Saturday, December 29, 2012.
Christmas Radio. Barbecue Shrimp.
I am on a four-day vacation from the radio show, made possible by those guys who play football. Because the station on which my show appears is the ESPN outlet for New Orleans, we are sometimes committed to run play-by-play broadcasts. At this time of year, such programs are wall to wall.
Everybody else had things to do, and I was left mostly alone. I considered lighting the pile of fallen branches and construction debris on the meadow--a job that has waited for over a year. But the wind was a bit strong, and a better window would be New Year's Eve, when a bonfire would be the perfect thing and there might even be a little rain to make the burn safer.
What I wound up doing is what I do all the time: fiddle with my website. I like doing all of that, but I especially enjoy the low-priority projects. Changing the background at the top of the page from Christmas to a New Year theme, for example. I also spent a couple of hours writing a jolly letter to subscribers who need to renew their subscriptions. This is a necessity, because that account pays for a big percentage of my restaurant research. It's the closest thing I've ever had to an expense account.
Mary Ann asked me this morning to play Christmas music. To do this in style, I hooked up my little internet radio--on which one can pull up dozens of stations playing every kind of Christmas music--to my big old (1930s) Grunow console radio. It came from the days when a radio was a piece of furniture. It stands three feet tall and two feet wide, with a single speaker a foot across. This thing worked when I bought it in 1975, but the big tubes are impossible to replace, and my efforts to fix it probably destroyed what was left of the original electronics. But nobody knows that a little black box hidden inside the thing was running the big speaker inside.
Good project for a geek with a cold.
Mary Ann wanted to make barbecue shrimp for dinner. Meaning she wanted me to do it, as I am happy to. Nice big fresh Gulf shrimp, a pound of butter, and larger measures of pepper than I use for any other dish came together in that criminally high-fat dish. But we only eat it a couple of times a year.
Once again, Jude's Suzanne said she loved the stuff. I wonder why she's never come to New Orleans before.
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