Juicing for lightweights

As advertised, I attended the golf league Christmas party and had a pretty good time … although I seriously need to work on my conversational skills. One of the women asked me if I was all done decorating for the holidays, and I said, “We don’t decorate.”

Definitely a little Wednesday Addams. A bit abrupt, at best. She actually looked kind of devastated. Like I poked a hole in her Christmas stocking. I’ve been practicing do-overs. Such as, “Almost! How about you?”

In hindsight, I can see that’s a better choice.

It looks like we’re headed for a week or two of rain, and it should start late this afternoon. We had the gutters cleaned yesterday, so that was good timing. No tall ladders for us anymore!

We’re happy to see wet weather. To celebrate, I’m making cabbage rolls tomorrow, and Dale is making rye bread to go with. Good rainy day food.

I played golf with a woman last week who doesn’t allow bread in her house. Jeez. Ours is like a bread factory.

My mother wasn’t much of a cook. I use her recipe for cabbage rolls, although I jazz it up some. For one thing, I use ground bison instead of ground beef. Way more flavor. As for spices, I don’t think she knew there was anything beyond salt and pepper. We had one tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce that lasted my entire childhood.

The recipe is on an old notecard in her handwriting. I love reading, “A half a small glass of vinegar.” For years I tried to calculate the exact measurement, but now guess what I do? I get out a small glass, and I fill it halfway with vinegar. Problem solved.

Last night was turkey soup from the freezer along with blue corn muffins. Last time, I forgot to put baking powder in the muffins. They were edible, but kids, don’t try this at home. The muffins came out great this time.

Dale’s making cashew chicken tonight. He likes this cookbook for Chinese take-out recipes.

Years ago I bought a juicer. I thought it would be a good way for me to poke down more fruits and vegetables. I figure real food ought to be better (and tastier) than those pills they advertise on TV.

The juices were delicious, but even with all the fiber removed, a big old hanging glass of that stuff was too much for my sensitive stomach.

I recently decided to try again. Fresh juice doesn’t stay fresh for long, so I froze 4-ounce portions and thawed one out every other day to drink and see how my stomach responded. To be safe, I stuck with non-cruciferous vegetables – mostly combinations of spinach, carrots, beets, celery, apples, grapes, and cucumbers.

I’ve had absolutely no problems and don’t always skip a day. I’m starting to branch out with 6-ounce portions and other fruits and vegetables. Green juice sounds like it would be awful, but it’s really delicious, and hopefully, a healthy addition to my diet. And depending on what you put in there, it’s not always green!

Once I knew I would stick with it, I bought a new juicer. The old one was a Breville Juice Fountain. They’re about $100. It’s a centrifugal juicer, which features a fast-spinning blade to chop up fruit and vegetables against a fine mesh filter to separate the juice from the pulp.

The Breville worked great, except it’s hard to clean that mesh filter, and it doesn’t quite get all the leafy greens, so there’s more waste. There’s also more froth, and the juice oxidizes faster.    

My new one is a NAMA J2 Cold Press Juicer. I had a discount code, and the total came in at right around $500. This type of juicer is also called a slow or masticating juicer. It uses a crushing, squeezing element known as an auger to extract the juice and separate the pulp and fibers. The result is less waste, less oxidation for slightly longer shelf life.

And the best part of all – it’s way easier to clean. I mean, you have to disassemble the whole thing and wash it all by hand, but all the leftover food is easily rinsed off, and you don’t have to scrub that mesh screen. I let it air dry on a towel. And because I make the juice in larger batches and freeze it, I don’t have to drag the machine out all that often.

The juice is perfect. With smaller servings, I can still enjoy the benefits of juicing without burning through tons of produce every week or becoming a slave to the machine.

Dale wants no part of it. I made him take a sip of my spinach-grape-apple-celery juice, and he said, “Well, it’s not poison.”

Beds don’t make themselves

For a retiree with nothing to do, I’ve been busy. I passed on golf so I could get cracking on the Christmas cookies we send to Dale’s sisters in Maine. It’s quite the process making the dough, rolling it out, cutting the shapes, baking the cookies, making the royal icing, decorating the cookies and then letting the icing dry for a day or two.

