Monday, February 7, 2011.
New Or Old?
Mary Leigh took Jude to the airport before dawn, and returned to her dorm at Tulane. Sad moment for Mary Ann, but the high from the weekend's celebration might soften that blow. As for me, I needed to get back to work--if only to pay for that extravaganza at Antoine's Friday.
But I found myself laggard. I had to refer to a mental note made in my twenties: that it's moments like this that take projects, careers, and marriages down. You have a hard time refocusing, and then you get behind, and then the work load gets scary.
The next thing that happens is critical. One can either sweep the backlog into a real or metaphorical box, throw it out, and start on today's targets. With luck, none of the old stuff will prove important after all. What part of it that was essential (tax matters, for example) will come back of its own accord.
The other option at this junction is to let some current projects die, and replace them with fresh new ones. This is why we take vacations. I am not particularly good at doing this. As a result, I'm still doing most of what I was doing forty years ago, just evolved a lot. At a few moments in there, I should have at least considered a new direction. I didn't. But I guess everybody has thoughts like that.
It's too late for me. I have a million things I want to accomplish before I disappear. But all of them are variations of what I'm already doing. I must like this work. And this life.
So I wrote in the morning and radioed in the afternoon. Then ate dinner. With Mary Ann, so where else? Zea. I managed to find an extraordinary dish that had somehow escaped my notice. It's a fish dish made with farm-raised freshwater trout from Idaho. One of my long-running carps with chain restaurants is that in a seafood-rich area like ours, it's absurd to serve no local fish and instead to use, well, carp. Or tilapia, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, or freshwater trout.
But I wanted fish, and the pesto-crusted version of the trout* sounded good. It was. Two big fillets, each with a substantial crust of the pesto of herbs and garlic. I cannot say this wasn't delicious. Corn pudding and Thai green beans on the side. MA had a bowl of red bean and andouille soup, plus some of my sides.
Then back to work until midnight, which got me nowhere near to being caught up. Gee. Maybe I ought to become a forester, as the Kuder Occupational Analysis told me I should when I took that test in 1964.
Nah.
*I'd put "trout" in quotations to differentiate it from speckled trout, but in fact this freshwater trout is a true trout, and speckled trout isn't.
Zea. Covington: 110 Lake Dr. 985-327-0520.
