Monday, 24 February 2014

Basically, a day spent not doing very much. There was one definite item on the agenda, a visit to Harbour Town to buy a new pair of joggers from the New Balance, and one item that definitely wasn't.

I spent the whole day avoiding the temptation to see what I'd missed by deciding not to head off to the Springsteen shows in the Hunter Valley. They probably might have been doable, but I reckoned there'd be access and accommodation issues that would end up costing an arm and a leg. 

So the day after wasn't the right time to see what I'd missed and check whether Friday on my Mind had made another appearance in the set. I'm hoping for it again in Brisbane on Wednesday night, but won't be complaining if it doesn't make the cut. If it doesn't I suspect there'll be another Australian cover that does, and I'm not necessarily talking Just Like Fire Would or Highway to Hell.

An acoustic Cattle and Cane might be a bit too much to hope for, but maybe, just maybe, Stranded, assuming Bruce is aware that Brisbane was The Saints’ home town.

But, in any case, once I'd taken a stroll in search of croissants for breakfast, I wandered off to the bus stop to get myself across to Harbour Town, which is the sort of place I tend to avoid unless there's something I really need.

And I needed a new pair of joggers that looked semi-presentable, didn't I? More to the point I needed the right size in a 4E, which wasn't quite the straightforward exercise you might expect.

It wasn't that they didn't have any. They had one, but there'd been a run on white joggers, what with the start of the school year and all, and the one they had was a chocolate brown number. Still, I took it and will be investigating the availability of a white pair further down the track.

In the meantime,  the old ones will do for the morning walk.

With the shoe issue sorted there wasn't too much else to do at Harbour Town, so I headed back to the bus stop, where a bus heading back to downtown Southport was conveniently taking on passengers.

Back to The Unit, upstairs to ditch the shoes, and a bit more Leonard bio, and it was more or less lunch time. I'd been doing the catering myself for most of the preceding couple of days, so I felt like a spell away from the stove.

The hawker food stall in the Asian grocery establishment yielded a Mongolian beef and rice that did the job nicely, and through the course of the afternoon I finished off the Cohen bio and started on the fourth Marco Vichi Inspector Bordelli title, death in Florence.

I'm not totally convinced about Bordelli, and the title in question has a strand in the plot line that I'd prefer to avoid, but it still delivered an interesting read as the cop with a social conscience made his way around Florence/Firenze against a background of the major flood I have vague memories of from the late sixties.

I broke from reading to rustle up a lamb and tomato pasta sauce that worked well with the largest pasta shells I've encountered and matched the Crabtree Cabernet very nicely.

And that, effectively, was Monday.

Tuesday, 25 February 2014

© Ian Hughes 2012