A newly discovered James M. Cain novel.

I spent $5 in gas today to find $2 shoelaces. And didn't.

Thirty-inch tan shoelaces are not to be found in this town. Thank goodness for ShoeLacesExpress.

I ran across this story about online custom shirt-makers while pursuing something else.

Just putting it out there. One of my brothers in Texas has shirts made by a tailor in Dallas.

LATER: Comments to that article provide some other sources:

EPIC -- good prices
Modern Tailor -- $19.95 introductory offer for fit
My Tailor -- large selection of ties and cufflinks (I like the handpainted coins), luxury fabrics

Gentlemen, a good quality soft shirt makes you touchable.

Good news on a Monday morning!

The thief was caught driving the car. The car is back, in all its laughable glory. The stepson took it to the repair shop to replace a side window and check out an exhaust leak. The mechanics guffawed at the thought that someone would steal it.

I guess crackheads will do anything.

Thanks, Natchez Police Department!

I am channeling Mama.

Just after school started, she'd take after the housekeeping. It was always as close to immaculate as a mother of many can keep it, but once we were outsourced to the schoolroom she'd go after the pantries, cabinets, closets and light fixtures. She'd move furniture to dust and sweep and mop and clean baseboards. Then rearrange it to give a new prospect to old furniture. Wash windows.

For me, it started with the office, proceeded to our bedroom, then to the pantry. Tomorrow begins the outdoor storage room, as the weather has broken.

Before tropical storm Lee we had summer, now we have fall. It feels good.

Well, nothing on the car. I'm afraid it's a goner.

We all liked that car. It was a good size and shape, you could put $5 worth of gas in it and run for two weeks.

On a better note, we had three days of lovely slow rain (about 5 inches), and predictions are that we won't break 90 degrees for the next week.

This recipe for General Tso's Chicken from Chef Tony is a keeper. We reduced the sugar to a 1/2 tablespoon.

Do tell. Someone stole my 1997 Ford Escort Wagon. It was parked outside the Bienville Apartments.

After my son took it, I wouldn't drive it. I have some hygienic standards.

Ferals.

I was running around yesterday doing errands.

After I'd walked into the house for the last time, Charles Gore the grey asked, "What you doing, sweet baby?"

Irish writer John Banville, writing under alias Benjamin Black, uses an Alvis TC108 Super Graber Coupe in Elegy for April.

He doesn't treat it well.

I'm not crazy about sweets. If I have three cups of grated zucchini, I prefer to put it in a colander with some salt and let it sit for half an hour, then squeeze the liquid out.

Meantime, I've sauteed onion and garlic in a dab of butter and olive oil until tender. Add the squeezed zucchini, toss it around until it's hot and serve it as a side with nearly anything.

Hmmm. I think I'd like that tomorrow.

Chef Tony sent me this cake recipe a while back.

I rustled up the gumption to shop for ingredients this morning. It's in the oven now.

I'll let you know.

LATER: I baked it for 60 minutes. Were I to do it again, I'd stop at 55 min, even if the tester shows a little underdone.

The tender crumb melts in your mouth. I used Ghirardelli Bittersweet chocolate chips. It's rich. Needs a cold glass of milk on the side.

So I'm reading a bit of fluff by Laurie Moore, Couple Gunned Down: News at Ten.

A character describes another as mean and bitchy -- "a couple of terrorists short of a jihad."

Shelling a bushel of pink-eye purple-hull peas. We're feeling lucky. Most of them went underwater around here back in the flood.

Someone trucked these in to the Natchez Farmers' Market.

LATER: Okay. Those are all blanched and packed away in their blanching liquid in freezer boxes -- about 14 meals' worth.

Heretofore, we've packed whatever we'd prepared in bags. Boxes make much more efficient use of space and are reusable. Easier to fill, too.

Did you notice that I'm posting again? That's what happens when you treat the drought-stricken rural folk with four inches of rain. It's taken three weeks of scattered showers, but we no longer feel so sere.

