The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Nowhere Special. She Always Wanted to Go There

A road to Nowhere Special

No doubt every part of the country has plenty of Nowhere Special places. I know the intermountain west is riddled with ghost towns, micro-towns, failed towns and all kinds of other places like that. A couple of days before I left the Hills the autumn weather was just perfect. I decided to just get in the car and drive in the Black Hills along some roads I never or seldom take to see a couple of Nowhere Specials.

I Really AM Retired Now

Photo by my friend Marian K.

One thing I have learned about retirement is that I no longer have much of a schedule that matters. Most things can be done tomorrow, or another tomorrow, or when I get around to it. Like writing a new blog post. It's been on the list of things to do one day soon, But, as you can see, soon did not come around real quickly.

The other thing I have found is that retirement is looking to be good for my health. One thing that tended to keep me from doing things like exercising and eating well while I was working, was time.  Time that I either did not have at all or that I did not want to spend on doing things like exercising or eating well.

Jul 2015 - NOT a Blue Christmas for the Blue Lady

SLC is cooperating this year by having a
white Christmas.

Smokey Rose looks just right in
Christmas mode

Happy in the Spring

A postcard from Belarus
which gave me joy when I found it in my mailbox

Spring is officially here. I might as well be happy. I am happy. There's lots to be happy about right now.

Summer Home

I'm at my summer home in South Dakota now. Haven't been out traveling, like to the Badlands or anything like that. I'm trying to puzzle out in my mind what is it that I do here and why do I think it's worth the trouble to come out here?

What I Eat These Days

Our heat wave broke last week with a big rain overnight on Thursday followed by all day fog on Friday. I'm feeling so much better.

As I said before I have been eating a lot of salads, fruits and other things that require no or almost no cooking. This has been going pretty well, and I'm thinking this is not a bad way of eating overall. I've also been reading some books that have to do with good and bad ways to eat, and of course, even NPR has stories and news items and whatnot about what we all should be eating, and not eating, to keep us as healthy as possible.

I've decided on some general principles for myself that I think, overall, are good ideas, but that don't make me an obsessive nut about what should be an overall pleasurable part of living. Most importantly, it's a plan that I know I can actually live with.

Simple Pleasures: Toast

I love toast. It's so simple and so delicious. I imagine it has been with us ever since someone invented bread. It's one of those things, like socks, that is just the exact right thing. I trust that toast will be with us forever.

I gave myself a gift this month of this fine new toaster. Before that I was using my toaster oven to make toast. This was part of my effort to simplify my kitchen. I use the toaster oven all the time as a little oven. Unless I decide to bake a full size cake or something similar, the little oven meets all my baking needs.

Several months ago my old little oven began to act up. For example, it had a fan, and the fan kind of broke which made it make a lot of noise. A toaster oven should not be noisy enough to drown out the radio at normal volume, but my old oven did just that. I put up with it, though, because I couldn't justify replacing it just because of the noisy fan. Then finally the control knob broke off and was unfixable. Hooray! The old oven was in the trash. I was completely toasterless, but I was free from that horrid old thing.

I went to Target.com and checked out all kinds of models of toaster ovens and toasters. I read a lot of reviews. I selected the new oven based on reviews. Two features that I like about my new little oven are that the settings are made with push buttons not a turning dial knob and that it happens to be made in America. It was moderately priced, neither cheap nor expensive. Now that I have it, I am pleased. It works just fine.

However, as you can see above I also decided to indulge myself. In addition to the little oven I bought an official toaster. I had come to decide after years of not having an official toaster that the oven was good as an oven, but not really the best thing for actual toast.

Toast (a noun) has to be made from sliced bread. You can toast (a verb) other things like bagels, English muffins, pita bread, but if it's toast you want, then bread is required.  And the official toaster machine makes toast just right.

(To my mind the best toast is made from some kind of white bread. As with bagels, you can toast rye or whole wheat bread, but a sublime piece of toast requires white bread. But this is my opinion. I won't argue about this if you disagree. And the best made toast has real butter on BOTH sides. Jam / jelly or cinnamon sugar are optional but always nice.)

I never say that a thing make me happy, but I will say that my new official toaster pleases me very much. First of all, it's colorful and well designed. Bodum, part of their new line of small kitchen appliances. Can you see how the cord happens to touch the outside? No problem with that because the green cover stays cool. The settings are simple and work well. And it has this warming rack feature that I didn't think would matter, but which has proved to be useful for warming up single rolls. I smile when I look at this corner of my kitchen now. I think that buying this new toaster was a good decision.

So now I eat toast a lot more than I used to. It's so easy to make some. I love toast.