Easy Monday

So it’s been a week since my last entry. I guess I was decompressing after finishing my big case and was feeling lazy.

It was a pretty passive week: lots of rain, quiet days in the house, time for reflecting and reading. No walks in the park, but I did exercise everyday. 

I pulled seven jalapeños off my plant and pickled them.  Will I actually eat them?  Time will tell. Adding jalapeños as a condiment to an already satisfying dish is like choosing to watch a horror movie instead of something funny or thrilling. When it’s over, you might appreciate the jolt to your system (or the lingering burn on your tongue), but seeking out and overcoming fear is almost never my first choice. I guess that says something about me.

I also made a nice roasted pepper basil pesto, which was an interesting variation on the usual green basil pesto, a little smokier, an open challenge to my palate. I think the sauce would be a good accessory to a plate of Italian sausage and ravioli with a light sprinkle of dried red pepper flakes.  That’s the kind of zing I do like.

My favorite dish this week was an eye of round roast, a notoriously tough piece of meat, which I put in the sous vide on Saturday night at 133 degrees for 24 hours!  The water whirred all day and all night and when I was ready to take it out on Sunday evening, I heated my trusty cast iron skillet (one of my most valuable possessions, slick as an ice rink, endlessly black black black, heavy and ready to gracefully transfer high heat to the surfaces of food) and I seared that roast to a beautiful crisp. Perfectly medium rare inside, it was a hit with the family, a light beef gravy glazing the slices of meat and the accompanying roasted rosemary and thyme potatoes.  Hoo boy - that was a dish that contained multitudes.

Today was a simple roast chicken in the same cast iron pan, following the recipe in my extremely limited edition cookbook, Recipes That Mostly Work All of the Time. I tucked a halved lemon in the cavity and some rosemary sprigs from my garden under the skin and it was just about perfect. That’s the thing about cooking - if you get good at it, you really never need to eat bad food again (at least at home).  If only I could convince my children of this elemental fact.

I had a medical setback on Saturday of the self-inflicted kind.  My trainer Art sent me a text that said, “If you’re bored…” along with a flyer advertising a track meet that his daughter was running in.

I’m a big fan of Art’s kids - I’ve known them all since they were born and they seem to like me. We’ve made Christmas cookies and had swim dates and I coached his middle daughter in soccer.  They are funny and sweet and interested in the world, which makes them interesting to me.

So I took a quick shower, threw some clothes on, considered and rejected wearing a hat and putting sunscreen on - it was a cloudy day, probably rainy - and raced to the Pearland High School stadium to catch the Parade of Teams.

Big mistake.  The sun came out with a vengeance and Art’s daughter did not race until an hour has passed.  I enjoyed her race and went down to congratulate her, and she said, “You are really red, Mister Scott.”

She was right.  I was red, not brown, not pink.  Ripe strawberry red on my head and forearms.  It was as if my head had been neatly sauted in my cast iron pan, or roasted on a rotisserie spit.  By the time the meet was cancelled due to a ironic monsoon of rain and lightning (leaving me soaked to the skin and burned, like a campfire doused with a bucket of water), I was miserable and pathetic.

Massive doses of aloe vera and moisturizer have mitigated the damage, but I should be peeling in earnest at precisely the same time I will be giving my speech on Friday morning.  Imagine!  The presentation will be to both a live audience and also broadcast to attendees in 4K on their room TVs. They will be able to see every sloughed flake of dead skin swirling around my face like a sandstorm in the desert.  Maybe I should just go full MC Doom for the speech (and if you don’t get that reference, look him up: it’s worth at least a medium dive down the rabbit hole).

This week is action packed: the usual workouts, taking my mother to a dermatology appointment tomorrow and guitar on Thursday, poker Tuesday night, dine with an old friend from law school on Thursday night, and my speech on Friday.  I may also throw in some professional work.  

Then it will be time to start mentally preparing for next week’s WSOP trip and the fame and adulation that will follow when I win the tournament.

Onward!

Finished Up Monday

If you are reading this blog, you know me, probably better than most. After all, this is not a general dissemination blog for the masses - it’s just a one-sided conversation between me and you.