I finished them yesterday. The cookies are drying on racks, so that monkey is off my back. Tomorrow, I’ll put them in tins, and Dale will add a few things to the box and get the packages shipped. That’s on him.

Years ago, my sister and I happily agreed to no gifts, and I’d like to spread that around.

This week starts with golf on Monday, golf on Tuesday and golf league party on Wednesday. I haven’t been to the party in a couple of years … well, since Covid. But I thought I’d put my life on the line and hope for the best.

One of the women in my group once said I dressed for golf like I was going on a hike. Not an insult, per se, but my goal is to show up at the party looking like something other than a hiker.

I donated to Joe Biden’s campaign. I hate all the begging that comes after, but I didn’t want to face myself if Trump wins, and I did nothing to help stop it. I do believe our democracy is at stake, so if there’s ever a time to step up, this is it. If I can find some sort of volunteer job with the Democrats that doesn’t involve getting shot at by Republicans, I’ll probably sign up for that, too.  

Last week’s household drama was about making the bed. I like a tight bed with hospital corners. I want to slip into bed like a perfectly folded letter slides into a crisp envelope. I sleep with two pillows and sometimes put a quilt over my side of the comforter for extra warmth.

Dale doesn’t believe beds should be made. Why bother?

I believe our differences are rooted in our military experiences. Dale and I met in the Army. He was an officer, and I was enlisted. His training included a place called summer camp, if you can believe that. How lovely for them. Enlisted people go to basic training, which sounds more like it, no?

He may have mastered strategic warfare or whatever, but this much I know. Only one of us learned to make a proper bed.

You, of course, know it’s important to redistribute the bedding. Sometimes, during the night, one person will steer the bedding to his or her side, a practice we call Grand Theft Covies. Another issue is fluffing the comforter so the filling goes back up to the top, where it keeps you warmer.

When making the bed, all that has to be fixed. It doesn’t take long, but you’ve got to commit.

I was kind of cold one night and realized the comforter filling was all down at the bottom. Dale was the last one who made the bed, so I asked him in the morning.

Did you fluff the comforter?

What?

I explained the finer points of comforter fluffing, but even as the words left my lips, I was thinking it was probably a case of too much information. However, he surprised me. Later that afternoon, I heard the delicious plop, plop of the comforter being fluffed! Oh, clever me.

Over dinner that evening, Dale said there was something he needed to say. As the proprietor of D&D Lodging, he regretted to let me know he was charging $1 for comforter fluffing, and an additional dollar because he had to remove the quilt prior to fluffing. So much work. Then he said, “And as you know, I have long waived the fee for the extra pillow.”

So, after all that, we had a great laugh. Of course, there are no fees, but just the same, he planted a seed. Like somehow this is going to cost me. Now when it comes to making the bed, I’ve been racing to get there first.

Maybe he is smarter than me after all.

Softening with age?

This head cold or whatever it was kicked my butt. I wondered if I got false negatives on the Covid tests, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. I’m recovered, except for some lingering sinus issues. That’s probably related to seasonal allergies, which everyone is complaining about. I’ve taken to the neti pot, and that helps clear the congestion.

Dale caught my cold, and all that congestion made his snoring worse. One night it was so bad I almost called 911. But then I thought, oh, just put the pillow over his face and be done with it. I’m pleased to report he survived the night and has a bright future. The things I do for this man!

I finally felt good enough to go back to swimming. It had been a few weeks, and I felt stiffness in my left arm. I thought, kick a little harder and take the pressure off the arm. So, now I have muscle cramps in my leg. No good deed goes unpunished. It’s better today, so I assume this, too, shall pass. I’ll probably do a short walk just to keep it moving.

That’s kind of my philosophy about all these age-related aches and pains – just keep moving. Although I love to read, I start to feel sluggish when I lie around for hours at a time. I always feel better when I get outside and do something. Of course, I’d play golf if I was on death’s doorstep. And, in fact, have. I played regularly when I was on chemo for stage 3 ovarian cancer. I didn’t want to fall behind just in case I lived.

