Mobile Routine, Lavish Desserts

I’ve only been at the Jack Daniels for 3 days now, and I’ve already settled into a routine.

Every night at 11:00 p.m. I watch The West Wing re-runs on Bravo (which, by the way, is a much less Anton Kuerti-focused channel here in America). Then I go to sleep.

The alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., and I turn on the TV to a station that plays the modern I’ve Got a Secret until 8:00 a.m. Today’s guest was Charro, who, believe it or not, is much as she was in the 1970s; her secret was that she speaks fluent Japanese (in addition to 4 other languages). Who knew? The panelists this week have been Terri Garr, that annoying campy guy who played the “ambiguously gay neighbour” on several sitcoms in the 70s and 80s, that guy who played the district attorney several seasons ago on The Practice and a fourth I can’t recall. As my friend Sherin remarked today: without The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, cable game shows like this are the only refuge for the once-a-B-list crowd.

I’ve benefitted from several lavish spreads at Yankee this week: on Tuesday there was a breakfast potluck to celebrate the on-sale date of the 2004 edition of the Yankee Magazine Travel Guide to New England (which is actually quite a useful tool for planning a New England vacation). Today there was an afternoon tea (complete with linen and china!) to celebrate the move of the magazine’s distribution to a new fulfilment house (complete with all the data conversion you might imagine that entails). In other words, I’m eating like a king.

Tomorrow I break the routine to fly out to Phoenix to hook up with Brother Mike who, word has it, is burning up the mid- and south-west U.S. with his blockbuster vacation. It will be hard for me to keep up.

Gotta run: West Wing starts in 40 minutes!