”.  One wonders why he thinks much of what he is describing in this 500 page slog is called “The Battle of Britain” and not “The Battle of England”.  In the over 50 pages dedicated to sources and references, Larson talks about many visits to the National archives and other sources but apparently didn’t have time to master the high level geography of the country he was visiting.

This is a typically disconnected paragraph.  Larson apparently enjoyed this fact and quote, and was determined to include it in the book, whether or not it fit in with the progress of the plot or not.

“In Bloomsbury, flares began to fall, flooding the streets with brilliant light.  Author Graham Green, whose novel “The Power and the Glory” had been published the previous year, was just finishing dinner with his mistress, writer Dorothy Glover.  Both were about to go on duty, he as an air-raid warden, she as a fire watcher.  Greene accompanied her to her assigned lookout.  “Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames,” Greene wrote in his journal.  “They drift like great yellow peonies.”

Here’s a quote that my brother in law, David, would appreciate (the Bond aficionado):

“Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attache in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond.”

One of the more interesting things I learned was about Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s number two, flying a solo trip to Scotland to visit the Duke of Hamilton.  He was spotted by folks in West Kilbride and Eaglesham – both short drives from Stewarton, where I grew up from the age of 6.  In typical disconnected fashion, Larson talks about his capture and initial imprisonment, and then leaves the entire topic there.

“As they spoke, Donald studied the prisoner.  Something about his face struck a chord.  A few beats later, Donald realized who the man was, though his conclusion seemed too incredible to be true.  “I am not expecting to be believed immediately, that our prisoner is actually No. 3 in the Nazi hierarchy.”

I do not recommend this book at all.  500 pages of loose history, chock full of incongruous anecdotes and gossip.  People magazine of the 1940s meets a lightweight biography of Churchill and his family meets an even lighter weight chronicle of the Battle of Britain.

On the other hand, “Sigh, Gone” by Phuc Tran was a delightful read and I highly recommend it.  Tran’s family escaped Vietnam in 1975, just as Saigon was falling.  They ended up as refugees in Carlisle, a small town in Pennsylvania.  The book tracks his life from arrival until graduation from high school.

Let’s begin at the end with his description of the typical high school make up:

“Carlisle High School stocked its seats and bleachers with a familiar cast form the eighties:  the athletes who towered above the rest of us; the cheerleaders who lay supine beneath them; the geeks with their physics books under their arms; the preps with their Tretorns, Swatches, and impeccable Benetton sweaters; a handful of black kids with MC Hammer pants and tall, square Afros, tightly faded; punks and skaters with their leather jackets and black Converse; a few swirly hippies; the rednecks with their oily palms and cigarettes and trucks.  Carlisle High School was another cultural cul-de-sac built with the craftsman blueprint of John Hughes, the Frank Lloyd Wright of teen malaise.”

“From what I gleaned from television, Carlisle seemed like a slice of American apple pie a la mode.  We bottled lightning bugs on summer nights.  Trucks flew Confederate flags.  We loitered at 7-Elevens and truck stops.  We shopped at flea markets and shot pellet guns.  My high school provided a day care for girls who had gotten pregnant but were still attending classes.  We stirred up marching band pride and fomented football rivalries.  The auto shop kids rattled by in muscle cars and smoked in ashen cabals before the first-period bell.  We were rural royalty: Dairy Queens and Burger Kings.

This was small-town PA.  Poorly read.  Very white.  Collar blue.”

Tran discovers the advantages of reading in middle school – way ahead of 99% of the population:

“Then I hit the jackpot.  Triple cherries.  Working at my town’s public library as a library page, I bought a discarded copy of Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan.”

There are so many paragraphs with perfect descriptions:

“Our apartment’s kitchen, my ersatz O.K. Corral, was a twelve-by-nine rectangular combo eat-in kitchen – the apogee of postwar efficiency and the nadir of seventies style – a kitchen into which my parents had shoved a secondhand white-and-gold-flecked Formica kitchen table and four matching chrome seats with squeaky patched vinyl upholstery.”

As Tran struggles with whether to be offended by the racial insults hurled his way on a regular basis:

“if we want to loose whatever words fly into our minds- then we render words powerless, ineffectual, and meaningless, like the playground bromide of “sticks and stones.”  That childhood logic leads you to believe that suffering corporal trauma is worse than verbal trauma.

Nathaniel Hawthorne would beg to differ.”

“But if I allowed myself to be harmed by words, I was showing them that I belonged at least by virtue of understanding their language.  And all I wanted was to belong.”

