For the last three or four years I have had some health problems which the doctors I have visited have been unable to cure. They aren't life-threatening, but they are annoying. My primary symptom is IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) which, as far as I can see, is what the doctor tells you you have when you complain about gastrointestinal problems and all of your tests come up negative. I had sort of resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to put up with these symptoms for the rest of my life but then a few weeks ago I met a woman who told me that she had gone through the same experience but had finally rid herself of the symptoms by eating a gluten-free (GF) diet.
I had done a little research on gluten-free diets when my symptoms first appeared a few years ago because one of the things I was tested for is celiac disease (CD), which is caused by an allergic reaction to gluten. However the test, which was actually a biopsy of my small intestine, had a negative indication. So I told that to the woman who is on the GF diet. She replied that she too had had a negative response to a test for celiac disease but her doctor had told her that some people have an intolerance to gluten even though they don't have CD, so the doctor recommended that the woman try giving up gluten for a month or so just to see if her symptoms changed. She did that and at the end of the month her condition had improved significantly. So she has been on a GF diet ever since.
Now I know that gluten-free diets are almost a fad thing these days. It seems like scads of celebrities and public figures from Gwyneth Paltrow to Bill Clinton are eating GF food and most of them claim that they feel better because of it. I'm usually kind of skeptical of things like that and I know that I don't have celiac disease. Never-the-less, I've got all these symptoms that other folks claim are cured by eating gluten free and I know that a study posted on the NIH website asserted that 1 in 133 people have CD and 1 in 30 have some form of non-CD gluten intolerance. So I decided that it couldn't hurt to eliminate gluten from my diet for a month or so just to see if it has any effect on my symptoms. I figured it would be easy to do and a lot cheaper than having more tests. At this point, however, I'm not sure if either of those assumptions is going to prove to be true.
I thought that cutting out gluten just meant that I would have to quit eating things like bread and desserts that are made with wheat flour. It turns out to be a little more complicated than that as these articles from Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic illustrate.
The easiest part of eating a GF diet is replacing the items you normally think of as containing wheat (bread, pasta, etc.) with GF items. I haven't had any problems finding gluten-free bread, bagels, cereal, breakfast bars, pasta and things like that. You can also get gluten-free flours for use in baking your own GF goodies. My wife and I found a variety of these types of GF food at places like Sprouts and natural food stores. In fact, we can buy a lot of them at our local supermarket. We even found some Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flour at Big Lots. GF items tend to be more expensive than the comparable non-GF items, so if you can find them at a discount store in your area, you're money ahead.
One thing that I have had a little more trouble locating is gluten-free beer. The problem is that most beer contains barley malt and barley malt contains gluten. Our local supermarket carries Anheiser-Busch's Red Bridge, which is made from sorghum and doesn't contain any gluten. So far that's the only GF beer I've tried. It's not bad, but being a dedicated beer drinker I'd like to have more variety available at an affordable price. There are other gluten free beers of course, but I have had a harder time finding them and the few that I've found locally have been pretty expensive.
While replacing things like bread and beer that are largely made up of gluten-laden ingredients isn't too difficult, it is much more challenging to avoid gluten in foods that you wouldn't think contained any gluten at all. Because so many people have food allergies the US law requires manufacturers to put the words "Contains wheat" or "May contain wheat" on products that contain it. So you might think that you just have to look for those phrases on the label, and in many cases it's that simple. Sometimes, however, it is not. Other grains besides wheat contain gluten. Both rye and barley contain it so when those grains are used to make a food additive, e.g., malt or food starch, it is likely that gluten may be present in the final product. For example, malted grain is used to produce a sugar called maltose which can be used in products such as soup or pudding. Foods of that nature may also contain thickeners made of gluten-bearing ingredients. So you have to check the labels carefully to see if any form of gluten-bearing foods are used as ingredients. Just to make an even bigger challenge, it turns out that maltodextrin, which is sort of a further processing of maltose, is not a problem because the processing removes the gluten bearing proteins. Then there are other foods, such as oats, which may be processed in a factory that also processes gluten-bearing grains and can become cross-contaminated. So to get serious about a GF diet you need to either avoid any food that isn't labeled “gluten free” or do some research and read labels very carefully.
The absolutely biggest challenge I have faced so far in my effort to eliminate gluten from my diet has been eating out. Restaurants are all over the map when it comes to offering GF selections. Some places just don't have a clue and the only thing to do is to avoid them. Probably the next level up from that are restaurants that have realized that more and more people are trying to eat a GF diet and have trained the wait staff to explain what items from the menu are gluten-free or can be prepared that way. This wouldn't work for someone with CD because restaurants like this will use the same utensils and prep services to prepare both GF and non-GF items, so cross-contamination will definitely occur and that can be really bad for someone with CD. For somebody like me, however, it is more of an inconvenience because it might mean that I couldn't really tell if eating GF was helping me or not. My wife and I have also encountered restaurants that have a GF menu but don't avoid cross-contamination, so they're not much better those without a GF menu. By far the most difficult thing to find is a restaurant that not only has a gluten-free menu, but prepares GF items using totally separate utensils and equipment so that there is no risk of cross-contamination. We've found one or two of those in our area and a lot more on the Internet. The best place to look for them is in the Gluten Free Registry.
