Less is the new more

On Mondays they bring in bagels from Brandwein's to our co-working space for breakfast. Typically I grab one, archive it in one of the plastic food containers I keep in my filing cabinet, then take it home for the next day's breakfast. Rather than eat a whole bagel myself, which I really don't need, Mary and I split it. I scramble one egg and butter the bagel. This ends up being a perfect meal. There salt on the bagel suffices, so all I just need to pepper the egg.

Similarly, over time I have gravitated towards ever simpler sandwiches. For example roast beef on rye with LTO plus mayo, or a chicken cutlet on a roll with the same combo, plus hot sauce. Instead of the endless proliferation of condiments, adjectives, adverbs, and combinations thereof, a few good ingredients.

Admittedly, this strategy works best when combined with a focus on quality purveyors and/or ingredients, which is pretty much the same thing, The chicken cutlet sandwich, for example, has become canonical for me and Natalie in two places: Nica's on Orange in New Haven and the Manor Deli in Larchmont, and has thereby ascended to the rare echelon of special meals, imbued with specific meaning, not unlike Proust's madeleine. 

Stretching it out

A few weeks back I signed up for Rainbow Soccer for the first time since the pandemic, motivated by what a pain in the ass it has been to schedule people to play tennis with since Adam went down to injury just after his 60th in November. Then I started traveling for a couple of weeks. At which point in time he came back from the injured reserves and more people started showing up to play tennis, so I still haven't made it out to the soccer field.

Adam pointed that if I did actually get out there on the football pitch, I should be careful because soccer involves sprinting for longer distances than does tennis, and I must admit he made a good point there. So on my otherwise plodding trip of the 3 mile lake loop this morning I mixed in 4 reps of striding (70-80% effort) for 70-100 meters. I figure that if Eric can go and be part of a national championship ultimate team at the age of 64, there's no reason I can't play a little soccer. But I should remind the legs of what would be asked of them by waking them up to longer sprinting.

Or, for that matter, make it out to the Godiva Club Wednesday evening to get times in some of the old distances from 200 meters to mile. I am feeling a little inspired by a video of a 65-year old crushing the field running a 54.9 400 (couldn't find it on YouTube just now). I know that ain't happening, but it was good to see. Overall seeing old dudes sprint in the short video universe inspires me. It just looks right.

A time of parting?

Amongst the least stupid things to have issued from the logorrheic jowls of President Trump might be his musing -- in the context of his tariffs perhaps making things more expensive for Americans -- that we might need to make due with two instead of thirty dolls. Many liberals as well as others -- going as far back as the original Charlie Brown Christmas Special -- pretty much agree with this sentiment. We don't need more things, we need to learn to let go of the ones we have.

Yesterday there were a couple of articles in the Journal about the booming business of storage units and how some municipalities had gone so far as to enact ordinances limiting of even banning them. When our things outgrow the substantial closets in our homes, it seems, we have a tendency to outsource the closet function to some building a couple of miles away rather than parting with our things.

At present I am faced with a similar conundrum. My 40-year old mountain bike* may have reached the end of its useful life without a major repair. It was handed down to me by my dad when I graduated from college. It belonged first to his then girlfriend who subsequently became his second wife, and for that reason it was always a little small for me and I had the seat way high up and leaned forward to ride it. For Graham's whole college years it has been his primary mode of conveyance while on campus. 

Graham took it in to be repaired recently and was told there's a hairline fracture that would need to be welded -- about a $500 job -- but was otherwise unsafe to ride. Really I should get rid of it. But it's hard to part with it. We've been together for a while.

 

*The first commercially available mountain bike, one of them graces the collection of the Smithsonian.

The Princess of Burundi

Amongst the many birthday treats I allowed myself, which included tennis with Adam, lunch with mom (Akai Hana for sushi), basically not working (I took one client call -- they needed a 1099 to file taxes), coconut cake from New Hope Market, running fewer of the errands I thought I might, I finished the mystery novel I was reading: The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. I had snapped up this total rando whodunnit at the library a month or so back in the course of looking for something else.

