Sunday, January 24, 2016.
Hello To HD. Good-Bye To PT. Eating: Normal.
An utterly normal Sunday, beginning in the choir loft at St. Jane's. Then stops in the same three stores I patronized yesterday, for things I forgot my first time through. Or am I just having fun driving my new Beetle around?
When I get home, I figure out how to pull in the HD channels on my new car's radio. Three of them are of particular interest. WWNO's all-classical and all-jazz services (HD-1 and HD-2 respectively, on 89.9 FM) are on the radios at home, in my office at WWL, and now in my car.
WWL's own HD-2 facility on 105.3 FM carries my show and everything else on WWWL. HD is an incomparable improvement over the venerable AM 1350's signal, which dies at night in a large part of our daytime coverage area. It breaks my heart that the AM signal is so inferior, but I'm glad that my listeners have this much better alternative now. (If I can persuade them all to buy an HD radio.)
I finally empty the Beetle's trunk of all the junk I transferred the contents of the PT Cruiser. I've been trying to do that for a week.
A reader said I should post an obituary photo of the PT Cruiser, which is probably dead. Here it is, in the parking garage where it met its demise. All the damage is on the other side.
Dinner solo at Zea. Tomato soup to start, followed by the rotisserie-roasted beef sirloin with a red wine and mushroom sauce. It was tasty and tender, but I wish it could come out warmer. And even more, I wish Mary Ann were here with me. She is happy she isn't, still enjoying the weather, Jude, and our cute grandson Jackson.
Monday, January 25, 2016.
A Good Thai Lunch.
I write and cross-check the recipe for a great raspberry-and-chocolate pie I made a few months ago and publish it in today's newsletter. Every time I work up a new recipe--which I do about once every two weeks--I am amazed at how long it takes to write. And no amount of proofreading ever seems to be enough to catch them all. It's astonishing to me that I was able to write Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food in a month--even though I was sequestered in the basement of my wife's sister's husband's eighty-five-year-old mother, and had few interruptions.
[caption id="attachment_20725" align="alignnone" width="500"]
The complimentary first course, lunchtime at Thai Spice.[/caption]
Lunch is my only meal today: green Thai curry with chicken at Thai Spice. The price of the whole lunch (including hot-and-sour soup and a small fried spring roll) is under $10, and is just the right amount of food. But, as is true in almost all Asian restaurants in my experience, the quality of lunch specials is never as good as that of the dinners. Another example of You Get What You Pay For.
At the NPAS rehearsal, we spend two hours running through a half-dozen doo-wop songs from the Fifties. Many of these include great solo tenor parts. Already there is some competition as to who will get to sing what. I have the Platters' "Only You" down cold, falsettos and all. But I'm not the only one.
I have volunteered to do a solo in a special concert we're doing at Beau Chene, but the more I work on it, the more difficult it becomes. The main problem is rounding up three or four people to hum in the background, punctuating the continuo with the rapidly repeating "she bop she bop" from the Flamingos' version of "I Only Have Eyes For You." But I have done this with unknown volunteers on the big stage of a cruise ship. So it might still work.
Thai Spice. Covington: 1531 US 190. 985-809-6483.
A reader said I should post an obituary photo of the PT Cruiser, which is probably dead. Here it is, in the parking garage where it met its demise. All the damage is on the other side.
Dinner solo at Zea. Tomato soup to start, followed by the rotisserie-roasted beef sirloin with a red wine and mushroom sauce. It was tasty and tender, but I wish it could come out warmer. And even more, I wish Mary Ann were here with me. She is happy she isn't, still enjoying the weather, Jude, and our cute grandson Jackson.
The complimentary first course, lunchtime at Thai Spice.[/caption]
Lunch is my only meal today: green Thai curry with chicken at Thai Spice. The price of the whole lunch (including hot-and-sour soup and a small fried spring roll) is under $10, and is just the right amount of food. But, as is true in almost all Asian restaurants in my experience, the quality of lunch specials is never as good as that of the dinners. Another example of You Get What You Pay For.
At the NPAS rehearsal, we spend two hours running through a half-dozen doo-wop songs from the Fifties. Many of these include great solo tenor parts. Already there is some competition as to who will get to sing what. I have the Platters' "Only You" down cold, falsettos and all. But I'm not the only one.
I have volunteered to do a solo in a special concert we're doing at Beau Chene, but the more I work on it, the more difficult it becomes. The main problem is rounding up three or four people to hum in the background, punctuating the continuo with the rapidly repeating "she bop she bop" from the Flamingos' version of "I Only Have Eyes For You." But I have done this with unknown volunteers on the big stage of a cruise ship. So it might still work.