(And I am self-aware enough to know that my in-person conversations are often one-sided with me being the storytelling bully…but I am working on bring a better listener.)

What you may not know, unless you’ve known me for a very long time is that I am prone to internalizing my anxieties, tamping them down deep, and obsessing privately over them.  This condition manifests itself as procrastination and peevishness, a real weight in the center of my chest belaboring my breathing, and an overwhelming desire to just flee my problems.

It’s not depression, as far as I can tell.  As soon as the underlying cause of my anxiety passes, so do the symptoms. It’s more like a slowly simmering panic attack, one that I manage by just pressing forward, knowing that whatever it is that is triggering me will eventually resolve itself because nothing lasts forever, right?

It is ironic that I chose to be a lawyer, because the profession is nothing if it is not taking on other people’s problems as if they are your own, and worrying about the worst possible outcome.  I spent 27 years representing my friends at the DA’s office and it was my job to keep that worst possible outcome from happening to them.

Most of the time, the conflicts were manageable, just professional disputes with ethical adversaries, ultimately leading to a reasonable result. But it seemed like there was always that one case where the adversary was irrationally angry and unreasonable, where he or she would take everything too personally, and their anger would extend from my client to me.

Even as I write this, I can remember these people and how they got under my skin with a practiced and amoral efficiency. The public information requestor seeking tens of thousands of documents to get even with the office’s refusal to accept a charge against the requestor’s enemy; the plaintiffs’ lawyer sending over gigantic amounts of discovery on a patently frivolous case; a variety of slash and burn attorneys pursuing a strategy of winning by attrition.  Everything was too personal, way too personal.

What got me through these hard cases was the love and support of my colleagues at the office, who I think could see the toll those cases took on me and did what they could to help, sometimes carrying the ball when I could not lift my head off the desk.

I was also buoyed by a fundamental belief that the law was on my side and that I would eventually get the result that the law supported.  I really was (and am) a true believer that good lawyering leads to just results.  It just might take longer than you’d like it to.

And finally, I drew on a core strength from a childhood in which some things were not easy, but I had been forced by my parents to persevere. You want a car? Earn it. We signed you up to be a reader at Mass.  Go do it. Want to be on the swim team?  The pool awaits, every morning at 6 a.m.  Want to convince your mother to ease up on her anger towards you? Put on your poker face and just keep going.

When I retired, I thought I left those anxiety triggers behind.  I can pick my projects, screen out the hard stuff, work on my own schedule.

But the case I was handling this month was a blast from the past, a bundle of irrational arguments made by an amoral murderer (literally!), high stakes litigation against a jailhouse lawyer.  I am going to win as long as I don’t screw it up.  But if I screw it up, embarrassment and a parade of horribles could ensue.

No parking ticket, this.

So I have been anxious and sleepless and consumed with dread as I march to the conclusion.  And today was supposed to be the end - I’d written a fifty page brief and another fifty page draft order for the judge to sign.  It was finally done.

Until I got a phone call from the clerk telling me that my adversary had filed three new claims.  I sat down and looked off in the distance, contemplating my fate. More briefing, more time worrying.

And then I gathered myself and waited to see what he had written. And it was nothing, nothing at all. I did some quick research, knocked down the arguments, amended my brief and draft order to address the new claims, and filed the bitch.

Done.

I then came downstairs from my office and made a Sidecar - lemon juice, brandy, Cointreau - a great drink and a happy celebration. And a new resolution to avoid these cases like the soul-sucking hairballs they are.  I’m 62 and I want to make it to 92.  Or 102. But I won’t if I keep doing this to myself.

___________________________________

Since last checking in, besides the hairball case, there’s not much to report on.  Some good meals - Killen’s BBQ Sunday fried chicken yesterday, a chef’s tasting at Amalfi on Westheimer on Saturday, some excellent fajitas on Friday with the family - and more swimming in May than I probably did in all of 2025.  

The bubby is a big part of that: he is getting more and more comfortable in the water and loves to throw the basketball we use in the pool.  He is getting very verbal, but everything besides “doggie” and “ball” is still gibberish, at least to me.  But he is getting closer to becoming much more interesting.