A decent if not great book, it is apparently the fourth but first translated into English of the Ann Lindell series. I say "apparently" because honestly there are so many members of the Uppsala police mentioned in the novel that I wasn't sure Lindell was the focus till I looked at the author's Wikipedia page. Really it's a novel about Uppsala (home of Sweden's second oldest university) as a place, more than anything. The novel fairly brims with little moments of Scandinavian moralizing about society's responsibility to each of its members -- including psychopathic murderers -- and just little Scandi-moments: strollers with sleeping infants left just outside, people on disability from burn-out, etc. Ultimately the solution to the mystery arrives completely outside of anything the team had been investigating, in the last thirty pages, as opposed to emerging from hidden clues in the detective work they had done. Therefore the whole thing disappoints a little. 

I may read another one if it crosses my path but won't blaze a trail to it.

60

Today I turn 60. It seems like a big deal. Everybody is noting this birthday. Yesterday evening I went to a meeting of my high school class evergreen reunion committee to talk about the collective birthday party we have scheduled for June 6. The class of '83 had done one of those.

As fodder for my 60th I peeked my head in to posts from my 50th and 40th birthdays, since the Grouse had been born before each of them. I had noted my 50th, but while my 40th was a busy day, I didn't even mention that it was my birthday. What I do remember is that for the occasion of my 40th, we had a dinner at Aurora in its location at the Pines with all the Glen Heights crew plus Crabill and our spouses and that the dinner along with gradually realizing how nice peoples' lives were down here was integral to my decision, over time, to return to NC.

But yeah, 60. It is hard to elude it. I won't get all maudlin on you here. To the extent possible, I'm not going to work today. Tennis with Z, lunch with mom, some errands in the afternoon, then some kind of tasty dinner followed by cake with neighbors in the evening. Should be a good day.

Chez nous

After a couple of weekends in a row on the road on top of several trips in the last couple of months (twice to Charlotte, once to Miami) it's nice to be home this weekend. For one thing, I am kicking it here at my weekend command post out on the screened in porch. I had done round 1 of pollen abatement earlier in the week and had become hopeful that maybe the worst of pollen season was over. Unfortunately, my neighbor Travis made the mistake of actually vocalizing the belief that we might be on the pollen downslope. I then checked with the interweb, which disabused me of any such hopes.

Just now birds are tweeting all around. Squirrels frolic around out in the yard there, doing whatever it is they do when they're not taunting cars. Down at the lake there are sunbathers and even an intrepid swimmer or two.

Other weekend highlights include tennis (I'm down one set (6-7) in a ladder match) and yesterday a walk south from Saxapahaw along the east bank of the Haw. Natalie and I had walked this path first back when we picked up our Xmas leg o lamb from the butcher out there. At the time I remarked how Mary would love this trail. I was not mistaken. She was delighted.

In recent months I've been making a concerted effort to get her out on trails in different state parks around here. I may have written about it. It has been a good thing to do. Mary at times traps herself in her routines (as do we all) but benefits from breaking out. More importantly, it's good for our marriage for us to mix it up and go different places, and to just prioritize the relationship itself. Nothing but good.

In the chair

As we careen inexorably towards perhaps the most globally consequential of events ever -- my 60th birthday--little things keep happening. Yesterday I found myself once more in the dental chair while Dr G and team drilled a bunch of once-useful tooth away and then replaced it with something else, all in the service of the noble goal that I should be able to continue to eat like a college student while I try to emulate one in as many ways as possible, all while wearing a sweater vest whenever possible and granting myself permission to use the word "glorious" to describe the weather, a privilege more typically reserved for the geriatric set.

While reclining in the dentist chair I enjoyed -- as always -- some renovation shows on HGTV. Dr G's team have settled on HGTV as a default because it is as resolutely apolitical a channel as one can find and they don't need patients getting worked up about this or that while in the chair. I never watch the channel anywhere else than at the dentist, what with not having cable and all, but I will confess to having become a sucker for the renovation genre due to my frequent visits to the dentist, ever backfilling for an utter absence of brushing and flossing discipline when I was younger (as an aside I really have to wonder how any woman ever kissed me a second time back then. Between the smoking, the drinking, the diet and the poor care, my breath must have been horrible).