A sort of hidden cost for Ellie and me has been that we don't have BOGO coupons for GF restaurants, so we have to pay full price for meals at them and they are usually more expensive than non-GF restaurants. My desire to eat GF food has also cut into our ability play the restaurant game and it makes it more difficult to take day trips or long weekends. I'm not sure if this is going to be a problem in the long run. It may turn out that my test indicates that I don't have a gluten intolerance and my symptoms are not relieved by eating a GF diet. Or it may turn out that eating GF does help, but it curtails our favorite activities so much that I have to make a life-balance decision and decide whether it's really worth it to me to eat GF forever. Stay tuned. I'll have more posts on this subject over the next month or so.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Here's a Little Tip
It seems as though the older you get, the more time you spend at doctor's offices. You play some basketball for the first time in twenty years or trip over the dog or something like that and you end up with excruciating pain in your knee or whatever. So you go to your family practice doctor who sends to to a specialist to get it checked out. Every time that happens you go through the same routine. The receptionist hands you a sheaf of papers and asks to you write down all of your medical information, lifestyle info and medical history, what you had for breakfast, what your sign is, who you voted for on American Idol and a bajillion other things you don't think they really need to know. So there you are, all distracted by the pain or discomfort that caused you to go to the specialist in the first place, and you have to try to remember all of your allergies, significant past medical events and whatever. What a pain! (Pun intended.)
A few years back I grumbled about this problem to a coworker who gave me a really good way to resolve it. She told me that she had made up a spreadsheet with all of her medical history and pertinent information. When she went to a new doctor and had to fill out the medical history forms, she just copied the data from her spreadsheet. I thought this was a really good idea, so I stole it.
I tried using a spreadsheet but that just didn't work out for me. So I used a word processing program, similar to Microsoft Word, to create a medical history document for me and another for my wife. Fortunately I had old medical records that dated back forty years so the data was close at hand. In fact, putting the data into a document allowed me to get rid of those old records. Now I have the data stored on the computer and backed up to some removable media so I can print it out whenever I want to. Of course if you are really high tech you can always download the data to your phone so you don't even have to carry the paper document with you.
Here's an outline of the data that my wife and I have in our medical history.
A few years back I grumbled about this problem to a coworker who gave me a really good way to resolve it. She told me that she had made up a spreadsheet with all of her medical history and pertinent information. When she went to a new doctor and had to fill out the medical history forms, she just copied the data from her spreadsheet. I thought this was a really good idea, so I stole it.
I tried using a spreadsheet but that just didn't work out for me. So I used a word processing program, similar to Microsoft Word, to create a medical history document for me and another for my wife. Fortunately I had old medical records that dated back forty years so the data was close at hand. In fact, putting the data into a document allowed me to get rid of those old records. Now I have the data stored on the computer and backed up to some removable media so I can print it out whenever I want to. Of course if you are really high tech you can always download the data to your phone so you don't even have to carry the paper document with you.
Here's an outline of the data that my wife and I have in our medical history.
- Doctors Here we list the names and contact information for the doctors that we see regularly, like our family practice doctor, e.g.
- Allergies We list what we are allergic to and what sort of reaction we get.
- Current medication This section lists the medicines we take, including over the counter medications, vitamins, etc., and the dosage and frequency as well as the reason for taking them.
- Health habits It seems that these days doctors want to know if you smoke or drink alcoholic beverages as well as the amount and frequency that you use them. So we include that here. Also, in the case of things that we used to do but don't do any longer, like smoking, we list when we quit and the frequency we used in the past.
- Blood chemistry This is where we list the info that we get from the doctor when we have a cholesterol check. Most doctors who are interested in this information will want to do their own check, but some will not. Also, if you have had something like a calcium score in the past, a cardiologist might want to know what the value was, and this is a good place to list that.
- Previous tests, procedure, operations, vaccinations and the like We list what we had done, who did it, on what date and for what reason.
- Previous drugs and prescriptions It is useful to list here those drugs which you have taken in the past and which did not generate an allergic reaction. This is useful if, e.g., you are allergic to penicillin and your doctor wants to prescribe some other antibiotic that you know you're not allergic to.