Today, I also pickled my crop of banana peppers in a solution of apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and fennel seeds. They are curing for a day, and then I will try them in a ham sandwich.

Tomorrow: dealing with the aftermath of my filing, some exercise, a stop at Home Depot for a large pot to transplant one of my tomato plants into (it’s almost ready to explode with fruit, but its pot is way too small), and then preparation for a speech I will be giving next week at the Annual Meeting of the State Bar.  I think it will be an easy speech, as long as I don’t freak out in my old age over the size of the audience and the topic (Transitioning Your Law Practice).

(Thinks.)

Have I learned nothing?  No more speeches after this one.  Geez.

What Happened Wednesday

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I am almost done with the big project that I wrote about many days ago.  It has been occupying my mind, to the exclusion of just about everything else, especially in the evening hours when I think about writing in this blog (and decide not to).  There really is some truth to the idea that multitasking is kind of a myth.

That was something my brother-in-law told me at dinner last weekend when he and my sister came down for the holiday.  I was skeptical about it, but I really do think that if two things really require your attention, you can try to do both at the same time, but one of them will suffer, like when someone is talking to you in person at the same time you are on the phone with someone else.  (And in those situations, I have the uncanny ability to make both people mad at me for not listening, mainly because I will be ignoring both of them while thinking to myself, “Which one should I be listening to?”)

Since I last wrote, I worked as an election clerk for the Texas primary poll.  This time, it was in an anonymous government building in a room about the size of a medium conference room.  My co-workers were, as usual, kind and friendly, and I really got to know them because we only had about 200 voters come through between 7:00 am and 7:00 pm.

I don’t mind the slow pace because I have a captive audience and can tell some of my stories to fresh ears.  The trade-off is that you have to listen to their stories, some of which are really interesting and some of which are not (which I guess someone would say about my material).  

Between storytelling, I read a book called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, which is about the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence (look it up: it really is great), and I worked a couple of Sunday crosswords.  I also got a cheeseburger for lunch at Killen Burger, super good.

I will not comment on the merits of the election except to note that I could tell that Ken Paxton was going to win because of the number of skeevy looking Republicans who turned out at our precinct.  They had the same energy as the J6ers who stormed the capitol in 2021, a kind of angry focus on delivering the MAGA vote and kicking the establishment guy out.  To this day, I just don’t get it, and maybe that’s the point.  You are either in the club or you are not.  I am not.

I got some good news from one of my favorite nephews. He will be getting married soon.  Apparently, he proposed at the Harry Potter wing of a California theme park and they had a wand battle, captured in a series of charming (possibly enhanced) photographs.  Their enthusiastic nerdiness is a big part of why I love him and his fiance dearly.

I volunteered to preside over the ceremony pursuant to my new status as a certified minister.  They expressed some kind encouragement, but I think they are sensitive to their extended family’s preferences and may pass on my offer, which will not hurt my feelings at all.  I am just happy that two people who I care about have found each other and will have a great life together.

On another front, I have resolved what was going to be an irreconcilable conflict in an elegant and first world way.  In about three weeks, I will be going to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker’s Seniors and Super Seniors tournaments.  But in the intervening weekend between the two events, my good friend B will be marrying his lovely daughter off and my friend R will be having a somber remembrance of his late wife at a cemetery.

I can’t do both the poker trip and the Houston events.  Or can I?

I recalled a few years ago that my friend Wojciech had professional commitments between tournaments and flew home to handle them before flying back to Vegas.  At the time, I thought this was decadent.  But now, with tons of Southwest points, it’s a practical solution to accommodate a busy schedule (as well as Father’s Day).

I told my wife what I had decided to do and she gave me a look of genuine surprise, followed by an arched brow look of semi-disapproval.  I think she had the same feeling that I had had with Wojo.  But she laughed and blessed off on the plan.

What else?  I took a guided tour of the Rothko Chapel on the campus of the University of St. Thomas in downtown Houston.  It was awesome in the truest meaning of that overused word, a meditative space surrounded by two-story black paintings with subtle variations and nuances accentuated by indirect changing light coming through a skylight in the chapel.  After we met the president of the Chapel’s foundation, a lovely and enthusiastic former Duke professor of ethics and philosophy and a practicing imam, we entered the Chapel and sat down to contemplate the space.