Oh, Diane, what is the name of the writer who writes the coffee-shop mysteries? The one with the lovely chocolate-covered cherry recipe?

A few chocolate-covered cherries with a side of ice cream and a cup of coffee would make a good dessert at Christmas, no?

UPDATE: Cleo Coyle

Colonial Cranberries with ice cream?

Shouldn't somebody step up and do noir cozy mysteries about the Hummingbird hash house in New Orleans? They'd read like Tom Waits lyrics, but they'd have some characters.

Oh, look. Here's a Baldwin County phone book from 2006.

And a Cook's Illustrated mag from 2007.

A friend sent me an email with the results of the Bulwer-Lytton bad prose contest. A comment from the the writer of the article and the entry follow:

To take the prize for best purple prose, Mike Pedersen of North Berwick, Maine, relied on a thesaurus'-worth of synonyms:

"As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue."

Those are not synonyms, darlin', those are different shades of blue.

Umm.

My SIL Karen has a point. Though she doesn't do it, and keeps a spotless house, she advocates moving every five years so we go through all our "collectibles" and discard those without use or meaning.

Now, we renovated our house in around 2000. In the lefthand cabinet under the counter in the office, I found a stack of Southern Living magazines from 1999 today.

What can I say?

No more experimenting. That way, we get to eat the rest of the grits ourselves.

So I'm looking at the luncheon this way:

Traditional shrimp cocktail
Ms. Spicer's garlic soup -- just a few sips
Caesar salad -- light and subject to change
Ms. Spicers Shrimp etc.
And a cool, fruity dessert -- perhaps a fruit compote over ice cream

So, the deal went down in the parking lot as expected.

Figuring out how to cook and cut this product is something else.

Ain't that cool?

I need some stone-ground grits to do Susan Spicer's recipe properly. I found a listing for the Louisiana Pride Grist Mill in Pride, LA, up the road from Fred. (Gotta love that -- I live in Fred, or Alice, or Nancy, or Thomas.)

The upshot is that I am going to meet the miller at the local McDonald's for delivery of freshly milled stone-ground grits around 7 am on Saturday. He and his wife will be on their way to a camp at Larto Lake near Jonesville.

While we're at it, let's add Lisa Fain's Homesick Texan to the blogroll. She offers lots of tempting recipes.

Let's put this here.

Now we may be getting somewhere with proper Tex-Mex enchiladas outside of Texas.

Adding this cookbook to my wish list.

Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

Today I lost a nearly brand new pair of shoes. I'd worn them once (and they are comfortable), and thought I'd tucked them under the bed (since son 2 is living in the big guest room where my closet is).

I remembered taking them off and changing into cloppers, then nothing. I looked high and low, under chairs and sofas and counters and tables, in cabinets and drawers, on shelves and mantels. Nothing. They were gone.

Lyman said, "Don't tell me they were walking shoes."

I was sitting on the edge of the bed wondering who would do me such a dirty trick when it occurred to me that I had put them in the shoe sleeve hanging on the inside of the foyer closet door. Voila!

It's gonna be a long middle age.

Now is the time to reach into our can of tricks and start seriously considering the annual Christmas luncheon. These recipes need testing, and tend to be costly.

I'm for Susan Spicer's Shrimp and Tasso in Cream Sauce with Chili-Cheese Grit Cakes.

The first comment beneath this article is one of the best I've seen:

My mom always gave me a choice...between what she wanted me to do, and something much, much worse.

Thanks, Mr. Sullivan.

I'm working with a local framer to have this sweet Christmas gift shadow-boxed for the coast:

Does the Eurostile font look okay to you? I need something legible and compressed. It also looks '30ish to me.

The size of the text block is 2-3/4" by 1" for scale.

Happy Father's Day to you pops out there!

Dave Schuler has posted pictures of his grandmother's wedding dress, from the early 20th century.