- Previous illnesses In this section we list conditions we have had in the past and for which we have been treated by a doctor. This is useful to determine patterns. E.g., if you have had chest pain quite a few times in the past and have had EKGs or some other tests that had a negative result, that might be useful for a doctor who has to evaluate you for chest pains in the future.
- Family history In this section we list things that seem to run in the family (e.g., some particular type of cancer) as well as cause of death of parents and close relatives and their age at time of death.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
A Lesson Learned
Usually I'm sort of like Spock on the old Star Trek series. I plan things, probably way too much, before I ever take any action. I'm just one of those persons who takes that old Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared”, right to my very heart. So I tend to think about things that might happen and then prepare for them before they occur, if they ever do. Once in a while though I neglect to do that and end up being a prime example of the answer to that old question that goes something like, “Why do smart people do stupid things?” That happened to me just this week.
I had had this old wheelbarrow for years and, as I got older, I started to realize how unwieldy and poorly-designed that antiquated tool really was. I found that I couldn't fill the furschluggener thing to the top anymore because I just couldn't control it. As I tried to push a wheelbarrow full of garden dirt or something else heavy like that it would start to pivot on its one point of contact with the uneven ground, begin to wobble like a gyroscope about to run out of steam and, when I was about five feet from the dump point, it would just lay on its side and spill its contents all over the lawn or whatever. I knew the problem couldn't be that I wasn't as strong and macho as I used to be. OK, I was never strong and macho to begin with. More like Arnold Stang. And if you're old enough to remember him your attention span is probably so short that you've stopped reading and are watching butterflies or Judge Judy by now so there's probably no reason I should even continue with this post; but one of my idiosyncrasies is that I have to finish what I start, so that's what I'm going to do. Anyway, I was sure that the problem was just the fact that wheelbarrows have always been impractical things right from the get go and had nothing to do with me personally.
Then one day a few years ago when my old girl and I were out on a day trip and she oohed and ahhed and got all “I gotta have one of those” over a planter out in front of this little shop that was made out of a wheelbarrow (that is, the planter was made out of a wheelbarrow; not the shop; that would be sort of Alice-in-Wonderlandish and it wasn't that kind of trip), I decided to be a hero and offer to give up my ancient wheelbarrow so she could use it as a planter. Of course, to do that I had to buy myself a new garden cart, but I was willing to make that sacrifice, cause that's just the kind of guy I am and, after all, I was more than a little bit sick of the thing dumping its load when it wanted to instead of when I wanted it to. When I turned that evil, cantankerous wheelbarrow into a planter I got my revenge on it by drilling the bottom full of holes and filling it with potting soil so my wife could stuff it full of plants and ceramic birds and other whimsical stuff. Her word, not mine.
Once the wheelbarrow/planter was installed in my wife's side of the garden (I think I already explained in an earlier post that my wife and I have divvied up the yard into her half and my half, but if I didn't, let me know and I'll do that), I began a study of all of the implements of garden cartage in any home improvement store and nursery in, oh, probably a 150 mile radius of our little postage stamp sized yard. I love stuff like that. So I happily compared design features, prices, ergonomics and Internet reviews of more garden wagons and ersatz wheelbarrows than I can count on my fingers and toes, even the extra ones. Eventually I pared the list down to one that was the garden cart of my dreams. It had everything you could possibly want in a nouveau wheelbarrow. You almost didn't have to touch it to get it to work. It would practically walk, talk and eat ice cream under water. Unfortunately it cost about as much as our last car, so I settled for this plastic thingy that had four wheels and a little rack for trowels and stuff and that was nice and light and easily moved. Also, it was all I could afford at the time.
For three years I used that plastic monstrosity to cart stuff around the yard and garden and I have been way less than happy with it. Sure, you could put trowels and stuff in the rack; and it was light and small and fit in the garden shed nicely. If that's all I was going to do with it, I would have been happy as a clam. OK, OK, I admit that I don't have any idea how happy clams are, especially when they get ripped out of their shells and consumed raw with horseradish and other stuff intended to make masochists think they are really eating some kind of delicacy instead of a quivering lump of mucus. Or is that oysters? Oh well, never mind. The point here is that the cart performed well until I tried to actually use it to move mulch and compost and stuff. Then, in spite of its four wheels, it turned out to be more of a Tippy Tumbles than the wheelbarrow. If you didn't put a bag of mulch or whatever in there just right, the doggone thing would fall right over and lay there kicking its legs like a turtle when you flip it over on its back. Of course I never did that ... often anyway. Besides its inherent floppiness, the plastic cart just didn't hold up. Eventually it cracked and tore and looked like it was about to spontaneously disintegrate at any second.
