La Vida Buena

Sculpterra Winery

Metal Cat - eight feet tall.

The group "Con Brio" from San Francisco. Very good!
Behind the camera we are drinking wine and listening to musica!

Seasons

 Snow at the lake before we headed south.

Snow at the Highway 101 bridge over the Siuslaw River. 

A butterfly cluster in Pismo Beach.

It is warmer to the South!

Catching Up

Turkey Day 2010

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I have been having a little bit too much fun to spend time taking photographs of sunny, happy times at the beach, golfing, wine tasting, etc. and then uploading them to my laptop to post here. I do have the occasional snap shot taken with my phone, but it takes a few gyrations to get those onto my computer to share here as well, so I am not doing it.

Our days have been as busy or lazy as we want them to be, with a minimal amount of planning involved. If we plan something for the day, we just as easily "un-plan" it if it does not feel right or if we find something we would rather do instead. The prerogatives of retirement prevail.

Bacon New Years

I have resolved that for 2011 I will not give up bacon. I do not eat a lot of bacon and on the rare occasion that I do have some I do not pile it up really high. This is probably because I envision my wife over one shoulder and my doctor hovering over the other wispering to me that I should watch my intake of fatty things. This is known as guilt. If it were not for guilt I would fry up a whole bunch of bacon every day until I could no longer stand the taste. I am not certain that the moment would come that I actually could not eat bacon, which is probably one of the reasons that I have never followed through with this thought.

There are many things that we think that we will never utter in company. Well, that is true for most people although I have met a few people in my life that just blurt out whatever comes to mind. The brain is a pretty tricky place and really needs a filter most of the time, so just verbalizing all of our thoughts in this day and age would eventually land most us in some sort of lock-up, either mental or criminal. For intstance you do not want to say the single word "bomb" while waiting to go through the security check point in the airport. Neither should you say the word "gun" to a policeman if you have just been pulled over for speeding. These thoughts, if verbalized, would get you in some amount of difficulty.

I want to live a long time and see my children continue their adult journeys, and my grandchild grow into whoever she chooses to become. These are a couple of the reasons that I wil not eat all of the bacon my brain would like to experience - the other reasons I can't talk about.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Roasting Day

Nearing the end of a roast.

Guatemalan - Huehuetenango!

A Sumatra dark roast.

I needed to get enough coffee in the bins for our travels. You never know the coffee terrors that await on the road. Some trips the coffees that we find are horrible, but once in a while we find a gem. Mostly, though, we find mediocre coffees.

Ever since we gave up our commercial 30 pound roaster, and the business that went with it, I have never, ever regretted laying out the cash for a good one pound sample roaster and green beans in 150 burlap bags. You would be surprised how many beans a coffee snob can go through. Or maybe you wouldn't.



Edinburgh