One of the things my old girl and I like to do is travel. When retirement was just something way off in the future we had visions of traveling around the world seeing strange and exotic places. After we retired and ran into reality we scaled back those dreams a bit. We still get to see strange and exotic places, but they are more like the spur capital of the US rather than the wilds of Kenya. Well, OK, most of the time it is more like the spur capital of Texas because we usually do day trips, but we have fun anyway. (BTW, in case you're interested, the spur capital of Texas is Gatesville, where lives the Coryell Museum and Historical Center, which houses the Mitchell Collection of antique and offbeat spurs.)
The overwhelming majority of our trips are one-tank day trips. The main reason is that they are cheap entertainment. For the cost of a tank of gas and one or two meals of road food we can spend all day doing and seeing the things we enjoy. Usually we will try to take in a garden or museum and do some shopping.
If the museum thing seems seems a bit hoity toity, that's just an illusion because I'm not talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or anything like that. We have a pretty eclectic taste in museums. Some of the museums we have enjoyed visiting include: the aforementioned Coryell Museum and Historical Center, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum (which, BTW, has nothing at all to do with the baseball team), the Dr. Pepper Museum , the Alamo , Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum in Niagara Falls, and the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. Obviously some of these are more than a day trip away from our Texas digs, but they may be only a day or so away from you.
We take a pretty broad view of what constitutes a museum so we have seen things like ice cream and chocolate factories, gem mines, paleontological digs, Anasazi villages, Revolutionary War forts, Civil War plantations, and houses of historical figures, like the House of Seven Gables in Salem Massachusetts, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and Kit Carson's house in Taos, New Mexico.
Gardens are another thing that we like to see on our day trips but, again, we have a liberal definition of gardens. For us it can be a formal botanical garden like the ones in Fort Worth or San Antonio, more diverse gardens such as Cheekwood in Nashville and Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio or arboretums and nature trails such as the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio. Anyplace with a nicely planted area or trails through native trees and plants counts as a garden for us.
My wife's favorite travel activity is shopping. We tend to spend time in little towns with one-off stores and antique shops, which often seem to be little more than flea markets. We do a lot more shopping than we do buying because, as my wife has pointed out, if we were to buy many more things we would have to add a room to hold them. We still like shopping though. I especially like antique stores because they are sort of like museums. I am interested in old tools from before the turn of the last century and I can often find them in small town antique stores. We don't usually spend a lot of money in these places because we just don't buy big ticket items; but on most trips we find some little thing that we can't live without, at least until the next garage sale.
A lot of the time when we go on a day trip we have only a vague idea of where we want to go. We'll head out to some place that sounds interesting, but if that doesn't pan out, we will just change our plans and go someplace else. For this reason we have always carried a good map with us as well as a AAA travel book and often one of those books you can pick up at Cracker Barrel that lists what is at each interstate highway on and off ramp. Of course these days we also carry a GPS. Either that or a smart phone with a GPS app is pretty much an essential these days. In fact, if you have a smart phone with a GPS app and Internet access, you probably don't even need a hard copy map or travel books. We're so used to carrying them, though, that we still make sure we have them with us.
One of the things we have learned about day trips is that, if you think ahead a bit, they can easily turn into overnighters. So when we leave on a day trip that we think might be far enough afield that we won't feel like driving all the way home at the end of the day, we usually pack a small suitcase with enough clothes and toiletries to get us through a second day. Something else that is helpful if your trip is suddenly extended overnight is one or more hotel chain customer loyalty cards. Most chains have them and they have proven useful when we needed to get a room without a reservation and most of the hotels and motels in the area were full. Motel and hotel clerks will often try extra hard to find you a room if you are a member of the club.
Another thing we did to make it easier to turn a day trip into an overnighter on the spur of the moment is to stop delivery of the newspaper. We get most of the news we need either from the TV or the Internet and a newspaper lying in the drive all day is a good sign to burglars that no one is home. So you might think about stopping the paper unless it is delivered to a mailbox or somewhere else that would not allow a thief to see that you're not home. We also have a monitored burglar alarm which we set most of the time that we are gone for more than a few minutes. Obviously someone could disable an alarm or do a smash and grab and be off with your prize possessions before the police can respond, but anything you can do to make the neighbors' houses look like easier targets than yours is a good thing.
I'll have some more to say about longer trips in a future post. Right now I have to post this thing and upload the pictures that we took on our last jaunt.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
For Free
There's a Joni Mitchell song about a clarinetist on a street corner who was "playin' real good for free". There are two things I like about that: live music and free stuff. As my old girl and I have recently discovered, the combination of the two can add up to lots of fun.
This summer has been a hot one in our neck of the suburbs and my wife and I were casting about one day for something to do to relieve the tedium of the summer doldrums that didn't cost an arm and a leg and would keep us in the air conditioning, or at least the shade. She was reading a local paper at the time and noticed an ad for a coffee shop a couple of miles down the road that has free live music on weekend evenings. Now, like a lot of retirees we don't usually go out on the weekends because that's the only time the folks who are still working have to get out and about and things tend to be more crowded than they are during the week when it's just us hoary old retired folks doddering around. We were kind of bored, though, so we thought we'd stop by the coffee shop to check out the music.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee shop had a couple of really good solo performers that evening. Both of them were singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitar and sang their own songs as well as covers of sort of folk and indie music. The space was so small that there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Everyone was within about five to 25 feet of the singers. So for the price of a cold coffee drink, in my wife's case, and a smoothie, in my case, we spent a pleasant hour and a half listening to live music.
We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to start searching for other free live music venues in our area. We live close to a fairly large city that has lots of live music but we didn't want to drive into the city in the evening and besides that most of the live music venues in the city have a cover charge. It turned out, however, that there are lots of places to hear live music for free if you just look around for them and, in our case, most of them were pretty close to home. So about once a week for the last couple of months we have gone to a different place to hear free live music.