Sooo, I did a new garden cart study. I checked online and talked to friends and family to get recommendations and finally settled on this heavy-duty Rubbermaid garden cart that is perfectly balanced and can carry kilos of whatever you have kilos of to carry over hill and dale on its sturdy pneumatic tires without making the clattering sound that my old plastic-wheeled cart did whenever I rolled it over the faux stone walk in the backyard. This time I had enough money squirreled away to buy the cart I really wanted, so I put that baby in the back of the truck in a fit of lifetime gardener ecstasy... which lasted right up until I tried to roll it into the backyard and nearly knocked the air conditioner off its foundation in the process.
Remember that postage stamp sized yard I mentioned? Well, one of its many attractions is that the width of the yard is just a little bit greater than the footprint of the house. In their infinite wisdom the folks who built the house decided to put both the path from the front to the back and the air conditioner on the narrowest side of the yard. It is sooo narrow that the new garden cart was about an inch and a half wider than the space between the air conditioner and the fence. Oops. Forgot to check that during my detailed and intensive garden cart comparison and analysis. So my old girl got practical on me and suggested that we just take the cart back to the store and get our money back and then I could do a new study and get a cart THAT WOULD FIT THROUGH THE SILLY PATH, DUH! But being a man, I of course, couldn't do that.
This post is getting way too long, so I'll just cut to the chase. Instead of exchanging the garden cart of my dreams V2.0, I got our a/c guy to move the air conditioner over a few inches so I could fit the cart through into the back yard. One might ask why I hadn't thought of doing that during the ten previous years that I had slammed wheelbarrows, the plastic cart and every part of my body below the knees into the stupid a/c unit, but I'm going to pass on that one.
The moral of this story is this: It's probably true that you shouldn't sweat the small stuff in life. Nevertheless, it is really easy to overlook the important little things when you're trying to stretch that fixed income and get the best bang for your buck. So don't do that, OK?
I had had this old wheelbarrow for years and, as I got older, I started to realize how unwieldy and poorly-designed that antiquated tool really was. I found that I couldn't fill the furschluggener thing to the top anymore because I just couldn't control it. As I tried to push a wheelbarrow full of garden dirt or something else heavy like that it would start to pivot on its one point of contact with the uneven ground, begin to wobble like a gyroscope about to run out of steam and, when I was about five feet from the dump point, it would just lay on its side and spill its contents all over the lawn or whatever. I knew the problem couldn't be that I wasn't as strong and macho as I used to be. OK, I was never strong and macho to begin with. More like Arnold Stang. And if you're old enough to remember him your attention span is probably so short that you've stopped reading and are watching butterflies or Judge Judy by now so there's probably no reason I should even continue with this post; but one of my idiosyncrasies is that I have to finish what I start, so that's what I'm going to do. Anyway, I was sure that the problem was just the fact that wheelbarrows have always been impractical things right from the get go and had nothing to do with me personally.
Then one day a few years ago when my old girl and I were out on a day trip and she oohed and ahhed and got all “I gotta have one of those” over a planter out in front of this little shop that was made out of a wheelbarrow (that is, the planter was made out of a wheelbarrow; not the shop; that would be sort of Alice-in-Wonderlandish and it wasn't that kind of trip), I decided to be a hero and offer to give up my ancient wheelbarrow so she could use it as a planter. Of course, to do that I had to buy myself a new garden cart, but I was willing to make that sacrifice, cause that's just the kind of guy I am and, after all, I was more than a little bit sick of the thing dumping its load when it wanted to instead of when I wanted it to. When I turned that evil, cantankerous wheelbarrow into a planter I got my revenge on it by drilling the bottom full of holes and filling it with potting soil so my wife could stuff it full of plants and ceramic birds and other whimsical stuff. Her word, not mine.
Once the wheelbarrow/planter was installed in my wife's side of the garden (I think I already explained in an earlier post that my wife and I have divvied up the yard into her half and my half, but if I didn't, let me know and I'll do that), I began a study of all of the implements of garden cartage in any home improvement store and nursery in, oh, probably a 150 mile radius of our little postage stamp sized yard. I love stuff like that. So I happily compared design features, prices, ergonomics and Internet reviews of more garden wagons and ersatz wheelbarrows than I can count on my fingers and toes, even the extra ones. Eventually I pared the list down to one that was the garden cart of my dreams. It had everything you could possibly want in a nouveau wheelbarrow. You almost didn't have to touch it to get it to work. It would practically walk, talk and eat ice cream under water. Unfortunately it cost about as much as our last car, so I settled for this plastic thingy that had four wheels and a little rack for trowels and stuff and that was nice and light and easily moved. Also, it was all I could afford at the time.
