Christmas vacation in Oregon

We've just returned from Christmas vacation in Oregon - it was a blast! There were many highlights  -  opening gifts at my son Arthur's home in Portland, a trip to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood,



catching up with Arthur, my daughter-in-law Allie, and my grandson Jack,


and spending quality time together with extended family. It's an 11 to 12 hour drive each way from Oakland to Portland. Can be brutal, but the weather was great and we took our time. Mary, Marja, Wayne, and I made the trek in Marja's royal blue Prius, packed to the gills with suitcases, coats, boots, and gifts. Fun was had by all!

Hope you had a happy Christmas too!

 

Feet up!

Are your dogs tired? Here's a terrific thing I've just learned at yoga for those of us who are on our feet too much (whew, bartending for 6 or more hours at a stretch gets more challenging every year).

The solution: Put your feet up in the air when you get home.

Best way is to lay on your back and snuggle your butt up to a wall, then lean your feet up the wall. 

Next best way is to just lay on your back and put your feet straight up in the air without the wall (see photo).

The benefits:

• All that blood that's been pooling in your feet flows back into your legs and body
• The bones and muscles of your poor little feet get a break from all the pressure of having your body weight concentrated on their small surface
• This helps avoid varicose veins by reversing the blood pressure in your legs
• It's totally easy to do
• It feels great!

 

Turkey stock

I made 3 quarts of turkey stock tonight. The turkey has bit the dust for this year. It was a really good one - thank you, Turkey!

Here's what I did:

• Cut most of the meat off the turkey and put it in the fridge (...I'm so over turkey - happens every year)
• Chopped the carcass into 3 or 4 pieces
• Put it all in a big pot with a cut up red onion and 4 cut up carrots.
• Added 3 quarts water and some bay leaf and thyme.
• Brought it to a simmer.  Simmer is important - no boiling!
• Simmered for two hours. Looked for scum, but for some reason this turkey didn't produce any. Would have skimmed it off if I'd seen it.
• After two hours I turned off the stove and let it cool down while we ate dinner (not turkey - we had corn chowder and salad).
• Strained it all through the big strainer into two large bowls. It smells good!
• Will let sit overnight to cool, and will remove fat, if there is any. Then I'll spoon it into quart freezer bags, label, and freeze.
  
  

I'll use it just like I'd use chicken stock - for soup, or beans, or risotto.

In fact, tonight I asked myself - why don't I make my own chicken stock instead of buying it? It's not hard. And who even knows what commercial chicken stock is? Maybe I will.

It's almost Thanksgiving!

It's Thanksgiving week, and today I'm going to start cooking. First, I'm going shopping. Then I'll salt the turkey and brine it in the downstairs fridge until Thursday. I'll make cranberry sauce too today, and that will be enough. At least I'll have those two tasks out of the way.

We're having 8 for dinner on Thursday - both family and friends and friends of family. It will be fun! If you'd like to take a look at recipes for some of the side dishes I'll be serving, click here. That'll connect you to my cooking blog Two for Dinner, where you'll find recipes for Cauliflower Sformato, Candied Sweet Potatoes, Cranberry Sauce, Kale Salad, Wilted Spinach Salad, and Bread Stuffing.

Of course there are many other recipes on my cooking blog that don't have anything to do with Thanksgiving. You might like some of them, and we give thanks for all good food, don't we?!

Have a wonderful holiday! I hope you're as lucky as I am, and get to spend it with family and friends. I'm thankful for them, and for your friendship, and for our lives of bounty and plenty.

Into the wild

Yeah, I know I've been absent. It's that time of year. I've been so darn busy I hardly have time to ....well, you know.

Anyway, more on this later. I just looked at a blog that a lovely lively young 20-something lady named Jeanna is putting up called 50 Food Truck Dates. Jeanna got tired of the truly tiresome old dating scene - how is it this hasn't really changed in the 40-some years since I was that age????? - of waiting for some hopefully-cool guy to chat you up in a bar, or waiting for answers to your match.com emails (well, that's changed, but it's still basically the same thing). So unbelievably boring. She decided to take matters in her own hands and have a little fun and adventure while looking for love. Take a little read, and keep on reading past the first part until you get to the "philosophical" part where she talks about what she's up to with her project and life. What a smart smart young lady!

And what does this have to do with me or you? I say it doesn't matter what your situation is - whether you're still or again lookin' for love, or whether you've found your soul-mate and that's where you're staying - life is meant to be lived to the fullest. Ask my friend Beppy, who went for a walk in her neighborhood last week and got run over by a car coming out of a driveway. And died, age 59. Live, people!!! Have fun!! Act as if there will be no tomorrow, because there just might not be.

