Sunday, December 16, 2012.
If I Were A Carpenter. Same Old Dinner Spot.
I think that one of the greatest current sources of bourgeois distress in America is the sudden free availability of services that one used to be able to charge money for.
The most disastrous example of this in recent times is what happened to Kodak after they invented digital cameras. If you took pictures you bought film, probably from Kodak. Then suddenly you could take all the pictures you wanted with your digital camera and never buy another roll of film. It was enough to bankrupt one of the oldest, most successful companies in America.
Last week, the editor of The Daily Meal--a New York-based website about the subjects I cover--asked me to resume sending them the Food Almanac. I had let them run it for free, with most of the New Orleans stuff removed. My thinking was that a) it would generate more traffic for NOMenu.Com by giving it higher rankings (which it did), and 2) The Daily Meal would recruit me to write reviews and recipes for cash.
I stopped sending them the Almanac when they told me they don't pay for reviews. But who would write restaurant criticism of any substance without being paid? Only people who like to eat and write and who have enough cash flow to support the endeavor as a hobby. Or, perhaps, people who dine out for free in exchange for a favorable review. I'm not in either category. (I don't think that The Daily Meal would go for the latter approach to covering expenses.)
Now they want the Almanac again, in exchange for more and better cross-promotion. Okay, I said--it's not a lot of work for me. But that's how I spent the first couple of hours today, getting ahead on the feature for the holidays. It will be easy after that.
Still, my lifelong mystification by the question Where's The Money? continues. The only greater puzzle is "What Do Women Want?"
Mary Ann asked how much time I thought it would take to install the trim in the new (two years old) bathroom. We spent $14,000 on it, yet we have never finished it. The window and the door have no molding. The light and vent switches show their guts. How hard would it be to buy a switch plate? Hard enough to keep it from happening, obviously.
I told her I'd get it done in about an hour. Four hours later, after thirty (at least) trips up and down the stairs to cut the wood, I had it done. Badly. I did a lot of carpentry on the house about fifteen years ago. Not enough to get good at it, but plenty enough to hate the job. I realized this again as soon as I began hammering the finish nails in. I could not seem to get a nail all the way in without bending it several times, ripping it out, starting over, and leaving a hole big enough to require spackling when I was done.
I am writing this two days later. The door and window are now trimmed out--badly. The door lacks the trim pieces that keep it from swinging beyond the latch. And the switchplate is still not procured.
All of this is, of course, preparation for the arrival at the Cool Water Ranch of Jude's girlfriend. Were it not for that, we wouldn't even be thinking about these jobs.
The stress is beginning to take a toll on Mary Ann. She said she needed to get out of the house and go to a place she finds comfortable. This means Zea. Where, in the bar (her favorite tables are there), we encountered a woman with worse personal problems. She needed to share them with other people, even strangers. This took Mary Ann's mind off her own issues, and we all but invited the woman to our table.
After the manager assisted the lady in getting home, we got back down to more germane issues. Such as when we would buy a Christmas tree. We noticed with concern that the lot where we bought our trees for the past ten years or so was almost cleared. Mary Leigh has insisted that we wait until she returns from a week-long visit to The Boy's parents' house in Baltimore. She has always had the final word on which tree will be ours, so we defer to her. I hope there are some trees left.
Dinner was almost identical to the one before, except for the Key West-style crab cakes with which we began. (Pretty good, we both thought.) Then salads, followed by the marinated, seared chicken breast with hummus. I shouldn't have, but I ate a piece of bread pudding at the end of the meal. That pleased Mary Ann, who asked me also to have a cup of coffee so she could sit there longer before we must face all the work that must be done at home.
To browse through all of the Dining Diaries since 2008, go here.
