Sunday, January 18, 2009.
All Day At The Desk. Lee's Hamburger.
The girls are spending the day with Jennifer and Bob Donner and their little kids in Atlanta. (Jennifer is Mary Ann's niece; she and Bob took us in for two weeks after Katrina.) The reason the Marys stopped there is that today looks like a rainy day, and they didn't want to drive to Savannah in a downpour.
It's beautiful and cool here. Yesterday's rain softened the ground, giving me the perfect opportunity to transplant a live oak tree. I've wanted to do this for three years now, ever since noticing it growing a few feet from the water well. Knee-high then, it's as tall as I am now--and that's after Mary Ann cut it in half by mistake last year. This is the perfect time to move it to its new spot, at the corner of the Slightly Less Than Great Lawn. It was easier than I thought to dig up. The soil over there has so many tree roots (from rather large trees) that I expected a fight.
Also on my list of potential projects is building a new roof for the well house. But I found that the angles at which I'd need to cut the joists exceeded the capacity of my mitering saw. So I gave up until a warmer day. I cleaned my car out instead. That took an hour and a half, and filled a contractor-size garbage bag. I can really be a slob.
My lunch was at Lee's Hamburgers, which has a new location on LA 21 near I-12. That's the traffic jam of tomorrow around there, with a large new mall going up across the I-12 from another large mall. They apear to be pawning smallwer malls along the way. No fewer than three national chain restaurants--all new to this area--are going up.
I sometimes think that my long memory of past meals is a curse. I remember the almost-original Lee's, the one on Tulane Avenue, when it was still operated by Lee Hash. (Real old-timers always come back at me when I call that one the original, so I now have to say that the first Lee's was next to the Orpheum Theater.) The old Lee's grilled hamburgers on a very hot grill with the onions. The onions caramelized and steamed, both of which gave Lee's hamburgers their distinction. The outfit that took over the Lee's franchise in New Orleans about twenty years ago has always made its hamburgers more along the lines of modern practice. They still have the onions in there, but it's not enough to keep the burger I had from being dry. It's better than most fast-food places, but not good enough to get me in there often.
Mary Ann left me a long list of things to do with her ads on the web site, and that took up most of the day. I need an assistant very badly.
Lee’s Hamburgers. Covington: 70380 Highway 21. 985-892-2300. Hamburgers.