So here it is http://the50dates.com/food-truck-date-25-wild/.  You go, Jeanna! Remind us how to do it.

Off to Florida

 I'm leavin' on a jet plane tomorrow for Tampa/Clearwater, Florida, for a few days to visit my friend Donna. We're planning four solid days of good music on the beach at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday, something we've done nearly every year for quite a few - nearly 20 years I think.

This year we'll see Chicago (remember them?), Jane Monheit, Larry Carlton, Average White Band, Tower of Power (Oakland's own!), Brandi Carlile - it's going to be fabulous!

We always have a wonderful relaxing time and lots of fun. It's warm and tropical in Florida this time of year - not too hot like it is in the middle of summer. It's our habit to eat grouper sandwiches or a grouper salad at least once, and the drink of choice is a Cuba Libre (Mt. Gay rum and diet coke with a squeeze of lime - yum).

I'm excited to see Donna again! Isn't it good to have a girls' weekend once in awhile? I think so - gives you a break from regular life and makes you appreciate what you have even more when you get back. Yeah. Buon viaggio to me!!

Wolves, and Dave

Yesterday Wayne and I drove to Sacramento. There was to be a hearing to hear comments from the public on the Fish and Wildlife Bureau's proposal to take the Grey Wolf off the list of endangered species protected by law.

Wayne was going to speak against taking wolves off the list. He has had four wolf-hybrids (wolf-malmute combinations) as part of his family, and he learned to love and respect them for their intelligence, loyalty, and family-oriented pack culture. He is appalled, as most people are, by Montana's, Idaho's, and Wyoming's wholesale slaughter of wolf families.

Anyway, the hearing did not take place because of the government shutdown, but we did take the opportunity to talk with a lot of like-minded people and to learn what we can do to help wolves survive humans. Honestly, when will we learn not to kill everything in front of us? All of today's domestic dogs, a.k.a. man's best friends, are originally descended from wolves, but that only happened about 7000 years ago. In caves from previous eras, wolf remains have been found guarding entrances to rooms and many wolf and human remains have been found together.

Wolves are a beautiful part of wild nature, and they are necessary predators in a healthy eco-system. They have co-existed and shared food with and guarded humans for over 200,000 years. They deserve to have our protection now while they rebuild their numbers after decades of slaughter.

Then today I learned that my old friend Dave VanThull has died. I worked with Dave for many years. He was an early computer genius, innovative and creative and always willing to share his knowledge. He was also a 4 handicap golfer (golfing friends will know that means he was a great golfer!) and he was a good man who loved and cared for his family. The cruel irony is that he died from brain cancer, brilliant man that he was. It doesn't seem right. Or fair. RIP Dave.

Often these days, I hear of friends and people I've known dying. I guess we're in that age group. None of us knows how many days we have left to enjoy. We have to make every day count.

The lime dotted blouse

Gee, I made this cute lime green blouse. 

And it even has owls around the neck and on the sleeves. See? I worked hard on the fit and it fits me great. But now I realize I don't have anything to wear it with. Why didn't I think of this before? Has this ever happened to you?

Guess I'll have to make something to go with my lime dotted owly blouse. I'd better take it with me to the fabric store, so I don't mess up. Again.

Some things I've learned about pickling

A while ago I wrote a post about making dill pickles. Look here to find it. When the pickles had pickled long enough, I tasted them and they were delicious. But oh my, they were so sour. Well, I said...there's a lot of vinegar in here. What does my mother's recipe say? My mother, of course, made The World's Best Dill Pickles.

Mom's recipe said 2 cups vinegar to 10 cups water, while the one I used said 3 cups vinegar to 3 cups water. What the heck? No wonder they were sour. When I went to make the next batch, thanks to three very prolific cucumber plants, the ratio of vinegar to water was a lot more like my mom's. Then Wayne got on the computer to check out why there would be such a discrepancy in recipes. Hmmm.

I looked at the old Bell Canning Jar recipe book for pickles that I got from my mom's stuff when she died. Same thing. One recipe said 1 for 1, vinegar to water. The next said lots less vinegar to lots more water. Eventually Wayne and I came up with the same answer.

If you're doing the whole canning thing, processing the filled jars in boiling water and all that, and expecting to keep the pickles for years on a shelf in the basement, the 2 cups vinegar to 10 cups water thing works fine. Well, no pickle lasts more than a couple of months in this house so why bother with that?