For three years I used that plastic monstrosity to cart stuff around the yard and garden and I have been way less than happy with it. Sure, you could put trowels and stuff in the rack; and it was light and small and fit in the garden shed nicely. If that's all I was going to do with it, I would have been happy as a clam. OK, OK, I admit that I don't have any idea how happy clams are, especially when they get ripped out of their shells and consumed raw with horseradish and other stuff intended to make masochists think they are really eating some kind of delicacy instead of a quivering lump of mucus. Or is that oysters? Oh well, never mind. The point here is that the cart performed well until I tried to actually use it to move mulch and compost and stuff. Then, in spite of its four wheels, it turned out to be more of a Tippy Tumbles than the wheelbarrow. If you didn't put a bag of mulch or whatever in there just right, the doggone thing would fall right over and lay there kicking its legs like a turtle when you flip it over on its back. Of course I never did that ... often anyway. Besides its inherent floppiness, the plastic cart just didn't hold up. Eventually it cracked and tore and looked like it was about to spontaneously disintegrate at any second.
Sooo, I did a new garden cart study. I checked online and talked to friends and family to get recommendations and finally settled on this heavy-duty Rubbermaid garden cart that is perfectly balanced and can carry kilos of whatever you have kilos of to carry over hill and dale on its sturdy pneumatic tires without making the clattering sound that my old plastic-wheeled cart did whenever I rolled it over the faux stone walk in the backyard. This time I had enough money squirreled away to buy the cart I really wanted, so I put that baby in the back of the truck in a fit of lifetime gardener ecstasy... which lasted right up until I tried to roll it into the backyard and nearly knocked the air conditioner off its foundation in the process.
Remember that postage stamp sized yard I mentioned? Well, one of its many attractions is that the width of the yard is just a little bit greater than the footprint of the house. In their infinite wisdom the folks who built the house decided to put both the path from the front to the back and the air conditioner on the narrowest side of the yard. It is sooo narrow that the new garden cart was about an inch and a half wider than the space between the air conditioner and the fence. Oops. Forgot to check that during my detailed and intensive garden cart comparison and analysis. So my old girl got practical on me and suggested that we just take the cart back to the store and get our money back and then I could do a new study and get a cart THAT WOULD FIT THROUGH THE SILLY PATH, DUH! But being a man, I of course, couldn't do that.
This post is getting way too long, so I'll just cut to the chase. Instead of exchanging the garden cart of my dreams V2.0, I got our a/c guy to move the air conditioner over a few inches so I could fit the cart through into the back yard. One might ask why I hadn't thought of doing that during the ten previous years that I had slammed wheelbarrows, the plastic cart and every part of my body below the knees into the stupid a/c unit, but I'm going to pass on that one.
The moral of this story is this: It's probably true that you shouldn't sweat the small stuff in life. Nevertheless, it is really easy to overlook the important little things when you're trying to stretch that fixed income and get the best bang for your buck. So don't do that, OK?
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Ellie's Mothers Day Adventure
Last Sunday was Mother's Day so Ellie and I decided to open the adventure book and spend a long weekend at her favorite B&B in Comfort, TX. The weather was beautiful when we left home Friday morning. We drove through Johnson City, boyhood home of LBJ, and then through Fredricksburg to Kerrville. Although this hasn't been the best year for wildflowers we were delighted to see that there were quite a few in bloom on the stretch of road between Fredricksburg and Kerrville, where we stopped for lunch at a little restaurant with the cumbersome name “Rails ... a Cafe at the Depot”. As the name implies, Rails is in a restored 1915 train depot. It was pretty hot by the time we reached the restaurant but Ellie and I opted to eat on the patio because we just like to eat outside on nice days. Rails has lots of goodies on the menu and we had a hard time deciding what to get but finally Ellie opted for the Farmer's Market Grilled Chicken Salad and I had Creole Shrimp Tostadas, which was one several lunch specials of the day. The price was a little more than we usually spend for lunch, but the food, service and ambiance were great so we felt that it was well worth the money.
After a delicious and filling lunch we were ready to tackle a few antique shops. We did a lot of looking and Ellie bought a couple of things but I mostly just followed her around and browsed through the aisles looking for something unusual that I couldn't live without. Didn't find it though.
In mid-afternoon we headed to Comfort and checked into the Meyer Bed and Breakfast, Ellie's favorite hill country get-away, which is situated on 27 acres along Cypress Creek in Comfort. The rooms are in a melange of old restored buildings including cottages, mercantile buildings and a historic stage coach stop guesthouse. Many of the rooms have screened porches on the creek side from which guests can watch deer that are attracted to a feeder installed across the creek. The whole thing is only about a block from downtown. Even better, Comfort itself is at the center of a collection of unique little towns like Kerrville, Fredricksburg and Boerne, each of which has a variety of attractions. So Ellie and I use the Meyer as a base of operations from which to do the tourista thing across a wide swath of Texas hill country.