It was not a negative space, like a sensory deprivation tank, but instead a place that rewards concentration with clarity.  The black panels subtly change with the ambient light, the echoes in the space amplify the smallest sounds.  This spare room contains multitudes.

I will go back soon.

Tomorrow, I get together with the Old Man Thursday lunch bunch, now meeting monthly instead of weekly as we all get older.  Also, I finish my project, once and for all.

I hope to be more diligent on this blog.  It’s important to me, and I hope it’s important to you.  Life goes by so fast.

Spring Cleaning Sunday

I made some progress on my work assignment on Saturday, enough to sleep well on Saturday night.  This week is the home stretch, and I can see the finish line finally.

Today, we spent the day getting the house in order for my sister’s visit this weekend. For some reason, my wife always wants the house to be guest-friendly, which means basically perfect in every way, as if my sister was meeting her for the first time.

Of course, I’ve known my sister for more than sixty years and we have no pretenses left. We are both cheerful slobs in many respects, which is not to say that we visit each other’s houses and make messes. We’re just comfortable being ourselves when family comes around.

Not so much for my wife, who has known my sister for over forty years.  She views a clean house as a sign of respect for visitors, which includes my family, in and out of town.  So we did some spot painting and rug cleaning and dusting to approximate a utopian ideal of a guest room.

I took the opportunity to also straighten out our various utensil drawers, which include vast collections of spatulas, cheesecloth, graters, and, weirdly, chopsticks.  Like my closet, these drawers would benefit from aggressive editing, but every implement I review has enough utility to merit its place in the crowded drawer.  I just have to remember that I have a herb chopper, a garlic press, a ricer (the best thing in the world for silky mashed potatoes), and a zester when I am cooking.

If I was a better cook, I’d reduce it all down to a chef’s knife, a paring knife, a fish spatula, a Microplane grater, some tongs, an electronic scale, and a probe thermometer.  

But when you go to Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma, you find yourself needing pie weights and a strawberry trimmer for that lattice-crust pie you’ve been wanting to make ever since seeing it in the New York Times cooking app.  So you get them, forgetting that a pound of uncooked pinto beans are just as good as the ceramic beads you just bought, and that your paring knife, spinning the strawberry on the edge of the blade, is just as good as the charming red plastic device gripping the leaves and core of the fruit with the same motion as the claw machines in an arcade (and with about the same rate of success).

And once bought, you keep them, even as you are trimming and cleaning berries with your paring knife.  There has to be some kind of parallel to my approach to personal relationships here, but that’s a discussion for another day.  Suffice to say, I am always inclined to hope for the best, in kitchen implements and in relationships, until either of them become so useless or toxic that I have to let them go, which explains my vast archive of spatulas and my long list of holiday granola recipients.

Speaking of cooking, I made my third batch of pesto from the basil plant in my backyard, a record return on investment due to my unusual level of care and attention this year.  I have been aggressively and strategically pruning the basil plant, just above a node of leaves, prompting the plant to get bushier and more productive.  Same for my rosemary and my sage, which are doing great.

On the other hand, my tomato plants keep teasing me, lots of yellow flowers, each a precursor to a fruit, none of which are actually getting there yet.  I’ve caged them, water and feed them regularly, and check on them for bugs and blight every morning, but nothing yet.  I’m kind of hoping that they will fruit all at once, an explosion of red blobs, as organic and fresh as a tomato can possibly be.

I aspire to what my friend Steve has in his backyard.  I visited him last year, and he had six or seven plants all fruiting.  He casually reached down and snapped off two or three cherry tomatoes, no big deal, and gave me a couple, letting me taste the fresh acidity exploding in my mouth all at once.  That’s what I want this year in my back yard.

Until then, pesto abounds.

This week, poker on Tuesday, my sister visits on Thursday for the weekend, and I have a tour of the Rothko Chapel on Friday.  Plus I finish my pending matter and start something new.

The watchword is focus.

Where Have I Been Friday

This is the longest break I’ve taken in this project so far.  