It is romantic and innocent. Just lovely.

All right. I used King Arthur's bread flour and saf-instant yeast in the bread machine to combine the dough for French bread. The dough is light and pliant.

It's resting right now, then I'll form it into loaves and let it rise for an hour.

We'll see.

MORE: We won't be killing any fatted calves, but we are talking alligator scallopine.

My sister, the Harley girl, is here!

She came with her beau, and there is a $25,000 motorcycle parked under the carport. Don't touch it. He's a police detective.

The menu tonight is shrimp maque choux with corn fresh from the field, Caesar salad and French bread.

We're doing a second crawfish boil today.

Quoth Lyman: "These are the meanest crawfish I've ever seen. They drew blood."

Well, %^&$&!

Yesterday, I changed my order of the fridge part from two-day to overnight delivery. But they didn't ship it last night, which means that the part will come when we expect to be on the road.

Maybe Sandy will save the day.

I ordered paint from Sherwin-Williams, but you can't get there from here, not without waiting a half-hour for the stoplight at Canal Road. Maybe things will settle down tomorrow.

Am I just snotty crazy, or do you find it odd that the plastic veg bin cover in the fridge down at beautiful Orange Beach has a big chunk out of the side? The glass is fine.

What y'all been throwing in there? Whole hams? Large turkeys? Small children?

The river has crested here at 61.8 feet, according to NOAA.

The expected crest of the Mississippi here has been revised downward to 62.5 feet.

The Mississippi is rolling.

The estimate for the crest here has been revised downward to 63', still due on May 21.

(Thanks, Natchez Democrat.)

The Morganza Spillway is to be opened this afternoon.

It's a big river on a good day. Here it's at about 59.5 feet, topping both '27 and '37 levels. It's expected to grow.

The mighty Mississippi. The Army Corps of Engineers is expecting the "Father of Waters" to pass here at approx. 2,720,000 cubic feet per second at 64 feet.

I haven't seen a Blogger glitch in some years.

The oyster fishermen on the Louisiana coast can't catch a break.

Huh. Email that is not idiotic.

My concern with the southern floods? I live five blocks from the Vidalia levee.

Oh, c'mon y'all cynics, you have to love the South:

"I want to say this: Graceland is safe. And we would charge hell with a water pistol to keep it that way and I'd be willing to lead the charge," said Nations, the county emergency official.

Great-nieces, 4 and 19 months. Lyman and I went up together to cook rehearsal dinner when their parents were married eleven years ago.

I didn't take many pictures on the trip, and none were good, but this gives you an idea of the view from my brother's house. The zoom is too strong on this one. That's the Columbia River, where you can glimpse it.

A somewhat interesting article in Christianity Today about the predominance of the King James version of the Bible in history.

(Thanks, Real Clear Politics.)

Of the three airports I used on this trip -- Baton Rouge, Dallas and Portland -- only one (Baton Rouge) had such a clearly marked facility for nursing mothers. And it was a small, separate room with a comfortable chair. That's all I took in at a glance.

There are frogs on the banks of the Columbia River that actually say "ribbet."

Around here we mainly have bullfrogs that "croak" -- sounds more like a belch, really.

The original:

Here's a story from the Baton Rouge Advocate about the flood of '27 and current fears.

Greenville is about halfway between here and Memphis, TN.

The Natchez Democrat has plenty of stories describing the activities and mood here.

Hey, y'all!

That was a good visit to the northwest. That sister-in-law of mine is just the same -- and a wonderful hostess. We picked up right where we left off eleven years ago. If I'd eaten as much as she tried to cram down me I would have put on ten pounds.

She still treats me like a baby.

Here at home, people are packing up precious belongings and taking them to higher ground. They worry that the levee will break under the stress of handling waters that have never been so high in recent history. The expected river crest will be higher than that of the floods of 1937 and 1927.

