A Good Day

Nothing too unusual today.

I got up this morning and challenged myself to make biscuits from scratch in less than thirty minutes.  My biscuit recipe is in my cookbook Recipes That Mostly Work All of the Time, and is pretty simple: flour, salt, and baking powder mixed with grated Irish butter, and then moistened with buttermilk and honey.  I laminate the dough, folding it over itself several times to make layers, cut the dough into rounds, put the rounds into a mini cast iron pan, brush with some more buttermilk, and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

I’m not sure if I made the thirty minute deadline, but it was pretty close.  I split one and ate it with honey and butter, and used another to make a turkey sausage breakfast sandwich (with no eggs, which are disgusting to me).  With a cold Diet Coke, it was the breakfast I needed today.

I worked my puzzles and then went downtown to work out. Today was interval day at the gym - high speed rowing, then alternating pulling a sled and jumping up with a weight plate, then alternating deadlifts and farmers carries with two 70 pound kettlebells, then alternating lateral shuffles and slams with a heavy bag.  There was probably something else in there, but I was just trying not to die, so I didn’t take notes.

Lunch was some leftover Panda Express and then shower and off to guitar lessons with my mother.  Our teacher is pretty great - he is exceedingly pleasant and patient with both of us as we try to learn the old classic I’ll Fly Away, with our good friends, the D, G and A chords.  I am trying to get better with barre chords, but I need to practice more.

Afterwards, I took my mother to the Pearland Recreation Center for a tour.  It turns out that she is eligible for a free membership through Medicare’s Silver Sneakers program. I get a discount too for being advanced in age, and I may join to start swimming some laps.  The pool is very impressive.

Then off to dinner at a Korean BBQ joint, which was good, but a little weird.  Why go out to eat and then cook your own food?  Plus, it turns out that a tempura fried Oreo is not worth the calories - too soft and strangely flavorless.

Tomorrow, I have an interesting lunch plan and then we will see the comedian Kathleen Madigan downtown.  I haven’t made a dinner plan yet, but it will probably involve a small plate of something green after tonight’s Korean overload.

I will also post another entry in the interview of my father tomorrow, so you got that going for you, which is nice.

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Random picture from the iPhone:

Sean Marrelli, John Floyd and me at the 2015 Grown-Up Spelling Bee, a fundraiser for the Pearland ISD foundation. Our team won the event in our matching yellow ties.  We took the competition way too seriously, but they raised a lot of money.  

Two years later, I emceed the event myself in what ended up being the last spelling bee.  Was it something I said?  Or was it my sparkly coat? 

I will probably never know.