Tuesday, November 25, 2015.
Thai Lunch. 60 Minutes.
I have long been of the opinion that going to an Asian restaurant for lunch is a bad idea. The curse suffered particularly by Chinese restaurants is that they compete with one another at the price level. So you get these big plates of cheaply-made food at very low prices. There will always be a market for that, but I am not part of it. I find that even when you order off the dinner menu, you get food distinctly less good than if you had held on to your hunger until dinner time.
Exception: If you are a well-know regular who gets dishes other than fried rice, chow mein, and Mandarin chicken, you have a fighting chance of getting careful cooking at noon. But even then, don't count on it.
Today I lunched at the Thai Spice, where my luck at dinner has been consistently good. But I almost never go there for lunch. Now I know why. I ordered the pad prik king, an offbeat dish with an interesting, almost musky flavor background in its dinner version. But the under-$10 lunch, including a spring roll and a cup of hot and sour soup, is bell peppers, onions, light brown gravy, chicken. Ball of rice. Meh.
Todd at the radio station called to tell me that the last two hours of my program will be pre-empted by. . . a basketball game, I think. That doesn't happen much on WWWL. Todd suggested I just stay home and phone the show in. Literally, not in the sense of my doing a careless job. There is no way that can happen when I have to do fourteen live commercials in one hour, on top of the many recorded ones. Too much for a one-hour show, but nothing can be done. We wind up having a good show, anyway, with many Thanksgiving calls.
The Marys and Jude are trying to persuade me to fly to Los Angeles so I can eyeball my first grandchild. I'd love to feel the freedom to do that, but I know I have far too much going on to take three days off, with the risk of being bumped by the chaotic Thanksgiving flight issues. Just this morning I heard on the CBS World News Roundup that something like forty percent of flights run late during this weekend.
Anyway, I'd prefer that my first impression of Suzanne and Jude's first baby not be of the cute but unresponsive newborn, but the kid who might well give me his first smile. That's how it happened with Jude. I'll never forget that moment. Jude agrees with me, and says the first days of the New Year will work better for him, too.
At least I have a place to go for Thanksgiving dinner. Two of them, in fact. And I get laughs from the new kittens that it took to replace Twinnery's role of keeping me company. Valencia somehow can jump from the floor to the top of the refrigerator. This must be some sort of trick.
