Hi,

A milestone, I made garden quiche for b’fast this morning and was able to peal an apple for the parfaits.  I also was able to do all the dishes and prep things, more or less one handed.  The unfortunate part is I’m getting a little water where my cast crosses my palm and I’m getting a little bit of an odor.  I’ve been very good with showers and stuff, so the whole cast isn’t smelling.  I’ve known some people that got their cast wet and you really didn’t want to be in the room with them.  Ten more days!

I’ve never done cursive with my left hand, I’ve always printed (or something I call printing, others frequently call it illegible).  Printing with my right had has been a challenge, initially just forming each individual letters took time and concentration.  Now I have somewhat of a flow.

I went over to Calvary Methodist Church last night for their Soup Night.  It’s a fund raiser for the church and the food bank they hold the first Thursday of the month.  It’s run by my good friend Lisa from The Fabled Table.  She keeps telling me that she wants to start a blog, but Mike won’t let her.  Anyway, I ran into friends of mine there, Carl & Tim from Galveston Road and Greg from the Mexican War Streets.  I sat down with them and Carl said Tim reads my blog every day (that I post) during his lunch and complains when I haven’t posted in a while.  🙂  If you ever get a chance to attend Soup Night, you definitely should.  Lisa always does a nice job with the food (nothing fancy, very inexpensive), but you also can go up and see the sacristy.  Calvary has three huge Tiffany stained glass windows and the interior was actually designed my Tiffany.  Which shows the money that was here then, that they could convince the premier jeweler of the time to design the interior of their church.  They’ve recently spend $5mil renovating the church.  The seat cushions are the original from the 1800’s.

Wednesday, the Warhol had a preview of their new show on Marilyn Monroe “Some like it hot, some like it cold”.  Quite the collection the Warhol owns on Marilyn and some very nice loaners from other collectors.  We came in and there was an introduction by the Carnegie’s Developer of Corporate Relations (I hope I got her title correct), Judy and her wonderful staff.  We then broke into three different groups that were lead by museum staff that explained the exhibit.  I was lucky enough to be in the group with the museum’s curator, Eric.  Very knowledgeable and interesting person.  He gave us quite the insight.  I knew Andy Warhol was somewhat obsessed with Marilyn, but he pointed out something some art experts propose.  Andy had been a struggling artist for years, tried a new pop art style and a contemporary had just done the exact same thing and Andy’s idea was immediately shot down.  That’s when he came up with the Heinz catchup bottle and Campbell’s soup can. These catapulted him to fame and he really pushed the envelope with his work.  He sort of figured that he was as successful as he was going to with art.  Marilyn’s popularity was exploding and he became obsessed with fame, hence his obsession with her.  They never did meet.  Interesting perspective.

We then went up to the newly reopened Penn Brewery.  They are again making their own beer on site and they carry a nice selection.  The staff are nice and the building is interesting.  They do need to work in their food though.  I’ve never been a big fan of their potato pancakes.  They haven’t improved and they were in a chafing dish and were actually cold.  This was a private party for a bunch of corporate sponsors for the Carnegie.  I’ve done tons of banquets (I was the Banquet Manager at the Crowne Plaza in Nashville and we did over $4 million a year in banquet revenue alone).  You want to treat all banquets as special, but when you have a bunch of corporate decision makers (and blogger s 🙂 ) you really should be on your toes.

On my constant rant about corporate greed, I was happy to see Citibank shareholders up in arms about executive compensation.  I don’t remember if it was Citi or another big bank, whose CEO received $24M in compensation.  That’s just wrong.  and on a really weird one, Chesapeake Energy stocks dropped 5% after Reuters reported that it’s CEO borrowed as much as $1.1B against his take in thousands of company wells.  $1.1BILLION, what, he needed a new car?  🙂

That’s about it for now,

ed