Here’s one of my favourite descriptions – “like angry origami” – perfect:

“After mass, we piled into our red Ford LTD (which had replaced the green Pontiac), Lou and I anticipating some repercussions of our misbehavior in mass.  My father’s brow was creased, symmetrically folded and ruddy, like angry origami.  His chin, flecked with the weekend’s stubble, bent an unmoving frown.  Trouble was up ahead.  Lou and I were relieved when, in the car ride home, my father announced, “I’m not going to spank you.””

An interesting perspective from a young Vietnamese immigrant taken by his father to watch “Chariots of Fire”:

“An eternity passed.  Still more running on the beach and through town.  There were long close-ups of faces and even more running.  The time period was not a mythical era with Medusas or Krakens.  It was twentieth-century England.  There were no swords, sandals, or togas.  It was just supercilious Englishmen, talking and running against the synthetic willing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch of Vangelis’s theme song.  At least that sounded cool.”

Well, I called out Erik Larson for lumping Scotland in as part of England, and so can’t let Tran away with a free pass on this paragraph either.  Much of “Chariots of Fire” was filmed in Scotland and at least one of the runners was Scottish.  A more forgivable error from a Vietnamese kid than from a biographer who has conducted deep research in England.

Here’s an excellent paragraph on the mindset of elementary school students moving up to middle school, though I’m quite sure none of them are thinking of it in these eloquent terms:

“My small worries about changing schools were eclipsed by my opportunism:  I had hopes for my new school.  At Wilson Middle School, I could break free from the chains of nerditude.  Eighth grade in 1986 was the middle arc of adolescent Darwinism.  We were amoebae in elementary school, gradually growing some spines when we entered middle school.  But now it was going to be eighth grade.  Everyone’s genus and species in the natural pecking order was ossifying, evolving for high school’s law of the jungle.  Jocks.  Preps.  Freaks.  Geeks.  Rednecks.  I was determined to make an evolutionary jump – if not into a cool kingdom, at least our from the nerd phylum.”

A father and son’s shared love for the library:

“My father loved the library because it was a safe haven for him – no missed cultural clues, no bigoted insults from his coworkers, no glaring reminders of what was lost.  All patrons of the library were pilgrims to the oracle, all seeking the same thing: knowledge.  And in their pursuit of the same thing, they were all equals.”

An awakening that you could be a cool skate/punk kid and also a good student:

“Could you love reading and still love punk?  I had assumed that you couldn’t be a skate punk and geek out on books, but Philip had changed that perspective.  I had wanted to ensure that I would fit in, and suppressed my nerdiness as an anathema to punk rock.  But Philip had obliterated that premise in an instant with a copy of The Stranger.”

Here’s a transformation that happened to Tran in high school, not to me until much later in life:

“I savored the academic clout that reading a book gave me in school, and beyond that, I discovered that I actually liked the books my teachers recommended to me.  My perceived need to read changed, slowly and surprisingly, into a desire to read – a desire that I didn’t fight.”

A sad reflection on Tran’s home life, after attending “The Importance of Being Earnest” with a high school English teacher:

“Mrs. Krebs listened to what I had to say, and she replied with thoughtfulness and care as if she were speaking to an equal.  In her tone and engagement with me, I was uplifted from the lowly caste of teenagers and felt for a moment like a valued, adult counterpart.  I wasn’t relegated to the back seat, as I often was in my parents’ car.”

On receiving his ideal college acceptance:

“But then I got a large white envelope from NYU the next week.  It was after school, and I tore it open, and I saw the words:  Congratulations, I had gotten into NYU.  I called everyone, did a crazy dance – that whole celebratory montage that you see on TV when someone hits the jackpot.”

“Sigh, Gone” has been added to the section of my library that contains the books that I enjoyed reading the very most:

These days Tran is a high school Latin teacher – has been for 20 years.  Interestingly, he also owns and operates a tattoo parlor in Portland and is apparently highly sought after.  Here’s some of his work:

Some music that I’ve enjoyed while working this week:

The excellent gentle touch of Bill Evans:

An interesting cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”.  I haven’t had a chance to investigate these artists.  Swedish perhaps?

