Every once in a while, I get to go back and revisit something particularly difficult and/or time-consuming that I did years ago.  Sometimes years and years ago.  Sometimes it’s just to read an old e-mail that explained how life, the universe, and everything works.  Sometimes I’m startled by my answers and wonder how I ever knew enough to write that because I sure as hell don’t know it now!

But sometimes I smile at my own brilliance.  Superb!  (Oh, how I love me!)

Take this morning, for instance.  I had occasion to look up something that I knew I had developed about a year ago and it was particularly onerous.  But I got it done and, boy, was it smooth!  I was prepared to relish the slick solution I had come up with only to find out…

...I had no idea how I had ever come up with this one.  I don’t recognize any of it, I didn’t know the things that I used ever existed - still don’t, in fact - and I couldn’t see how I could have possibly devised this.

Folks, that was only about a year ago.  What does this say about my memory??  I did develop this.  I just do not recollect it AT.ALL.  I fear for my future.  A future that I’m sure will not be nearly as brilliant as my past apparently was!

Why is it that, when a hotel or B&B or an inn or motel leaves you a tasteful little sign in the bathroom giving you instructions on how to let them know if you will be so kind and green as to reuse your towels, they totally ignore you?

There has been exactly one place where we’ve stayed in the last, um, te..tw..EVER who paid attention to the fact that we were signaling them to leave the towels in the bathroom and we would use them again!  And that place was owned by two great guys that we sort of got to know.

Is that what it takes?  Am I going to have to go have a drink with the manager of every place we stay to let them know that we are worthy of being paid attention to and we really are trying to help them stay green??  Sheesh!  I got a lot of drinking with strangers in my future.

Drugstore.com.  It’s true.  I love this place!

I can find all sorts of bargains, I often get special offers for free shipping or what-have-you (it doesn’t take much to get you to the free shipping that they always offer even if you don’t have a special code), you accumulate points every time you order that translate into actual dollars off another order, they usually throw in some special little gift, and the delivery is lightning fast!

I just placed an order Monday morning and when I checked the shipping status (yes, it had shipped on Tuesday), it is currently on the truck to be delivered to my house today!

Love, love, love this place!  I’ve never gotten anything incorrect on my order, never anything back-ordered (if they don’t have it, it doesn’t show up as an option) and they usually have what I need.  Plus, you can shop around the site for some interesting items.  Great!

(P.S.  They included some lavender-scented dish soap last time, which I was totally reluctant to try, but when I did - dynamite!  It’s not the scent - it’s the way it keeps my dish sponge from getting that rancid, nasty smell and it also keeps the sponge soft - weird, huh?  I love it and ordered a big bottle of it in this order.  And as my gift this time?  A bottle of the lemon-verbena scented version!  Fun!!)

I’m always stunned by how many people are actually sitting down and eating dinner at our house on Thanksgiving.  This was a relatively small crowd - only 20 people - but still.  That’s a lot of people for a sit-down dinner!  Here are some pictures of the tables when they were set, from one end to the other (click to enlarge).  Whew!

One End:

The Other:

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and Buzz and I have done some ridiculous things today, considering that we’re having 20 people over for dinner tomorrow.  These are stories for another day.

But one of the things we did that was NOT ridiculous was to try something new for lunch.  It’s basically vegetarian (except that it does have some bacon in it) and, damn, was it good!  I found the recipe on stephencooks.com.

It’s Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Apples and Onions.

I command you to try it!  It got better with every bite.  Mmmmmm!

P.S.  I like the Brussels sprouts softer than these turned out so next time I’ll roast them longer.  And we’ll probably up the bacon by two slices so that every bite has a bit of bacon in it.  Other than that - perfecto!

Buzz and I went to West Dover, VT this past weekend.  We’re scoping out the area.  Thinking that someday when we’re old and in a different position than we’re in now and can both support ourselves by working from home, we may move there.  Or New Hampshire.  Or Connecticut.  Somewhere in New England.  (That’s what we were sold on until we got detoured into the back streets of Upper Bucks County on the way home and remembered all about why we so desperately wanted to live there not so many years ago.  But that’s another story.)

Anyhoo, we stayed at a country inn.  It’s the oldest continuously running inn on that side of the street or something equally as questionably impressive, according to the innkeeper.  (I wasn’t really paying attention - I don’t know.) They had a great restaurant and bar - dinner was FABULOUS! ( dinner gets an ‘A’ ) - but they really need to sink some money into this place. 

We got the biggest, most expensive room they had and, honestly, I wasn’t expecting the bad taste wallpaper (that was lifting at the seams in places), nor the seafoam green carpeting, nor the tile in the bathroom that was popped up in places.  But the thing I REALLY didn’t expect was the hair that was left on the wall of the shower from a prior guest.  EWWWWWW!!!!  We purchased the “Romance Package” which gave us a bottle of champagne and some fruit and cheese and the room did have a double jacuzzi, but it doubled as the shower and once we saw the remains of the prior guest, there was no romancing anywhere NEAR the jacuzzi!  Plus it was your standard bathroom and, even if it was clean, it wouldn’t have inspired romance.  You really need to come up with something special.  And it should NOT be the tub where you step into to take a shower.

Did I mention that the tub didn’t drain very well?  So you’re sloshing around in your own runoff by the end of the shower.  I give the bathroom an ‘F’.