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping the antique stores in Comfort. Then we had dinner at a more or less German restaurant called Guenther's on the outskirts of town. The food was good. We split an order of Black Forest Cobbler, which was a combination of chocolate cobbler-like cakey stuff covered with cherry pie filling and topped off with a huge scoop of French vanilla ice cream. Awesome! While we were there Ellie got a kick out of the fact that a guy who looked like he had just ridden in from the range, all dressed in cowboy hat, boots and such, whipped out a bottle of Germ-X to sanitize his hands before he ate. It did seem a bit incongruous.
We had planned to spend a relaxing evening just chilling out on the screened porch at the back of our cottage but there was no peace in Comfort that night, at least not at the Meyer. It was pretty much wiped out by about a dozen loud and obnoxious middle-aged, and apparently drunken, women who were spending the weekend in a block of rooms just behind ours. They sat outside in a common area whooping it up like a bunch of yahoos the entire evening and scared the deer away from the feeder in the process. By the time they took it inside it was too dark to see the deer even if they had been near the feeder.
In the morning we got up early and were able to see the deer slip through the mist to the clearing where the feeder is located and then melt away again down a path across the creek from our cottage. There were more of them at the feeder when we went down to breakfast a little later. The Meyer provides a fantastic breakfast buffet. There is usually at least one egg dish as well as pancakes, fruit, pastries and the best bread pudding this side of New Orleans. It was all delicious and we both ate too much. On the way out of the dining hall Ellie spotted the woman who owns the B&B and told her that we thought the ladies of last evening were a bit too boisterous for an inn that advertises quiet nights in the hill country. The owner agreed and told us that we weren't the only people who had remarked about the noise. So we had high hopes that our second evening would be a little more quiet and restful than the first.
Most of the stores in Comfort hadn't opened by the time we finished breakfast so we just walked around downtown admiring the old buildings along the main street. We stopped to talk to a woman about our age who owns a bakery along the road and who had some freshly baked soft pretzels for sale. She filled us in on the local lore and told us all about the historic house in which she lives and works. We enjoyed talking with the little old Comfort baker and bought one of her pretzels to eat while we finished our walk. On the way back to the B&B we stopped at a used book sidewalk sale which was a fund raiser for the local library. Between the two of us we bought about half a dozen books.
By the time we had taken our purchases back to our room it was lunch time. So we drove back into downtown and had a terrific tuna nicoise salad out on the patio of a cafe we had passed on our walk. After that we drove to Boerne, a quaint little tourist town on the Guadalupe River.
Beorne has a larger and more eclectic mix of shops downtown than either Comfort or Kerrville. We spent a couple of hours shopping and then decided that it was time for something cold to drink because the weather had turned sunny and hot. We hoofed it down River Road out of the shopping district and stopped in a brew pub called The Dodging Duck Brewhaus. It was too early for dinner so we just had some drinks and munchies. Ellie doesn't drink alcohol so she had to be content with a Coke while I had a draft of freshly brewed pecan ale. While we were chilling on the deck at the Dodging Duck we met a young couple who were having a late lunch there. The woman was just finishing a pediatric dental residency in San Antonio and her husband, who is a commander in the US Navy, was about to be transferred to a post on the northwest coast. So they were kind of having a last hurrah in Texas before moving north. We both enjoyed visiting with the young couple. I think the opportunity to meet new people is one of the things that Ellie likes most about these little adventures.
We did a little more shopping in Boerne and spent a few minutes at a quilt show that we ran across in a park near the town square and then we headed back to Comfort. After freshening up at the B&B we went to dinner at a little restaurant called the Hen House Cafe. My wife decide to go moderately healthy and have a black bean burger and grilled asparagus. I figured the salad I had had for lunch was enough healthy stuff for me so I went for the coconut shrimp. We both enjoyed our dinner. Afterwards we went back to the B&B and had a little quieter evening than the one before. We spent the evening on the screened porch watching the deer and taking it easy.
The next day was Mother's Day. We got up early, watched the deer for awhile and had another great breakfast at the B&B. Then we packed up and hit the road for home. All in all it was another fun weekend. We're both rested up now and looking forward to the next time we open up the adventure book.
After a delicious and filling lunch we were ready to tackle a few antique shops. We did a lot of looking and Ellie bought a couple of things but I mostly just followed her around and browsed through the aisles looking for something unusual that I couldn't live without. Didn't find it though.
In mid-afternoon we headed to Comfort and checked into the Meyer Bed and Breakfast, Ellie's favorite hill country get-away, which is situated on 27 acres along Cypress Creek in Comfort. The rooms are in a melange of old restored buildings including cottages, mercantile buildings and a historic stage coach stop guesthouse. Many of the rooms have screened porches on the creek side from which guests can watch deer that are attracted to a feeder installed across the creek. The whole thing is only about a block from downtown. Even better, Comfort itself is at the center of a collection of unique little towns like Kerrville, Fredricksburg and Boerne, each of which has a variety of attractions. So Ellie and I use the Meyer as a base of operations from which to do the tourista thing across a wide swath of Texas hill country.