We've been to several coffee shops and have discovered that most of them tend to book solo acts or small groups that usually play jazz, blues, 1930's or 40's swing or what I think of as indie music. Generally all you have to do is buy a cup of coffee or a smoothie or something and you can sit there for a couple of hours listening to the music. The coffee houses we have gone to are pretty small so you can hear the music well and you get a chance to interact with the performers. I should probably mention here that a lot of these performers are playing for exposure and tips, so there is usually a tip jar nearby and we always make sure to drop a couple of bucks in it.
Another place we have found to listen to free live music is in small towns. There is a town near us that has some folks who get together on the square on Saturday evenings to jam, mostly doing country music but also some old rock and roll. There's no charge to sit on the courthouse steps and listen, although most people tip the musicians. We were sitting on the steps one evening this summer listening to the jam session and got into a conversation with an old boy sitting beside us. It turned out that he was vacationing alone and had been traveling around our area for the last week. He was on his way home when he saw the courthouse dome from the interstate and decided to stop by for a look. The jam session that was in progress was a happy surprise for him. He told us that he had been playing guitar and even writing his own songs for years and he wished he could join in. We encouraged him to do that but he was kind of reluctant to ask the musicians, whom he didn't know, if he could jam with them. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), my old girl is a lot less inhibited than that. She told the group on the square that the old boy sitting with us played guitar and would love to sit in on a few numbers. The musicians had a spare guitar so they asked our new found friend to come on down for a little picking and singing. He did just that and ended up jamming with them for over an hour, even singing and playing one of his own songs. Before he left to head home he came over and shook hands with us and thanked my wife for intervening for him with the singers on the square. He told us that that night was the highlight of his vacation. It just goes to show that you never know what you will find when you're looking for some inexpensive fun.
Of course sitting out on the courthouse square in the summer time is a little warm, even in the evening. For those that prefer their free live music indoors there are several restaurants and bars in our area that provide that. You do have to buy something to eat or drink, but there is no cover charge. Those places range from one with an indoor performance area and a pretty big outdoor stage to one with a little postage stamp sized boot scootin' area in the corner of the restaurant. We've enjoyed listening to live music in several of these places. They tend to have electric music that is mostly country and old rock and roll cover bands but they are fun to listen to if you can hear over the whooping and hollering.
Another place where we have listened to live music is at a local farmers market. It is only open on Saturday mornings so we were surprised to find that there are live music acts playing there every week. We've spent a couple of Saturday mornings there, shopping for local organically grown produce, drinking microbiotically-enhanced fruit drinks and eating homemade tamales and empanadas while listening to pretty much the same kind of acts we see in coffee houses.
Finally, now that fall is here, one of our favorite places to hear live music is at halftime at local highschool football games. I guess it's not really free, because they charge $8 per ticket for highschool football games in our area, but we get to see a football game and listen to live music as well, all while drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Frito pie. It doesn't get any better than that.
This summer has been a hot one in our neck of the suburbs and my wife and I were casting about one day for something to do to relieve the tedium of the summer doldrums that didn't cost an arm and a leg and would keep us in the air conditioning, or at least the shade. She was reading a local paper at the time and noticed an ad for a coffee shop a couple of miles down the road that has free live music on weekend evenings. Now, like a lot of retirees we don't usually go out on the weekends because that's the only time the folks who are still working have to get out and about and things tend to be more crowded than they are during the week when it's just us hoary old retired folks doddering around. We were kind of bored, though, so we thought we'd stop by the coffee shop to check out the music.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee shop had a couple of really good solo performers that evening. Both of them were singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitar and sang their own songs as well as covers of sort of folk and indie music. The space was so small that there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Everyone was within about five to 25 feet of the singers. So for the price of a cold coffee drink, in my wife's case, and a smoothie, in my case, we spent a pleasant hour and a half listening to live music.
We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to start searching for other free live music venues in our area. We live close to a fairly large city that has lots of live music but we didn't want to drive into the city in the evening and besides that most of the live music venues in the city have a cover charge. It turned out, however, that there are lots of places to hear live music for free if you just look around for them and, in our case, most of them were pretty close to home. So about once a week for the last couple of months we have gone to a different place to hear free live music.
We've been to several coffee shops and have discovered that most of them tend to book solo acts or small groups that usually play jazz, blues, 1930's or 40's swing or what I think of as indie music. Generally all you have to do is buy a cup of coffee or a smoothie or something and you can sit there for a couple of hours listening to the music. The coffee houses we have gone to are pretty small so you can hear the music well and you get a chance to interact with the performers. I should probably mention here that a lot of these performers are playing for exposure and tips, so there is usually a tip jar nearby and we always make sure to drop a couple of bucks in it.
Another place we have found to listen to free live music is in small towns. There is a town near us that has some folks who get together on the square on Saturday evenings to jam, mostly doing country music but also some old rock and roll. There's no charge to sit on the courthouse steps and listen, although most people tip the musicians. We were sitting on the steps one evening this summer listening to the jam session and got into a conversation with an old boy sitting beside us. It turned out that he was vacationing alone and had been traveling around our area for the last week. He was on his way home when he saw the courthouse dome from the interstate and decided to stop by for a look. The jam session that was in progress was a happy surprise for him. He told us that he had been playing guitar and even writing his own songs for years and he wished he could join in. We encouraged him to do that but he was kind of reluctant to ask the musicians, whom he didn't know, if he could jam with them. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), my old girl is a lot less inhibited than that. She told the group on the square that the old boy sitting with us played guitar and would love to sit in on a few numbers. The musicians had a spare guitar so they asked our new found friend to come on down for a little picking and singing. He did just that and ended up jamming with them for over an hour, even singing and playing one of his own songs. Before he left to head home he came over and shook hands with us and thanked my wife for intervening for him with the singers on the square. He told us that that night was the highlight of his vacation. It just goes to show that you never know what you will find when you're looking for some inexpensive fun.
Of course sitting out on the courthouse square in the summer time is a little warm, even in the evening. For those that prefer their free live music indoors there are several restaurants and bars in our area that provide that. You do have to buy something to eat or drink, but there is no cover charge. Those places range from one with an indoor performance area and a pretty big outdoor stage to one with a little postage stamp sized boot scootin' area in the corner of the restaurant. We've enjoyed listening to live music in several of these places. They tend to have electric music that is mostly country and old rock and roll cover bands but they are fun to listen to if you can hear over the whooping and hollering.