The bed was bouncy ( and seemed smaller than a queen but I guess it wasn’t - the bed gets a ‘C’ ) and breakfast the first day was overdone.  Oh, and there was sausage on the menu for breakfast - only they were out of it the first day.  And don’t you know that we came down to breakfast the next day and they were still out of sausage?  Had I known they weren’t going to go get some, I’d have picked some up during our travels the day before!  Lame.  Breakfast gets a ‘D’.  (The waffles the second day were very good but I think I really just enjoyed the syrup - a LOT!)

Note to innkeepers:  clean up your yard.  They have all of an eighth of an acre of property and most of it was parking lot.  But the rest had old boxes and various other trash items hanging about, not to mention the basketball goal laying down at the edge of the parking lot.  They could have made it really cute with some nice bushes surrounding the parking area and maybe a wooden fence around the trash dumpster to distract from its definite presence.  I don’t know.  We’ve stayed at a lot of B&Bs and country inns.  This had some real potential but needed a lot of work.  Outside got a ‘D-’.

This is not the worst place we’ve stayed.  At least it was mostly clean and there were no visible bugs.  We actually left a B&B in the upper west corner of Connecticut because it was dirty and there were bugs in the room.  AWFUL!!

Anyway, we won’t be back to that inn or to that part of Vermont.  We did drive over to Brattleboro, which looked like a cute town.  So the West Dover area is off the list and we added Brattleboro.  I think next trip will be back to Connecticut.  It’s been several years since we were there and I think it’s time to relook.

Or maybe we’ll just head up to some place in Upper Bucks County!  I KNOW we’ll like it there! 

Buzz and I were discussing what to take on our little quickie vacation to Vermont this weekend.  We said things like “we definitely need to take the camera” and “ooh, let’s take a couple of bottles of our finest wine” and I think I even said “I can’t forget the vitamins” or something equally as inane.

But we were watching Pairings with Andrea tonight and she said something about Munster cheese pairing so well with wine and I said that I wanted to get some real Munster cheese (not the processed orange-coated stuff they sell in the supermarket) from our local Cheese! shop and we both said “ooh, let’s take that with us on our vacation!”

To Vermont.

Where they grow the cheese.

I’m thinking we can probably get us some decent cheese in Vermont, no?

Now, I just have to dig out that bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s to take for breakfast, ‘cause surely they don’t have any decent maple syrup there, right?

(We’re such dorks!)

As I mentioned before, pinot noir is certainly not my favorite red wine.  But I do have to mention one that we had last night.

We got this as a “Last Chance Wine” in our PA wine & spirits shop back in August.  I had read that Estancia (one of my favorite wine producers, by the way - their Meritage being my 2nd-favorite wine I’ve ever had) produced two pinot noirs - one much less expensive than the other.  This “Last Chance Wine” was the 2004 vintage of the more expensive kind and was selling for a little over $25.  (Click here for review.)

We opened the bottle, which has been in our wine rack in the basement since August, and I thought that it felt too cold in the glass.  I sipped it and was underwhelmed.  I set it down and read some e-mails and read the news.  I came back to it about 15 minutes later and was very pleasantly surprised!  It had opened up a lot and was getting to be very tasty.  By the time it had sat in my glass for half an hour or so, it was scrumptious!  The second glass was even better.

So, I may be softening a little on the old pinot noir front.  I did truly enjoy the 2004 Estancia Stonewall Vineyards Pinot Noir that I had last night.  And it’s ALWAYS nice to have some good wine.

Our cupboards have been bare for about a week.  They’re not really bare - they just don’t have anything on them that can easily or successfully be combined into anything edible.  (We find ourselves in this situation a lot!)

Thursday night, we were both tired and decided to stop at our favorite hoagie place for Italian hoagies.  We both ordered them the way that we always do.  Buzz got his right - mine had no onions - WRONG!!  I can eat just about any kind of hoagie (it can’t have tomatoes, though) but an Italian hoagie MUST.HAVE.ONIONS.  Seriously - it is inedible to me without them.  We had one onion left in the house and Buzz was going to slice it up nice and thin for me.  He took it out of the almost-empty cupboard and promptly threw it in the garbage can because it was...um...sorta squishy.  Ew!  So I had no hoagie on Thursday.  I ate a very old Nutrisystem meal.

Friday night is the night we’re trying to turn into “pizza and wine and a movie” night (an idea shamelessly stolen from Harvey and Glenn).  Normally, we stop and get the pizza on the way home from work.  But I wasn’t feeling good and was fairly sure I would go right to bed when we got home but I took some DayQuil (grrr) and felt OK enough to do some school work and get hungry.  We ordered a pizza (Buzz didn’t want pizza so he got a sandwich) and it took an ungodly amount of time to arrive.  When it finally did, I opened the box and was greeted with an odor so rank and foul that my stomach did flip-flops.  I don’t know what happened but that pizza was not able to be eaten!  I eventually had half of Buzz’s sandwich and that was that.

Today, we still have no food in the house.  I got really, really hungry and we couldn’t decide what to get.  We eventually ended up going to Wawa (shut up!) because we needed to hit the MAC machine anyway and both got their homestyle roast beef bowl with mashed potatoes (and stuffing - but it really didn’t need the stuffing).  I stared at my bowl with dread, fearing that I would go 0-3 in the “eat out” series. 

But I didn’t.  It was delicious!  Very lean and tender roast beef with gravy.  Nice!

Tonight, we’re going to visit Statia and Meester and the Mini-Meester so we won’t have to think about the cupboards again today but we’re back to the same situation tomorrow. 

If I thought about it for three seconds, I’d say it’s time to go shopping!