If you're doing a simple pickle, where you pour boiling pickling brine over the cucumbers and just seal them up to do their thing but plan to eat them within six months or so, they'll start growing all kinds of bacteria unless you put enough vinegar into them to make that impossible. So there we were, with some mighty sour pickles. And one batch that was going to grow bacteria.

We found a solution, of course. First, we re-did the second batch with more vinegar. Then we took a jar that was ready to eat (it had pickled for at least 2 weeks) and we poured the pickling brine out but left the pickles and the goodies like garlic and dill in. Then we made a new brine with just water, salt, and a bit of sugar. We brought it to a boil and we poured it over the sour pickles. It went into the fridge for a couple of days so some of the vinegar could leach out of the pickles. Eureka! We hit it perfectly and the pickles were finally to die for.

Now when we need more pickles, we take them from their original brine and put them in the jar with the less-vinegary brine. They only take a day or two to calm down. I imagine after a few rounds of this, the brine in the new jar will get vinegary from all the leaching-out, and we'll have to make a new mild brine to use. Meanwhile we are enjoying those dill pickles.

P.S. Did you know dill pickles are delicious instead of the traditional celery stalk in a Bloody Mary? Yum.

Another great book

Wow! Last week I read another terrific book, Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It's the story of a girl in her early 20s who was going a little astray (hence the name Strayed, which Cheryl took after her divorce) and decided to right herself by going on a long walk. I mean a really long walk, over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail from Los Angeles to Portland OR, by herself.


It's a wonderful story, and very well written. I recommend it highly!
P.S. It's an Oprah pick too!

Good reads

I used to read voraciously. I was never happier than when I had a whole pile of books on the coffee table, waiting to be read. Then suddenly I stopped, and in the past couple of years I've read magazines, I've read what I call "popcorn" mysteries (easy, involves very little brainpower, and you  keep consuming them like popcorn), I've written stories, and I've started 4 or 5 "real" books and put them down after a chapter or two. It's not that the books weren't interesting or well-written. It's just that I couldn't get into them, I couldn't sit still that long.

Now, suddenly again, that seems to be over. This summer I've read a book I got from Rosanne, my girlfriend in England, and I've picked up most of those books I put down mid-chapter and finished them. I'm so glad to be back!

Here are the books I've read recently - maybe you'd like them too:

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson (who also wrote Devil in the White City).

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President (President Garfield) by Candice Millard

The Language of Flowers: A Novel by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (this is the one I got from Rosanne)

La Lacuna: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver (love Barbara Kingsolver, she also wrote Prodigal Summer and Poisonwood Bible)

Happy reading!

Yellow nail polish

My nails look like I dipped them in French's mustard. Who knew anyone would be painting their fingernails lemon yellow, or for that matter sky blue and mint green, in 2013? And then again, who says fingernails should only be red, pink, or orange? Why paint your fingernails at all? It's one of life's burning questions.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my mustard-tipped fingers. Ah, the vagaries and mysteries of fashion!

Painting the backyard furniture red

We gave a party last weekend to celebrate the re-do of our backyard . . . which really happened last year! However, it was the end of summer when all that work was finished on the two upper levels of the yard and then the rains came, so we never got around to doing a yard-warming. This summer was the time, but we had one more thing to do - repair and paint the backyard furniture. The party was a great excuse to finally get it done.

The backyard furniture was a hodge-podge and quite the mess. There was the big wooden table that used to hold all the party food and lately had become a place to store plant fertilizer and such. It had wood rot on one side of the top. I had painted the benches that matched it to look like stressed pottery in a long-ago moment of artistic fervor. Then there were the two $15 chairs that we bought off the back of someone's pickup truck 20 years ago. I had first painted them blue, and then yellow. Now they were dirty and the seats were rotten. Time for change! And the Adirondack chairs we had so lovingly lacquered with marine varnish a few years ago. Yikes! They were a mess from years out in winter rains. Plus a couple of wood folding chairs - who knows where those had come from? One was bare wood and the other was pink.

It was a job. We power-washed all of them. We replaced seats and sanded and pounded and primed, and finally painted. And then painted a second coat. Wayne has a spray painter and wow, it made the job a lot easier. So we fixed it all and painted it red, kinda like the red of the tomatoes in the front yard. Sounds crazy, huh? Here it is drying in the driveway.

 

And here's the way some of it looks in the backyard. It's beautiful.