Another place where we have listened to live music is at a local farmers market. It is only open on Saturday mornings so we were surprised to find that there are live music acts playing there every week. We've spent a couple of Saturday mornings there, shopping for local organically grown produce, drinking microbiotically-enhanced fruit drinks and eating homemade tamales and empanadas while listening to pretty much the same kind of acts we see in coffee houses.
Finally, now that fall is here, one of our favorite places to hear live music is at halftime at local highschool football games. I guess it's not really free, because they charge $8 per ticket for highschool football games in our area, but we get to see a football game and listen to live music as well, all while drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Frito pie. It doesn't get any better than that.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
A Few of my Favorite Things
As my wife and I have gotten older we've come to appreciate tools that are designed for us older folks who don't have the grip we used to have or just feel like we could use a little more convenience. We've accumulated some tools in the last several years that we really like because they make life a little easier on us. So I'm going to tell you about a few of them here. Most of them are pretty inexpensive, although one was a splurge for us. I should say up front that we have no affiliation with any of these companies and my comments here are just based on personal experience and opinion. There's no implication here that you will like these products and, for all I know, you might have found a better or cheaper alternative. That said, here are some products that my wife and I have found to be particularly useful.
Firm Grip All Purpose Work Gloves
I like these gloves, which I bought at Home Depot , although you might be able to find them at other home or garden stores. I use them for gardening as well as working on projects around the house and yard. They have some padding in the area where you might bang a knuckle or otherwise need it and they have a really good gripping surface. Although they fit snugly, the fabric of which they are made seems to breathe well and they are comfortable to wear. I haven't had them long enough to speak to their durability, but they have held up well so far.
OXO Good Grips Jar Opener
I have to admit that I like every OXO product that I have ever bought, but this jar opener is one of my favorites. Over the years I have bought a variety of jar openers and, while most of them seemed to help, this Good Grips jar opener is the simplest design and most effective that I have used. It fits a wide variety of bottle caps and jar lids, is easy to use and easy to clean up.
Chef'n PalmPeeler
This is one of those “why didn't somebody think of this before now?” products. It is a vegetable peeler that fits in the palm of your hand. To peel something you just fit it on your finger like a ring and move your palm over the veggie you are trying to peel. The movement is natural and peeling is easy. It is also easy to clean. Chef'n also makes a zester and a corn stripper with the same basic design, although we haven't tried them yet.
Zyliss Pizza Wheel
This is another one of those products that seems so natural to use that you can't imagine why it took somebody so long to come up with it. It is a pizza cutter with a soft plastic housing that serves as the handle. The cutting wheel is totally encased in the housing except for a small arc at the business end. When you use this pizza cutter you press straight down on the axle of the wheel, which gives you tremendous leverage. When you're done cutting pizza you just swing the housing open, pull out the cutting wheel and wash them both.
Keurig One-Cup Coffee Maker
This is the splurge I was talking about above. You can definitely buy a good coffee maker for less money. However, we got ours on one of those sales at Kohl's where they cut the price way down and then send you a 30 percent off coupon that applies to sales items. So we paid a lot less than the “normal” sticker price. We also discovered that it pays to shop around for this item because quite a few stores carry them and the prices do vary between stores. You can also buy them online of course.
Yeah I know, there are bajillions of coffee makers out there and I think my old girl and I have tried most of them. They all seemed to have drawbacks, though. Most of them take longer to brew the coffee than we are willing to wait in the morning. We have had coffee makers that keep a well of water hot so that they brew more or less instantly and, yes, we understand that that is not the most environmentally friendly thing to have because it has to use energy to keep the water hot. We also understand that some people think that makes the water taste funny. For us, however, the primary requirement was that we have that first cup of coffee in the morning quickly before murder and mayhem ensued.
We had a couple of problems with the coffee maker that made coffee very quickly though. One was that it only seemed to work well when we made a fairly large pot of coffee and some mornings we didn't want to drink that much. The other problem was that some mornings I want to drink tea, and the coffee maker didn't work for that so I had to get my hot water for tea in other ways, none of which worked well for me. Microwaving the water seemed to me to make it taste funny and while heating water in a conventional tea kettle worked fine, it takes a little while.
The Keurig coffee maker has solved those problems and then some. It does keep water hot constantly so that it brews coffee almost instantly. In addition, it brews the coffee from little pods that are designed to brew just one cup. You can set the size of cup that is brewed to one of five different sizes. We have found that you can use the pods twice, so we get two cups out of each pod. There are lots of pods available so if, e.g., my wife wants to drink vanilla decaf and I want to drink regular French roast, we can do that without any waste. In addition, there are pods of tea of various kinds so my wife can have her coffee and I can have my tea and we can both have them nearly immediately in the morning.
But there's more. This little gem makes iced tea instantly. You just fill a big glass with ice cubes, pop in your favorite tea pod, and press the “iced tea” button and there it is, instantly brewed and instantly ice cold. More yet: You can get a little coffee container that fits where the pods go. Then you can put your favorite coffee, tea or whatever in the container and brew your drink with that. Finally, if you just want some hot water to put into a cup with your favorite tea bag (or instant coffee if you are that perverted) you can do that too.
All of these gadgets make life a little easier and most of them won't cost you an arm and a leg (unless you use the peeler or cutter with absolute abandon anyway) so they are a few of our favorite things.
Firm Grip All Purpose Work Gloves
I like these gloves, which I bought at Home Depot , although you might be able to find them at other home or garden stores. I use them for gardening as well as working on projects around the house and yard. They have some padding in the area where you might bang a knuckle or otherwise need it and they have a really good gripping surface. Although they fit snugly, the fabric of which they are made seems to breathe well and they are comfortable to wear. I haven't had them long enough to speak to their durability, but they have held up well so far.
OXO Good Grips Jar Opener
I have to admit that I like every OXO product that I have ever bought, but this jar opener is one of my favorites. Over the years I have bought a variety of jar openers and, while most of them seemed to help, this Good Grips jar opener is the simplest design and most effective that I have used. It fits a wide variety of bottle caps and jar lids, is easy to use and easy to clean up.
