I did paint Thursday, just it was watercolors. The hotel offers “experiences” and this month’s experience was watercolor painting.
I have no evidence because I left it behind. The instructor took photos; perhaps an email is in the offing.
The instructor’s grandmother also painted china like my great-aunt Rosemary.
I was not thrilled with the result. I used too much water. Did you know if your paper buckles that you’ve used too much water? My other instructor did not tell me that. Then again, on hearing the effort involved in getting just the right amount of water, I think oils are the way to go.
By the way, I’ve had a bad backache all week, and at the end of class my backache was fine. It has been bad to such a degree that only one other thing has relieved it:
Lying in the baked bean pit at the BBQ museum gave my back just the right support all over. (I texted the friend group that I was at Crown Center and one demanded it.)
Had I not seen this sign I left for myself in the suitcase I would have had this version of Eggs Benedict for breakfast.
Speaking of food, my niece and I ate at the hotel restaurant and almost everything was great. We kept ordering plate after plate.
Lobster Toast: Texas toast, lobster chunks, “Everything But the Bagel” topping. And chili oil? I think, yes, but not too much.
Pork chop: This was rated the best pork chop people had ever had, and yes, it was excellent. Chewy / Savory on the outside and Tender / Rich on the inside. They kept one of the bones in situ and it looked very Flinstone-esque. It came with cornbread that was topped with butter and just the right amount of flaky salt.
Shrimp: Too spicy for me, paired with pickled cucumber. So spicy, and so sour, that the shrimp didn’t taste like shrimp anymore. There were also pistachios that, again, were too weak to fight off the acids. Just not to my taste. Great for people who like spicy pickles.
Melon salad: I had a bite of cantaloupe and melted. I moaned, “This is the best cantel – uggggghhhh!”
Because, and I don’t know how they did this, that bite of cantaloupe morphed into meat in my mouth.
”Oh, come on, Aunt Ellen, it can’t – ugggghhh!”
”Why would they do that?” I said. “It’s like the cantaloupe is betraying you.” Like, I’m so sweet – hah! Psych! Umami!
We asked the waitress how jaded people were that they had to have this magic trick in their mouths and she said it was because it had been … reduced? Decocted? Somehow lessened, and that intensified the flavors. For one I have never noticed the undertones of meat in cantaloupe.
However, the watermelon, pecans, and radicchio (weeds) stayed true to their expected flavor profiles.
Post-meal Amuse-Bouche: Little wee balls that tasted a lot like Cap’n Crunch cereal, but far less brutal to the palate.
I am in the midst of packing. The room is in chaos. I’m pulling all the options into a pile and deciding what to wear for the two weather forecasts: hot and steamy and rainy and hot and steamy and not rainy.
Above is a piece of the pile. Brown shirt is a definite, striped linen pants on the right are for hot days, and jeans are for the rain. All are way too big for me, but I will be eating recklessly.
The issue is the shoes. I know, those tennis shoes are ideal, aren’t they? Maybe a little smudged on the toes. I almost put them in the bag before I realized they were shoes of the dead from 2012, and I only wore them once. They might have been broken in for someone else’s feet, but not mine own. Back in the closet they went, perfect or not. Even I am no longer dumb enough to wear “new” shoes on vacation.
I fear I might end up packing 6 pairs of underwear and no bra.
I know we scored a necktie for Gary at the Raphael Hotel last time. I wonder if … no.
Oh, and of course, at the very last minute Gary volunteered to come along and then revoked his offer immediately after I agreed. I remember a time in my life this would have driven me crazy. But then, I remember a time in my life I would have worn those tennis shoes.
Gary woke up and came in to my room singing and dancing to the birthday song. Then he spoke to me for forty-five straight minutes about this hummingbird house he bought that he feels is too small for the hummingbirds.
Gary: “One hummingbird couldn’t fit in there, much less two.”
I was watching American Experience: Chasing the Moon, episodes 1 and 2, which promised me new space footage or information.
(First off, trigger warning: episode 2 contains a very clear recording of the audio of the Apollo 1 fire. What I heard from the NASA archives years ago was crackly. And – this is key – it was not closed captioned. This one was, and it was awful. Thankfully, the American Experience one edits out the short scream at the end. )
So, I was clarifying for Gary the difference between being in space (cross the space border, come back down, like Alan Shepard) and being in orbit (up, circle the earth, come back down, like John Glenn). Then the show reminded me that Yuri Gagarin crossed the border and circled the earth in a high orbit both on his first try. Then I noticed the TV show was talking about Gherman Titov, “second man in space.”
“Who?” I thought, “This is new information.”
So after Yuri G went up and rang the bell on the space part and the full orbit part on his first try, then Shepard went up and Glen orbited low. Then this Titov character went up and did 17 full high orbits while taking a nap and getting spacesick from motion sickness.
I read his Wikipedia page (excerpt below) and I suspect the reason I didn’t know about him was because Russia doesn’t brag about him.
Though he had been suffering from space sickness during his orbit, Titov celebrated upon landing. His celebration is described as “a fit of euphoria” after landing, and on his return flight to Kubishev for debriefing, he alarmed the medical staff by opening and downing a beer, in complete violation of the rules.
After landing, Titov was sent to hospital for further testing to ensure that he was not sick. After his mission, he reportedly engaged in behaviours that could be considered unacceptable for someone working within the space programme. He is reported to have been enthralled in his love of women, excessive drinking, and fast cars, which caused some to theorise that his behaviour had potentially been another side effect of the space sickness he experienced from >zero gravity. Further testing revealed that not to be the case.
I need to learn more about this guy, this missing horny spaceman. Is he real?
The plan was to pay for these trips with the airline miles we’ve stored up since 2018, but you redeem airline miles for flights, car rentals, and hotels.
Early in planning the KC trip, I dropped air travel. An AA flight to KC — 240 miles west — would require that I head south for a layover in Dallas Texas, which is stupid and wasteful. Then I’m not using a car for anything because KC is relatively small, and I fell in so in love with this hotel that I want to give them money. They have watercolor classes. At the hotel.
It’s like I’m a target and the hotel is romance scamming me. It’s almost suspicious.
When I started with Chicago plans, I looked at the Palmer House. Glorious lobby, but tatty rooms. I was on the fence so I looked some more.
I saw a very central hotel, the Pineapple hotel, with a price in the $200s that looked like a high-end boutique. Really nice hotel, 15 stories, good area.
And then I saw this.
”Well,” I thought, “That must mean that you have to walk steps to get from the lobby to the lobby bathroom.”
And then I saw this.
This 15 story property doesn’t have elevators? Or are they just weeding out the fatties and the olds? Is it like when the zip line operators said I had to be able to climb a 15-foot ladder, and there was no ladder, they just wanted a certain type of clientele?
Anyway, they have weeded me out. I might have to stay at the Palmer House, poor me.
I was focusing on how to make my leftover chicken palatable for the five minutes Gary spent ranting about Elon Musk. According to Gary, Musk has a plan to build a robot-operated satellite factory on the moon.
That’s why I was a little distracted when he stopped ranting and I said, “Maybe Elon’s just talking. Maybe he’s trying to distract us because that old part of one of his spaceships fell into the moon today.”
And then the seven-year-old version me who lives in my head said, “You live in science fiction but you sound bored about it!”
