Fresh Market Opens In Pensacola
People have been excited ever since the announcement was made that Fresh Markets was opening a store in Pensacola. Although it is one of the smaller Fresh Markets, if there is anything carried by Fresh Market that is not in Pensacola, and you want it, they can bring it in for you. 🙂
It’s a wonderful shopping experience. Think about it – we live like kings, better than the nobility of medieval Europe. We have indoor plumbing (if you’ve ever had to use an outhouse in a cold country like Alaska, you will have a greater appreciation for indoor plumbing all your life), we have hot water, we have heat and air conditioning, we have more than enough clothing for any season. We live so high on the hog as to be wasteful and oblivious to our own wastefulness. Oops, I digress.
We have access to abundant fresh food. Even without Fresh Market, we have markets with clean, fresh vegetables, fresh sanitary meats and poultry, and goods in – and out – of season.
What is the height of luxury? Service. Beautiful displays. People who know their product and talk about it lovingly. It’s kind of like Disney does groceries; it’s a lot of fantasy, and probably a level of goods that goes beyond need into just-a-little-over-the-top, but isn’t it the nature of being a human to be looking for something novel and just a little better than the product you loved last week?
Fresh Market is a little like the Food Market at Herrod’s or Selfridges in London, all these little boutique-y spaces, with people who seem to love what they are doing and are happy to be of service. Publix does it well; Fresh Market takes it to a whole new level.
The Flower Market:
Gift Baskets:
Fresh Veg Displays (artichokes!)
What catches the eyes:
There is a very large section dedicated to quick foods – sandwiches made to order, prepared soups, salads, pizzas, cheeses, cold cuts, and deli items with lots of salads. We particularly loved the seafood display, and AdventureMan was mesmerized by the dessert selections.
All in all, Fresh Market makes grocery shopping less of a chore and more of a little vacation. For the best experience, get there on a week-day, or at opening – 0900 – on the week-end, so you don’t have to fight for parking in a crowded parking lot shared with the new Marshall’s, Ulta, Stein Mart, etc.
Sun Setting Over the Bayou
I love winter. I love the cool temperatures; I feel so much more energetic. I get things done.
I’m in my office, and I can smell tomatoes roasting downstairs; AdventureMan has found a new recipe for a Shrimp and Avocado Soup. He is using freshly picked tomatoes given us by our daughter-in-law’s Dad, so fresh, so tasty, and the roasting is intensifying the flavors. He is happy; he has found passion in cooking up new tastes; one night a week he does dinner and from time to time when he is inspired he also cooks up dinners to share with our son and his family.
I’ve gone off duty. I’ve been working all day, following my passion, listening to NPR and a guest talking about happiness. Happiness, she says, is enjoying the process, living in the right now. High points like Christmas and weddings are but a moment; the true secret of happiness is learning to appreciate the daily life.
For me, the right now is gathering colors. I love colors, and I can see minute differences in shades and colorings, so this is precise and demanding work, gathering the colors, sorting them so once I start using them I can find them quickly. This is just a fraction of the colors I will be using; the colors of the sea:
I have a good collection, but never enough. This time I especially need a good selection of the lighter shallow-water colors:
At this time of the year, I can see the bayou through gaps in the trees that have lost their leaves. The sun is setting; sparkling in through our windows, and it’s the most light we’ve had all day. Even so, the light is fading fast, and I can no longer reliably sort one shade too close to another. Time to go “off duty.” I’ve saved the newspaper as my reward for working hard all day. Time to enjoy the setting sun, sparkling off the glimpse of bayou.
Second Day of the New Year
The first day of our New Year was a lot of fun – we had little Q overnight, so after breakfast he and I walked to a near by park while AdventureMan cooked up a big pot of Turkey Gumbo, accompanied by a salad that had apples and cranberries and a fabulous Roquefort dressing, our son and his wife came for lunch and picked up their son, and then we had a free afternoon. I started a new quilt, a complicated quilt, one that takes a lot of planning and a lot of cutting before I can even stitch the very first piece.
Then last night we watched District 9, a movie we had seen before. I always find it troubling, and I know I shouldn’t watch a movie like that which stirs me up, before I go to bed.
So today is the first normal day of the new year, I hit the pool for aqua aerobics and then I come home to do some more cutting for the quilt. I’ve been cutting all day. I still have more cutting to do. Aarrgh.
