“Much Colder in New Orleans”
I know that I’m having some trouble with videos. The YouTube plugin for my blogging software is causing a problem with mobile rendering and I haven’t found the best workaround yet. I spent hours on it yesterday just to determine which plugin was causing the problem.
We flew back home on Tuesday – thanks to Caroline for the airport ride – advance party and departure assistance. All our Thanksgiving travels were completely smooth – not what it was looking like a week or two before with all the government shutdown and other nonsense.
While we were flying, the Bayou Boyz trivia teams in New Orleans and Boulder were plugging away. The New Orleans version struggled with the final question – particularly how many territories there are in Risk – I would not have been any help as it’s 40 years since I played (at a minimum.)
The guys ended in third place – very respectable. Meanwhile, in Boulder, CO, the other team came in a lower place – but against many more teams.
It was too cold for yoga and other stuff outside the house on Wednesday morning. Diana ventured out to get stuff for butternut squash soup in the afternoon – it was a recipe I’d seen in the paper and asked her to consider making – she made the curry version and it is delicious (we have lots of leftovers.) Those squash were hard to cut through – I had to take on a knife sharpening task after that. And what do you know – Amazon popped up with an email recommending a Japanese knife sharpener to me – of course they’re not listening to us.
A beautiful calendar from Mum was delivered. I always love the nature photographs and the clever titles.
I did some chopping for Diana with the newly sharpened knives on Thursday night. She made a recipe that I had found and that we had shopped for earlier in the day – a Mediterranean style stir-fry featuring mushrooms. Here’s the recipe – we substituted barley for the rice:
Mediterranean mushroom stir-fry
The Cowboys win streak ended – too good to be true. The Detroit Lions were way too much for them. This means they are for all intents and purposes eliminated from the playoffs – nothing to get too excited about for the rest of the year.
I invited Diana to lunch at N7 on Friday to celebrate our stock crossing the $20/share mark. Not bad from $11 at the beginning of the year – amazing actually. We sat in the inside dining room for the first time and had a lovely experience. Great ambience, service, food and company.
We split the charred romaine salad with clever presentation plate. Then followed that with the N7 burger – check out the squid ink infused bun.
To cap of the celebration we finished with a pavlova. The meringue and cream were perfect – so unusual to get that chewy center in the U.S..
On the drive to N7 Diana was explaining the World Cup draw process to me – perfectly. She had all the aspects covered, including the 6 remaining open spots and how that works. Where is all this sports knowledge coming from?
Scotland has a touch group with Brazil:
When I think about Scotland and the World Cup, I always map to 1978 against Holland and the Kenny Dalglish goal. I couldn’t tell you the score in the last Cowboys game, but I know Scotland won that match 3-2.
Kenny and Kara invited us to join them to watch a film by a friend that was playing at the Black Film Festival. The event was headquartered at Cafe Istanbul which is in the community center on St Claude Avenue.
This is a very cool venue that supports a lot of local community events. It turns out we got the wrong time for the film that we wanted to see. No worries – we listened to the panel for the prior film and then transitioned over to the St Roch market.
I really like this venue. It has space for 10 or 12 pop-up style restaurants and a great bar. I was wandering around looking for some snacks for us while the other 3 settled in at the bar. When I got there, Diana was in a conversation with the bartender. He hails from the English Midlands and has an extremely strong accent. I was amazed at Diana’s ability to carry on a conversation – she’s come a long way since Ian Fanning from Linlithgow. The bartender was a very nice gentleman, recently a U.S. citizen, and interested to talk to me about what I missed from Scotland as compared to New Orleans and about the process to obtain citizenship. He shared a single malt Welsh whisky with me – and it was very smooth.
We stopped into the Avenue Pub (one of my favourites) on the way back home. This was Diana’s first visit and I talked her into trying some of their excellent food – this time the loaded tater tots with pork – they were very good.
I forgot to mention that before all those festivities took place, I was enlisted to help install the latest blow up holiday nonsense – a polar bear with penguins – hanging off the front porch. Sitting on top of that hedge doesn’t look comfortable to me.
Our neighbour, Thomas, came walking by right as we started – “That’s perfect.” Of course it is. Should I expect an Easter bunny next?
Sunday brought the holiday parade, delayed by the weather from Saturday.
This was a fun parade – Diana found Debra in the hundreds of Dolly Partons and we enjoyed the penguin balloon and Santa:
I had asked Diana (new sports commentator) her opinion about whether Alabama would make it to the college playoffs. She made some notes:
I finished “Flesh” by David Szalay this week. I can appreciate the sparse writing style that led to this winning the Booker prize. At the same time, that’s really not my preference. I felt as if we jumped through things way too quickly without smooth transitions. Here’s some online review thoughts:
“From Booker Prize-winning author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour—a married woman close to his mother’s age—as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.”
Spotify sends out an annual “wrapped” thing. It tells you what you listened to most, and this year provided a “listening age” based on the release years of the songs you play most. I listened to a lot of new stuff, and apparently a lot from 1970 and 1971 – giving me a listening age of 69. Younger than Diana’s 89 – she played a lot of Sinatra for her Mom. Here were my top albums:
Kenny had an age of 34 and Kara was in her forties. Hopefully they’re keeping us young at heart.
Steve Cropper died this week. He was a guitar giant, playing with Booker T and the MGs, on most of the famous Stax records, including Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay.” He was also the guitar player on the Blues Brothers albums and in the movies. Here are some of the more famous songs:
As we were driving home from N7, the local radio DJ played some Steve Cropper and gave a recap of his career. Diana laughed as he said almost all the same things I had told her in the same order. I told her she had to leave when she didn’t now who Cropper was – kidding as I didn’t expect her to.