It was not for lack of material: I played a pretty good game of poker on Tuesday, worked out every day this week and walked one morning, even as I am still recovering from my recent illness.  I even found out that my trainer’s wife is related to Mary Todd Lincoln.

I also celebrated my wife’s birthday today by making a dolce de leche cake from a recipe by the owner of the Momofuku Milk Bar, Christina Tosi.  I also made ravioli lasagna, cucumber salad and focaccia, all of which were very successful.

The whole family attended the birthday dinner, including the bubby, who was in high spirits.  He is now actively imitating us and trying real hard to speak, not quite there yet, however.

I guess I’m slowing down a little because I am worrying in tbe back of my head about my professional obligations, and spending time writing in this blog seems like an indulgence until I finish what I need to finish.

I plan to spend most of tomorrow on that matter, mostly for my own mental stability.  I read somewhere that the way to overcome anxiety is to directly confront your fears.  I almost never do that, however, preferring to tamp down my trepidation until I can’t.

But I’m hitting that point now, so tomorrow is a work day.

I will report back on whether I actually do it tomorrow or if I find another reason not to.

Sigh…

Catching Up Monday

It was a nice Mother’s Day on Sunday.  For the first time (well, technically the second time, but last year the bubby was barely seven months old, so it didn’t feel like a true holiday for my daughter because the bubby was still so new), we had a three-generation event with my mother, my wife and my daughter all celebrating their day.

We went to Killen’s Steakhouse, which is ordinarily closed on Sundays but …Mother’s Day, and how can you not be open?  The bubby was in good spirits, pointing and babbling and walking and eating and throwing stuff, but not crying or being difficult.  We played peek-a-boo and cover your head with a napkin and surprise-face and he genuinely laughed out loud and then pounded the table with both hands like a boss.

I love that kid.

These family events are about shared history.  My mother tells stories about my childhood, and my wife and I tell stories about our children, and in telling the stories, we reaffirm our links to each other.

The flip side to this is about the people not at the table.  When I was in fifth grade, around 1973, my family moved from upstate New York to Texas.  Until then, we gathered at one family event or another for the holidays - my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my cousins - and we made memories.  

While the adults sat around the kitchen table sipping coffee or beers, the cousins would gather outside and act like the idiots we were, playing football or throwing snowballs or wandering around the small towns we visited, entirely safe in our recklessness.  We all played our roles - I was the skinny nerd, my sister was pretty and athletic, my cousin Doug was stocky and reasonable, my cousin MaryAnne was fun and spunky and her brother Frankie was annoying and sarcastic.  We opened presents, gorged on sweet corn and freshly pressed apple cider.

And then we moved.  No more extended family events.  Just the five of us in Texas while things continued without us in upstate New York.  We were the ones not at the table.

Years later, after my father died, I reconnected with my aunts, who had missed us.  My aunt Vicki pulled out old photo albums and we looked at pictures from long ago.

“This is your seventh birthday party,” she said, pointing to me in a form-fitting turtleneck sweater and thick plastic glasses, a cheerfully punchable face leaning forward to blow out candles, surrounded by cousins.

We flipped ahead through the album, through Christmases and Easters and summer weekends and winter vacations, until we got to about 1973 when we were erased from the pictures, as if Marty McFly had gone back in time and broke up my parents before they could meet and eventually get married.

On Sunday, the person missing from the pictures was my father, who I miss every day, and who would have loved the bubby with the unqualified passion of a proud patriarch, surveying all of his progeny and finding it good.  Dad was the glue, the one person everyone loved and respected, and he would have made sure that my brother and sister and my nephew were there, either in person or in spirit.

At 62, I try to be the glue now, but it is harder than you think to be that guy.  We live our separate lives, my siblings and my children and my nephews, separated from each other by hundreds of miles in some cases, separated from each other by personalities and pride and ancient resentments in other cases.  We are not as willing to compromise for family harmony and have all become more inclined to be the center of our own stories rather than being parts of a larger family saga.

But we do what we can.  When the bubby grows up, he will look at these pictures and ask who’s that, and who’s that, and in telling him the stories, he will become part of the story himself, the story that continues on and on and on.

