Friday, January 1, 2016.
A Toast. Beautiful Music. Corn.
I have no radio show today, and just one other job on deadline. We have been so busy with the holidays that I haven't had time to write my Christmas Toast, a fixture on the radio show and the NOMenu Daily since around 1995. It's my attempt at writing poetry. Because I always am in a hurry to do it, it's never as good as it could be. But just a consistent rhyme scheme gets the interest of readers and listeners. Except those who are real poets.
Once done with that, I get to work on another project just as difficult but much more troubling. Let's just say it's in the realm of bookkeeping. I will work on this throughout the weekend.
Trying to keep my tension down, I find something wonderful on Spotify: a collection of about two hundred songs arranged and conducted by Andre Kostelanetz, the king of "semi-classical" music. I have an inexplicable taste for corny old music, which in the 1960s through the 1970s was more popular than it ever had a right to be. These were the years when "beautiful music" attracted enormous radio audiences. The format died out when orchestras who made that kind of music became extinct, and when easy-listening pop tunes (like what's on Magic 101.9 now) took over.
Andre Kostelanetz was in the avant-garde of Beautiful Music. Most of what he played was in the classical tradition, along with show tunes and the Great American Songbook. All of it had a classical sound, with enormous phalanxes of string players. I don't know why, but I could listen to this stuff for hours.
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Saturday, January 2, 2016.
Kick-Starting The New Year.
For the first time in months, I present my Saturday afternoon edition of The Food Show on WWL two weekends in a row. But I learn that the usually two-hour show will be all of a half-hour long next week, so the sports load is not getting lighter just yet.
One caller has a problem that is difficult for me to help. He has a six-pound piece of frozen pork and doesn't know how to cook it. Neither do I, because he also doesn't know what cut of the pig we're talking about. The differences in how you'd cook a pork loin and a Boston butt are so great that anything I tell him will likely be wrong. But he settles with my telling him what temperature his pork needs to be brought to: a hundred sixty degrees. It's a wonder that matters like this come up only rarely.
I have proposed to Mary Ann that we begin eating one of our weekend meals at home, cooking some new dishes. She likes the idea until it gets to be dinner time. She says that she would like to cook at home tomorrow, but go to Zea today.
Zea is nearly full. We get a table in the usually-uncrowded bar, but only after a few minutes of waiting. MA eats almost nothing. I have their good hummus, a bowl of corn soup, and the spicy crab cakes again.
All evening and past midnight, the fireworks create as loud a din as they did when welcoming 2016 last night. The dog Suzie, brave as she is about any other challenge (Katrina, to name the worst), is afraid of fireworks and thunder. One probably reminds her of the other. Our old dog Popcorn had the same problem. The dog Barry pays firecrackers no mind, as do the cats.
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Sunday, January 2, 2016.
The First King Cake. Round Burger Comes In Second.
Mass today celebrates the Epiphany--the story of the three wise men. It is also the day of the month when coffee and doughnuts are served in the parish center. I always go there, but stand up to doughnuts' urging me to eat one of them. But today we have king cakes on the table. The official King Day is this Wednesday, but the liturgy was presented today, and we have all these king cakes. It seems I have a plausible excuse to eat one or two slices. (Okay, it was two.) They were less than ideally light in the pastry, and topped with too much white icing. Those two issues keep me from eating three. Or four.
I return to work on the bookkeeping project and come very close to finishing it. The bottom line is not as bad as I thought it would be. I can feel my spirits rising. I take a five-lap walk around the Cool Water Ranch, even though I have to dodge many deep puddles and avoid slippery spots.
Mary Ann and I go ahead with our plan to cook one of our weekend meals at home. We start from a low point: hamburgers. I buy both sirloin and round to see which we think is better. Sirloin wins. I also cook one with a coating of chopped onion, and one without. The burger with the onions (which have caramelized on the hot grill) is clearly the better.
I have a lot of catching up to do on my routine jobs, what with all the days during which I refrained from maintaining them. Far more important were all the people we met up with throughout the jingling season. Mary Ann, who was all ready to go through a season of grief during this, the first Christmas without either of our kids around, now says that it was a wonderful two weeks, even after I express that feeling myself.
