The highlight this week was a visit to Greenville Avenue for dinner and a concert on Thursday night.
We tried a new restaurant, Wayward Sons, which just opened across from the Granada theater. Diana had a lamb brisket and I had English pea falafels. Both were delicious.
The concert at the Granada was by the Ian Moore band. He’s a singer and blues guitar player who rose to fame in the early 90s in Austin. My favorite song of his is “Blue Sky” and there’s a link to listen to it below. When we arrived we had a surprise treat of Jason Elmore as an opening act. He’s a local blues guitarist that we typically see in small restaurants or bars and it was nice to see him on the big stage. The sound for Jason was great but Ian’s vocals were way too loud and distorted when he sang loudly – this was disappointing since he has such a great voice.
We spent the night at the Magnolia hotel – it was great to wait 3 minutes for a $5 uber from the Granada to the hotel. For lunch on Friday I had one of my favorites – sour cream chicken enchiladas from the original Blue Goose on Greenville.
We decided to attempt the jigsaw puzzle that Denny and Anne gave me for my birthday. It’s a painting by the New Orleans artist Frenchy and the pieces are all interesting shapes and characters – a fleur de lis, a guitar, a saxophonist. The shapes and colors made this the most challenging puzzle we’ve ever attempted. None of the outside edges seemed to fit together normally at all – first puzzle worked from the center outwards. I think Diana spent at least 12 hours on this one in many sittings.
Denny came to visit on Sunday afternoon and spent the night with us – he has work in Plano next week. He helped finish up the puzzle with Alicia. I think they did about 20 of the 463 pieces but you would have thought they were the puzzle completing saviors to hear Denny.
Blue Apron meals this week were: Steakhouse Salmon with thyme-sautéed potatoes, green beans and mushrooms; Spicy miso-glazed chicken wings with purple rice and zucchini salad; and Seared pork chops and fig compote with sautéed kale and faro salad. Denny joined us for the pork and was impressed that I could cook a decent meal. My favorite was the miso chicken wings and I liked the fig compote for the pork a lot as well.
We streamed two interesting movies this week. “Wordplay” is about the New York Times crossword puzzle tournament. It’s a great documentary about puzzle creators and master solvers.
“Bayou Maharajah” is a documentary about James Booker, a crazy and flamboyant New Orleans piano player with amazing technique combining jazz, classical, and blues. I enjoyed watching this one with Denny who appreciated all the New Orleans characters and their commentary.
Discover Weekly on Spotify led me to Mary Gauthier and her amazing song, “Mercy Now”. There’s an excellent cover of this by Mike Farris also. Searching for some information about Mary led me to an excellent music blog, “The Immortal Jukebox”, which provided great background on her interesting life and has many other amazing articles.
Ordinary (Extraordinary) Stories
I finished “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr this week and absolutely loved it. I’ll right a separate posting with more thoughts. I’d been savoring the book slowly but couldn’t put it down over the last 150 pages as all the threads that had been building came together. I’m almost finished with Bob Benmosche’s (AIG CEO who died last year) biography and look forward to writing a post about what I learned from the book.