Watermelon Radishes

The weather was bright and blue and crisp yesterday, so Olga and I took an afternoon walk to the cemetery. Yes, I am still technically in Covid isolation, but since I'm pretty much over it and I was outdoors and away from people the whole time, I didn't see how a walk could hurt. I desperately needed a change of scenery and I think Olga did too!

Along the way I found this stamp lying on the sidewalk. It's an old French stamp, somewhat battered and torn. Who knows how it wound up lying on a London street. It makes me suspect someone's stamp collection got discarded and this one blew out of the trash can. But who knows.

Olga wasn't super-energetic, and in fact she turned for home after we'd made one loop around the rear part of the cemetery, rather than also doing a loop around the front too -- our usual path.

I finished Sean Wilsey's "Oh the Glory of It All," which I liked even though it ran long in a few places, particularly toward the end. For example, I could have done without the road trip to Marin County, complete with thumbnail-sized photos from a disposable camera, to find the exact spot where the author's father had died peacefully a few weeks before in a passenger seat while en route from Napa to San Francisco. But Wilsey's descriptions of interactions with his truly evil stepmother -- a cliché, but this woman was capital E-V-I-L -- and his entertaining accounts of his troubled teen years and education at various expensive and exotic reform schools made up for the occasionally excessive detail. Like I said, it was thumbs-up overall.

Here's something I've never seen before. It's called a "watermelon radish," and Dave bought a package of three at the grocery store as an experiment. His verdict?

"They taste like nothing," he said. "It’s the 'Seinfeld' of radishes."

(In case your '90s cultural references are rusty, "Seinfeld" was often described as "a show about nothing.")

Indeed, they are pretty and they're pleasantly crisp, and as you can see they're quite a bit larger than a traditional radish, but they don't have much of a taste. I think they're more about texture and appearance than anything else.

We also tried another new product, courtesy of my monthly (now quarterly; I reduced the frequency) box from the Craft Gin Club. It's called "Crodino," and it's a non-alcoholic Italian aperitif. It's very bitter and neither Dave nor I cared for it. He likened it to concentrated orange rind, and I think that's pretty accurate. But some people love it (at least according to the Amazon reviews) so maybe it's just not our thing.