I subscribed to PBS Masterpiece. I’ve always liked my crime dark and hard-boiled, but I must be softening with age. Like a ripe Camembert. Probably more like an old cucumber.

There’s a lot of great content on PBS Masterpiece! I liked Miss Scarlet & the Duke, a Victorian mystery about London’s first female detective. I’m told All Creatures Great and Small is excellent, so that may be next on the list.

My sister’s goal is to watch every single Hallmark movie aired between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I might be softening up, but that is her dream, not mine. I do like Elf and Christmas in South Park, so I’m not a complete grinch.

As for reading, I’ll go out on a limb here and share I am absolutely loving The Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman. The books features friends in their 70s and 80s who meet at their retirement home and commence to solve murders.  They all have unique backgrounds that come into play.

I’ve read some bad reviews, but I find the novels laugh-out-loud funny and yet quite sensitive about aging and all things associated. I’ve read two, and there are only four, so the good times will end soon.

Do you dream about work? I had a weird one last night. Six years, and I still can’t get that business out of my head. But it’s not all bad. When I was working, I put all the money I could into various savings plans, and two of them are set up to make annual distributions for five years. This was year two, so I got my little cash infusion, and I forgave them for the bad dreams.

Who knows what got into me, but I put my name in the hat to be a volunteer at the library. As soon as I did it, I started thinking about all the negatives. Like Covid, shooters, children. I want nothing to do with any of them. I think it’s just shelving books, but still.

Happy it’s just a cold

I came down with a cold – tested for Covid twice 24 hours apart like a good girl – and both tests came back negative. One presumes it’s a garden variety cold. I don’t feel horrible, but I don’t feel great. Still, I’m happy it’s just a cold.

My sister got Covid for the first time last week, and she is doing well now, but she was quite ill, and I wouldn’t trade places with her for anything.

Oh, for the days when E. coli was the worst thing you brought home from the grocery store!

So much has changed since this virus came into our lives. I always had an aversion to large groups, and I felt bad about being somewhat anti-social, but now I just roll with it. So-called experts will say that’s well and good now, but you’ll die of loneliness. I don’t know. I’ve read about a lot of people who lead solitary lives, and they seem pretty happy to me.

For in-person social connections, I have the women’s golf club, but that’s the extent of it. Against my better judgment, I agreed to be secretary for two years, so there’s no turning back. One of the women started calling me Madam Secretary, and I must say, I rather like it.  

We’re a week out from Thanksgiving. Dale ordered a fresh Diestel turkey – 14 pounds – and we eventually eat every bit of it. I’m known in these parts as Side Dish Mama … which means I will be making green beans, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. I’m also making apple pie and homemade vanilla ice cream.

They sure are proud of those Madagascar vanilla beans. We ought to banish the term plain vanilla since there’s nothing plain about vanilla these days. I needed two beans, which is what came in a jar, and I think it was $15. But I made the same ice cream last year, and it’s worth every penny. I suppose I will make it a few days ahead in case something horrible happens and I have to get some from the store. Nothing like a positive attitude.

Apple pie used to give me fits, but I think I’ve got it now. For apples, I use half Granny Smith and half Honeycrisp. For crust, half butter and half lard. Plus, my beloved Emile Henry ceramic pie pan.

After reading the book about ultra-processed foods, I avoid Crisco. Good quality lard is your friend! We like lard from the farmer’s market, or we buy US Dreams leaf lard on Amazon. Most of the stuff you see at the grocery store is hydrogenated.

Dale and I usually drink Pinot Noir with our Thanksgiving dinner, and we have a nice one from Navarro in the queue. We visited the winery in Mendocino County a year or so ago and loved their wines. They have good deals for 1 cent shipping if you live in a place where they can ship wine. We especially like their Gewurztraminer and other whites.

Oh, and for art, I’m happy to present Number 41. It might be one of my favorites. See if any of you New Mexico art fans can identify a little inspiration on the right side of the board. My rendition is pretty pitiful, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

A reader recently said she was considering art as a retirement hobby but couldn’t draw much more than stick figures. Just so you know, I’m still terrible at drawing freehand, although I do like my quirky cats. I traced and transferred most of the images on this piece. Once I have a penciled outline, I burn them in with my pyrography tool and eventually paint.

