Monday, August 1, 2011.
New Belt. MA Makes Red Beans. ML Makes Cookies.
Brought my car in for the new belt today. Turned out I needed two belts, plus a new tire. So, $400. Oh, well. The car has almost 160,000 miles on it, so I must expect such things. But why did it come the same week when Mary Ann's car needed a brake job ($400), and Mary Leigh's had some sort of crankshaft (!) issue ($500)?
I would learn that this wasn't the end.
Mary Ann was so happy with the results of last night's dinner that she wanted to cook again. Red beans and rice would let her get rid of some of her stockpile of sausages. (I suspect we never have less than ten pounds of sausage around here.) She said she would cook it, because she had some other jobs for me to do.
Mary Ann has many fine qualities. But she has the cook's equivalent of tone deafness. When I checked the red beans after the radio show, I found a mass that would not have fallen out if the pot were to be turned upside down. That's easy to fix, of course--add water, stir a little. And the ultimate result was good, with a piece of grilled andouille.
I am getting back into my habit of walking around the Cool Water Ranch at least once a day. It's too hot in the daytime--the cooling monsoon rains have ended for now. My longest walks have been right before sunset. My oldest trail in the woods needs trimming. I haven't yet tried to walk the longer one I cut six years ago. It's riddled with roots, and my footing is still a little unsure. It's surely marshy in spots after the weeks of storms. I'll bet that at least two trees have fallen on top of it. Quite a few Katrina victims are still standing in there, waiting to topple.
Perhaps my absence from that trail during the past six months explains why I am hearing more owls hooting and more whippoorwills chuck will's widowing this summer than in recent years. But we also have an unusually large population of blue jays and cardinals this year. Lots of black swallowtail butterflies, too. None of them give a damn that I broke my ankle. I like their attitudes.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
August 8, 1996. Unless one commits the day to exploring Big Bend—almost a hundred miles south—there's nothing to do in Marathon after you've slept and eaten in the Gage Hotel. So it was back on Highway 90. About fifty miles up the road, I stopped the car so all aboard could experience one of the most striking attributes of that environment: the silence. There's no dull roar of distant traffic or air conditioners—nothing but the rustling of the few leaves in the wind and the clicks and buzzes of busy desert insects. We gleaned samples of desert plant life—a few pricklypear fruits, some branches of the ancient, aromatic creosotebush—and were just about to resume our flight when the railroad came alive. All of a sudden, here was a link with home: the Sunset Limited, about a day out of New Orleans in its push to the Pacific. And then, after the obligatory waves, it was gone.
Our only stop of note the rest of the day was in Langtry, the ghost town that once was the seat of Judge Roy Bean, whose saloon and courthouse (one and the same) is preserved. We found a restaurant here to satisfy the adults' cravings for barbecue: the Wagon Wheel, operated by an emigrant couple from Houston. Although the premises were minimal, the chef was very proud of his slow-smoked brisket, which was indeed quite good. The challenges seemed daunting, though: he had a 150-mile drive to get supplies. And there wasn't much local business. Only ten people live in Langtry.
Many miles (and our fourth McDonald's stop of the trip) later, we arrived at the Crockett Hotel in San Antonio. The Crockett is an old hotel located literally across the alley from the Alamo. It's recently undergone a substantial renovation, but clearly the owners didn't have their sights set very high: the place is a Best Western, and felt like one.
This was the only time on our trip where I felt that I'd really missed something by gearing our activities toward the kids. We wound up on the Riverwalk—as blatantly commercial a tourist strip as anything we have in New Orleans. There are good restaurants in S.A., but none of them are down on the river.