The good news is – it is my choice. I want to do more quilts, I want to make time. I want to do all the small work that goes into a truly grand quilt. It’s just tedious when you are in the middle of the preparation stages, and the light today is not bright, it is dark.
Maybe better light tomorrow. I am working with wonderful colors; colors of the desert and colors of the Arabian Gulf. 🙂
Happy New Year, Kuwait and Qatar!
It’s just about time! Happy New Year to all our friends in Kuwait and Qatar!
May God bless you and your families abundantly in the coming year 🙂
Mutual Hallucination
“Let’s stop at that quilt shop up the road here!” AdventureMan exclaimed, sounding a lot more enthusiastic than I suspected he felt.
“I don’t know,” I reply, “it looked a little junky. I’m not sure it was even open.”
“It IS open!” he was delighted as we approached.
We drove in, and peered through the windows. It didn’t look like a quilt shop. It looked like a rickety tickety oyster bar of some kind, the kind of place we might love, if we were hungry, but not a quilt shop at all.
We looked again at the sign:
We had both read it as “Quilts Too” but it was something else entirely. I guess we saw what we expected to see.
Wakulla Springs Lodge: Attitude Matters
AdventureMan and I just had a grand adventure, a trip to Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, where we stayed at the Wakulla Springs Lodge for a couple nights.
I think we mentioned we lived in Florida before, a while back, at which time we came to dislike the commercial Florida intensely – think DisneyWorld and Orlando and schlock-filled shops with T-shirts “3 for $10!” It’s not that I dislike Disney, I grew up with Disney, and Bambi and Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. They’re a lot of fun.
But have you been to DisneyWorld recently? Have you paid those prices? And if you want to park there, or stay there, or eat there – it is horrendous! Advertised as family friendly, but a death-knell on a family budget.
There is so much MORE to Florida, some wonderful places. Wakulla Springs is one of our favorites, and not far from another favorite, Appalachicola, home of world famous oysters, fresh out of the Gulf (Gulf of Mexico, :-), for my other Gulf friends) We used to stay at Wakulla Springs while we were living in Kuwait and Qatar, and traveling to the USA to catch some time with our son, at FSU in Tallahassee.
After our drive down, we show up at the counter . . . and the receptionist barely looks at us. She doesn’t get up. She doesn’t have a name tag on; she is wearing a FAMU sweatsuit. We give our names, and she doesn’t say anything to us, just dials a number and talks to someone and then, finally, looks at us and says “we don’t have anything ready. Check-in isn’t until 3:00 o’clock.”
Welcome to Wakulla Springs Lodge. I was speechless. I couldn’t imagine how someone could be so rude! So unwelcoming! We are guests, here to spend our money, and this is how our time in Wakulla begins?
It’s all about attitude. I could feel my temper rising. On the other hand, what good would it do to get angry? Am I going to make a difference in how this young woman welcomes her customer, or am I going to make her day worse than it already is? Sometimes it’s just poor training. Sometimes someone is just having a bad day. Sometimes it’s disgust with corporate management, and this may have been a little of all of the above.
We decided to go to lunch, and the doors closed just as we got there. Wakulla Springs is on a different time zone, and the restaurant is closed!
We were so happy to be going, and now we are having second thoughts. We decide we had better go find something to eat – have you noticed it is easier to be down or angry when you are hungry? Really, really hungry? 😉 We drove to the crossroads that had a few eating places, about half of them closed. There was one I thought “oh please, please, don’t let that be the only one open” and encouraged AdventureMan to drive on, just a little further.
What we discovered will be the next entry 🙂
This is the Wakulla Lodge fireplace:
Edward Ball brought in artisans from Italy to paint the beamed ceiling in the lobby; it is truly lovely:
Later, I sat in the lobby with a cup of coffee, waiting for my boat trip, and a wedding party came in to rehearse for the big day. The mother of the groom had to walk away, trying to staunch the tears, as the pianist practiced “Here Comes the Bride.” I had to cry a little along with her; I LOVE weddings 🙂
The lobby is spacious and light and beautiful. There is a gift shop and ice cream bar at one end of the lobby, and a restaurant at the other end:
These boat trips last about an hour and tell you a lot about the history and wildlife of Wakulla Springs. They are a lot of fun:
The first night, we had a truly indifferent meal in the Wakulla Lodge Restaurant, made bearable by the cheerful and professional waitress, Brittany, who had to tell us that they were totally out of their famous navy bean soup, and also out of the salad we wanted to order.