If you are inexperienced at art, I think the trick is to say, ok, I’m going to try art, and I will show up with whatever I have. It’s your art, so it doesn’t have to be anything other than what you are able to create.

Election anxiety

As I said in my last post, I’m struggling with election anxiety and am preparing myself for the worst so I don’t go into shock. I’ve rehearsed in my head how I will stay calm if it all goes to hell. Then I woke up to the news Sunday morning.

The New York Times reported on a poll showing Biden trailing Trump in five critical swing states. I can’t imagine how that’s possible, and it is simply overwhelming. I was in a funk before I even got out of bed, and that was when I realized I have to get serious about detaching.

The U.S. presidential election is a year away, polls are notoriously unreliable and I refuse to be miserable for the duration. I do love The New York Times and will continue to enjoy my subscription, but I don’t need the headlines delivered to my inbox.

My bad. I signed up for all these newsletters – one in the morning, one at night … plus a few others that seemed intriguing at the time. I went into my account and canceled about six newsletter feeds, and it was like doing quick release on the Instant Pot … a big burst of steam exiting my body.

I don’t miss any of them. The news is still there if I want it. Sometimes I just bypass the headlines and go straight to games. There’s a new one called Connections. I think you have to be a subscriber to play. The game shows a grid of 16 words. You get four tries to put the words into four groups that share a common thread. Here’s the official description:

The game is fun, but it’s tricksy. There might be five words that would seem to share a thread, and you have to figure out which one doesn’t belong. Makes you think in different ways … which is usually a good thing.

It has been a bit chilly playing golf early, and my winter wardrobe sucks. I remember being cold a lot last year, so I headed over to REI and threw some money at it. I bought some good thermal underwear (as opposed to the cheap stuff I bought last year), wool socks and a fleece neck gaiter.

We started the round yesterday with the temperature in the high 40s. And I was super toasty! I had multiple layers, so it was easy to peel them off as it warmed up. I was surprised by what a difference the socks made. If you spend a lot of time outside, I believe good quality layers are key.

I watched Nyad on Netflix with Annette Benning playing the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster playing her friend and trainer Bonnie Stoll … both actors are in their 60s. As a recreational swimmer, I was naturally interested in the movie, but I was surprised by how good it was. I especially loved how the movie depicted older women.

As for reading, I splurged and bought the new Lincoln Lawyer book. Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly. It’s all ready to go on my Kindle, but I haven’t started it yet. I’m excited. Oh, and I think Harry Bosch is in the book!

Dale did roast chicken last night, so today I’m making mini-pot pies for the freezer. I used to love the Marie Callender pies from the supermarket, but these homemade pies are so much better. There’s still some chicken left, so Dale is making quesadillas tonight. Yum.

So, tips for election anxiety. Less news. More food. More games. More books. More movies. More walks. More of anything that makes you happy.

The purpose of hobbies

I had a beautiful run of good golf, so I’ve been playing a lot, trying to savor the last of the good weather, and as it turns out, my good golf. What a game. It must be there are just a few people who can play consistently well. For the rest of us, it’s mostly bitter disappointment mitigated by tiny spurts of proficiency and eternal hope.

But that’s why I have lots of hobbies. So disappointment is a moving target.

I’m thinking the key is diversity of interests. When you get pissed off at one, move on to the next until you can come back and play nice with the others.

And so, with golf turning out to be such treacherous jerk, I turned to my friend Art and completed Number 40!

For some strange reason, I went with a Christmas theme. You may recall I don’t like Christmas all that much, although I’m into the food part and regularly make decorated cookies and other holiday treats. I think I wanted to see if I could capture some of the iconic images of the season.

As it happens, I actually like Number 40! Maybe it will make a believer out of me. Probably not, but I still like it.

I haven’t decided whether I should hang it on the wall with all the others or box it up with almost nonexistent holiday decorations and trot it out sometime in December. We have a big nutcracker from Germany, and that’s about it for seasonal décor, so I’m leaning toward another brick on the wall.

