1. I rarely reveal ahead of time what I'm fixing for family dinner when I'm the host. So, for now, I'll just say I had a lot of fun Friday evening and today preparing it in the slow cooker and I'm happy to say that with very little effort on Sunday, I'll have dinner ready to serve.
Tomorrow I'll write about what I did and whether it passed the family dinner taste test . . . .
2. As I grow older, my sleep at night is more fragmented and I wake up much earlier in the morning than I used to. I rarely have difficulty falling asleep. Often I sleep hard when I first fall asleep and in about an hour or an hour and a half, after a series of wondrous and vivid dreams, I wake up. I feel like I've been asleep for hours and I'm always startled when I check the time and it's often not even past midnight yet. It's at this point or sometimes a bit later that I have sometimes have difficulty going back to sleep and for the next four hours my sleep is off and on, but I always seem to fall into a deep sleep about an hour or hour and a half before I wake up, usually between 5 and 6 in the morning.
I don't feel as refreshed by sleep at night as I used to.
I nap more during the day than I used to.
There.
That's it.
A dispatch from the Bureau of Aging and Sleeping.
It's a bureau that accepts no complaints.
It just reports the way things are.
3. I no longer drink alcohol out of caution because alcohol can interfere with the effectiveness of anti-rejection medicines, weaken the immune system, and increase the risk of side effects.
But, I still enjoy reading about beer. I check in on the DC Brau website from time to time to see what's happening at my favorite brewery in Washington DC. I follow DC Brau on Facebook and I follow Eugene's Bier Stein as well. (And I follow New Tons. It used to be 16 Tons.)
Today the Bier Stein celebrated its 20th anniversary and I enjoyed reading about the collaboration beers they poured today and the other fun ways they celebrated this milestone.
I let my mind run wild for a while nostalgically thinking back on all the superb sessions of drinking craft beers I've enjoyed, especially over the eleven or twelve years starting in 2011 when I first visited 16 Tons.
I just sat here in Kellogg and relished the great beers I enjoyed in Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, Washington, DC, Seattle, Eugene, Portland, New York City, Valley Cottage, Baltimore, Beltsville, Salem, Mass, Wallace, Kellogg, and on the trip Debbie, Gibbs, and I took from Valley Cottage to Kellogg back in September of 2021 when we organized our travel around dog friendly breweries and enjoyed beers everywhere from rural New York to Miles City, MT.
I can't drink those beers any longer, but the flavors and great smells have stayed with me, as have the great conversations I so often enjoyed with both friends and strangers while delighting in these beers.
Since I can no longer have those experiences, I'm ecstatic that the memories remain so vivid.
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