Chef'n PalmPeeler
This is one of those “why didn't somebody think of this before now?” products. It is a vegetable peeler that fits in the palm of your hand. To peel something you just fit it on your finger like a ring and move your palm over the veggie you are trying to peel. The movement is natural and peeling is easy. It is also easy to clean. Chef'n also makes a zester and a corn stripper with the same basic design, although we haven't tried them yet.
Zyliss Pizza Wheel
This is another one of those products that seems so natural to use that you can't imagine why it took somebody so long to come up with it. It is a pizza cutter with a soft plastic housing that serves as the handle. The cutting wheel is totally encased in the housing except for a small arc at the business end. When you use this pizza cutter you press straight down on the axle of the wheel, which gives you tremendous leverage. When you're done cutting pizza you just swing the housing open, pull out the cutting wheel and wash them both.
Keurig One-Cup Coffee Maker
This is the splurge I was talking about above. You can definitely buy a good coffee maker for less money. However, we got ours on one of those sales at Kohl's where they cut the price way down and then send you a 30 percent off coupon that applies to sales items. So we paid a lot less than the “normal” sticker price. We also discovered that it pays to shop around for this item because quite a few stores carry them and the prices do vary between stores. You can also buy them online of course.
Yeah I know, there are bajillions of coffee makers out there and I think my old girl and I have tried most of them. They all seemed to have drawbacks, though. Most of them take longer to brew the coffee than we are willing to wait in the morning. We have had coffee makers that keep a well of water hot so that they brew more or less instantly and, yes, we understand that that is not the most environmentally friendly thing to have because it has to use energy to keep the water hot. We also understand that some people think that makes the water taste funny. For us, however, the primary requirement was that we have that first cup of coffee in the morning quickly before murder and mayhem ensued.
We had a couple of problems with the coffee maker that made coffee very quickly though. One was that it only seemed to work well when we made a fairly large pot of coffee and some mornings we didn't want to drink that much. The other problem was that some mornings I want to drink tea, and the coffee maker didn't work for that so I had to get my hot water for tea in other ways, none of which worked well for me. Microwaving the water seemed to me to make it taste funny and while heating water in a conventional tea kettle worked fine, it takes a little while.
The Keurig coffee maker has solved those problems and then some. It does keep water hot constantly so that it brews coffee almost instantly. In addition, it brews the coffee from little pods that are designed to brew just one cup. You can set the size of cup that is brewed to one of five different sizes. We have found that you can use the pods twice, so we get two cups out of each pod. There are lots of pods available so if, e.g., my wife wants to drink vanilla decaf and I want to drink regular French roast, we can do that without any waste. In addition, there are pods of tea of various kinds so my wife can have her coffee and I can have my tea and we can both have them nearly immediately in the morning.
But there's more. This little gem makes iced tea instantly. You just fill a big glass with ice cubes, pop in your favorite tea pod, and press the “iced tea” button and there it is, instantly brewed and instantly ice cold. More yet: You can get a little coffee container that fits where the pods go. Then you can put your favorite coffee, tea or whatever in the container and brew your drink with that. Finally, if you just want some hot water to put into a cup with your favorite tea bag (or instant coffee if you are that perverted) you can do that too.
All of these gadgets make life a little easier and most of them won't cost you an arm and a leg (unless you use the peeler or cutter with absolute abandon anyway) so they are a few of our favorite things.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Whisk Me Away
My old girl came up with a new twist on the restaurant game a few weeks ago. She told me one morning that she was going to “whisk me away” to a mystery restaurant for lunch. I wasn't allowed to ask questions about it or to know anything about it until we got there. So we jumped in the car about lunch time and she drove kind a circuitous route to a Mediterranean restaurant that we had passed many times over the years. Whenever we drove by there I would say “We need to try that place one of these days”, but we never did until I got whisked away to it.
After a delicious lunch of dolmas, falafel and other middle eastern goodies, my wife informed me that it was now my turn to pick a restaurant to whisk her away to for lunch some day soon. I sort of felt like the pressure was on for me to find a restaurant that we hadn't been to before and that my wife would like. At the time she was trying to stick to a diet that was high in veggies and fish and low in red meat, so I had to pick something that would provide a fair number of meatless or fish dishes. Also, I kind of wanted to make a short day trip out of it because we had bought a new GPS and I wanted to test it on the way to and from the restaurant. So I decided to go to a town about sixty miles from here that we've been to many times before because it has a lot of shops that have the sort of stuff that my wife likes to shop for. It's a small town but I had done an Internet search and discovered that there was a new restaurant there that had just the sort of menu that would line up well with my wife's diet.
The next week I told her that I was going to whisk her away to a restaurant that was a bit of a drive from here and that I was going to use the opportunity to test the new GPS. My wife is a much better driver than passenger on these day trips. If she's driving and I'm navigating, I just check out the scenery and watch the map and/or GPS to let her know if there is anything unusual coming up. If I'm driving and she's the passenger, she redoes her makeup, rearranges everything in her purse, cleans and rearranges everything she can reach in the car, calls all of her friends and then tells me that she's bored and wants to know how long it will be before we reach our destination. So I decided that it would be better if she drove to the restaurant. I put the address in the GPS and told her to follow it to the magical mystery bistro.
Even though the restaurant is only about sixty miles from our house, there is no direct route there, and some of the roads are back country trails. So it took nearly an hour and a half to get there. All the way there my wife kept trying to guess where we were going, but I wouldn't tell her. When we were within about ten miles of the restaurant we were driving on a road that pretty much only goes to the little town where the restaurant lives, so my wife guessed correctly that we were going to that town. We have eaten at most of the restaurants there, so she asked me if each of them was the mystery restaurant but again, I didn't spill the beans, or the hummus, which is probably a better analog considering the restaurant's menu. Finally, when we were about three miles from the restaurant, my wife guessed where we were going. I still didn't confirm it for her, but she hit the nail on the head. When we pulled into the parking lot my wife started laughing. I asked what was so funny and she told me that that restaurant is the one that she had picked to whisk me away to when it was her turn again. We had a terrific lunch at the mystery restaurant and then did some shopping and even bought a few things. Then we headed home.