The mayor and the sheriff are trying to calm people's fears. They are in constant touch with the Corps of Engineers, who assure us that the levees will hold.

If not, Charles has offered us his spare bedroom in Natchez. One of my other big brothers in Dallas has offered his home as sanctuary should it come to that. But that is too far away. I appreciate the thought, though.

Y'all can get rang'upped stupid any day you want, but I'm going to see my big brother.

I'm a few pages into the second volume of the Byzantine trilogy.

I've been thinking a little about what person I'd like to be in the empire. I can't think of one. Maybe a nice, busy nun, far from the seat of power. The kitchen garden would be pleasant.

Goodnight, Irene. She was the first empress of the Byzantine empire when Charlemagne was coronated emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Umm, she mutilated and murdered her own son to attain the position. And so closes the first volume of the Byzantine trilogy.

Charlemagne asked her to marry him. Didn't sound like such a bad idea to her, but her citizens flipped. She was overthrown, exiled and dead shortly after.

Oh, well.

I consider it a mission to remind people that Fleetwood Mac wasn't always a pop band.

Now the driver has a valid Louisiana license. I'm done.

That's the story, Kate.

Without the parts that recount how little the left hand knows what the right is doing in GA -- positively, ambidextrously obstructive.

The whole business was stupid, avoidable, boring, frustrating and expensive.

Kate wrote to tell me that I've been too cryptic about the Georgia saga. Now that the boy has a valid driver's license and insurance, I'll try to recount events to the best of my knowledge.

It does not involve anything so heinous as an accident or DUI. It's a tale of ignorance and neglect, a failure to recognize that valid "communication" in our current society extends beyond text-messaging and Facebook.

Let's go on:

On a spring day in Decatur, GA, the boy is stopped by an officer for "driving too fast for conditions," whatever that means. In the course of writing that citation, s/he finds that the registration of the vehicle has expired, the car has not been registered in Georgia, the driver's license has expired, the driver has failed to transfer his driver's license to GA, and there's an "open container" in the car, which the driver insists to me is an empty beer can.

A smart, responsible person would have hustled his butt to the nearest office of the GA Department of Driver Services and taken care of four of those things, and presented evidence to the Dekalb Recorder's Court. Not this one, though. He drops the citation in the glove box and never looks at it again.

He does get the GA driver's license sometime down the road.

The court date comes and goes. The driver doesn't look at regular snail mail. Who uses mail anymore? Duh.

Years pass. At Christmas in 2010, he re-registers the car in Louisiana, the Dekalb Recorder's Court grows impatient, issues six warrants for arrest and suspends the driver's license for "failure to appear." The driver doesn't know this because it didn't show up on Facebook.

The driver is caught driving with a suspended license and gets hauled off to the pokey. The driver calls Daddy.

Daddy bails the driver out with the help of the driver's local friend, and finally, the driver appears in court. Daddy pays fines.

The driver goes to the DDS to reinstate the license. No go. Daddy calls the driver's mother. There are more charges outstanding. The driver goes to the courthouse, pays fines, and finds that there are more charges outstanding. These are turned over to a probation service.

And that's where I come in, dealing with the probation service, the Recorder's Court and the GA DDS. I am doing this because the driver has relocated his sorry self to Louisiana and is working.

And here we are.

Good food is always good news.

Lyman and I have been erratically trying to develop a go-to stir fry recipe for years. The other day he came across Garlic Chicken Stir-Fry.

We've made a few changes to bring it more in line with our tastes. First, a teaspoon of grated ginger ain't nothin'. We use a tablespoon of minced. Second, two tablespoons of sugar is way too much for us. If we want something sweet we'll buy ice cream. So we dropped that to a pinch, about a teaspoonful. Third, we added about five minced dried Thai chiles for heat. Fourth, we added a carrot, thinly sliced so it would cook quickly.

And for variation, last night we used pork tenderloin sliced into thin strips rather than chicken. Rather than browning that early, we waited until the veggies were nearly done, so the pork wouldn't dry out.