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping the antique stores in Comfort. Then we had dinner at a more or less German restaurant called Guenther's on the outskirts of town. The food was good. We split an order of Black Forest Cobbler, which was a combination of chocolate cobbler-like cakey stuff covered with cherry pie filling and topped off with a huge scoop of French vanilla ice cream. Awesome! While we were there Ellie got a kick out of the fact that a guy who looked like he had just ridden in from the range, all dressed in cowboy hat, boots and such, whipped out a bottle of Germ-X to sanitize his hands before he ate. It did seem a bit incongruous.
In the morning we got up early and were able to see the deer slip through the mist to the clearing where the feeder is located and then melt away again down a path across the creek from our cottage. There were more of them at the feeder when we went down to breakfast a little later. The Meyer provides a fantastic breakfast buffet. There is usually at least one egg dish as well as pancakes, fruit, pastries and the best bread pudding this side of New Orleans. It was all delicious and we both ate too much. On the way out of the dining hall Ellie spotted the woman who owns the B&B and told her that we thought the ladies of last evening were a bit too boisterous for an inn that advertises quiet nights in the hill country. The owner agreed and told us that we weren't the only people who had remarked about the noise. So we had high hopes that our second evening would be a little more quiet and restful than the first.
Most of the stores in Comfort hadn't opened by the time we finished breakfast so we just walked around downtown admiring the old buildings along the main street. We stopped to talk to a woman about our age who owns a bakery along the road and who had some freshly baked soft pretzels for sale. She filled us in on the local lore and told us all about the historic house in which she lives and works. We enjoyed talking with the little old Comfort baker and bought one of her pretzels to eat while we finished our walk. On the way back to the B&B we stopped at a used book sidewalk sale which was a fund raiser for the local library. Between the two of us we bought about half a dozen books.
By the time we had taken our purchases back to our room it was lunch time. So we drove back into downtown and had a terrific tuna nicoise salad out on the patio of a cafe we had passed on our walk. After that we drove to Boerne, a quaint little tourist town on the Guadalupe River.
Beorne has a larger and more eclectic mix of shops downtown than either Comfort or Kerrville. We spent a couple of hours shopping and then decided that it was time for something cold to drink because the weather had turned sunny and hot. We hoofed it down River Road out of the shopping district and stopped in a brew pub called The Dodging Duck Brewhaus. It was too early for dinner so we just had some drinks and munchies. Ellie doesn't drink alcohol so she had to be content with a Coke while I had a draft of freshly brewed pecan ale. While we were chilling on the deck at the Dodging Duck we met a young couple who were having a late lunch there. The woman was just finishing a pediatric dental residency in San Antonio and her husband, who is a commander in the US Navy, was about to be transferred to a post on the northwest coast. So they were kind of having a last hurrah in Texas before moving north. We both enjoyed visiting with the young couple. I think the opportunity to meet new people is one of the things that Ellie likes most about these little adventures.
We did a little more shopping in Boerne and spent a few minutes at a quilt show that we ran across in a park near the town square and then we headed back to Comfort. After freshening up at the B&B we went to dinner at a little restaurant called the Hen House Cafe. My wife decide to go moderately healthy and have a black bean burger and grilled asparagus. I figured the salad I had had for lunch was enough healthy stuff for me so I went for the coconut shrimp. We both enjoyed our dinner. Afterwards we went back to the B&B and had a little quieter evening than the one before. We spent the evening on the screened porch watching the deer and taking it easy.
The next day was Mother's Day. We got up early, watched the deer for awhile and had another great breakfast at the B&B. Then we packed up and hit the road for home. All in all it was another fun weekend. We're both rested up now and looking forward to the next time we open up the adventure book.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
More of my Favorite Things
I know I've listed lots of my favorite things in previous posts and I'm well aware that having so many favorites is like not having the brain cells to decide what really is a favorite, but tough darts. Here are some more of my favorite things.
Cape Cod Weeder
OK, I'm not sure that this is really what this thing is called. I would tell you exactly what it is except that it doesn't have any identifying marks on it and I bought mine at a master gardener tool sale and didn't get any instructions or manufacturer's info or anything. For all I know it might be made in a sweatshop by children somewhere over the pond, sort of like designer clothing. But regardless of who made it and wherever they are hiding their factory, this thing really works great for digging out weeds, especially in hard-packed dirt or hard to weed spots like between rocks or pieces of sidewalk. Plus it doubles as a serious weapon in case you run into muggers in your garden or the neighbor's cat thinks it's a litter box or something like that.