And finally for this week, a sad tribute to his father, that I heard Tommy Malone of the Subdudes play on Anders Osborne’s Friday livestream:

Have I told you my Tommy Malone stories?  No… well let’s see:

Story #1:  We were attending an oyster bake at Macon’s baturre (a house on stilts on the wrong side of the New Orleans Mississippi river levee).  I was underneath the house watching Denny very dangerously shucking a huge sack of oysters without a glove.  Macon was telling a story about his friend, saxophone player Derek Houston, who was attending the Grammy awards in Los Angeles.  On checking into the Beverly Hills hotel, he noticed that the font for “Coat Check” looked remarkably like “Goat Check” and called to report this to Macon, who keeps a couple of goats out in front of the batture.  I asked Macon what kind of music the Grammy nominated band (Roddy Romero) played.  He said something about swamp rock and I asked if that was like Tommy Malone’s band (I couldn’t remember the Subdudes – old age).  He thought I was kidding because Tommy was standing right behind him.  I hadn’t registered that was him.  I know – a rambling story and you kinda had to be there, but I like it.

Story #2:  Not as much a story as a fond memory.  We attended a Subdudes concert at Poor David’s Pub in south Dallas – a great place to see them play acoustically with the amazing sound in that venue.  At the end of the show, Tommy said they wanted to get closer to the audience and so they formed a circle and asked everyone to gather round and join in as they performed a few more songs.  A real treat.

Stay kind and patient amid the craziness of these times!

“Hello in There”

It’s been two weeks again – just not that much to post about.  The same old routine here – work, swimming, and elliptical for me and work, running, early morning walks, and elliptical for Diana.

The bathroom remodel continues and should be completely finished by the next post here.  The original contractor quit after hiring a tile guy that made a complete mess of 256 square feet of glass wall tiles.  He realized he was too far in the hole and was going to lose a lot of money on the job.  We now have the original contractor back (he was too busy to do it on our previous timeline) and he will finish up, with some different wall tiles, in a week or so.  Meanwhile we have to decide what to do about recovering money from the guy who quit on us.  We’ve learned a lot of lessons through this process.

My leg is doing well – I can do the elliptical or swim for an hour at a time with no ill effects.  The orthopedist checks it out on Tuesday and I’m hoping this is my last visit.

In addition to continuing to plow through my Winston Churchill book, I read “Normal People” by Sally Rooney this week.  It was a quick and reasonably light read, contrasting with the dense detail of the World War II history.

The story is set in Ireland and revolves around two friends who meet in high school and then attend Trinity College together.  At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

I started the new Stewart O’Nan book yesterday and should finish that up today – it’s only 175 pages long.  If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that O’Nan is one of my favourite authors – more on this novel next week.

This week I’ve been working on the chorus to John Prine’s “Hello in There” on the piano.  Here’s what John Prine had to say about this song, one that he composed in his head while walking his mail delivery route in his early twenties:

“I heard the John Lennon song “Across the Universe,” and he had a lot of reverb on his voice. I was thinking about hollering into a hollow log, trying to get through to somebody—“Hello in there.” That was the beginning thought, then it went to old people

I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old peoples home where we’d have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.

It was all that stuff together, along with that pretty melody. I don’t think I’ve done a show without singing “Hello in There.” Nothing in it wears on me.”

It’s amazing to me that someone that young can write such a mature and indelible song.  Here’s a bit of the wonderful chorus on my piano:

Certainly one of my top five all time songs!

On the guitar I decided to try and learn some of “Sweet Child Of Mine” by Guns & Roses.  I don’t have the echo and other pedals that Slash uses to get this sound on the introduction, but gave it my best shot.  I’m working on the solos and may have one of those in rough form for the next post.

Practicing this inspired me to finally put some new strings on my guitar.  It must be close to 10 years since I changed them.  Not too much of an operation but it does take a little work.  And then there’s the constant tuning until the strings settle down – I rarely had to tune with the ancient strings. Here’s my weak attempt – I enjoyed trying it if nothing else:

Continuing the guitar theme, The Allman Betts Band have a new album out.  This is the band made up of sons of Greg Allman and Dickey Betts.  We loved their show at the Kessler a year or so ago – back when live music was a big part of our lives.  Here’s my early favourite from their new stuff:

From a completely different genre, Yo-Yo Ma and a few friends have an eclectic new album out.  Here’s “Waltz Whitman” – Ma is certainly one of those musicians you can pick out almost immediately from his sound – absolutely gorgeous:

And finally, some female folk rock from the early seventies, courtesy of Sandy Denny.  Denny was the lead singer for the epochal English folk group Fairport Convention (Richard Thompson on guitar).  This one caught my attention on a play list – something about the sound just grabbed my ears, maybe the key change right before the vocals start, and the sound of Thompson’s guitar: