A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

Saturday I only had to go to the grocery store and got home fairly early in the afternoon. Mom and I split a chicken ceasar wrap I got at the Rouses deli, then I vacuumed downstairs, prepped my planner for July, and took Penny for a walk. It was shockingly nice, after a couple of days of heavy rain. Which we needed, so I'm not complaining. The weekend was sunny and dry, with warm sun but a cool breeze. Nice spring weather is usually just a fond memory in south Louisiana by the first week of May.

We had leftovers for supper, then I watched a couple more episodes of The Expanse and did some collaging.

Sunday I made pumpkin doughnuts for breakfast, put clean sheets on the bed, and read for a while before getting in the shower. I finished London Falling, which felt kind of... inconclusive? I'm not really sure what point Radden Keefe was trying to make with it. Was it about zoomers and materialism? Was it about organized crime? Was it about how foreign oligarchs and their money have ruined London? I mean I guess it was about all of those things, but it never really felt like it cohered for me.

Which isn't to say I hated it or anything, it was an interesting story and he's a good writer. It just felt unsatisfying to me.

In the afternoon I made a baked lime pudding and did some dinner prep, in between drinking wine and reading the next Dave Robicheaux book, Heaven's Prisoners. There was a terrible movie adaptation of this one back in the '90s, which I mostly remember because Teri Hatcher, of all people, pulled off one of the very few decent Cajun accents I've ever heard in film. Most actors don't even try because of how weird it sounds, they just opt for a bog standard southern drawl.

Burke can be problematic for me to read, and if he didn't write with such beauty about the place I live in I might not bother. I've mentioned this before, and he got better about it later on, but the women in his early books seem to just exist to further the plot or to make Robicheaux feel a certain way. This is the book where he pulls a little Salvadoran girl out of a plane wreck and he and his wife just like, keep her? I don't mean they go through the system of fostering/adoption, I mean they just take her home like, "finders keepers". That seems weird!

Her mother has died in the plane wreck, then Robicheaux's wife gets murdered, then like a week later he brings home an old flame, then she leaves, and like, we never get a single word about how the little girl feels about any of this. Robicheaux never even finds out her real name--and she's a toddler, not an infant, she could have told them!--and just starts calling her his mother's name, Alafair. (In his defense, that's a great name.)

There's also a fair amount of playing to the cheap seats. I mean, it's 1987, and people are still using the word "negro" in this book. And I don't mean it was published in 1987, at some point a character in the book literally says "it's 1987". I remember hearing people still use that word here when I was very young, in the late '70s and very early '80s. And they weren't always white people; it wasn't meant to insult, it's just that the south is also little-c conservative, as in slow to change. But by 1987, you would only use that word if you were racist and for some reason didn't feel like you could use the other n-word.

There's a certain amount of pandering to Yankee stereotypes about the south in a lot of media; my favorite example is how Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd constantly look like they've been lightly sprayed with baby oil in A Time To Kill. Air conditioning existed in late 20th century Mississippi, Hollywood. It will always bug me, especially when the writer is southern and knows he's peddling bullshit.

Anyway, I made tonkatsu for supper, mostly because Rouses started carrying "pork panko", which is basically just pulverized pork rinds and I really wanted to try them. Verdict: okay, but not worth the money (about double as regular panko), and also didn't get as crispy. I'll stick to the real thing.

Collages completed in the past week:







I should start using more people in my collages. People make them feel more dynamic, and it's also more fun to play with size/perspective.

So I guess we're going to war with Iran to get the same nuclear deal that Obama and Kerry made and that Trump tore up in his first term. Great. I love it here.

Saturday I had a haircut scheduled a little earlier than usual, so I got going right after making breakfast for Mom and I. I hadn't slept well, for the dumbest possible reason: I was up late playing June's Journey, because it was the last day of a seasonal set they did for Mardi Gras called "Lovely Louisiana", and I had earned enough points for all of it but the last, most expensive building. Normally with seasonal sets I just get whatever I think is visually interesting and don't worry about playing enough for all of it, but I actually wanted all of this one (for obvious reasons). The game kept awarding me just enough points to keep playing, and I just managed to get enough coins for that last one, but it took a while.