I did another twist on the "whisk me away" restaurant game this past week when our son flew in for a visit from out of state. My wife and daughter and I picked him up at the airport about noon. Since we hadn't eaten lunch yet, I whisked all of them away to a restaurant where none of us had ever eaten before. It was a funky little place with a lot of local flavor. We all enjoyed both the ambiance and the food.
This week it is my wife's turn to be the whisker and my turn to be the whiskee (or maybe whiskey, which definitely suits me better). I can't wait to see where we go.
After a delicious lunch of dolmas, falafel and other middle eastern goodies, my wife informed me that it was now my turn to pick a restaurant to whisk her away to for lunch some day soon. I sort of felt like the pressure was on for me to find a restaurant that we hadn't been to before and that my wife would like. At the time she was trying to stick to a diet that was high in veggies and fish and low in red meat, so I had to pick something that would provide a fair number of meatless or fish dishes. Also, I kind of wanted to make a short day trip out of it because we had bought a new GPS and I wanted to test it on the way to and from the restaurant. So I decided to go to a town about sixty miles from here that we've been to many times before because it has a lot of shops that have the sort of stuff that my wife likes to shop for. It's a small town but I had done an Internet search and discovered that there was a new restaurant there that had just the sort of menu that would line up well with my wife's diet.
The next week I told her that I was going to whisk her away to a restaurant that was a bit of a drive from here and that I was going to use the opportunity to test the new GPS. My wife is a much better driver than passenger on these day trips. If she's driving and I'm navigating, I just check out the scenery and watch the map and/or GPS to let her know if there is anything unusual coming up. If I'm driving and she's the passenger, she redoes her makeup, rearranges everything in her purse, cleans and rearranges everything she can reach in the car, calls all of her friends and then tells me that she's bored and wants to know how long it will be before we reach our destination. So I decided that it would be better if she drove to the restaurant. I put the address in the GPS and told her to follow it to the magical mystery bistro.
Even though the restaurant is only about sixty miles from our house, there is no direct route there, and some of the roads are back country trails. So it took nearly an hour and a half to get there. All the way there my wife kept trying to guess where we were going, but I wouldn't tell her. When we were within about ten miles of the restaurant we were driving on a road that pretty much only goes to the little town where the restaurant lives, so my wife guessed correctly that we were going to that town. We have eaten at most of the restaurants there, so she asked me if each of them was the mystery restaurant but again, I didn't spill the beans, or the hummus, which is probably a better analog considering the restaurant's menu. Finally, when we were about three miles from the restaurant, my wife guessed where we were going. I still didn't confirm it for her, but she hit the nail on the head. When we pulled into the parking lot my wife started laughing. I asked what was so funny and she told me that that restaurant is the one that she had picked to whisk me away to when it was her turn again. We had a terrific lunch at the mystery restaurant and then did some shopping and even bought a few things. Then we headed home.
I did another twist on the "whisk me away" restaurant game this past week when our son flew in for a visit from out of state. My wife and daughter and I picked him up at the airport about noon. Since we hadn't eaten lunch yet, I whisked all of them away to a restaurant where none of us had ever eaten before. It was a funky little place with a lot of local flavor. We all enjoyed both the ambiance and the food.
This week it is my wife's turn to be the whisker and my turn to be the whiskee (or maybe whiskey, which definitely suits me better). I can't wait to see where we go.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Capturing Those Old Pictures
My wife and I were shopping in one of those antique store/flea market places the other day when I ran across a couple of old photo albums full of somebody's history. There were formal shots of people dressed in the fashion of bygone days and a few candid shots too, mostly of kids. I see these things in antique stores all the time and it always makes me sad because those photos represent somebody's heritage.
We have lots of albums filled with pictures of friends and family from our younger days. We also have pictures we have inherited from our parents and more distant ancestors. Some of them are tintypes that have been handed down for many years and more than a few of them have begun to deteriorate. I worried about what to do with all of these photos for a long time and finally decided that the best thing I could do with them was to scan them into the computer and turn them into digital media. Having worked for a long time in the high tech industry I know that the format of any media, picture files included, will change over time; but I'm sure that there will always be a period when cheap means of conversion will be available to turn the old format into the current one. I also know that pictures stored in digital form won't deteriorate any further and those that deteriorated before they were scanned can be digitally restored.
It is a lot easier and cheaper than you might think to scan old pictures, and other paper documents for that matter,and it makes a great thing to do on rainy days or during those days when it is too cold to be outside in the north or too hot to be outside in the south. You can use any Windows PC or Mac to process the pictures. It doesn't need to be a new, big, fast or expensive computer as long as it can handle the hook up to a scanner and has some form of media to store the pictures on. You can always store them on the computer's hard file, of course, but hard files can malfunction and in that case the pictures you have stored on them may be irretrievable. It is also possible that you may have a fire or your computer may be stolen and, if the pictures were only stored on the hard file, they would be lost forever. In addition, if you use antivirus software to scan your hard file for viruses, you will find that an accumulation of picture files on the hard file will make the time to scan it for viruses increase substantially over time. So, while it is fine to store the picture files on your computer's hard file, assuming you are willing to live with a longer virus scan time, it is imperative to also store them on some kind of removable media like CDs or DVDs. If you are really worried about losing the media that contains the pictures to theft, fire or some other tragedy, you can make multiple copies on CDs or DVDs and store each copy in a separate place. For example, you might ask a friend to store one copy for you so that, if your own copy is lost or damaged, you can simply retrieve the copy you have left with your friend.
I use a Windows PC to process photos. My machine has a built-in CD drive, so that's what I use to store the pictures. To do the actual scanning you need either a scanner or a combination printer/scanner/copier. It can be either new or used. While a used one might be cheaper, if you look around you might find a good deal on a new one. I bought a Canon PIXMA combination printer/scanner/copier at Wal~mart for $40. I liked buying a new machine because it came with all the software I needed to scan the photos. Most of the software that comes with scanners will allow you to tell the machine whether you are scanning black and white or color photos so that the computer can process them properly and produce the smallest practical picture file. Often the software will allow you to crop the photos, which will result in smaller files. This is handy if the photos have large borders or if they are in frames and can't be removed. The software that came with my scanner also allows me to scan large photos in pieces and then knit them back together after the photos are in the computer.
