Wednesday, April 20, 2016.
Three Good Legs. A Fine Little Neighborhood Pizzeria In
Metairie.
Tragedy Alert: The veterinarian who examined the dog Susie calls with bad news. Thirteen-year-old Susie has bone cancer, which is why her upper left leg is broken. It probably happened in one of her rough-and-tumbles with Barry, our other German Shepherd, who is twice Susie's size. The vet says that the leg will not heal and surgery will not help. The two choices before us, he says, are a three-legged dog or euthanasia. He is a young doctor with sympathy, one who has worked at least ten hours overnight, so I trust him.
Mary Ann has the feeling that we should just bring Susie home and see what happens. Perhaps she will learn to get around on three legs, and one day she will disappear. "We don't know where she came from," MA says. Susie just showed up at the Cool Water Ranch in 2004, taking the position of guard dog with great aplomb. "It would be perfect if we didn't know where she went." All we'd have to get past in scenario is that we all love Susie.
As if that weren't enough, I have a serious problem with my desktop computer, which doesn't want to boot up.
However, the show must go on. I manage to be cheerful. I drive to Metairie to pick up Mary Ann's hundred-pound suitcase that we didn't have room for in my car yesterday. (The only disadvantage of my new Beetle is that it has very little trunk space.) In trying to load it yesterday, she messed up her back and I may have goobered my ankle.
I invite MA's brother Tim, his wife Desiree, and their daughter Hillary to join me for dinner. They are all busy. Too bad. They would have been perfect to share the large pile of food that came to me at Gio's, a thirty-something-year-old Italian café on West Napoleon just off Transcontinental.
Gio's is a well-worn spot which, according to third-generation owner Travis Giovotella, has always remained a small, simple restaurant open five days a week, baking pizzas in an old-style stone-bed Blodgett oven. That's at the center of my dinner, with a thin crust and a sauce cooked down a bit more than is my preference (but others love this style). The menu goes on to include the basic family-style Italian pasta dishes, and a few specials daily.
[caption id="attachment_51321" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Italian salad at Gio's.[/caption]
Before the pizza arrives, I get what the menu calls a small Italian salad. It's enough for four people, with artichokes and lettuce and tomatoes in a slightly garlicky Italian vinaigrette.
The walls are covered with memorabilia, some of it painted by Travis's grandfather. But the most interesting item is a hand-lettered sign that says, "This is our business phone." I remember that advisory from my Time Saver days. All the stores had a pay phone that served both people who needed to make a call, and the store's own business. All such had a sign that started off as above, but ended, "Limit three minutes." This was when a phone call was still a nickel--the last such tariff in America, which by the 1960s had long since raised the price of a phone call to a dime.
This brings to mind a trick that one of my fellow Time Savers had discovered. If you leveraged a key in the round slit where the nickel went in (there were also slots for a dime or a quarter), you could make the nickel go down with such an urgent speed that it would come out of the coin return slot and you'd make your call for free. (But the three-minute limit remained.) I thought this pretty amazing, but I was only thirteen at the time. I learned to spin nickels down the slot, too.
Gio's. Metairie: 4941 W Napoleon Ave. 504-885-3515.
Thursday, April 21, 2016.
Queedle-Deep?
After two days of tragedy in the animal kingdom at the Cool Water Ranch. a bright moment. The bird that I learned a few years ago is a woods thrush began singing his song this morning as the sun came up. I'm sure it has always been around, but I first noticed its unique song when Jude and I were in a tent at Boy Scout camp in 1998. [caption id="attachment_51316" align="alignright" width="300"]
The queedle-deep bird, a woods thrush. He's back for 2016.[/caption]I was up early and was fascinated by the bird's question-and answer calls. The question: "Queedle
deep?" The answer: "Queedle-
dee-doop." Since then, I notice the call at the Cool Water Ranch every April, and keep track of the date of the first queedle. Last year, it was April 15. The latest was May 15, 2014. The earliest was a tie on April 2 between 2008 and 2009. I don't know what any of this means, but the question and its reply always cheer me up.
The troubles with the dog and the computer continue. I stay at home to do the show, which is one of the liveliest we've had in a long time. If I knew why, I'd do it that way more often. But I need the commute time to figure out what to do next with the current crises.
