“Brrr!”
Diana’s week started again with 8am pickleball, and again it was cold and early. She cooked up the oysters from Frank on Monday afternoon – I had suggested using a muffin pan and Diana found a recipe that was designed for that – lots of garlic, butter, parmesan and a little spinach make most things taste good. These were delicious.
The Tuesday pickleball clinic happened as usual. This week I met Diana at Aroma for lunch. This is a nearby Indian restaurant that I enjoy. The flavours are so well done. We shared a couple of appetizers – Gobi Manchurian (Gobi are cauliflower florets and the Manchurian has garlic, ginger, chilies, onions, and peppers) and vegetable pakora (not my favourite version of this), and then a yummy butter chicken and butter garlic naan. I need to visit this place more often.
I am enjoying this routine of visiting a walking distance restaurant after Tuesday pickleball. I have a few more ideas queued up.
The Tuesday puzzle made me smile – there was a Topsy Turvy land book that I enjoyed as a kid that I remember well.
A similarly clued answer on Wednesday made me smile as I remembered my turtle attacked by snails joke:
Oops – I skipped ahead with that Wednesday puzzle update. I did not make it to trivia on Tuesday evening, and the small team still pulled off a win. Kudos to Kenny for driving to a zero point wager on the final question when he realized the team didn’t know the answer – we have a bad habit of betting the full twenty points when we’re not sure and dropping quickly down the rankings with the lost points.
I drove Diana over to yoga on Wednesday morning and took a lap around the park. In the afternoon, we made the long (18 minutes of so) drive over to Jefferson hospital for Diana to meet with the orthopedic folks. Her back is hurting again in a different place. She’ll have an MRI after Mardi Gras and we’ll take it from there – a frustratingly slow process.
Diana decided on another pickleball session on Thursday morning – it’s chilly outside and this allows her to get some exercise and fun inside. She met me at the HiVolt coffee shop afterwards and we shared a root veggie bowl – very tasty and filling. I really like this painting that they have in there:
And I continue to be so thankful for all these independent coffee shops that I can walk to, serving good drinks and food.
After lunch, Diana drove over to her annual eye exam (all good- no new lenses required) and then stopped in to try and pick up the ring that she was having resized. The ring was too big and then she got trapped in the jeweler parking lot due to a Jaguar with an issue that required a tow -unreliable British cars at the core.
As I was leaving HiVolt for the walk back home, I got a call from Steve Washwell. I worked with him more than 25 years ago at EDS in Silicon Valley, and we share the same birthday. I hear from him every few years, and we always have an entertaining catchup. Having walked past “Down the Hatch” a few times on my way to HiVolt, I decided to give this divey looking bar a try as a place to relax and catch up with Washwell. A very relaxing and quiet patio out back was perfect for my catchup. Steve didn’t know we had moved to New Orleans and was excited to hear the details of that. He has a bucket list desire to attend the Bacchus Ball and I just might have a contact that could make that happen for him.
I mentioned to Kenny that I enjoyed my visit and saw some good looking burgers that folks were having for lunch. We should put it on our list.
He took my up on that for Friday lunch. I walked over to French Truck for my relaxing morning coffee in the morning, while Diana was at pickleball again. The trio behind the counter were quite annoying – entitled youth cutting up and doing that explosive laughing thing. Not what I wanted to accompany my relaxing coffee. I committed to wait five minutes before telling them to sssshh. Fortunately they got busy and didn’t have time for their nonsense for a little while. I know Diana would be proud of my restraint.
The burger that I split with Kenny at Down the Hatch was very good, and we had a nice visit. A new local place to put on our rotation for a casual lunch and drink with a good patio.
Meanwhile, the little monsters were taking part in the Friday protest about ICE and their tactics:
Saturday was our coldest so far, and of course Nina’s move in day. I suppose cold temperatures are better than brutally hot for moving? We usually like to watch Krewe de Vieux (the most irreverent of our parades and the most politically hard hitting) in the Marigny on Saturday night – this year it was just too cold for that.
My book this week was “The Life Impossible” by Matt Haig. I thought the idea of a retired math teacher running around Ibiza sounded entertaining. I recommend the book, although it quickly becomes necessary to suspend disbelief to enjoy.
“When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.
Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.”
Here’s a quick overview of how Grace is feeling at the start of the tale:
“And I did feel it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was something. The truth was that I hadn’t really felt much for years. Just a vague lingering sadness. Anhedonia. Do you know that word? The inability to feel pleasure. An unfeeling. Well, that had been me for some time. I have known depression, and it wasn’t that. It didn’t have the intensity of depression. It was just a lack. I was just existing. Food was just there to fill me up. Music had become nothing more than patterned noise. I was simply, you know, there. You should be able to feel something.”
