I was sitting at the table having coffee when, out of the blue, my friend from childhood, Shawn Baugh, lit up my phone. His first question? “What do you think of this political situation?” These days, such a query via telecom might cause one to have a sudden outage, but we’ve known each other for almost 50 years, so we pitched right in. We would seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but as our highly enjoyable discussion revealed, we have much in common regarding what we’d like to see fixed. We also laughed a lot about the absurdities of life, found ourselves remembering the world of our youth, and pondered our future road as oldsters. Neither of us are entirely sure we are excited to see what happens during the next 25 years, but this quote from Shawn sums up both our attitudes: “I love life.” He always has! And so have I, and I’m going to pursue measures to sustain that philosophy. That call was a great boost for my day.

Elsewhere, Nicole and I drove to the Columbia Farmers Market and picked up our usual weekend haul from Pasta La Fata, Uprise Bakery, and Happy Hollow Farm. I as usual picked the wrong basketball games to half-watch (Tide v. Sooners, Auburn v. Baylor) and mopped up a basement leak; Nicole made red beans and rice and some stir-fry to go with the smoked sockeye salmon we ordered from Sea Bear–I could almost have eaten the whole filet!

Movie Night: we finally watched Netflix’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Horatio Alger-goes-to-India / Bildungsroman from Hell novel The White Tiger. The director is Rahmin Bahraini, one of our top five faves. Nicole’s side-eye review: “This is intense.”

Streaming for Strivers:

Mmmm…Goldie’s Bagels!