That reminds me last year I convinced Dale not to get a tree, so I suppose I will have to go along with that mess this year. I’d better start preparing myself now. By the way, I’m doing that with politics, too. Preparing myself for the worst so whatever happens won’t be such a shock. I’ve already rehearsed in my head how I will stay calm if it all goes to hell.

Anyway, I do like the tree in the end, particularly the part where Dale decorates and I drink Single Malt Scotch. But overall, I see Christmas trees as a long run for the short slide.

Aside from bad golf and visions of sugar-plums, I was feeling sad that I finished the Easy Rawlins series by Walter Mosley. I prowled around the internet to see if there was a new one on the horizon. There isn’t, but I found a six-book series by Mosley featuring Leonid McGill. I’m in the library queue for the first one, so I should get that next week.

Current reading is the Longmire series by Craig Johnson. As for the books, I like them but don’t love them. I used to say that about men. With a few exceptions, it mostly still applies.

Free from Amazon Prime was a twister called Twenty Years Later by Charlie Donlea. It’s about a woman accused of murder and headed for a trial when she is killed on 9/11. An investigative reporter starts unraveling the story 20 years later, and there are surprises everywhere. I enjoyed it.

Have you seen Killers of the Flower Moon? I haven’t read the book, and I was thinking about doing that first, but this might be one time when the movie wins. However, I haven’t been to a theater in years, and I’m not sure I can sit for 3.5 hours. Still, I actually think I might rather sit in a theater for that duration as opposed to my living room …

Fewer distractions and the popcorn is better!

Dinged up and loving it

This week was our golf group’s Halloween tournament. I made cookies and bagged them up so everyone could grab and go. The cookies were a big hit, which is good, because I’m not the most social person on the planet, and maybe I got some good will points.

The cookie biz is a fun hobby if you’ve got a place to off-load them. I started after the first time I had cancer in 1999. As I was recovering, I thought, I need to try something that isn’t golf and isn’t work. I saw Martha Stewart baking and decorating these beautiful cookies, and I said, that’s it!

These days, I have tubs of cookie cutters, sanding sugars, piping bags and other supplies. In some ways, it’s similar to my woodburning hobby. Neither one is hard to do, but they’re both time-consuming. But that’s what I like … gets me out of my own head.

I was on the way to play golf one day last week, when a truck pulled out in front of me presumably because he couldn’t stand being behind another truck for another second. Something about that transaction resulted in the spewing of rocks, which hit the windshield of my brand-new car.

As my mother used to say, I can’t have nice things.

Anyway, the result was two tiny dings. My insurance company paid to repair them – no deductible applied. The dings are sealed and safe and barely noticeable, but I still see them, of course. Honestly, as a recovering perfectionist, they don’t bother me. It’s just a car. I wasn’t injured. We all get dinged up in the end.

I’m surprised and happy I didn’t go all psycho because my pretty car got a boo-boo. I have come a long way. I attribute my progress to retirement. Aging. At some point, you just can’t hang onto that stuff.

Speaking of aging and dings, a close friend of mine is getting her face done. You know, injectables and all that. She has done it before with fantastic results. I was happy for her then, and I’m happy for her now. She’s had her share of life’s unwanted gifts, and a subtle tightening of the face lifted her spirits immeasurably.

But I do wonder if I’m going to be the only one left who looks my age. I squandered some time the other day looking at before and after pictures, and it’s impressive stuff. I even looked pictures of women with gray hair who decided to go back to dying it.

It seems to me if you have the money and the will, you can easily look 10 years younger. It was tempting for a minute or two, but I actually like how I’ve aged – gray hair, dings and all. I care more about keeping my body in reasonably good shape so I can continue to enjoy outdoor activities. I played golf earlier this week with a 92-year-old man who walked the course at a brisk pace.

My role model!

All in all, I’m exceedingly grateful my back is cooperating. A bad back is a big ding. I rarely have pain, but if I do, all I take is Advil or Tylenol. But then I’m quite faithful to my daily stretching regime. One of the women in my golf group has a similar diagnosis as mine (herniated disc, spinal stenosis). She said it never occurred to her to stretch. She said that’s what pain killers are for.