This Nana Mouskouri reference made me smile. Hadn’t thought of her since Dad used to play her records. Could picture her with those big glasses.
“I remember her as a very beautiful and shy young woman, with an air of glamour, which was a rarer quality back in 1979 than it is now. She had a heavy fringe and long dark hair and wore beads. She reminded me of the singer Nana Mouskouri, but without the glasses.”
Grace explains her love for mathematics:
“Maybe that is why I loved mathematics. To properly know mathematics is to know the only thing that can be assuredly known. Politics and sociology and history and psychology have facts you have to interpret. But in mathematics facts are just facts. There is no arguing. There is no left-wing or right-wing algebra. There is no sin in geometry and no guilt in trigonometry. Mathematics is the purity of peace. Except, of course, it is also as mysterious and enigmatic as the whole of life, and expecting it–or anything–to conform to what I wanted it to be was a mistake. And that is the most devastating thing of all. When the logical world we have sought out crumbles to dust in front of our eyes.”
I love the use of Easter Island here:
“I thought he was trying to shock me. So, despite my anxiety in that moment, I kept my face as still and strong as an Easter Island statue and gave him not even a flicker of the prudery he was probably expecting.”
A tour of all the different kinds of folks inhabiting Ibiza:
“There were so many Ibizas, I realised. There was the family holiday go-karting, horse-riding kind of Ibiza. The party Ibiza. The hippy Ibiza. The spa hotel Ibiza. The scuba diving and beachy Ibiza. There was the expensive, yachty, Michelin-starred Ibiza. The Leonardo DiCaprio Ibiza. The nature trail, star-gazing Ibiza. The traditional Ibiza of folk dances and villages and festivals and churches and old customs. And then of course there was the local, lived, contemporary Ibiza I had caught glimpses of in supermarkets and cafés and amid the dog walkers beside the road. There was seemingly an Ibiza for everyone, except lonely grieving widows.”
Another great simile:
“It was a rickety, creaky old wooden dive boat with an even more rickety engine that stopped and started like a dog growling at a mischievous squirrel.”
Venn diagram – a nice maths reference:
“Her accent was strange. Somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between American and English and Dutch and Spanish and nowhere at all.”
I like this creche and abandoned toddler quote:
“He was quite young. Under forty. But then, everyone was quite young. (When you hit your seventies the whole world is basically one big crèche and everyone in it an abandoned toddler.) It wasn’t the clothes or hair or face or youthfulness that interested me.”
The Barry White of marine mammals:
“But this whale uses a very unusual high frequency to make his calls. Fifty-two hertz. It is the world’s loneliest whale because no other whale understands calls at that frequency. It is a blue whale, and blue whales are much lower. Blue whales are the Barry White of marine mammals. Deep, deep, deep. So the poor high-pitched creature has to swim through the ocean all alone, finding it impossible to make friends and with no one to hear his call.”
A great description of a Cure song:
“‘Listen. It is called “The Last Day Of Summer”. It is by The Cure. I wasn’t really the goth era. I was the Rolling Stones era. I was protest music. Soul and Dylan and Joan Baez and Sam Cooke and Gil Scott-Heron. Imagine me in eyeliner! But I’ve always tried to keep my mind open to later music. It is such a beautiful song. Julia–my wife–she loved The Cure. We saw them at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. She liked this song a lot too. It is so underrated. It is a bit sad and not my normal thing. But listen. Listen to those guitars, how they create shapes, like a forest. Then his voice comes in and it is as natural as a shadow.’ He paused. ‘This song is exquisite.’”
I’ve spent some time with the Black Keys album “Ohio Players” (a gift from Carolyn) over the last few weeks. It’s very good – not a bad track on the whole thing.
A trip into “A Case of You” yielded some great finds. I had been listening to the Joni Mitchell live album “Shadows and Light” and loved the version of this song. Jaco on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, the Brecker Brothers on brass – what could go wrong. Here are a few great versions:
Are you in an open minded and somewhat experimental mood now? If not, skip the next option. This is an album that showed up on the 5 favourite albums from Spin magazine – the target this week was Nick Mason, drummer for Pink Floyd. He had two albums that I enjoy – “Halcyon Days” from Bruce Hornsby and “Jack Johnson” by Miles Davis (a huge boxing fan.)
Sly Dunbar passed this week. One half of the legendary “Sly and Robbie” rhythm section, I first heard on Black Uhuru records from the 80s. And then heard everywhere on those records record at Nassau studios – Joe Cocker, the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Sinead O’Connor etc etc etc.