1. The Deke and I are ready to experience the sound of streaming music into our home. This morning I read CNET reviews of different possibilities, focusing on Amazon's Echo products, different wireless speakers, and combining the two. I'm still contemplating -- everything sounds kind of fun. We'll see.
2. The Deke and I piled into the Sube around 1:30 for a drive to Wallace. We watched -- and sang along with -- Carol and Paul and the rest of their band at the Sixth Street Melodrama. They put on a musical production, Goin' for the Gold, Settlin' for the Silver. It was a program of work, love, and Christian songs, with narrative material woven in as a tribute to the history of the Silver Valley. The work songs were particularly powerful for me and brought back great memories of teaching U. S. Working Class Literature with Margaret and, in particular, of the great songs in the movie, Harlan County, USA -- especially Merle Travis' masterpiece, "Dark as a Dungeon". Team teaching that class with Margaret was a superb experience in my life as an instructor and I loved the class sessions when we focused on songs about work and labor and union organizing. It was uplifting to have those memories rush back to me during the program.
3. Our fun afternoon at the matinee performance just got more fun as the day darkened. A group of knitters meets at Radio Brewing on Sunday afternoons and the Deke joined in when we returned to Kellogg. She loved meeting new people, knitting with them, and getting in some serious yarn talk. I took a spot at the thinking table -- or the bar -- and enjoyed talking with the tasting room manager Meredith and, when she had customers to serve, reading recipes online.
After Radio Brewing, we went next door to Christy and Everett's for family dinner. Carol, Paul, Christy, Everett, the Deke, and I are trying to have dinner together on Sundays and, so far, as long as we are all in town, we are succeeding.
Christy made a delicious pitcher of pear and apple fall sangria for our cocktail half hour and for dinner we had a most delicious pot roast with potatoes and carrots, complemented by cornbread and a fresh apple salad. I asked Christy if the meat was a chuck roast because I was staggered by how moist and flavorful it was.
Now, I know the pot roast was so good because Christy worked her magic with the crock pot and with just the right seasonings, but I was staggered because the chuck roast brought back memories of some chuck roasts we had when we were kids that were kind of stringy and dry and required a lot of ketchup. I never minded the dry stringy chuck roast. Ha! I liked it.
Tonight's pot roast/chuck roast, however, was a revelation of just how good that cut of meat can be when slow cooked and seasoned right. The potatoes and carrots were also moist and perfectly prepared and absorbed some of the taste of the beef as they stewed in the broth created by the roast as it cooked. What a perfect fall dinner to warm us up, especially as we experienced our first snowfall over the weekend, starting on Friday.
Christy made delicious bar cookies for dessert. They brought our meal and our lively conversations to a tasty conclusion.
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