So I wasn't sure I was going to have enough energy to do anything after my haircut but go to Rouses and go home, but I got just enough of a second wind at the salon. Plus when I left the salon it was still only about half past noon, and if I went home that early it would feel like I'd wasted a Saturday. So I went to Aromatic Infusions for more neuropathy balm, and I also got a spearmint eucalyptus balm that will be nice for when the weather gets real hot, and I got some more steam eye masks.

I went to the carwash, first I checked the tire pressure on all 4 tires and used the compressor to put more air in one of them. It seems to be losing air a lot faster than the other 3; I'm sure it will blow at some point, but the horrible roads here are so hard on tires that I usually use them until they blow or become otherwise unusable. If I changed them at the first sign of trouble I'd be spending an insane amount of money on tires, you know? I have AAA and I'm religious about renewing every year, so I don't worry too much about it. I could put on the spare myself in a pinch, but I'd rather call them and have them send someone from the local Pop-A-Lock franchise to come do it.

I vacuumed the inside and used a cleaning sponge, then took it through the wash, then went to Rouses. When I got home and put away the groceries, I did some work in my planner, cleaned out my current fountain pens and filled 4 different ones, cleaned my desk lampshade with glass cleaner, then took Penny for a walk.

David made loaded baked potatoes for supper, and afterwards I decided to re-watch Murder on Middle Beach. I google Barbara Beach-Hamburg a couple times a year to see if there's anything new in the case, there never is, although last year the state of Connecticut offered a $50,000 reward for information, the largest ever offered in the state for a cold case. It'll probably never be solved any other way; they had DNA but it sounds like they fucked it up, and destroyed the sample when they tested it, and she was cremated so there's no chance of getting more from her body.

I still maintain it was her ex-husband, who had both personal and financial motives, and all that stuff about the gifting tables is just a red herring.

Sunday Ken showed up in the afternoon to mow, so I guess it's officially spring. I made ube pancakes and bacon for breakfast, put clean sheets on the bed, washed the dirty sheets and a load of clothes, made ice, used Barkeeper's Friend on the dishwasher and fridge, cut Penny's back nails, made some strawberry jam and chocolate tarts, and did a little closet cleaning. Nothing too hardcore, I've (mostly) been managing to keep up the entire room deep clean I did last summer.

I was going to mop the kitchen floor, but after all that I decided it could wait until next week. So I made some greyhounds; the grapefruit are still good but they definitely have less juice in them than they did last month, so I think the season has peaked. I finished Fox, which I mostly liked but, like The Goldfinch, I thought was at least 100 pages too long. Parts of it felt really drawn-out and/or repetitive. I started reading The Neon Rain, James Lee Burke's first Dave Robicheaux novel. I decided the last time I re-read The Tin Roof Blowdown that I was going to finally read all of them, and in order. This one is a little different because he and Cletus Purcell are both still NOPD; in the books I've read, Robicheaux has moved back to New Iberia (where he and Burke are both from) and joined the Iberia Parish SO, and Purcell is a PI.

I made garlic butter brioche with sauteed mushrooms and Boursin cheese for supper, it was from the Studio Ghibli cookbook and inspired by the cheese toast in The Secret Life of Arietty. It was delicious but a bit light, if I make them again I think I'll top them with poached eggs. I did have a carton of roasted red pepper and tomato soup to serve with it, and my tarts were really good. We had this huge jar of strawberry jam that had like one spoonful missing from it, so it inspired me to use it for dessert. I got the little frozen puff pastry shells and a good bar of bittersweet baking chocolate, and just put a spoonful of jam topped with a chocolate square in each, and popped them in the oven for a few minutes.

After supper I watched the new episode of Dark Winds, then finished Murder on Middle Beach (it's 4 episodes), then went to bed a little early. We moved offices last week, into a building that the company owns entirely, and I wanted to be rested for that. It's not actually that far from the old office, but it's a much more industrial part of Lafayette, and of course the commute is different. So far there's been a few glitches (my building badge didn't work at first, the scan to email function isn't working on the copier, they DIDN'T UNPACK THE COFFEE MACHINE!!!), but at least my computer was set up over the weekend, and I set up all my personal stuff on Friday afternoon, so mostly it was good to go.