Tomato Time!

We harvested our first tomato last week although the tomatoes on the other

plants are not quite ready yet.  Then we had to celebrate with the first BLTs

of the season. Delicious!

Donna's potato salad (a recipe)

My friend Donna sent me her recipe for potato salad, and it is fabulous. I have a mixed relationship with potato salad, having grown up in a place where potato salad was a staple, and every picnic and church supper included at least two varieties. Mostly I didn't like any of them. I didn't like my mother's version either.

So I usually say I don't like the stuff at all, but once in a while I'll taste something that appeals. This recipe is one of those "once in a while" deals. I love this potato salad, and have already made it twice. And eaten most of it. . .well, Wayne had some too. Here's the recipe:

• 4 medium red potatoes, cut in pieces and boiled until soft
• 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
• 1/2 small onion, diced
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar
• Mayonnaise to taste (about 3 tablespoons)
• 1/2 tablespoon brown or Dijon mustard
• Celery salt and black pepper

Let potatoes and eggs cool. Leave skin on potatoes and cut them up in bit size pieces.
Sprinkle the potatoes with vinegar, then sugar. Toss carefully with spoons.
Add chopped eggs.
Add mayonnaise and mustard. Toss carefully to combine.
Sprinkle generously with celery salt and a little pepper.

Mix together, taste for salt, then put in the refrigerator to cool and blend the flavors. Yum!!

The pickle blues

Last weekend was what passes for a Party Weekend these days. We went dancing Friday night and all day Saturday, and then Sunday I cleaned house and put up pickles. And hobbled around a bit while I did that. More rickety than "naughty", drat it all.

Friday was the outdoor FREE concert in Pt. Richmond, which is about 20 minutes from where we live. It's a cute little town right between gritty old Richmond and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Once a month during the summer, they block off a street downtown and have live bands, food from nearby restaurants, wine, and dancing in the street. This Friday we got there in time to catch the last couple of tunes by Irie Fuse (catchy name), a hot reggae band, and then danced our butts off to Andre Thierry and Zydeco Magic, who play (duh) fabulous Louisiana zydeco.

Saturday we drove out to Isleton, a little burg of 923 people about an hour into the Delta, for the Isleton Cajun and Blues Festival. For this weekend Isleton becomes a city of 20,000 people and it was great! What a sweet place! The festival headliner was Elvin Bishop (fabulous!), but we also enjoyed several other groups: Kyle Rowland Blues Band, Magnolia Sisters, Terry Hanck. It was hoppin', and even though my legs were just a tad creaky from all that boogyin' the night before, we still cut a rug. Of course we had to sit down and rest once in a while; guess I'm not the party animal I once was. It sure was fun! I had to pass on the crawfish though...can't do those heads.

When Sunday rolled around and we finally rolled out of bed (before noon, but not much), I started cleaning. Lordy, I dislike cleaning house but I wanted it to be clean so there you have it. Partway through, I took a break and put up six jars of pickles using our cucumbers from the front yard, so prolific they threatened to take over the fridge. Here they are, those bad boys!

Love these party weekends!!!!

Jack London's Wolf House

A couple of weekends ago, we drove up to Glen Ellen, a sweet little town in the wine country between Sonoma and Petaluma. It's about an hour away from Oakland - an easy drive at least partly on country roads. We went to visit Jack London Historic State Park, one of the many precious public landmarks that were saved when local people stepped in to help and more money was miraculously found in California's park budget.

The last time we were here, in January, the park was closed, as at that time it was only open on certain days of the week, and a sign was posted that it would close permanently this summer. Now it's open 7 days a week. Hallelujia!

This park is well worth the drive and the $10 per car it takes to get in. Here's the story about Jack London and his Wolf House, in case you don't know it. Jack London was a well-known figure in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He grew up in and around Oakland and Berkeley, CA, and was a vagabond and explorer. He was also a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, my favorite of which is probably To Build a Fire. Incredible short story.

 Anyway, he made a fortune and eventually married a woman named Charmian. Together they moved to what is now the site of the park, Beauty Ranch, and built a mansion there over a period of several years, called Wolf House. Two weeks before they were to move in, Wolf House burned down. This was in 1913. All that was left were stone walls and the stones of the nine fireplaces in the home.

The ruin of Wolf House is still in the park, and you can wander around the walls and go up onto a second floor ledge overlooking what was the pool and the courtyard in the center. It's in a beautiful sunken glen among the trees a half mile or so from the entrance. You do wonder whether it would have been prone to flooding in the rainy season.

