I cooked up a shrimp & sausage boil for New Year’s Day dinner. Donna bought crawdads at Costco a couple of days before so of course they went into the mix, and don’t they look great? Gotta say, I didn’t love them. Perhaps, given that they were red before I tossed them in the pot, they’d already been cooked or steamed, and by cooking them again I inadvertently boiled some flavor out? I haven’t had crawdads often enough to know what fresh ones taste like.
When it comes to oysters, which you can get at a few places here in Tucson, my rule has always been no … we’re just too far from the ocean to trust certain kinds of seafood. Maybe crawdads should be filed in the same category. If we ever make it to Louisiana, I’ll be sure to try some again.
Big wind overnight and this morning. There are bits and pieces of shingles littering the patio. We were hoping to delay re-roofing to summer, but that may not be possible. We’ll get out there and give the roof a visual scan later, even though we dread what we may see. We’re catching the edge of the storm affecting southern California, but at least there’s no fire on our mountains (requisite knocking on wood).
I’m getting disturbing notices from the host server where pwoodford.net and my blogs live, warnings about renewing SSL certificates, which apparently doesn’t happen automatically. My go-between, a fellow Hash House Harrier who runs the server, isn’t answering my increasingly panicked queries. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe it is. Guess I’d better do a backup before it all goes away!
Gulf of America? Reminds me of the time Arab nations came up with “Arabian Gulf” and the rest of the world, including its mapmakers, laughed and kept right on calling it the Persian Gulf. Well, not the George W. Bush administration and U.S. Central Command, which went along with the Arabs, but that’s understandable because we hate Persia, er, Iran. Do we hate Mexico, or just Mexicans? God, the next four years are going to be one damn thing after another, aren’t they?
One of the news sites I check daily referenced the latest movie in the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus, saying it was pretty scary. Turns out Hulu’s streaming it, and since we have a subscription I watched it. My reaction? Same shit, different day, which you can say about every sequel and prequel to the 1979 original, Alien. This one even more so, right down to the half-an-android with white goop oozing from its severed trunk and the girl in skivvies climbing into a cryogenic pod at the end. But I guess that’s what people want, reprises of greatest hits, god forbid anything new or challenging. Look how they reacted when a Black storm trooper took off his helmet in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
I started reading Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch cop novels with The Late Show, the 21st in the series, the one where a new character, Renée Ballard, made her first appearance. I loved it and followed up with a couple of later novels also featuring Renée, who works cases with Harry. A little later I started watching Amazon’s streaming series, Bosch, which generally follows the plots of earlier Bosch novels, and decided I’d better start reading the books in order, starting with the first one, The Black Echo. Easy enough to do — the library has all of them available in hard copy and ebook format, and since they’re old there’s never any wait.
But then I get up to #12, Echo Park, and what’s this? Other readers have holds on it and I have to get in line? How is that even fair?
A different book I’d reserved came in and I had to go to the library to check it out. When I walked in the door, there was the latest Bosch/Ballard novel, The Waiting, sitting on the new releases shelf. Just like that, my resolution to read the books in order went in the trash. Which brings me to those of us who cover our eyes, plug our ears, and start singing La-La-La real loud whenever anyone starts talking about a book they’ve read or a movie they’ve seen, crying about spoilers.
By skipping around in the Harry Bosch series I take on the risk of learning about things that happen in installments I haven’t read yet (at least one of the spoilers I encountered in the latest book was a major one, too). But am I not going to read the older novels now that I know what happens in some of the later ones? Hell no, I’m still going to read them all — and enjoy them too.
Please forgive my jumping around. I thought I was sitting down to write an organized blog post but the wind is distracting me.