I told her about John Sarno’s book, Healing Back Pain. I’ve written about this before. He believed a lot of pain is the result of repressed anger and other emotions. After reading the book, I worked through some lifelong issues. I believe releasing all that baggage, along with my stretches, helped me recover from what was sometimes debilitating back pain.

For me, the key was forgiveness. But it took me a while to figure out the most important person to forgive was myself.

My golf acquaintance seemed receptive to the concept of the mind-body connection. I saw her yesterday and said, “How’s your back?” She said, fine, I just popped a (insert name of pill here).

I guess everyone has to find their way own through the valley of dings.

Living gently

The reluctant travelers have returned from a two-night stay in Morro Bay, a casual beach town in San Luis Obispo County. We mainly go to smell the ocean and eat seafood. Mission accomplished.

Even though we had a lovely trip, it’s good to be home. Everyone has to find their own retirement rhythm, and my hat’s off to those who are taking this time to see the world, but I can’t imagine being gone for weeks at a time. We enjoy our cozy lifestyle and couldn’t wait to get back in the kitchen. Other than the golf course, I don’t want to go anywhere for a while.

Dale made pizza last night. I’m making bison curry in the Instant Pot tonight. I already made naan in the pizza oven and will just have to heat them up. So delicious! Dale has some beautiful jalapeño peppers from his small garden, so he’s going to make beer batter-fried jalapeños stuffed with cheddar cheese. We’ll have that as an appetizer.

To celebrate our return home, I ordered the pasta attachment for the KitchenAid mixer. I’ve been using a hand-crank pasta machine, and while it works fine, I want to be able to use both hands to guide the pasta.

It should arrive later today, and that means homemade pasta tomorrow! Our basil is looking gorgeous, so I believe it will be pesto.

I also have some homemade lobster stock thawing in the refrigerator. I’ll use that to make miso seafood chowder later this week … probably Tuesday. Monday’s a golf day, so  I can start a no-knead loaf of bread in the evening when I get back from a hard day of sport and bake it the next morning. I prefer bread over oyster crackers.

Certainly, there are more important things in the world than what I’m eating, but for sanity’s sake, I am learning to disengage from politics and global trauma. For lack of a better term, I think of it as living gently. For now, anyway, I’m happy and grateful to enjoy the simple pleasures that define my retirement – golf, cooking, art, walking, swimming, reading and writing.

You had me at croutons

I’m making Caesar salads for dinner tonight, and I wouldn’t even bother if it weren’t for homemade croutons. Such a simple pleasure and so damned good.

Easy, too. I used Italian rolls from the freezer. Thawed them out, cut them in cubes and then tossed the cubes with melted butter and salt. Then you just spread them out on a sheet pan and brown in a 400-degree oven.

For the salad, I start with romaine lettuce and whisk together a dressing made with anchovies mashed with a couple of garlic cloves, olive oil, a one-minute egg and fresh lemon juice. Then toss the whole thing with freshly grated Parmesan Reggiano.  

Top each salad with those amazing croutons.

I was trying to start the second Louise Penny book while the croutons were browning, but I didn’t get very far. You do have to watch them. But I have some time after I’m done here, and I’d like to see how far I can get in the book before dinner. That’s when I do my best reading.

If I go horizontal after I’m fed, it’s all over.

Lupin, one of my favorite Netflix shows has new episodes. I watched two last night! The French mystery follows Assane Diop, the son of an immigrant from Senegal who had come to France to seek a better life for his child. The father gets framed for a theft and hangs himself in prison. Assane is orphaned but grows up to become a professional thief and master of disguise who avenges his father’s death.

Speaking of simple pleasures, I’ve been buying artisan chocolate instead of the drugstore varieties I used to favor. One of my favorites is Dick Taylor, and I just toured the factory in Eureka when I visited my sister last week.

They had bins, yes bins, of samples in very small pieces, which I liked a lot. It doesn’t take much to fully enjoy the experience of chocolate. I bought a few bars of the 72% Belize dark chocolate to take home. With a discount for taking the tour!