[caption id="attachment_51319" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Shrimp remoulade and crabmeat ravigote @ Forks and Corks.[/caption]
Mary Ann and I have lunch at Forks and Corks in Covington. We both very much enjoy this Creole bistro. It's the only restaurant of its kind on the South Shore, and reminds me a bit of Clancy's, Galatoire's, and Gautreau's. I begin with crab and corn soup, while MA--who keeps telling me how she hates going out to eat with me because she winds up eating too much--gets a combination appetizer of shrimp remoulade and crabmeat ravigote. She follows that with blackened speckled trout and a lot of vegetables. My main is fried spinach-and-cheese ravioli, topped with a lightly creamy crawfish sauce. Both our entrees are as handsome as they are delicious.
[caption id="attachment_51318" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Fried spinach ravioli.[/caption]
After the radio show, I begin assembling the new computer that came in two weeks ago. I discover that the computer is incompatible with my monitor. Sending it back is not an option: my old unit is near its death. I go to Office Depot and come home with a high-definition screen and the special cable to make it work. Now all I have to do is transfer a terabyte of data from the old one to the new. This scares the you-know-what out of me, even though this is the fifteenth computer I've set up since my first one in 1985. (With DOS 1.2, a 10-meg hard drive (yes!), and a 256-byte memory.)
Well, I know what my weekend will be like.
Forks & Corks. Covington: 141 TerraBella Blvd. 985-273-3663.
Gio's is a well-worn spot which, according to third-generation owner Travis Giovotella, has always remained a small, simple restaurant open five days a week, baking pizzas in an old-style stone-bed Blodgett oven. That's at the center of my dinner, with a thin crust and a sauce cooked down a bit more than is my preference (but others love this style). The menu goes on to include the basic family-style Italian pasta dishes, and a few specials daily.
[caption id="attachment_51321" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Italian salad at Gio's.[/caption]
Before the pizza arrives, I get what the menu calls a small Italian salad. It's enough for four people, with artichokes and lettuce and tomatoes in a slightly garlicky Italian vinaigrette.
The walls are covered with memorabilia, some of it painted by Travis's grandfather. But the most interesting item is a hand-lettered sign that says, "This is our business phone." I remember that advisory from my Time Saver days. All the stores had a pay phone that served both people who needed to make a call, and the store's own business. All such had a sign that started off as above, but ended, "Limit three minutes." This was when a phone call was still a nickel--the last such tariff in America, which by the 1960s had long since raised the price of a phone call to a dime.
This brings to mind a trick that one of my fellow Time Savers had discovered. If you leveraged a key in the round slit where the nickel went in (there were also slots for a dime or a quarter), you could make the nickel go down with such an urgent speed that it would come out of the coin return slot and you'd make your call for free. (But the three-minute limit remained.) I thought this pretty amazing, but I was only thirteen at the time. I learned to spin nickels down the slot, too.
The queedle-deep bird, a woods thrush. He's back for 2016.[/caption]I was up early and was fascinated by the bird's question-and answer calls. The question: "Queedle deep?" The answer: "Queedle-dee-doop." Since then, I notice the call at the Cool Water Ranch every April, and keep track of the date of the first queedle. Last year, it was April 15. The latest was May 15, 2014. The earliest was a tie on April 2 between 2008 and 2009. I don't know what any of this means, but the question and its reply always cheer me up.
The troubles with the dog and the computer continue. I stay at home to do the show, which is one of the liveliest we've had in a long time. If I knew why, I'd do it that way more often. But I need the commute time to figure out what to do next with the current crises.
[caption id="attachment_51319" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Shrimp remoulade and crabmeat ravigote @ Forks and Corks.[/caption]
Mary Ann and I have lunch at Forks and Corks in Covington. We both very much enjoy this Creole bistro. It's the only restaurant of its kind on the South Shore, and reminds me a bit of Clancy's, Galatoire's, and Gautreau's. I begin with crab and corn soup, while MA--who keeps telling me how she hates going out to eat with me because she winds up eating too much--gets a combination appetizer of shrimp remoulade and crabmeat ravigote. She follows that with blackened speckled trout and a lot of vegetables. My main is fried spinach-and-cheese ravioli, topped with a lightly creamy crawfish sauce. Both our entrees are as handsome as they are delicious.
[caption id="attachment_51318" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Fried spinach ravioli.[/caption]
After the radio show, I begin assembling the new computer that came in two weeks ago. I discover that the computer is incompatible with my monitor. Sending it back is not an option: my old unit is near its death. I go to Office Depot and come home with a high-definition screen and the special cable to make it work. Now all I have to do is transfer a terabyte of data from the old one to the new. This scares the you-know-what out of me, even though this is the fifteenth computer I've set up since my first one in 1985. (With DOS 1.2, a 10-meg hard drive (yes!), and a 256-byte memory.)
Well, I know what my weekend will be like.