 

Jack and Charmian determined to rebuild, but Jack died in 1916 before much progress was made. He was only 40. Charmian continued to live on the ranch and eventually built The House of Happy Walls, which today serves as a museum housing all kinds of interesting stuff from their worldwide travels and adventures.  It's a lovely home, but not grand in the way Wolf House promised to be.

 

The House of Happy Walls

 It's easy to feel a sense of melancholy and nostalgia here in this park. The beauty and the ruins. The House of Happy Walls, where there must also have been a fair amount of loneliness and isolation. The simple picket-fence-surrounded grave on a nearby hill, where both Jack and Charmian are buried (she died in 1955), marked with a large stone from the ruins of their dream.

On the brighter side, the park is filled with walking trails and lovely views, and it makes a very interesting day trip from the Bay Area.

Cleaning vinyl albums

Dear readers, not long ago I told you about the new 1970s stereo system that Wayne put together for us. The thing I didn't mention was the cleaning. Between us we have about 400 old-school record albums. Some of them we kept from the old days, some of them we bought at garage sales and thrift stores. Most haven't been played for 20 or 30 years, and when they were played, they were played a lot. We didn't know much about taking care of things in the old party days - drinks got spilled, records covers doubled as tables, records got left on the turntable for weeks, people smoked like chimneys and flicked ashes all over everything. It was a chaotic time, full of fun and bad habits!

Bottom line is the records are dirty. In truth they are worse than dirty. They are filthy, and filthy records not only don't play well, they can ruin a brand-new old-school needle quicker than anything. They have to be cleaned before they can be played. Drat.

We started out cleaning one or two with water, and then with alcohol, but they didn't get clean. So we went to the internet and, voila!, there was the solution - a Spin-Clean Record Washer. We ordered it from Amazon for $80. Cute as can be, here it is:
 
It's a plastic reservoir with two removable brushes. You fill it with distilled water and add three capfuls of a cleaning fluid that comes with it. Then you rotate the records three times in each direction through the brushes, let the water drip off, and dry them with anti-static cloths. Suddenly the records are like new - no clicks, superficial scratches gone, sound as clean and full as it was when they were right off the shelf. They sound great!

One reservoir-filling will clean 50 records before it gets too dirty to use. So far we've had three 50-record-cleaning sessions. The first time, we had no idea how long it would take and we started too late in the evening. At 3 a.m., we were just finishing (major yawn), because of course we had to play all the records as they got clean. It was a disaster trying to function the next day.

Now we start earlier, and finish before midnight. It's great fun, and more and more of our records are ready to play. What a pleasure!!

Here's Wayne cleaning a record, equipped with his trusty headlamp. Many more records to go, and we're still accumulating . . .

New York virgin. . .(sort of)

My friend Donna and I spent last weekend in New York City. I had never spent much time
there before and she had, so I asked her to show me around. It was a beautiful weekend.

Lady Liberty is doing just fine, thank you. She had a little issue after Hurricane Sandy and had to have her pedestal cleaned up, if you know what I mean. But she'll be open again soon. We took the FREE (!) Staten Island Ferry around her, got off in Staten Island, and got back on the next ferry returning to Manhattan. It's a great way to pay your respects.

Here are some highlights, and a few favorite experiences:

* Jazz Standard for Fred Hersch on piano and Esperanza Spalding on bass and vocals. Rockin'! We decided to concentrate on jazz clubs and local restaurants, because you just can't do everything. Another time for the shows and museums.

* Vin sur Vingt for wine and croque monsieur before music at The Village Vanguard. Perfect little French bistro.

* Having Sarah Jessica Parker and children brush by me while standing in line at The Village Vanguard.

* Being at The Village Vanguard.

* Seeing the newly-raised spire on the Freedom Tower at the site of the World Trade Center.

* Meeting Donna's niece Tracy and boyfriend for Saturday brunch in Brooklyn. Loved Brooklyn, very neighborhood-y.

* All the cab rides - great way to see a lot when it's too far to walk.



* Harlem on Sunday for Marjorie Elliot's parlor jazz and lunch at The Red Rooster. Harlem is so cool.

* The well-dressed couple outside Marjorie Elliot's who helped us decide to eat at Red Rooster.

*The young man on the Harlem street corner who helped us flag down a cab and negotiated the price we wanted. People were so helpful all over Manhattan.

