oh, but i need to tell you about the food we had on our little cabin outing. we stopped in anacortes at this place called Adrift. it is a restaurant which buys locally and organic, and uses that stuff to produce excellent dishes!!  my favorite is the wee beet salad, which is so beyond yummy as to stun the imagination.

another place, in langley, is called the Prima Bistro and is, once again, excellent!! and our waiter was just so fun -- good-natured, affable, spoke french eloquently, and a sweetie.

we were both surprised by how much a few excellent meals had us filled up for, supposedly, days. is that typical of good food? fills you up for a long time? if so, i've been doing something wrong. not that i cook anymore, but i'm just saying ...

little cabin

the husband and i just returned form a 2-night stay at a little cabin in the woods. it was (1) fun and (2) depressing. i mean, that's the way people used to HAVE to live. ackkwwk!!!

i mean, yes, there was an indoor bathroom and it had a kitchen with a stove, sink, frig, and microwave, and there was several beds upstairs and a fireplace downstairs and a tv with which to watch movies, but... it was waaaay too easy to see how it would have been 100 years ago. dust and cobwebs hanging from the support timbers, spiders and bugs inviting themselves in for a stay, using an outhouse, washing clothes someplace, and what if the unfriendlies come for a call?

honestly, how did humans survive??? it just had to be easier in the midwest than in the northwest.

a couple of things....

long time, no write. no time, short or long write. but ... just a quick note. the husband and i are going to rent an rv and take a couple of days to see how we like it. we may decide to get one.

i'm going on my annual girlfriend trip soon. that should be fun and probably not long enough.

we're heading down to visit MYS one of these days. got the 'ole first class tickets, just to make things a little easier. probably not much easier, but with flying any little bit helps!

the husband has been doing some interesting things with metal and paint. ask him about it. i'd show you a couple of pictures, but the hubby got a new camera and i don't know where it is or how to work it.

i miss having time to hold forth on subjects. maybe one of these days i can get back in the swing. nice to tell myself so, anyhow.

really??

it seems like all of a sudden, doctors here in the northwest are worried about people having enough vitamin d. the husband and i both have to take supplements. yes, it's cloudy here most of the year but no one suggested we have that checked until recently. it seems strange, but then there's been speculation that mozart died of vitamin d deficiency. you not only can die from lack of vitamin d, it increases your risk of infections and a whole host of health troubles.

we're thinking about moving.

just like nebraska

we never hear thunder around here. and you'd think, with all the rain we get, we'd have thunder. but we really only hear thunder about once a year. maybe twice.

so just now, when i'm taking clothes out of the dryer, i hear thunder. memories from the past. anyhow, i stop by the bedroom door and the husband (who's in bed already) says, 'hunh.'

i say, 'thunder!'

he says, 'good thing we're not'n kansas.'

i think, 'huh?!' then i realize he'd said, 'good think we're not camping.'

mental grins. and yes to both.

ah so ...

the husband and i went for thai tonight for supper. yeah, i know, we don't really like thai. i mean, lemongrass, cucumber, coconut, curry, and weird stuff like that -- yuck!!

but when we go there i get pad garlic. i mean, GARLIC!  yum!!! it's really great and it's fixed with chicken and spinach. just tooooo fabulous!

but that means i can't kiss the husband for awhile. he hates garlic.

off into the wilderness...

the husband and i are going adventuring in another week -- we're headed for this cool place.

i like their video, but go here to see where we're going to stay. if that link doesn't work, from the home page click on 'view gallery' then click on 'tent house suites' to get a feel for where we're going.

i expect to enjoy our trip -- it's on an island, after all, and we take a ferry to get there. it can't help but be beautiful country. it's really too bad our forefathers couldn't have somehow gotten their hands on that whole british columbia area. it's so pretty it'd make you cry.