It was good. Worth doing regularly.

I feel sharpish. Don't ask me to cook. Or help you.

It was an amicable parting.

Georgia and I are quits.

Good Lord. I've talked to Alice twice. She was much more cooperative when we'd paid fines.

I call it inspirational music. I caught up with this woman in 1978.

Got it!

Nothing better than a Byzantine background when you're dealing with a Georgia court.

I'm loaded for bear. Now I need to find the bear.

UPDATE: The comments have lapsed because I am dealing with real life. If you have anything to say to me you can use the email address in the header.

That's enough of that.

The main heresy running around Byzantium and the Eastern Empire as opposed to Rome is iconoclasm.

It doesn't improve my mood when I tell someone I'm from Dallas.

"What part of Dallas?"

"Dallas, the city."

"But what part?"

"Dallas. I mean Dallas. Oak Cliff, Oak Lawn."

"My dad lives in Dallas. He's lived in Garland, Allen, and some other places."

I do not know how many times I have to admonish you to stay street-legal, you idiot chilluns.

We are looking at $4000 worth of cascading expenses because you wouldn't take the time to register your car in Georgia, of all places -- stringent traffic laws. Or bother to address a ticket.

You are not bulletproof.

UPDATE: For two days, I have been talking through closed loop telephone systems. I want to shoot somebody.

I can do entirely without Stephen Tyler, but where are the other choirs doing "Lean on Me"? Do you have some?

Of course, there's the classic:

Maybe this one:

For kicks, because there's a pretty woman backup saxophone:



That alto sax is Kate St. John. She's just a few months younger than I. Now, I know I have worse genes than a lot of people, but really.

She works with Marianne Faithfull, which, if you're my age, gives you confidence in the resilience in the human race. The women, anyway.

Unanimously we will flow into the mystic.

Maybe we'll go with this one:



It soothes me, if not his mother.

I don't think that music exists to describe the conversation that passed between the boy's mother and I this morning. We're civil. We might even like each other, given time.

She doesn't sleep under stress, and I don't eat. We're very helpful.

What would you posit?

The outside scent is orange blossoms. Yes, the satsuma trees need spraying for smut.

Our big, bubbly, bouncing, blond 35-year-old baby boy is coming in.

I've been making space. I wonder if I could have fit into those black jeans I bought in 1991. Or breathed, if I did.

And I took those dresses I bought with my mother in 1990 off to a Baptist mission store. The dresses were pretty, still are, if more befitting a thirty-year-old than a 54-year-old, but they did represent the last shopping trip I took with my mother. She always pushed me a little harder than I would have gone, and I never regretted it.

The boy will be hungry, and that spells some serious expense.

When I married Lyman I thought I was surely out of the woods with children. I had chosen not to have any, he had a vasectomy.

April Fool's!

I don't typically think of myself in a rural area. We live in a small town.

But sometimes I do wake up to "moos". I don't know why these cows have been isolated in the lot behind a neighbor's house.

I am something more than halfway through John Julius Norwich's Byzantium: The Early Centuries.

Heresy, heresy everywhere.  We're up to our necks in heretics: Arians, Nestorians, monophysites.

And all those barbarians: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns.

Western Emperors, Eastern Emperors, and lots and lots of murder -- families, rivals, possible rivals, traitors, so-called traitors, and whole stadia full of people.

And that's just halfway through the first book of the trilogy.

I have been talking to my BIG brother all day long.  His son picked up the phone and  said, "It sounds like one of your sisters."

Quit being such a punk, child, I'm coming with the gumbo recipe.

Ok, then.

My brother Charles and I are scheduled to fly to Portland, Oregon to see the Major Dude in May.  We tried last year, but Charles was put down with osteomyelitis.  That's gone.

