Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

(The idea, while very desirable and fun, takes getting used to.  I haven’t had regular dates per se in more than twenty years!)

Hero Woman and I went out tonight after she got off work and I got loose from yet another of my doctors.  (The gastroenterologist.  He’s decided that since my last blood work from the hematologist came back normal, and since he hasn’t been able to find any evidence anyplace of me bleeding into my gut, he’d leave it up to me whether I wanted to do a capsule nano-camera exploration of my small bowel.  I said I didn’t see any great therapeutic benefit to be had from it, and if it was all the same I’d beg off.)  I’d intended we’d go to the Micael Priest poster exhibit at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, but because I can’t read a calendar properly, I failed to realize they aren’t open on Wednesdays—which left us without even a scrap of an agenda or a purpose for the evening.  (I hadn’t had much to begin with.)  This called for improv.

We improvised pretty well, prowling around a nearby Half-Price Books where Hero Woman found a Joe Lansdale title she hadn’t read, and I found a book about Texas courthouse squares and a copy of Texas Trilogy, built around the Steven Fromholz song cycle of the same name.  I was particularly happy to find the Trilogy book; I’d wanted to buy it when it came out (like at the 2002 Texas Book Festival where I could have had it signed by the author, the photographer, and Fromholz himself), but unemployment meant that never happened.  Well, now I have one and perhaps I can track all three of them down gradually (the hardest is gonna be Fromholz, who’s been living up near Stephenville since his stroke and not performing very much).

Once we left the bookstore we decided it was hungry out, and ended up at Azul Tequila, which I like a good deal and where Hero Woman had never gone.  Dinner was indeed good, and I need to go looking for a recipe for the enchiladas pipián I had.  The pumpkinseed sauce intrigues me.

After dinner we spent a few minutes browsing the exotic-pet store next door, where we made the acquaintance of a lively milk snake that’s going to live in a fourth-grade classroom at a south-side elementary school, and an utterly cute baby albino corn snake.  BunRab, they had two or three silly-hair pigs and a mother chinny with some half-grown babies.  I thought of you.

We said goodbye to the exotic fauna and, again being at a loose end, finished up with coffee, cocoa, and talk at Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse.  We finally had to give up because (a) it was SO muggy we felt parboiled, and (b) a thunderstorm was rapidly coming up.  I dropped Hero Woman off at her car and came on home, beating the rain by a few minutes.

We consulted everyone’s calendars and decided we’re going to try having Sundays as a regular date night.  Sounds fantastic by me.

Porcupines are the new dereliction encasement.  Fnord.

Hero Woman had mentioned needing to have dinner since she was coming over directly from work, so I’d kinda planned to have stuffed mirlitons, which I’d been planning to make for a while to find out what they were all about.  As is often the case with my cooking, I underestimated prep time so nothing was anywhere near done by the time Hero Woman arrived, and I had to keep getting up to tend to kitchen stuff during the movie.  I rushed scooping the pulp out of the shells—they were almost too hot to handle and I tore them up too much to be stuff-able, so I ended up putting the “stuffing” into a baking dish and calling it mirliton casserole.  It was good, but I need to halve the creole spice next time ’cos what I made was far too hot for L’s palate.

We watched Play It Again, Sam, one of my favorite Woody Allen movies and one of the few of his I think to be re-watchable (the others, in case you wonder, are Love and Death and Annie Hall).  After that, I offered a selection of three or four lighter films and one “heavy”—Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.  To my surprise, Hero Woman chose Last Picture Show, which I regard as something of a downer but absolutely the most honest of McMurtry’s novels about West Texas, and the one of his books that was loused up the least in transition to film, perhaps ’cos he wrote his own screenplay.  (Hero Woman and I agreed that Cybill Shepherd was hot, and Cloris Leachman maybe wasn’t hot but was definitely classy and beautiful.)  We watched almost until Sam the Lion’s death, but somehow seeing Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman going All The Way sorta . . . distracted us, so we’ll have to re-watch the end of the movie another time.  (The whole movie deserves a full-attention watching.)

Having been distracted, we excused ourselves and stayed distracted for A While, most pleasantly.  Afterward, I think I said far more than I ought and more than the situation should have had to bear.  I only hope I didn’t say something irrevocably wrong and fatal.

In short, it was a wonderful evening and I’d do almost all of it again in a New York minute.

The fluorescent speaker resounds with some evangelical whiffletrees.  Fnord.

Shiny Woman and Hero Woman just left after a good evening of dinner and talk.  I’d spent an hour or so in the afternoon putting up a ceiling fan in M’s room, which turned into a wrestling match, so my plan of a simple dinner (sautéed chicken breasts in a sour-cream/cherry sauce, with rice and a green salad) sounded even better than it had when I first thought of it.  Everything turned out well and wasn’t much leftovers at all.  Hero Woman and M made silly faces and giggled (well, M giggled) through half of dinner and the visiting after, while the conversation went on unabated.  Shiny Woman went home with a book borrowed from L, a fascinating history of the theatrical productions of The Wizard of Oz that came before the MGM musical.  As L observed, once you read this book, a number of things in the movie that weren’t in the book become clear; they’re legacies of the stage shows and contemporary (1939) audiences would have expected and understood them.

This morning, TerribleLynne treated me to breakfast.  I decided we ought to go do a very Old Austin thing:  have breakfast at Cisco’s.  TerribleLynne was delighted with the funky retro ’70s decor, and the food was still good Mexican breakfast as it’s been getting on for sixty years now.  (If you’ve lived in Austin more than six months and you’ve never been to breakfast or lunch at Cisco’s, why the hell haven’t you??  Go do it NOW!!)

Hero Woman is coming over Tuesday for a Movie Night.  I haven’t a clue what we’ll watch.  We’ll figure something out.

You will massage a toner cartridge with the unmitigated pork pie.  Fnord.