Here’s my indulgence. I break the bar into roughly dime-sized pieces and store it in a zipper-lock bag. I pull two pieces out after breakfast and begin with several sips of hot coffee to pre-warm my mouth. Then I slide in one little piece and let that luscious chocolate melt slowly on the tongue, swishing it about the mouth, savoring the complex flavors. No chewing allowed.

And then I do it again.

OK. It’s just two small pieces of chocolate, but it’s almost like meditation.

A little road trip and new art

Unlike many retirees, Dale and I don’t like to travel all that much, but I’m pleased to report our overnighter to Sonoma was great. It’s an easy drive – just under two hours – and the weather was spectacular. You hardly have to pack anything for such a short trip, and there’s no stress. The toughest part was leaving the kitty, but Riley is good by himself for one night (although I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think so).

While we’ve been in and out of Sonoma before, this was our first time staying overnight. We stopped on the way at the Gundlach Bundschu winery for a tasting. I never liked the idea of wine tasting as a hobby until I realized it’s a great way to buy wine. No surprises. We try to keep a hearty stash in the wine rack and seldom buy wine from the market. I do love California!

The wine was quite good, but we only liked two of the six we tried. We bought two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc and two bottles of a Cabernet Sauvignon-Malbec blend. The venue is quite lovely, and although we didn’t eat, we saw some tempting charcuterie plates.

The good news is there are more than 400 wineries in Sonoma County, so I don’t think we’ll run out of options.

We stayed at the El Dorado Hotel on the square in downtown Sonoma. We got there a little early and just walked all around town. There are some nice stores, and it was fun to wander about. We checked in around 4 p.m. and sat out on our balcony people-watching.

There are tons of restaurants, but I wanted to try The Girl and The Fig, which is highly regarded – and directly across the street from the hotel. The only reservation available was 5:30 p.m., which Dale views as the early bird special, but the place was packed.

Dale had steak tartare as an appetizer and duck confit for his entrée. I was lucky enough to get a bite of his steak tartare, which was fabulous. The duck confit was good, but he said he wouldn’t get it again. I tasted it and agreed.

I chose the Bistro Plats du Jour. That would include three courses with wine pairings. The appetizer was crispy chicken livers with an arugula salad. The chicken livers were a bit overcooked, but they were good. The star of the show was my entrée … trout meuniere. The fish was fresh and tender, the skin was shatteringly crisp and the sauce was sublime. The plate included wilted kale, which was excellent, and fingerling potatoes, which I didn’t care for.

However, that trout may be some of the best fish I have ever eaten.

We shared my dessert, which was a pear-hazelnut cake with yummy vanilla anglaise and a cherry reduction. Pretty damned good.

That’s the first time we’ve been out since June, and before that, who knows? We’re almost always disappointed when we dine out, but this time, we were mostly thrilled. A few small things could be improved upon. All in all, we’d go back but skip the duck confit.

And we’d definitely go back to Sonoma. There was sort of a laid back vibe we liked a lot. We’ve been looking for a place that would be sort of our go-to escape when we feel the need, and Sonoma is definitely a contender. There’s a lot to do in the area, and downtown would be a nice homebase.

I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise since I’ve often described us as reluctant travelers, but our habit on the day of departure – even a one-nighter – is to get up and go. We were headed home by 7:30 a.m. with just a cup of coffee to get us out the door.

No lollygagging for us. I said in my outside voice that maybe we should try to change, you know, be better tourists, hang around, see more, do more. However, we quickly agreed that was crazy talk. Let’s just accept who we are and do what we want. Wow, there’s a novel concept.

For some reason, I didn’t work on my art much this summer. Maybe because it’s hot out in the garage? My sister is a quilter, and she said she doesn’t seem to get much done in the summer, either. But I’m back in the saddle and present for your viewing pleasure, Number 39.

This one is kind of weird. I’m continuing to push myself in trying to capture realistic images, as opposed to doodles. I’m not shamed to admit I sometimes trace and transfer images! On this piece, I was inspired by science fiction and monster movies. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I love the monster on the left.

It’s quite the imperfect piece. I keep telling myself, so what? It was just scrap wood. It seems to me that for most of us life is a study in imperfection, but isn’t it interesting how we keep wrestling with it? If anything, creating art has helped me tame my perfectionist nature.