Since I don't know who made it the best I can do is tell you to google “cape cod weeder”. You should get quite a few hits. Most of them will be for tools that you'll have to sell your first-born child to pay for, but if you keep looking I'm sure you'll find one at a reasonable price. Hopefully. If not, let's hope you have a lot of kids.
Ames Planter's Pal Multi-purpose Garden Tool
That's a mouthful, isn't it? Despite the cumbersome name, this is a really useful tool. When I found it at Home Depot I was looking for one of those Japanese garden knife things that you can use to divide plants, dig out big weeds, open bags of mulch, cut your hair, trim your beard and a thousand other things. I was expecting to pay a small fortune for the thing so imagine my surprise when I found this little gem for less than ten bucks. You can find all the details about it on Ames' web site but I've got to tell you some of the things it can do. It has both a straight and serrated edge and, if you sharpen them like I did, you can use it to divide clumps of flowers, cut open bags of garden stuff and nearly take your finger off. But there's more. It has a neat little v-notch in the end that works great for digging out weeds with deep tap roots, like dandelions e.g., which the Cape Cod weeder isn't long enough to handle. It also has little notches near the handle that you can use for cutting string. But wait, there's even more. It has a trowel built into it which is great for planting and digging and it is marked every inch so you can use it to plant bulbs. And the end of the handle has a hammer built in. I wouldn't be surprised if the doggone thing blends, chops and purees too. I've thrown away half my garden hand tools since I bought this thing. I don't even buy razors anymore.
Husky Bucket Jockey
So now that you have the weeder and the Gardener's Pal and a jillion other things that you want to lug around the yard while you tend the flowers and molest the weeds, you need something to carry all that stuff in. The Husky Bucket Jockey is just the thing. It fits on a 5-gallon bucket and lets you organize more things than you probably have the strength to carry. There are about 50 pockets on the outside and maybe ten inside as well as a loop that's supposed to be for carrying a hammer but works really well for the Cape Cod weeder. It is open on the bottom so that, if you put some weeds or things like that in the bucket, the tool holder doesn't get all slimy. I use this when I go out on master gardener volunteer projects. I put my pruning shears, trowels and stuff like that in the outside pockets and use the inside of the bucket to carry bigger stuff like a two-handed lopper or a poacher's shovel. You can use it for things other than garden tools too. It has a pocket for a drill or battery-powered screwdriver as well as pockets for drill bits. There is even a neat little loop that attaches at one end with a spring clip. I use that to attach a kneeling pad for working in the garden when the soil is wet. If it just had a place to stow a six-pack it would be perfect. I got this thing at Home Depot for somewhere around ten bucks or less.
Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot
OK, OK, I know this isn't a garden tool and it doesn't really seem to fit with the whole theme of this post, but you see it really does fit because it is a game about killing rabbits and any gardener can identify with that, right? Ellie and I discovered this game just in time to play it over the Easter weekend. I know, I know, how appropriate is that? We've had a great time playing it with friends and family and even with just the two of us. This is one of those games like Monopoly where you don't just get to win the game; you get to crush your opponents in the process. There is a certain amount of strategy in the game, but there's a lot of luck too. In fact, some people don't like that element of luck. So if you are one of those people who think that if you live right and say your prayers you should get to go to Texas when you die, then you can make a slight alteration to the game rules and eliminate some of the element of luck. In either case, you can work out all your frustrations by leaping on the other players with both feet. Figuratively, that is. At least so far. The game has a slew of booster packs that add new and, hopefully, exciting elements. So who knows? Maybe you will be able to physically jump on your opponents with both feet somewhere down the line. In the meantime, though, just keep looking over your shoulder for the Cyber Bunny of Death and make sure your furry little lagomorph doesn't get scooped up by the aliens.
Cape Cod Weeder
OK, I'm not sure that this is really what this thing is called. I would tell you exactly what it is except that it doesn't have any identifying marks on it and I bought mine at a master gardener tool sale and didn't get any instructions or manufacturer's info or anything. For all I know it might be made in a sweatshop by children somewhere over the pond, sort of like designer clothing. But regardless of who made it and wherever they are hiding their factory, this thing really works great for digging out weeds, especially in hard-packed dirt or hard to weed spots like between rocks or pieces of sidewalk. Plus it doubles as a serious weapon in case you run into muggers in your garden or the neighbor's cat thinks it's a litter box or something like that.
Since I don't know who made it the best I can do is tell you to google “cape cod weeder”. You should get quite a few hits. Most of them will be for tools that you'll have to sell your first-born child to pay for, but if you keep looking I'm sure you'll find one at a reasonable price. Hopefully. If not, let's hope you have a lot of kids.
Ames Planter's Pal Multi-purpose Garden Tool
Husky Bucket Jockey
Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot
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