weekend excursion

Thursday was a pretty rough day for me, obviously.  Nothing bad happened, is the thing; I just have a day every once in a while where I feel especially awful and sad and crazy, and Thursday was one of those days.  I've been forbidding myself from blogging on those days, because no one really needs to read about me feeling like a crazy person, right?  But I did decide to publish that blog post on Thursday night for whatever reason, so I'm not going to take it down.  I do feel like that sometimes, and I do think it's normal and healthy and part of moving forward.  And just to clarify, I don't feel that way all of the time - not even most of the time - and I am definitely moving in a positive direction, emotional well being-wise.  It's just a very slow process, and it's two steps forward, one step back, that sort of thing.  So no one needs to be overly concerned about me or worry that I'm miserable or anything like that.  I'm generally okay, and getting better.

Ok, enough of that.  Yesterday, a carful of us drove up to Tomales Bay, to this little oyster shack where they fish the oysters out of the bay and serve them up to you on ice.  You choose whether you want them cooked or not.  So we got 24 raw oysters for the 5 of us, served up with white wine vinegar and herbs, and we brought our own bottle of wine and some crusty bread and cheese.  It was tasty!  We also got 4 grilled oysters, which each had a dollop of melted chili butter in them, and they were super good, but I might have been mostly into the butter. ;)

Grilled oysters with chili butter.  Image by Emma Christensen, at TheKitchn.

So at this oyster shack, they have communal picnic tables, and while we were finishing up our tasty lunch, this older Filipino couple came and sat next to us.  They were really cute, and the guy was just talking up a storm.  Talking talking talking, he wanted to be an 'agriculturalist' in the Philippines, but he wound up getting an accounting degree instead, Tagalog is the easiest language in the world, this is how you plant a pineapple, one time his son did this one thing, yadda yadda yadda.  It was fine at first, but we were all about ready to leave, and he just. kept. going.  Then he started to talk about how the only presidential candidate he believed in was Rick Santorum, because he watched his facial expressions, and he was the only one speaking truly from the heart.  My friend's husband said, "That's because he's crazy."  And we got a good laugh out of that, but it was clearly time to get going.  Thankfully (?) I was getting pretty sunburnt by that point, so I was like, "Man, I really have to get going, I'm going to be a tomato tomorrow!"  And they thought that was hilarious, so it was a semi-graceful exit.

Anyway, on the way back, I snapped some shots of the landscape from the car window, some of which turned out decent.  It was a gorgeous summer day, and it was so, so nice to get out of town, see some countryside, and have a little adventure.

Oh, I forgot about our pitstop.  On the way back, we stopped in this teeny tiny little town to check out the bookstore, and most of us picked up a little souvenir.  I got a $3 calendar that has beautiful pictures of coffee drinks, and for each month it details the history of coffee drinking in a particular country, and gives a few recipes for a traditional coffee drink from that country.  Jevon got a book published in 1827 that was written by a former slave, and it has a bunch of household tips, tricks, and handyman-type things, like how to make 19th century style recipes, or how to mix your own stain for woodwork, weird stuff like that.

When we came out of the bookstore, we saw this little market across the street, and we went in looking for snacks.  We ended up getting some chocolate, coffee, and amazing strawberry peach crostadas, and then we sat down at the picnic table in front of the market to snack for a bit.  Well, there were three of us on one side of the table, and two on the other side, and when the other two stood up, the table tipped right backward and dumped us on the ground.  It was really, really scary for about half a second, and then once we realized what had happened and we were all okay, it was really, really funny, and the guy sitting behind us got a really good laugh out of it too.

Well, it's 11:00 and I could probably use a shower.  Then it's time for groceries and reading, then maybe some dog walking, and then some frisbee this evening.  Love to all, and I may even see you soon - barring unforeseen circumstances, the plan is to leave on our road trip in about a week and a half, which puts us in Illinois sometime in mid-July.