PeacefulkT's Pursuits

Last Friday was Clyde’s birthday.  Unfortunately, every grape in Missouri decided to ripen last week, so our celebrations were pretty low-key.  I exaggerate.  Actually, just three-quarters of the grapes all ripened last week. 

Anyways, after a pretty full work day, Julie took us out to eat on Thursday night at a japanese restaurant in Rolla called Kyoto’s.  I forgot to bring my gift, but she brought along a nifty card that she made her dad:

We ate lots and lots of food while we were there and even tried the ‘hand grenades’.  Hand grenades came highly recommended by a couple of customers, and we could see why.  They were de-li-cious!

The next morning was Clyde’s actual birthday.  To celebrate he got to work on the Concord that needed processing:

Unfortunately, grapes wait for no man’s  birthday!  But everything went pretty smoothly Friday – no equipment breakdowns, no pump cloggings, and no rain either.  Here’s the press getting filled up with concord skins & seeds:

And after the Concord was all pressed out, we had just enough time to eat lunch and talk about how nice it would be to take a nap when a truck load of empty wine bottles showed up.

So the birthday boy jumped on the tractor and unloaded 15 pallets of bottles off of the truck.

Pepe supervised all the action throughout the day.  Someone needed to relax for Clyde’s birthday!  Fortunately, I was able to make one of Clyde’s favorites – a carrot cake – to eat after dinner Friday.

Happy Birthday Clyde – thank you for all the things you do each and every day!  Cheers!

This is the month of celebrations around here.  My dad, our friends Bob, Gerald, Molly, and Rob all celebrate their birthdays this month (and I know I’m missing a few other friends in there too!), plus Clyde’s birthday is at the end of this month.  In addition, Clyde’s parents celebrate their anniversary and our friends Bill & Marilyn celebrate their anniversary.

Of course, harvest has started early this year so we aren’t getting out too much unfortunately.  But Saturday our neighbors Gerald & Crystal came by after their work was done over at Murphy’s Place.  We all went out to eat at The Traveler’s Table in Davisville to celebrate Gerald’s birthday – and to relax after a full day’s work!

This was our first time eating down there, but I hope that it won’t be the last.  Oooo lolly was it ever delish!  We had a great time and I wanted to share a few of the photos that Clyde snapped throughout the evening.

Here we are loaded into the truck; eager for Clyde to drive us down to Davisville.

We arrived just before dark, and the light from inside was warm and inviting.

Greg works hard in the kitchen……….

while we goof off at our table!

We lingered long enough into the evening that owners Kris and Greg could come out and chat with us for a few minutes.  We had a great time sharing stories about rehabbing old buildings and running businesses.

Happy Birthday Gerald!  Hope it was a great one for you.

Cheers!

P.S. – You know you’ve got good friends when they can laugh at the foot that’s permanently wedged in your mouth!

Where does time go?  I can’t believe it’s been almost a month and I haven’t blogged at all.  I’ll just take this post to update anyone interested in some of the highlights of the past month.

The big thing from July is that Clyde and I took a week off to go to Trout Lodge.  I mostly laid around and read.  On my last day there I decided I should do a hike aaaalllll the way around the lake.  I think that was around a 7 mile hike or so.  I was hoping to get a shot of Trout Lodge from the opposite side of the lake, and here was my best try:

I kept on hiking on the “Lake Bluff Trail” despite the heat and humidity, and eventually was rewarded when I found myself on top of the lake bluff looking over this view:

Fabulous view, and worth every chigger bite!

Around Peaceful Bend, our wild blackberries have been in abundant supply.

I picked several quarts and we’ve either eaten them or given them away already.

Another highlight this month was the Missouri wine competition.  We won our first gold medal in this competition this year for our Huzzah Valley.  That was fun to find out.  The day of the awards ceremony, we went up to Columbia, MO to attend the Missouri Vintner’s Association annual meeting.

After the meeting finished, Dr. Marco LiCalzi gave attendees a tour through the Universtiy of MO’s experimental winery.

After the tour was over we changed clothes quickly and headed over to the awards ceremony.  No best of class wines for us (yet), but someone snapped this picture of me, my frizzled hair, and Curtis Bourgeois of Les Bourgeois Winery:

I have one more highlight from the month of July.  A week or so after the awards ceremony, I was back up in Columbia for a Grape & Wine Board meeting.  A crazy thunderstorm hit that area just after the meeting was over, and I elected not to drive back to Peaceful Bend right away.  So I headed over to the Columbia Mall to shop for a new pair of shorts – badly needed as most of my shorts are falling off of me and I don’t seem to have time to get them altered.

I tried on a bunch of shorts, and discovered that  I’ve dropped 6 pant sizes since March.  Big news for me – or little news, depending on how you look at it!  Plus, there were some great end-of-season sales going on, so I was able to pick up a pair of shorts and a pair of pants for $10.  With prices like that, I’m not sure I’m going to worry about trying to resize my other shorts!

So that’s all the highlights from July.  I hope to blog more this month now that I’m not running all around the countryside.  Cheers!

Clyde and I have no big plans tonight.  Maybe we’ll watch fireworks, maybe we’ll watch TV.  Who knows.  I wanted to mark today in some way though, just in case we go the TV route.  So I made up a card in honor of Independence Day and thought I’d show a few from past years too.  Enjoy the show.

That there is this year’s card.  I don’t have any patriotic type stamps, so I did the best I could with what I’ve got onhand.

Here’s last year’s:

And one from two years ago:

Come to think of it, that might have been last year’s card and the one above it two years ago.  In any case, looks like I used a flower stamp to mimic fireworks.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone!  I do have plans to drink either a glass of Norton or Concord wine since they are both native grape varieties.  Who knows, maybe I’ll do a blend of both!  If I do that, maybe I’ll watch fireworks on TV.    Cheers!