“Chilling at Home”
The usual live music streams kept us company on Tuesday evening – Hayes Carll (this week from his front porch with fiddle accompaniment), followed by the BoH Supper Club. Both were well done as usual.
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.
Diana made anniversary dinner reservations for us at Rye in downtown McKinney. I decided to trim up my large beard, wear a collared shirt and some non-workout shorts for the occasion. We sat outside on the sidewalk and enjoyed a delicious meal. Here are the descriptions of the shareable plates that we enjoyed from the Rye menu.
Ceviche
tx striped bass, yellow curry crema, cilantro, celery, fish sauce, lime, sesame oil, fish skin chicharrón.
Blue Cheesecake
grilled local mushrooms, danish blue, pecan, rye cracker crust, lavash, wild arugula, cherry gastrique
Queso Stuffed Wagyu Sliders
tx craft wagyu, green chili queso, green chili-bacon jam, thousand island, brioche buns.
Those Wagyu sliders were ridiculously good and rich. We took one home so that we could enjoy our final plate of chicken baos. It was wonderful to get out and celebrate in what seemed like a very safe socially distanced environment.
The Ogans teased us with pictures of them enjoying a day in the Florida panhandle on a pontoon boat. We did try to rent one when we visited but waited too late to think about it.
At work we migrated our major financial systems to a new cloud environment on Wednesday and Thursday nights. I was quite nervous about this activity and it all went very smoothly. Much better performance now and glad to get that behind me.
I briefly attended several happy hour online calls on Friday evening – I suppose it’s kind of like hopping from one bar to the next. First a work one with the financial team who helped with the migrations, then Diana’s girlfriends from California (with occasional husband participation), and 
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.
My crazy running wife successfully completed Week 8 Day 1 of Couch to 5K with a solid 25 minute run. I’m very proud of how she’s kept after it. At the end of week 8 she should be ready for her 5K run – we’ll have to pick that out.
After the run, we were joined by the contractor who’s putting together an estimate for our master bathroom remodel. What have we embarked upon?
Diana made me a delicious omelet with chorizo and I heard from “My Three Sons” on Father’s Day, which was very nice. The funniest picture I got along with special greetings was from Anne:
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.
Over to music – I really enjoy Dawes and this is a great song from them. Great sound and guitars.
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.