* The memorial concert for jazz great Dave Brubeck at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. This was free, and featured Dave Brubeck's musical sons as well as Chick Corea, Tony Bennett, Roy Hargrove and other musical legends. It was fabulous and touching.

It was an amazing trip! My first time in New York.

Sew-very-British!

I've gotten very excited about a BBC reality show called The Great British Sewing Bee. Those who know me know I don't even have a functional TV - I mean, I have a TV but I don't have cable so I can't get any channels. I hate TV really and only use it to stream movies from the computer or to watch DVDs. Anyway, you can watch The Great British Sewing Bee on YouTube. Episode 1 is here, and there are 4 episodes total. They're all available on YouTube and, believe me, they are addicting. Begin watching at your own peril!

After watching the first two, I was so inspired I went immediately to my sewing stash and pulled out a skirt I started working on a year or so ago. I had been gifted with the fabric, a beautiful soft wool plaid, and I actually drafted the pattern for the skirt myself. It's not complicated, but I decided to put a ruffle of sorts on the bottom of it, and at that point I got stuck and put it away.

These British ladies and gents, who were pulled from the general public in London with varying degrees of expertise with sewing, really cranked me up along the lines of, "I know how to do that - I can sew that well. I'll bet I could do that even better." Well, you can see I got mildly insufferable, but the end product was good. It got me excited about sewing for myself again.

So here's the skirt with its ruffle - not finished, but all that's left is to attach the lining and hem it. Piece of cake, love, as the Brits say!

The Steamer

True confession: I have fallen in love with a home cleaning device. You won't hear me say that often - I personally detest cleaning the house. Unfortunately I like living in a clean house, so I have had only two options . . . get over my aversion to housework, or hire someone else to do it.

When I was working fulltime, I hired someone else to do it. The appointed person usually did a good job for the first few months, then started to slack off as time went on. About the time I noticed waxed-over dirt on the dining room floor, and cobwebs in most of the high corners of the house, I'd let that person go and try it myself for a month or two before hiring someone else. Et cetera, et cetera.

When I retired from my fulltime job, I couldn't justify hiring a cleaning service anymore. I mean, I was theoretically home much of the time, so why did I need someone to come in and clean my house? Drat. The house hasn't been so clean lately, although in reality it's probably as clean as it was when I was having someone else do it. The problem is it's not clean the way I want it to be, and I have no one to blame.

We were visiting our friends in Denver and getting their home ready for 31 people for sit-down Hanukkah dinner, when Yasmin, one of the daughters, pulled out this machine and started running it over the hardwood floors. Everywhere she went, she sprayed a cleaner on the floor, not even bothering to bend down, and then ran the machine over it. Steam came up, and the floor behind the machine was clean, shiny, and beautiful. It didn't even look wet. "What the heck is that?" I asked.

It was a steam cleaner, and I bought one immediately after I got home. Here's the link on Amazon. You sweep or vacuum the floor first, and then you spray with a good cleaning product, like Method, and run the steamer over the floor to wash and deep-clean it. The linoleum in my kitchen, which is seriously trashed and really needs to be replaced, hasn't been so clean since it was new 20 years ago. I mean the corners and edges too. The hardwood in the dining room, the victim of the wax-over-dirt disaster, is starting to look great. A few more passes with the steamer and I should have most of the old wax, as well as the dirt under it, up and out. Couldn't be easier.

Forget mops. Forget getting down on your knees and scubbing. I'm sold on my new love!

Tons of fun: Cana and Pacific Grove

Whew! Last week was full of adventure, starting out with pupus and salsa dancing at our neighborhood Cuban club, Cana. A crabby-melted-cheesy-wonderful-toast thing, an order of sweet fried plantains, a minty mojito, a sultry cuba libre, and then a few turns around the PACKED dance floor before making our way on foot up the hill and home...couldn't be better on a Bay Area Sunday afternoon with temps in the 80s.

Then mid-week we took off on a little driving jaunt to Pacific Grove, on the Monterey Peninsula. Have you been there? What a gorgeous little town, and really nothing like the hustle and tourist vibe of Monterey and Carmel, except that it has the same beautiful non-stop scenery. Right on Monterey Bay and Pinos Point, the sparkling blue water and white sands are hard to beat.

We went there theoretically to play golf, but the golf was really the least enjoyable part of a very enjoyable 2-day stay. We stayed at the Butterfly Grove Inn, and while we were too late for the Monarch butterflies that throng here October through March, we still really liked the Inn. It's pink, of course, and quite 50s motel-like, but the rooms are huge and nicely, if simply, decorated. It's clean and attractive and comfy - we even had a gas fireplace in our room. Sweet! Not expensive, either, at least at this time of year. Outside is the beautiful grove of trees that the Monarchs return to, and in both directions we were close enough to the Bay and to downtown Pacific Grove to walk it.