_____________________________

Today was a good gym day, pushing sleds and sprinting on the exercise bicycles and treadmills and stair climbers, then doing leg extensions and wall crouches and lateral shuffles and not much lifting.  My trainer seems to be taking it easy on me as a recovering invalid, easing me back into more stressful stuff.

Then it was a Mom day, replacing air filters in her townhouse and spreading mulch and dropping off cookies with the nice ladies at the tax office who had been so kind to her last week.  

It’s powerful stuff, giving cookies to public servants.  The clerk who had helped us was there and she was genuinely confused for a second as my mother handed her the box before realizing that it was a gift and she then just melted with gratitude.  Collecting taxes has got to be the ultimate thankless job.  I think it might have been the first time anyone had ever brought cookies to the tax office out of appreciation for a job well done.

Dinner tonight was leftovers - a mystery sandwich wrapped in foil in the outside refrigerator and a burrito with unknown contents.  The sandwich turned out to be chopped beef my son had brought home from his job, and the burrito was chicken and cheese, which reheated nicely.

My wife watched me eat these mystery entrees with a combination of disgust and fascination.  “I know you’re trying to be frugal and I’m not trying to be mean, but I could never do that,” she said.

I grunted and took another bite of the burrito.  Leftovers are free food, and I have an iron stomach.  I’ll probably be fine.

Tomorrow: more exercise and poker night!

Tepid Friday

Not much to report for today.  My health continues to improve,  I went to the HFSC board meeting, which was mostly perfunctory.  Some interesting briefings on the operations of the company, a couple of quick votes, and it was over in about ninety minutes.  Everyone who was there was very pleasant and collegial.

Then lunch at a Chinese restaurant (chicken lo mein, fried rice, egg roll, and wonton soup), me and a couple the only people in the place.  They were amusing to eavesdrop on - the guy was burly and tattooed and about my age, and the woman joining him for lunch was trying hard to be charming.  He told a story about trying to feed leftover “mash” he had obtained from a microbrewery to his pigs, but they passed on it.  

“Now the cows, they thought it was like candy. They couldn’t get enough of it,” he said between bites of sweet and sour chicken.

“Ha!” his lunch date responded.

I then went to an auto parts store and got my mother a shiny license plate frame with enameled daisies for her new Texas plates.  I had borrowed her car to attend the meeting downtown, so I returned it with a full tank of gas and some new bling.

She loved it.  I also got her a couple of decals for her back window, which she wanted to be able to spot her car in a crowded parking lot.  A bedazzled queen’s crown and a metallic American flag now make her car hard to miss.

The rest of the day was a reading day.  I plowed my way through a new biography of the Rolling Stones, which pretty much told me nothing I hadn’t read in the other biographies I’ve read about the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.  I am kind of amazed how much Keith Richards has rehabilitated his reputation after spending the Seventies in a fog of addiction and amorality.  He’s like everyone’s favorite burnout uncle now, albeit an uncle who co-wrote some of the best songs ever written.

I looked up from my book to see that the day had slipped away, and had some dinner (enchiladas) and watched some pro basketball with my wife.

My car is still in the shop.  I’m getting the seats reupholstered, and the battery replaced, and they are working on the front brakes.  When it’s all done, the repair bill will be about one-third the total value of the entire car, but still cheaper than buying a new one.

My wife does not agree with this logic.  She wants me to get a new car, but I am holding out for a little longer under the logic that (a) we may be on the cusp of self-driving electric cars with solid state batteries, and I don’t want to own a practically obsolete car; and (b) the next car will be the one I use to drive around the country and to travel with my grandson, so I want it to be the best for him.  I don’t want him telling my daughter, “Mom, I don’t wanna go with him.  Grandpa’s car smells bad and is old, just like him!”

At some point, however, the decision may be taken out of my hands.  I can see my wife having the old car towed away and sold for scrap, then having my son drive up with a new car, hand-selected by my family, forcing me to politely accept their largesse.

If that happens, that happens.  But until then, I will continue to putter along in my bucket of bolts.

Tomorrow: Saturday!  I’ll probably cook something and keep trying to get a little better.