I have thousands of photos that I want to scan so I know I will be at this project for a long time. I started with some very old pictures and am working my way toward more recent ones.
In another post I'll talk about ways to view the scanned photos. You can always use the Windows media viewer or the Mac equivalent, of course, but it is more convenient to view them as a digital album, or at least a web page. In later posts I will also talk about ways to convert other artifacts to a more modern format. For example, I have converted all the old VHS video tapes that document past vacations and family gatherings to DVDs. In a future post I'll tell you how I did that.
We have lots of albums filled with pictures of friends and family from our younger days. We also have pictures we have inherited from our parents and more distant ancestors. Some of them are tintypes that have been handed down for many years and more than a few of them have begun to deteriorate. I worried about what to do with all of these photos for a long time and finally decided that the best thing I could do with them was to scan them into the computer and turn them into digital media. Having worked for a long time in the high tech industry I know that the format of any media, picture files included, will change over time; but I'm sure that there will always be a period when cheap means of conversion will be available to turn the old format into the current one. I also know that pictures stored in digital form won't deteriorate any further and those that deteriorated before they were scanned can be digitally restored.
It is a lot easier and cheaper than you might think to scan old pictures, and other paper documents for that matter,and it makes a great thing to do on rainy days or during those days when it is too cold to be outside in the north or too hot to be outside in the south. You can use any Windows PC or Mac to process the pictures. It doesn't need to be a new, big, fast or expensive computer as long as it can handle the hook up to a scanner and has some form of media to store the pictures on. You can always store them on the computer's hard file, of course, but hard files can malfunction and in that case the pictures you have stored on them may be irretrievable. It is also possible that you may have a fire or your computer may be stolen and, if the pictures were only stored on the hard file, they would be lost forever. In addition, if you use antivirus software to scan your hard file for viruses, you will find that an accumulation of picture files on the hard file will make the time to scan it for viruses increase substantially over time. So, while it is fine to store the picture files on your computer's hard file, assuming you are willing to live with a longer virus scan time, it is imperative to also store them on some kind of removable media like CDs or DVDs. If you are really worried about losing the media that contains the pictures to theft, fire or some other tragedy, you can make multiple copies on CDs or DVDs and store each copy in a separate place. For example, you might ask a friend to store one copy for you so that, if your own copy is lost or damaged, you can simply retrieve the copy you have left with your friend.
I use a Windows PC to process photos. My machine has a built-in CD drive, so that's what I use to store the pictures. To do the actual scanning you need either a scanner or a combination printer/scanner/copier. It can be either new or used. While a used one might be cheaper, if you look around you might find a good deal on a new one. I bought a Canon PIXMA combination printer/scanner/copier at Wal~mart for $40. I liked buying a new machine because it came with all the software I needed to scan the photos. Most of the software that comes with scanners will allow you to tell the machine whether you are scanning black and white or color photos so that the computer can process them properly and produce the smallest practical picture file. Often the software will allow you to crop the photos, which will result in smaller files. This is handy if the photos have large borders or if they are in frames and can't be removed. The software that came with my scanner also allows me to scan large photos in pieces and then knit them back together after the photos are in the computer.
I have thousands of photos that I want to scan so I know I will be at this project for a long time. I started with some very old pictures and am working my way toward more recent ones.
In another post I'll talk about ways to view the scanned photos. You can always use the Windows media viewer or the Mac equivalent, of course, but it is more convenient to view them as a digital album, or at least a web page. In later posts I will also talk about ways to convert other artifacts to a more modern format. For example, I have converted all the old VHS video tapes that document past vacations and family gatherings to DVDs. In a future post I'll tell you how I did that.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Reading on the Cheap
I like to read. What I don't like is paying beaucoup bucks to buy books. I really like hardbacks but they are just way too expensive. So I used to just buy paperbacks but the price of those has gotten pretty expensive these days as well.
The logical solution to this problem is the local library, right? Well, that kind of depends on where you live. My wife and I used to live in an unincorporated area of the county outside of any city limits. So, since the county didn't have a library system, our only alternative was to join a city library; but since we weren't city residents we had to pay what seemed at the time to be a fairly steep fee for a non-resident family membership.
We thought that we had overcome that problem when we moved inside the city limits of a small town. Since we were now residents we got free memberships to the city library. The problem with that was that our town, which is growing rapidly, still has a single small library that doesn't have a lot of books or other media. Since the library's inventory hasn't caught up with the increased population it is often the case that books that we'd like to borrow are either not part of the library's inventory or they are out and there is a waiting list for them. Fortunately most libraries are part of an interlibrary loan system. That works differently depending upon where you live. In some states you get access to the catalogs of other libraries in the system and you can request an interlibrary loan of the book or other media you are interested in. Then you have to wait until it gets delivered to your local library or branch so that you can pick it up. We live in Texas, which has a consortium for more less traditional interlibrary loans such as I just described but also has something called TexShare, which uses a little bit different model. In our state anyone who is a member of a participating library can get a TexShare card. If you present that card at a library which is a member of the system (and most of them are) you can get a local library card for that library at no cost to you. Then you can use that library just like any other card holder. So my wife and I used our local (no cost) library card to get TexShare cards and then used those to get local library cards at libraries in other towns with bigger catalogs than our local library at no cost to us. Now we can borrow from any of those libraries. We just have to keep track of which library we have borrowed the books from and when they are due.
Being a library member can save money even when you think you might want to buy a new book. For example, my wife and I recently attended a seminar which was based on a book. The person conducting that seminar mentioned that the book was available online at most of the usual places. We thought we might want to have a copy but, just to make sure, we drove from the seminar to a library and borrowed a copy of the book. After reading through it we decided that we didn't really need it after all. That saved us about $25.
Some of the libraries we belong to have other features that save money. E.g., one of them has a magazine recycling program where members can bring in their relatively new, but used magazines, and put them in a rack where any other member is free to take them home at no charge. We often take home magazines that are of interest to us and then re-donate them so that someone else can use them too.