Here's a view of the Bay:

 and some of the flora:

Gosh, it was pretty. That purple flower is iceplant and it was all over the rocks on the way down to the Bay. There are some beautiful homes here too. Quite a nice little city, and just minutes from Monterey if you wanted to go to the Aquarium or to the Monterey Jazz Festival, both worthwhile activities.

We had fabulous food too. We tried Fishwife for dinner, and loved it. The calimari appetizer is the best I've ever had, and very substantial. We also shared the Baja Fistherman's Bowl (shrimp, scallops, lobster) and thought it was great - lots of food. For breakfast the next morning, we first tried Red House, which looked great but we were too late getting up - they stop serving breakfast at 11. They sent us to Holly's, which was wonderful. Wayne had the carrot cake pancakes...unbelievable. So good! I had poached eggs and buttermilk pancakes - also to die for. So it was an eating frenzy in PG.

The golf? Well, it wasn't the course, it was us. The course was fine, although it was right on the Point (beautiful) which meant we were whipped by wind the entire time. I mean whipped! I'm not a huge fan of wind. Anyway, we golfed 13 holes and called it a day. We did get a special treat, though, and that was to see the Point Pinos Lighthouse, which is right next to the course and is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the West Coast. Cool!

This week we're recuperating...

How to make a lion comforter for Baby Leo

My brother's family is exploding with baby boys! My brother has two daughters. The youngest, Kristin, had a beautiful baby boy, Lincoln, in October and Great-Auntie (me!) helped her celebrate with a baby owl comforter, because owls were the theme of her nursery. See Lincoln and his owls here.

Now Kristin's older sister Amber and her husband Jason have adopted Leo, also a darling brand-new baby boy. In the way these things are, they waited for a long time for Their Baby to show up, and then when he did, it happened overnight. Suddenly they were new parents! So the idea of a "theme" didn't happen - in fact the nursery was still a dream in their heads. When I went to get fabric for a welcome comforter for Leo, I was on my own. Well, not really, because Leo pretty much means "Lion", doesn't it, and what could be better than a comforter full of lions!? I definitely had lions in my mind.

Lan at Piedmont Fabrics, my favorite neighborhood fabric store, came to the rescue as always with the perfect fabric. First she said, "You have to make a book, because I have this great fabric with lions that is meant to be cut up and made into a book." Then we said, "Well, why couldn't it be made into a comforter with all the book pages on the front?" And that's what I did.

Here it is in my sewing room. I bought one set of pages and cut off the instructions on the side. You can see it in the photo. The remaining fabric with all the pages was 33" x 32", a perfect size for a baby comforter.

 

I also bought a yard of soft flannel baby-blue-and-white striped fabric for the backing, some soft cotton batting for the stuffing, and a ball of baby blue yarn for tying the comforter.

 

I washed the fabric front, the batting, and the flannel backing in the washer on "hot", dried them in the dryer, and then ironed them. Who wants a baby blanket that's not perfectly clean? And besides, someone (probably Amber) is going to be washing this baby blanket every other day from now on - might as well get all the shrinking out of the way from the start.

After the ironing was done, I cut the flannel backing to match the size of the lion fabric, and laid the two pieces of fabric right sides together (see photo) and pinned them on three sides, plus a couple of inches into each end of the fourth side. I machine-stitched the pinned edges together using a 1/2" seam, and left the remainder of the fourth side open so I could turn the "envelope" right side out and stuff the batting in through the opening.

 Then I used the fabric "envelope" as a pattern to cut the batting. I used two thicknesses of batting, which in this type of cotton batting results in a thickness of about 1/2". We don't want it to be too thick, because it can overwhelm a tiny baby and even restrict his breathing if it's so thick and stiff that it sticks out over his face. Not good!!

 

Stuffing our batting into the envelope is a piece of cake if we roll it up first.

 

 

 

Then stick the whole roll into the farthest end of the envelope and unroll it toward the opening. Adjust the batting inside until it's smooth and even all over. Pin the open edge closed, folding under 1/2" seam on each edge. I hand-stitched this seam closed. It could also be sewn close to the edge with a machine, but the stitches will show and it won't look nearly as nice. Hand sewing is therapeutic... let's put on some nice music and find a comfy chair.