Returning to the present, the renovation shows are actually rather pertinent to my own life because -- and I'm not sure how I've failed to mention except in passing last November -- we will soon have two bathrooms under renovation. Mary has been focused on selecting tile and fixtures and colors for many months. From the shows I watched in the chair I can see that the stuff she's been picking is in fact in fashion and I see the excitement of the customers when the project is done, I'm getting in the mood! (though it has been resolutely her project to drive)

Before wrapping it up for today I must note that -- as with so many genres and dramatic moments -- I am a completely sap when watching the shows so that when the reveal scene happens (as it always does) and the couple is led back into their newly and miraculously renovated home by the show's host, the wife always cries. It is a requirement of the genre. Being emotionally easily swayable, I often shed a wee tear in sympathy with her. Thankfully my eyes are covered over with the protective and tinted eye coverings that the dentist gives me whenever she is drilling in my mouth, so she and her assistant can't perceive my slight tears. Which is important because she's constantly asking "Are you doing OK?" with reference to dental pain or just the discomfort of being half upside down with women pushing metal equipment deep into my mouth while doing pretty precise work. But of course I'm OK. I'm a rock.

Adjusting

Can't recall if I've blogged about it, but for the first time ever we've hired a junior person into our NC office. An exciting development to be sure. 

Unfortunately she leaves the office at around 2 to go home and meet her kids' school bus, then works from home. This has meant I've needed to adjust my own schedule and am now going into the office -- for the first time in some years -- at 9 am.

It is something of a shock to my wee system. Thankfully my commute is short so that's not really an enormous issue, but arriving into our pretty urban parking deck right when others are arriving and yet others are leaving -- and often those are students, so aren't super attentive -- adds a bit of insult to injury. Thus far I have kept my wits about myself and have managed through it, but it's a bit much. I am very much looking forward to the arrival of Friday tomorrow.

Kids on the floor

Last Wednesday in Manhattan Natalie and I had a date to hang out. We initially thought we'd hit the Raphael show at the Met, but the museum turned out to be closed on Wednesdays (who knew?). Instead we decided to go gallery-crawling.

Armed with a list of approved galleries from my friend Joe, whom I had fortuitously run into on Broadway no Tuesday, we set off. As is typical on such ventures, some of the art was interesting, some of it not so much. For my money the best show was Afterlife at Andrew Edlin, featuring works from a range of artists, mostly "outsiders", who were discovered posthumously.

But the high point of our jaunt was going into some gallery where, in an interior room shielded from the gaze of the haughty young women at the front who so often seem choses to dissuade people without money from bothering to come in and survey the gallery's fare, a few young boys were hanging out on the floor, two of them black, one of them aspiring to blackness. They had backpacks and looked like they were just chilling out and goofing, having figured out that art galleries weren't that well policed beyond the front room. The only incongruous thing was the thick wad of cash they were waving about. That was a little surprising. Had it made more sense with the art, I would have suspected that they were part of a performance piece. Indeed, they may well have been. 

Searching for fresh gold

As I have gotten more disciplined in hanging from my new bar and even doing some pull-ups, my fingers have gotten bigger. Apparently it's not finger muscles, but tendons in the hands thickening up. Google it. It's a thing.

Therefore my wedding ring has gotten tighter and tighter on the old ring finger there and thus harder to take off. When I am swollen from exercising, or flying, or eating too much salt, or really just about anything, it's painful to take it off and it feels tight just sitting there.

So I decided to go out on 47th St and seek a replacement, an easy thing to do since my favorite lunching spot in NYC is on the main block of the diamond district, 47th between 5th and 6th. Sadly the eatery was closed for all of Passover and my friend and I had to go elsewhere, but afterwards I came back to accomplish my ring mission.

I was looking for the place where I bought my original band back in '97, but I think it must be gone. I ended up in a small shop. A young woman helped me get a size (probably a 10.5) and then got out a tray of rings. I was hoping to trade in like for like but the only thing they had was bigger and would have costed $950 out of pocket after the trade in (he offered $450, which is what I had paid for it maybe 7 years ago when the price of gold was, now that I look it up, less than a third of what it is now). That was $950 even after the guy who came over started haggling with himself when I showed initial disinclination. The woman had first asked a colleague if they could resize my ring for me today, and he said "not today!" The guy who was haggling with me offered to resize it in "an hour.... 30 minutes." At that point in time I figured it was time to cut out of there. He wanted the sale too bad.