Oh, hey, this looks different, don’t it? Yep. Yesterday was my birthday and I decided to push the Saturday chores to Sunday, take the day off and do webpage stuff. I’d wanted to combine my mostly unused website The Toast Point Page and my blog into one site, plus point to my old blog and music site and stuff. This basically just required figuring out to do basic stuff in WordPress I’d never bothered to do before. And I did! “www.toastpoint.com” now points here, there are links to the old site until I (leisurely) migrate the poetry contests and writing pages and stuff over here, and links to the old blog. Still stuff to do, and I don’t love the current layout (for instance, that mini menu right below the heading needs to go, and I can’t find it to make it go away), but I want to make sure I’ve exhausted the resources I’m already paying for before plunking down more money for a website that gets little to no traffic.
But the basics are done. If you see that header image of Manhattan, look at the tall white building with ‘landscape’ rectangular windows just right of center. That’s the Grace Building and was my first office building when I moved to town. The job sucked, but we were on the top floors and the views out of the conference rooms were amazing. (I now work just a few blocks from there, at 45th and 6th.) Anyway, I’ll be moving over my music website too. Getting geeky here, I think I want to be able to write blog posts that show up on both this site and the music site, by tagging them a certain way. I’m sure that’s possible, I’ll just have to figure out how to do it.
My birthday was delightful! It was bookended by great food: breakfast at a diner, dinner with a handsome gentleman at Bistro Eloise and one of the famous birthday cakes from Milk Bar. If you haven’t seen Chef’s Table Season 4 Episode 1 (or any others) on Netflix, get thee hence, they’re terrific. At Eloise, I drank wine (a nice treat, because I’m not drinking at home nowadays) and C had cocktails. I started with the country pâté and C had escargot, and we each got a sample of the other’s plate. Terrific. Then I had codfish with au gratin potatoes and string beans, and he had the chicken cordon bleu. Those were both really tasty- I’ll definitely get the chicken at a future visit. Their service isn’t that snappy, but all the food we’ve had there has been top-notch.
I still have ‘life’ things to blog about and those may have to wait for another day, but they include:
- I’m playing Beethoven’s Fifth with QUO! So great to be playing with an ensemble again, and playing an iconic piece for the first time! (also to be playing horn for real for the first time in over two years) Also, looking around the QUO rehearsal room and happily realizing how many other gigs I’ve done with at least half of these musicians, some of them dear friends who I’ve known for twenty years or more. It’s amazing.
- We’re now ‘back to the office’ in an official way, which means everyone’s expected to come in at least once a week, hopefully matching up with your teammates on some sort of coordinated plan. I’d been coming in once a week anyway, and it looks like coming in on Wednesday, then heading to QUO rehearsal, works great for me. I’ve now met (in person) a lot of co-workers I’ve been working and virtually chatting with for a year now, so that’s been delightful and humorous. Like just waving to someone, saying “Hi, Dave”, and then stopping and thinking, ‘wait, we’ve never actually seen each other before’.
- Tomorrow I have an X-ray and clavicle checkup, and that should put paid to the whole “Eric spends the summer with a broken collarbone” thing. It certainly hasn’t given me any trouble for a while – I’m still far more likely to have pain in my right hand, which I fractured two years ago. (then, as I type this, my shoulder twinges. OK, fuck you, shoulder.) All part of the grand package of being fifty-seven where everything twinges and aches on a random schedule. Should I talk about my weird toe pain now, which I suspect is simply arthritis? No?
- Also, as I mentioned and as planned, I’ve been low-carbing and not-drinking since we got home from vacation. And it’s working! Numbers-wise, there was a bit there where I’d dropped ten pounds in two weeks, although a lifetime of weight issues has taught me that that wasn’t really real. But it’s at least heading in the right direction. I should be back on it today, except what am I supposed to do with this leftover birthday cake? Hmmm…
Enjoy the week!
The Toast Point Page 