Weekend Update: Tuesday?
As if nothing else were going on, last Friday afternoon, the phones at the apartment went dead. I found this out from an email that Kathleen sent, after failing to get through. I had a minor meltdown. When the power or the water or the cable don’t work, I know that it’s not just me. But our landline phone service is fragile for several reasons, almost all of them having to do with the age of the building. In 1963, you might have two phones in a house, one in the kitchen and one somewhere else. You might have a third phone on a bedside table. We have seven phones — three in the bedroom alone — on two lines, and those two lines are jury-rigged (by the phone company) out of one. Only two of phones, moreover, run without extra electric power. A problem with any one of the units can knock out service. So can a loose jack. And if the problem occurs within the apartment’s wiring, anywhere beyond the phone company’s junction box, then we’ll have to pay to fix it.
Kathleen was wonderful. She took a moment (a long moment) from helping out with some bits and pieces of the aftermath of the credit collapse to contact Verizon. They told her that the outage affected “the area.” That was the good news. The bad news is that it would be repaired by Tuesday evening. I was so relieved by the good news — it wasn’t us! there was nothing that I could do about it! — that the bad news didn’t register until shortly before it was mooted, and phone service was restored.
We never did find out what “the area” comprised. Some tenants in the building reported uninterrupted service. The liquor store, across the street, took the vino order that I placed for vino, using the cell phone. (Like most people in their sixties, I hate everything about cell phones except their convenience. They’re pretty unendurable products, as “utilities” go.)
The news about the phones came just as I was settling down to put the afternoon to use. I’d been to the movies, and I’d made myself a sandwich for lunch, actually measuring out one ounce of potato chips. (Saturdays and Sundays not included!) I am trying to make Fridays my menus plaisirs afternoon. That’s a joke; the more correct French term would be paperasse. This site defines paperasse as “papiers san valeur” — papers without value. That’s just what having paperasse means: turning receipts and notes into rubbish by entering information on a computer. You’ll have to agree that anything in French sugars the pill that would be hard to swallow as “data entry.”
But I was already too unsettled by the news. My feverish imagination, which is more or less permanently set on “wingnut putsch” alert, was quick to crochet dire prognostics from the financial meltdown, John McCain’s dithering about the debate, and a rather too party-linish comment by Barney Frank about House Republicans. Congressman Frank turned out to be speaking the truth, but in such a way that only made the House Republicans seem even more seditious than they already are. (Happily, they’re not sure of just whom they aim to subvert.) And, on top of that, I was giving a little dinner party.
Well, an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while was coming to dinner, because I’d asked him, on the spur of the moment, the night before — when it was still the night before, and it was still possible to think of “throwing something together” as a larky pastime. In the event, this repast saved my bacon. Shoving Big Ideas out of my way, I concentrated on the orderly production of a meal. Have I already mentioned that Friday is our night for home-made fried food? That’s because I dust and vacuum on Saturday, elimination most of the aerosols that linger whenever fat has been brought to three hundred seventy-five degrees. I was so well organized, however, that I managed to set up the deep fryer out on the balcony.
Our friend is a fan of my fried chicken, so there were no leftovers. He’s also a fan of my cornbread, which is curious, because I rarely use the second cornbread recipe twice, and, even when I do, I throw in little bits of tasty leftovers. On Friday, I threw two breakfast sausages that Kathleen had virtuously left on her plate after breakfast a few days earlier (okay, Saturday; but sausages age well once they’ve been cooked). Also a few gratings of Cabot’s Monterey Jack with Jalapeños. What we had a lot of afterward was Caesar salad; I’d forgotten that our friend doesn’t eat salad.
We did listen to a bit of the debate, while waiting for Kathleen to come home. I certainly hope that Mr Obama wins, but I want to report that, because I can listen to John McCain without wincing, the silliness of most of what he said didn’t bother me so much. When the angels ask me to recall the hardest thing of all, I’ll tell them it was watching Alfred E Bush run for President. I still can’t believe it happened. I can’t even be shocked that he won.
I’ll be having another dinner party this evening. I don’t really know who’s coming, though. Ms NOLA, for sure. Kathleen, if she can. The newlyweds if it fits in with their plans — they’ve got something musical to go to later in the evening. It is probably incorrect to speak of dinner parties here, since everyone who’ll have shown up is family or the next thing to it.