Saturday was kind of a quiet day for us.  The husband is old struggling with some back pain, so plans for hiking and/or kayaking went out the window.  In the morning I straightened the house and then went out to pilfer the garden.  Note to self for next year:  thin the beets and carrots more.  Be brutal about it!  I picked all of the carrots because they were very small. I picked enough beets (also small) for a meal last weekend and picked a few more for dinner this evening.  There’s likely enough for one more meal.  Only because there are only two of us and one of us doesn’t like beets (that would not be me). I picked a large handful of cherry tomatoes.  And I threw a rack of baby back ribs on the Traeger to smoke for a few hours while I ran errands.  Oh, and I made an apple crisp with the last of the apples from our tree (mixed with a few given to me by a friend).  I do so love food.  And there’s a satisfaction that comes with growing it yourself (even if the quantities are limited).

Dinner, therefore, looked something like this:  smoked baby back ribs, roasted beets and carrots (I was going to roast them separately, but it made sense to just toss them together with a little balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper), fried corn with tomatos, green bell pepper (also from the garden) and garlic.  Fried corn involves cutting the corn off the cob and cooking it in a pan on the stove with just a spritz of olive oil.  And wine.  And apple crisp.  I cook good stuff.

I also met Colby Jack today, which I shared with you here.  After leaving Feline Friends I headed out to a local waterfront park that, I have to admit, I’ve never been to.  Is that possible?  I have lived here for….uhhh…..probably around 15 years now and somehow I’ve never made it to Frye Cove Park.  I guess it’s possible.  It’s a bit out of the way.

Anyways, I took the camera (of course) and walked a trail along a trail that meandered along the shore.  There wasn’t as much beach as I was expecting, but the tide was just turning, so it probably looks totally different at low tide.  It was a nice walk that allowed me to continue to practice my manual photography skills.  Sometimes the whole process is a bit of a head-scratcher.  I think that things, as a whole, land higher on the meter than I want to put them.  And, to be honest, I often find myself quite surprised to find that I’ve taken some decent pictures once I’m home out of the bright light and have imported them to Lightroom.  I’d like to rack it up to skill…but I think there’s a certain amount of dumb luck.

One aspect of photography that I have abandoned, for now, is white balance.  The first three weeks of the online photography class I recently took focused on the basics:  aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.  On week four we dipped into the wild world of white balance.  I got lost a bit.  And, when I tried to experiment with it I found that I, at this point, have a hard time differentiating between too warm/too cool and overexposed/underexposed.  So, for the most part I have returned to auto white balance for now.  I’ll get there.

I digress.

After visiting the park the husband and I headed down to a local wine store for a little wine tasting.  It was nice sitting outside on a semi-warm fall day, sipping wine and chatting.  We weren’t compelled to buy anything that we tasted, but we did stock up on some old favorites.  I get a little nervous if there are empty slots in the wine rack.  I mean, there could be an earthquake and I might not be able to get to town!

The evening involved watching the Sounders on television (well, he watched, I wrote this blog).  We’re not very exciting people.  We like to stay home.  And eat our own homemade food.  By-the-by…the ribs were amazing.  Why go out for sub-standard fatty bbq when you have a Traeger at home?  Smoky, fall-off-the-bone tender.  Yum.  Double yum.  Pat myself on the back yum.

And that was Saturday.