young people

honestly, my memory seems to get worse and worse. a young gal at work invited the husband and me to her housewarming which was to take place yesterday evening. she had sent the invite within the last 2 weeks and i had responded that we'd be there. we were to bring a dish, but no gift.

all this week i thought about what dish i could possibly bring -- the husband and i are not social butterflies and don't have a catalog of dishes to draw from. so i never did really figure something out.

when i got off work yesterday, i called the husband on my way home to see if he wanted to go to our much-liked chinese restaurant. he reminded me about our obligation. shit. since i was already almost home and wouldn't be able to figure out anything any quicker if i turned around and went to the store, i headed on into the house and opened the pantry.

i didn't have a whole lot of time to come up with something, so i finally cooked up some basmati rice while frying slices of ring sausage. i added a can of black beans and a can of corn to the sausage, then threw in a couple of handfuls of the rice. i added cinnamon, 6 or 7 dashes of pepper sauce, then sliced up some banana peppers and threw them in for good measure.

it was a really nice house-warming. i enjoy the people who were there and the new homeowner is just a neat gal anyhow. she and her husband had personalized their new home and had done a really terrific job. the interior colors were neat and up-to-date, and she had added artistic touches everywhere that were very effective.

it was a lot of fun. and my impromptu dish was tasty. thanks, husband, for remembering our invitation!

back when i was a boy, we had to ....

i have a friend who lives in grand forks, north dakota. recently there was some really bad flooding in that state. some of the damage is shown here -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2-Ccybv5fo&feature=related .

i found this video of a blizzard which was either right before or right after the flooding. give this a look -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNnxE4JqCbU .

the husband and i wax nostalgic at times because we used to live in nebraska and he lived in the black hills of south dakota when he was in high school. we had some really great vacations up there with the boys when they were little. we wonder if we'd like to live back there again.

and then we see a video like those. uhh ... no. probably not.

little patter

when the husband walked in this morning to say good-bye, he was softly saying "tlrrrrr chitchit, tlrrrrr chitchit, tlrrrrr chitchit." "i'm off," he started. "what are you?" i interrupted. "a sprinkler," he replied.

many things

we've been busy lately doing several things, one of which is building a pergola on/over our deck. you can go to http://www.gardenstructure.com/p/Pergola_Plan_with_Optional_Screens.html to see what the plans look like, although since our space isn't that big, the plans are just an idea of what the finished product will look like. but it will be nice. the fellow doing the work is young, experienced, and very good, so we're going to be happy. and he's going to finish off the front porch post the same way he's doing the pergola posts, so things will tie in nicely. when it's all done, i'll include a picture.

after that's finished we are going to do some landscaping around that quadrant of the yard to see if we can work up some kind of privacy in this tiny space we have. i'm excited about all of it.

my girlfriend got their house sold and immediately found a nice one on camano island, with views! they are going to love their new place and i'm so happy for them!

my new computer is excellent and i've decided i'm going to have to buy a new computer every two years, just like some people buy a new car regularly. this thing is fast and the monitor is wide and the graphics are great. not too crazy about office 2007, but what can you do. and vista sorta sucks, but meh.

life goes on.

oui, oui!

our front door is on the east side of the house and we have french doors on the south side. there's also a large patio outside the french doors and we finally decided to have convertible french doors installed outside the regular french doors. the convertible ones have full-screens which can be replaced with full-glass when it starts to get colder.

we are happy with the result. it looks nice and allows a nice air exchange.

we've toyed with putting in air conditioning, but two (both) of the people we've had give us an estimate have pushed hard for a heat pump. we rented a duplex in the 70's which had a heat pump and hated it! i've never heard anyone say they loved their heat pump, although they surely have changed for the better in the last 30 years. if our weather keeps being fairly nice, i'm really going to drag my feet about the a/c conundrum. maybe we'll get lucky and have to wait another year before we are again presented with hot, humid wx.

up with frenchy screeny doors. down (or at least level) with heat pumps. so sayeth the not-quite-informed.