 

Our lion comforter is nearly finished! All we have to do now is tie it in regular intervals with yarn to keep the batting inside from shifting around, and also to provide a pretty pattern. In this case, I tied the comforter at the corners of the printed book pages, more or less, and kept up the geometric pattern where the pages became irregular at the top. Here's a photo of how to tie a comforter; of course we are putting the yarn through all layers of the comforter, so a stitch of yarn shows on the back too. Then  tie a square knot on the front and clip the ends off to about half an inch long.

 

 

One more pressing, and we're finished. Here's our beautiful storybook comforter for beautiful Baby Leo!

 

Through a train window

We live in a beautiful country! Wayne and I had an adventure - we took the train, the California Zephyr, from our neighboring town of Emeryville to Denver and back, where we visited our friends the Dinars for Passover celebration. Whew! 30+ hours each way and, believe it or not, it was fun!

We took hundreds of photos out of the window of the train.

I'm serious, the beauty that went by our window in Colorado and Utah took our breath away. Craggy mountains, snow-covered peaks, wild turkeys, a sparkling Colorado River, elk, green hillsides, bald eagles, pine forests - we couldn't tear ourselves away from the window.

It was comfortable too. We had big seats with lots of legroom. There was a dining car and a bar car, although we brought food and wine onboard with us. Occasionally we wandered down to the Observation Car, with its big windows and swivel seats, but mostly we just sat staring out our window and snapping photos.

Here's the inside of "our" car. See a few more photos here!



More later on our trip on Amtrak. All aboard!!

 

The New 1970s stereo system

Wow, Wayne's really on my good side now. He has found an incredible turntable from the 1970s era (the BEST electronics for playing vinyl) for $25, replaced its stylus (a.k.a. needle...I'm learning new terminology here), researched and found a top-of-the-line pre-amp (who knew you needed a pre-amp as well as an amplifier??) from the same era online for $45, dusted them off, and hooked them all up.

 Now we're finally listening to some of our many hundreds of old record albums. It's fun and the system sounds great!

It wasn't really as easy as it sounds. First we had to clear out the little library, where we keep all our records and CDs and books on shelves, and where the stereo equipment is housed. That's the part I helped with. We had used that little room as an office for awhile, so it was filled with a desk, a filing cabinet, a computer, and lots of paper. We couldn't even get to the music! Once all that stuff got moved out, voila! It was a music room and library again.

Of course then we had to organize the wires and decide which of the three sets of speakers and amplifiers to keep and where to put them. That was a bit of work, but it was well worth it.

Here's the first record we played (one of my favorites). Yay, Jimmy Cliff and reggae!!




And here are some of the rest of the records. We're still working our way through ...

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Baggin' it

Alameda County, where I live, finally decided to do its part to reduce non-compostable garbage and try to save some trees. Effective January 1 this year they outlawed plastic bags in grocery and other stores, and mandated a fee for paper bags, if customers fail to bring their own.

I fully support this action, having seen enough photos of dolphins choking on plastic bags and knowing those bags have a half-life of nearly forever. And I have nice cloth bags that will work fine and, even better, are reusable almost to infinity. Nevertheless, it took weeks for me to remember to bring the bags to the store. At first I had trouble remembering to take them from home, so I put a bunch into the back seat of the car. Then I had trouble remembering to bring them from the car into the store. Drat. I can't tell you how many times I left Trader Joe's with my arms full of milk, orange juice, yogurt, and bananas, clutching a box of dishwasher detergent in my two free fingers. I got tired of it.

Now, almost three months later, I've got it down. This post is in celebration of baggin', and of course the bags that make it possible. . .

A few of the bags I have in my car.

Some wine bags I also have in my car. Who knew I needed FOUR wine bags that hold six bottles each? Oh well!

A few more bags from my traveling life (Cambridge, UK, Maui, Holland America Cruise Lines). And that's not all of them. I guess I have enough bags!







Last week I got a new kind of bag, and are they ever cute! And good for the environment too! These are planting bags, and they're made from recycled plastic bottles. I'm using them to plant potatoes in a plot that's become way too overgrown with roots, and I don't have the time or energy to dig the silly thing up and put new soil in.


Here are the Potato Bags, each filled with dirt and a seed potato (some are Reds and some are Yukon Golds). Not only are they cute as can be, they're sturdy, are supposed to last several years, and let water through for good drainage. I got them from GreenhouseMegastore.com. Gonna be some yummy potatoes...


So, here's to baggin' it!