Saturday the rains came again. I woke up and took Beatrice for a walk in the sprinkly rain. At 9:30, my wife and I headed to Vision Works to replace my eyeglasses. I got three pair--a first string, a back-up and a set of non-bifocal sunglasses. The cost for 3 was only a bit more than I paid for 2 pair nearly 4 years ago. This was because we chose sturdy, non-designer frames. I want to get away from wire frames.
The woman at Vision Works who helped us was perfect--stayed out of the way, but then, when asked, made great contributions.
My wife helped me choose. If eyeglasses are a metaphor, she thinks of me as more square and less like an aviator, and more like brown and less like blue than I see myself.
In the afternoon, I ate a grilled chicken sandwich and a small chili. I watched a legal education seminar about United States Supreme
Court decisions. I walked in the rain in Russell Creek Park in Plano, trying out a 60x zoom camera I got used on eBay. It worked fine, but not having an electronic viewfinder is a huge drawback. I mistook 28 Mallards for early-arrived teals, and figured out my mistake the hard way, by posting "what is this bird?" on the requisite Facebook site. It's embarrassing when someone has to name a mallard for me.
This evening we went to El Fenix in McKinney. The original El Fenix is in downtown Dallas. Like lots of cities, Dallas has a Mexican place that opened between 1900 and 1925 that kind of defined Mexican food for the city. In Los Angeles, El Chollo serves a similar role. El Fenix was Dallas' first Mexican restaurant. I used to eat at the flagship downtown Dallas location often when I was 20something and would go after work in downtown. It holds a restaurant-sized place in my heart.
Tonight the McKinney location served me a meal of Hatch chili chicken enchiladas and served my wife chicken fajitas. It was all okay, but the service, the food and the whole feel of things was a bit warmed-over. Our attendant, Liz, seemed nice enough, and fairly attentive, but my dish came out wrong, my wife's looked less than appetizing, and so forth. The table next to us had to advise the wait person that their tacos came out cold. I missed the old, classic days of eating at the flagship. I may go back to this location again, but I have better places I prefer.
I started a new novel, "The Chameleon" by Samuel Fisher. I got this from Salt Publishing, being the third novel I have gotten from this indie English publisher. The first section of the book was a good read. I hear the rain began again outside.
from Dreamwidth, because two posts of the same text are twice as nice