So belonging to one or more libraries solves the problem of getting cheap access to reading material. The only problems I have with that are that I like to buy books so that I don't have to worry about when they are due back at the library. In addition, I like to buy reference books and just keep them handy. (Yes, even in these days of bajillions of bytes of data available at my fingertips from the Internet I still like to have some reference material in hard copy form. I know that's anachronistic, but that's how I am.) Way back in the golden days of yore I satisfied my craving for cheap book prices by buying them at a local bookstore that sells them for half of the cover price. They also give you a small credit for turning in used books so that offset the cost somewhat. I'm pretty cheap, though, and half price on a $30 book was still more than I wanted to pay. So I was thrilled when a bookstore opened that had new books for 75% off. That just seemed to be too good to be true. Apparently that was the case, however, because that store only lasted about six months and then I was back to paying half price.
About that time I started buying books from online retailers. They usually had lower new book prices, but since I was used to paying no more than half price for gently used books, and getting immediate gratification rather than waiting a week for cheapo cheapo snail mail delivery, I kept on the lookout for something that suited me better.
I heard from a friend that Goodwill stores had used books for a reasonable price, so I started buying them there, but they still charge more than I'd like to pay, so I continued to search for other sources of cheap books.
These days I buy most of my books from the used book stores in the libraries that my wife and I frequent. One of our favorites, which has a fairly large used book store that often has titles that are only a year old or so, charges $3.00 for a hard back and half that for a soft cover. That's pretty cheap but they usually have a monthly special which is almost always a BOGO for some category of books or media that is currently overstocked. So, e.g., you might get two hard back fiction books for $3.00 or a BOGO for any non-fiction book or media. That amounts to about $50 worth of hard covers, often last years titles, for $3.00. That's what I'm talking about! I haunt that book store a couple of times a week.
We have found an even better deal at an independent thrift store in our area. They sell hard covers for $1.50 unless they are very new titles from really popular authors, in which case they charge $3.00.
Since we can buy books so inexpensively these days my wife and I always seem to have ten or twelve books on the “To Be Read” shelf. Of course we end up with boxes of books that we've read and don't plan to keep. Some of them get passed along to friends who want to read them. The rest get donated back to the local thrift store because we feel that, with a cost of only $1.50 per book, more people will get to enjoy them if we donate them there. Everybody wins. The thrift store and library used book stores get to make some money and we get to read lots of good books on the cheap.
The logical solution to this problem is the local library, right? Well, that kind of depends on where you live. My wife and I used to live in an unincorporated area of the county outside of any city limits. So, since the county didn't have a library system, our only alternative was to join a city library; but since we weren't city residents we had to pay what seemed at the time to be a fairly steep fee for a non-resident family membership.
We thought that we had overcome that problem when we moved inside the city limits of a small town. Since we were now residents we got free memberships to the city library. The problem with that was that our town, which is growing rapidly, still has a single small library that doesn't have a lot of books or other media. Since the library's inventory hasn't caught up with the increased population it is often the case that books that we'd like to borrow are either not part of the library's inventory or they are out and there is a waiting list for them. Fortunately most libraries are part of an interlibrary loan system. That works differently depending upon where you live. In some states you get access to the catalogs of other libraries in the system and you can request an interlibrary loan of the book or other media you are interested in. Then you have to wait until it gets delivered to your local library or branch so that you can pick it up. We live in Texas, which has a consortium for more less traditional interlibrary loans such as I just described but also has something called TexShare, which uses a little bit different model. In our state anyone who is a member of a participating library can get a TexShare card. If you present that card at a library which is a member of the system (and most of them are) you can get a local library card for that library at no cost to you. Then you can use that library just like any other card holder. So my wife and I used our local (no cost) library card to get TexShare cards and then used those to get local library cards at libraries in other towns with bigger catalogs than our local library at no cost to us. Now we can borrow from any of those libraries. We just have to keep track of which library we have borrowed the books from and when they are due.
Being a library member can save money even when you think you might want to buy a new book. For example, my wife and I recently attended a seminar which was based on a book. The person conducting that seminar mentioned that the book was available online at most of the usual places. We thought we might want to have a copy but, just to make sure, we drove from the seminar to a library and borrowed a copy of the book. After reading through it we decided that we didn't really need it after all. That saved us about $25.
Some of the libraries we belong to have other features that save money. E.g., one of them has a magazine recycling program where members can bring in their relatively new, but used magazines, and put them in a rack where any other member is free to take them home at no charge. We often take home magazines that are of interest to us and then re-donate them so that someone else can use them too.
So belonging to one or more libraries solves the problem of getting cheap access to reading material. The only problems I have with that are that I like to buy books so that I don't have to worry about when they are due back at the library. In addition, I like to buy reference books and just keep them handy. (Yes, even in these days of bajillions of bytes of data available at my fingertips from the Internet I still like to have some reference material in hard copy form. I know that's anachronistic, but that's how I am.) Way back in the golden days of yore I satisfied my craving for cheap book prices by buying them at a local bookstore that sells them for half of the cover price. They also give you a small credit for turning in used books so that offset the cost somewhat. I'm pretty cheap, though, and half price on a $30 book was still more than I wanted to pay. So I was thrilled when a bookstore opened that had new books for 75% off. That just seemed to be too good to be true. Apparently that was the case, however, because that store only lasted about six months and then I was back to paying half price.
About that time I started buying books from online retailers. They usually had lower new book prices, but since I was used to paying no more than half price for gently used books, and getting immediate gratification rather than waiting a week for cheapo cheapo snail mail delivery, I kept on the lookout for something that suited me better.
I heard from a friend that Goodwill stores had used books for a reasonable price, so I started buying them there, but they still charge more than I'd like to pay, so I continued to search for other sources of cheap books.
