The computer went back to John's shop first thing in the morning for a second attempt to find its mysterious problem. I am trying to get some writing done, but it was hard to do without the data that currently exists only in that one sick machine. I tried pulling the critical files from the cloud. Some came down, but there were far too many for the limited abilities of my backup computer.
As a result, I was unable to publish a newsletter today. Aside from weekends and holidays, I hardly ever skip a day of publishing, and I feel terrible about it. If you say something is daily, you have to put it out every day. Unless you want to be like the Times-Picayune.
Looming above everything on my agenda today was the arrival of Mary Ann's car. It has been en route from Los Angeles since last Friday. The driver said he would arrive at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Covington by eight p.m.
I headed that way at around seven. No serious meal had crossed my lips today, so I used the time to get supper at the Thai Spice. That's the survivor of the great battle of the Thai restaurants that went on for a few years at the intersection of Causeway Boulevard and Three Rivers Road. Its competitor Thai Thai came to a bad end when Ricky, the man who was running it, was arrested on an assortment of unsavory charges. He has not been seen since. Other people took over Thai Thai, but couldn't maintain the quality. It closed about six months ago.
The Thai Spice suffered, too. The last time I went there, I didn't recognize any of the staffers, and they didn't know me. The food was significantly less interesting than it had been.
[caption id="attachment_40332" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Panang curry at Thai Spice.[/caption]
Tonight's crew brought another flight of unfamiliar faces. But this time the cooking had returned to the goodness I remembered. With my time limited, I ordered only one course: Panang curry with chicken. It was not only very good, but made in the most ethnic style. Which is to say that it would be classified by most American eaters as a soup, not an entree. But that's the way they do things in Southeast Asia, where gigantic bowls of soup are supreme.
I was just finishing up when Mary Ann relayed a call from the driver. He would show up at exactly eight, he said. It was a quarter till, and I was about two miles from Wal-Mart. This errand, unlike everything else today, was proceeding perfectly.
The arrival of the car transport at Wal-Mart solved a mystery. A few times, I've seen the kind of skeletal apparatus that delivers new cars to automobile dealers filled not with new cars of the same make, but obviously used cars of many different brands. They didn't look bad enough to be headed for the junkyard. What was this about? Well, now I know.
This particular rack was almost completely full with six cars. The driver's route began in Los Angeles. He both dropped off and picked up cars as he drove across the Southwest. He would, in fact, collect another automobile at Wal-Mart after he took ours off the rack. And that process would repeat until he made it to Florida, there to load up more cars bound westward. Interesting business.
It took in $700 from us. If either Jude or I (or both, as Mary Ann kept suggesting) had flown one way and driven the car back to town, it would have cost at least that much for gas and accommodations. To say nothing of the time away from work for either of us.
I left my car at Wal-Mart. (I didn't want to, but I have not figured out how to drive two cars at once.) When I pulled it up at the Cool Water Ranch, the dogs were ecstatic to hear, see, and smell it. Mary Ann was happy, too. And so this trip finally ends, three weeks late and in a way far worse than Mary Ann had planned.
[title type="h5"]Thai Spice. Covington: 1531 US 190. 985-809-6483. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris October 30, 2013 03:21 in