If he can't go this year, that's too bad. I love the brother's wife. I have loved her since I saw her walking down the concourse from gate whatever at Love Field in 1966. Some combination of pleated beige chiffon and strawberry blond tripped my love button.

Lyman and I both went up in 2000 to feed the crowds for their first son's wedding rehearsal.  Lyman made red beans and rice, crawfish pies, and seafood gumbo.

I will carry those responsibilties on my shoulders.

When Mama cleaned her old round-shouldered refrigerator in the '60s, she'd empty it, take all the wire racks and enameled metal bins into the backyard, hose them down, swab them with a bleach solution, hose them again, then let them dry in the sun while she wiped down the box and defrosted the freezer.

With all this crappy plastic and glass, I spend twice as much time cleaning the fridge.

Lyman has his very first sauerbraten in the oven.  We are going to attempt spaetzle tonight.  I do not think we'll be doing it this way:

Okay, so my Valentine tulips are a little late.

Recipe.

Regarding the recipe: I had eight-inch pans when I made it before. They work fine. The proper size pan for the recipe is a nine-inch, which I have obtained since.

Tomorrow is my mother-in-law's 91st birthday, so I've spent most of the day working on an Italian Cream Cake.

It don't get any easier when you do it so seldom.

Let me preface this by saying that I have worked in newspapers, both weekly and daily. (No, never, I didn't work for the Dallas Morning News. Nothing that large.)

And I understand that the time pressures of publishing do push proofreaders to the max, but, can you make any sense of this sequence out of context?:

A group of women in down coats went through the door; behind them a quartet, the two men black, white haired, distinguished, both in suits as though they'd been to a board meeting, their while wives dressed in for coats.

It could be a too elegant expression about women the men were running with, but I don't know.

My husband fed me Susan Spicer's "Spicy Shrimp with Tasso Cream and Green Chili Grit Cakes" for after-Valentine's. We all doing just fine.

UPDATE: Scott provides a link to the recipe, p. 67.

I really shouldn't laugh, but here goes:

Yesterday, I took a tiny miniature rose bush, a pretty Valentine card and a Whitman's Sampler to Lyman's mother at the assisted living center. She'll turn 91 on March 5.

The great current irritant in her life is the woman in the next room over. A group of ladies were chatting after lunch one day when suddenly this woman stood up, looked directly at her and loudly said, "You're a liar, and you're lying right now!"

Girl was flabbergasted and hurt. She said the woman was hard to get along with anyway, and she'd made a special effort to be her friend. The upshot is that there are some papered-over bad feelings.

Now, Girl's memory is shaky. I suspect the other woman's is, too. Who knows what they've talked about or how they remember it, or how much they remember? Who could ever tell if they're deliberately lying? Girl can't even remember what she said to prompt the outburst.

Happy Valentine's Day!:

Sometime before Christmas I read Anne Perry's The Sheen on the Silk, a novel about Constantinople after the sack. I'd read many of her mystery novels.

Which led me to the history I finished reading about three weeks ago that I started on New Year's, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, from my brother's library. The book had a lamentable lack of a good map of Constantinople that was remedied by a reference to Wikipedia: Constantinople.

He also has the trilogy of the history of Byzantium by Julian Norwich, which I will read as time allows after he drops them by.

Commenters at Amazon say that Warren Treadgold is a readable historian who pursues more of the cultural aspects of Byzantium.

As a separate offshoot, Charles has a couple of books on the history of Venice.

If the illusions were pretty cool, this is WAY cool:



Have at it, Sarah. The kids will love it.

(Thank you, Nate McCord.)

Pierre saw his shadow -- a short spring and a long summer for Louisianans. New Iberians say Pierre's prognostications are strictly local for Acadiana.

Tomorrow is February 2:

Down in the swamp lives Pierre C.Shadeaux,
where the nutria tells how the seasons will go.
If the sun wakes him up on Groundhog Day,
summer comes early and spring goes away.

Happy Cajun Groundhog Day!