These days I buy most of my books from the used book stores in the libraries that my wife and I frequent. One of our favorites, which has a fairly large used book store that often has titles that are only a year old or so, charges $3.00 for a hard back and half that for a soft cover. That's pretty cheap but they usually have a monthly special which is almost always a BOGO for some category of books or media that is currently overstocked. So, e.g., you might get two hard back fiction books for $3.00 or a BOGO for any non-fiction book or media. That amounts to about $50 worth of hard covers, often last years titles, for $3.00. That's what I'm talking about! I haunt that book store a couple of times a week.
We have found an even better deal at an independent thrift store in our area. They sell hard covers for $1.50 unless they are very new titles from really popular authors, in which case they charge $3.00.
Since we can buy books so inexpensively these days my wife and I always seem to have ten or twelve books on the “To Be Read” shelf. Of course we end up with boxes of books that we've read and don't plan to keep. Some of them get passed along to friends who want to read them. The rest get donated back to the local thrift store because we feel that, with a cost of only $1.50 per book, more people will get to enjoy them if we donate them there. Everybody wins. The thrift store and library used book stores get to make some money and we get to read lots of good books on the cheap.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Restaurant Games
Even though my wife and I both like to cook, mealtime can get a little boring when you are retired and spend a lot of time at home. So we like to vary our menu by eating lunch out once or twice a week. Our favorite restaurants are one of a kind places and we like to try new ones so that each meal is an adventure because we have no idea what the food will be like. We are fortunate in that the area in which we live is a melting pot that provides the opportunity to sample the cuisines of many cultures and ethnic groups. There are a lot of one-off eateries and local chains that range from glitzy four star restaurants high atop buildings downtown to funky little mom and pop cafes and bistros tucked into strip malls or hidden in plain sight in small towns off the highway.
It seems as though there are always new restaurants popping up and many times old favorites fade away before we realize it. One day as my wife and I lingered over lunch with a couple of good friends someone suggested that it would be possible to eat at a different restaurant on every outing and never eat at the same one twice. At first we laughed at that notion, but eventually we decided to put it to the test. Our plan was to work our way through the alphabet, eating at a different restaurant each time, but choosing one whose name started with the next letter in alphabetic sequence. My wife and I volunteered to choose the “A” restaurant. Our friends made the “B” selection and we alternated that way for the rest of the list.
We set up a few rules to help us make our choices. We thought that we would get the best local flavor by avoiding national chains, although we did agree to include restaurants that only have a presence in the local area, even though they may have more than one location. The four of us are retired, so we usually meet for lunch or brunch during the week. For this reason we made it a rule that we would only eat at places that are open at lunch time and we would only meet on weekdays. Since we all have some commitments that make it difficult to travel too far at that time of day, we limited our selections to restaurants that we could reach in an easy sixty to ninety minute drive. In general we chose eateries that none of us had ever been to in the past, but occasionally the choosing couple picked one that they had visited previously but which was new to the other couple. We tried to be sensitive to each other's eating preferences, but part of the fun of going to a different restaurant for each meal is trying new places and eating a variety of foods, so we all agreed to abide by the other couple's choice even if that meant going to a restaurant that served things that one or more of us wasn't real fond of.
It took us two years, but we managed to work our way through the alphabet with only one cheat. We could not find a lunch restaurant with a name starting with “X”. So we used that as a wild card to pick any place that the choosing couple wanted. We had a lot of fun and ate a lot of good, and sometimes not so good, food. Along the way we passed the game on to other friends across the country and even some in other countries. Once we reached the end of the alphabet, though, it was kind of a let down for us. So we started another lunchtime game where each couple picked ten restaurants that they had been to but that the other couple had not. We put all of the names in a hat and, after each meal, we took turns pulling out the name of the next eatery we would visit. We worked our way all the way through that list too. Now we are working on a list of ten ethnic restaurants. Each couple has picked five restaurants. The rules for this game are:
It seems as though there are always new restaurants popping up and many times old favorites fade away before we realize it. One day as my wife and I lingered over lunch with a couple of good friends someone suggested that it would be possible to eat at a different restaurant on every outing and never eat at the same one twice. At first we laughed at that notion, but eventually we decided to put it to the test. Our plan was to work our way through the alphabet, eating at a different restaurant each time, but choosing one whose name started with the next letter in alphabetic sequence. My wife and I volunteered to choose the “A” restaurant. Our friends made the “B” selection and we alternated that way for the rest of the list.
We set up a few rules to help us make our choices. We thought that we would get the best local flavor by avoiding national chains, although we did agree to include restaurants that only have a presence in the local area, even though they may have more than one location. The four of us are retired, so we usually meet for lunch or brunch during the week. For this reason we made it a rule that we would only eat at places that are open at lunch time and we would only meet on weekdays. Since we all have some commitments that make it difficult to travel too far at that time of day, we limited our selections to restaurants that we could reach in an easy sixty to ninety minute drive. In general we chose eateries that none of us had ever been to in the past, but occasionally the choosing couple picked one that they had visited previously but which was new to the other couple. We tried to be sensitive to each other's eating preferences, but part of the fun of going to a different restaurant for each meal is trying new places and eating a variety of foods, so we all agreed to abide by the other couple's choice even if that meant going to a restaurant that served things that one or more of us wasn't real fond of.
It took us two years, but we managed to work our way through the alphabet with only one cheat. We could not find a lunch restaurant with a name starting with “X”. So we used that as a wild card to pick any place that the choosing couple wanted. We had a lot of fun and ate a lot of good, and sometimes not so good, food. Along the way we passed the game on to other friends across the country and even some in other countries. Once we reached the end of the alphabet, though, it was kind of a let down for us. So we started another lunchtime game where each couple picked ten restaurants that they had been to but that the other couple had not. We put all of the names in a hat and, after each meal, we took turns pulling out the name of the next eatery we would visit. We worked our way all the way through that list too. Now we are working on a list of ten ethnic restaurants. Each couple has picked five restaurants. The rules for this game are:
- Each couple has to pick five different types of ethnic restaurants.
- Each restaurant has to be one that the other couple has never been to.
- The restaurants can't be national chains and must be within our 90-minute driving range.
- Because at least one of the restaurants that my wife and I picked is only open for dinner and one of the restaurants that our friends picked was only open on the weekend, we allowed exceptions to our normal rule of only going for lunch during the week.
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