Trees, martinis and Sally

Dragon Mood? -- waking up, catching up

Thursday morning, just past six a.m., I'm sitting here with my steaming cup of hot coffee, waking up, enjoying these few, quiet minutes to myself.

This past weekend, Sally was 'down state', visiting us, hanging out with S on another solo week of vacation ('sigh' -- one of the few negatives of my new job -- no time for vacation). S was busy working with Mike, the Tree Guy, selecting and placing half a forest of trees in our backyard. But mostly, S was working her tail off, cutting down many, many small, under-canopy deciduous trees (mostly chokecherry), bucking or sawing them into pieces, stacking them and chipping up the rest of the small limbs and foliage. Loads of work!

Sally seemed pretty content to hang out at the house. She and S met with Mark on Thursday evening for dinner, Matt and Sarah and kids on Friday evening (along with Tim and Nicki too). Saturday afternoon, we all stopped our respective activities and watched the Spartans give the Wisconsin Badgers a well-deserved spanking, beating them 34-24. Oh yeah! Next week, it's Michigan and I hope the Spartans are on the delivery end and not the receiving end of a spanking.

Saturday evening, we had a warm, tasty meal of pot roast, potatoes, carrots, onions and baby bella mushrooms. Mmm-mm good! Then we had a rare dessert, a pineapple-orange flavored cake that Sally had brought with her. It was moist and delicious with some (more) hot coffee.

After cleaning up the kitchen, we began playing three-handed euchre. If memory serves me right, I won the first game handily. The cards were definitely coming my way. To celebrate my victory, I announced I felt like having a dirty martini. I asked Sally if she would like a Bloody Mary and she said no, she'd enjoy a martini too. So I got to practice my newbie martini-making skills not once, but three times that evening. Sally tipped me off to use cracked ice rather than cubes for a better chilled martini. Wow, what a difference! And, I can see why Josh and Leah are so discerning about the olives they use in their martinis. Olives can make or break a decent tasting martini. Ours were not the freshest, but they did the job. Next time, I'll make sure to have fresh and probably better quality olives on hand.

And from my martini-making, I learned that Sally used to be a bartender at the Metro Bowl in Lansing, way back, 'in the day'. She had applied for a bookkeeping job there and ended up a bartender instead.

Obviously, the more liquor we drank, the more we talked and shared. And you understand, it's not like Sally and I haven't hung out before or that we haven't done our fair share of drinking together. But somehow, this evening was different. There was more the quality of two women letting down their hair, sharing life experiences. S was more bystander than participant. This is her mom, of course, and she chose to listen more than talk. The stories just got better and better.