“We’ve been inundated!” she cried. “The lunch crowd wiped us out!” She was so cheerfully honest we couldn’t help but be cheerful right back. That’s the magic in good customer service.
While the meal was mediocre, Brittany sparkled as she served, and turned what might have been a real downer into just a less-than-memorable meal, we’ve had a few of those now and then, no big deal. With a lesser waitress, it might have been horrible.
All in all, customer service was notable in its imbalance at Wakulla Springs Lodge. Brittany, in the Dining Room, was a star. JJ, a part-timer at the desk, was another star. Our bathroom floor in our room was not clean, but the staff was gracious and eager to please. The ice-cream bar attendant was overworked and grouchy. (Honestly! How can you serve ice cream and be a grouch???)
There is so much potential at Wakulla Springs Lodge. They have this fabulous location, a huge spring where water pumps out thousands of gallons per day, where manatees and wildlife congregate, where movies have been filmed, where serious birders come to “twitch” (check off birds seen), with these fun boat trips, natural attractions, lovely sized rooms, and it just needs some polish to be a seriously first-class destination.
Qatar National Day 2012
Congratulations to all our Qatari friends and greetings on your National Day, December 18, 2012. One of my new favorite sources of information out of Doha, the Doha News, has published a great article, Everything You Need to Know About Qatar’s National Day 2012, which you can access by clicking on the blue type.
Sorry for laughing, but this year they have forbidden people to decorate their cars and some of the displays common on National Day. Good luck with that!
National Day in Qatar might be a lot of fun, if it weren’t for the crowds, and the grid-locked streets. If you want to watch the fireworks – and they are truly fabulous, the Amir and his supporters spare no expense, it is truly bread and circus time in Qatar – you just have to grit your teeth and buy into getting through all the traffic to a viewing site.
We found a great – and relatively remote – site from which to watch, us and our 300 closest Qatari friends, over at the Marriott marina; it was a great view, and only maybe two hours trying to get home afterwards, LOL, fighting our way through the party-SUVs with their foam sprays and their decor, and young Qatari males dancing on the top of the SUVs, yes, they did, I am not kidding.
Why Am I Never in the Atlanta Airport When This Happens?
I fly through Atlanta all the time. I NEVER get to see anything fun like this!
Christmas Cookie Prep – Done!
There was a time when I worked AND I was a mother, and I was a wife (still am) and I had other roles, all of which seemed to require at least a plate of cookies at every occasion, and often some kind of hors d’oeuvres as well. There was only one answer – be prepared! Like a good girl scout, I developed a strategy – do one or two cookies every day for about a week, then store them in storage containers and dig them out when you need them. The good thing is, you can buy these containers and pull them out once a year for a month for many, many years.
One of my earliest memories of Christmas cookies are of my mother and her best friend from university getting together once a year and making rosettes. I made my first rosettes when I graduated from college, sitting over pan on a stove burner, turning it up and then down, trying to get it to hold the perfect temperature, which it never did. Sometime around the 80’s there was a great fad for Fry Babies and Fry Daddies, and the Fry Daddy is just the perfect size for making rosettes, holding the perfect temperature.
This year, I did a hands-on seminar for a family group who wanted to learn how to make these. I am not sure it was a huge success. Everyone succeeded, but one said “I have learned how to appreciate YOU making them in the years to come.” A couple parodied my teaching technique (I am not such a great teacher) and I just figured it means they no longer have to be polite to me; I really am family, that’s what sisters do.
So I made them this week for my friend who hosts a big party every year for the ballet performers. I think of them as ballerina cookies, light as air, mostly made of air – wrapped in fat and sugar:
Rosettes – DONE.
Meringues, too, have that light-as-air feeling, and I am hoping the weather will stay crisp enough that they will not get chewy:
Still light, and melt-in-your-mouth, are the Russian Teacakes, snowy in powdered sugar:
Last, but necessary for color, are the stalwart sugar cookies, time-consuming and fiddly, but so good and so colorful:
Cookie prep – DONE!
Christmas House Prep . . . Done!
No, no, not the CELEBRATION of Christmas . . . That’s just beginning. But the craziness of getting ready for Christmas, after which you can sit back and enjoy some time for reflection.
A lot of the pain is self-inflicted. Before I even went to Seattle, I got out the garland and threaded it up the stairs. Found some glittering stars, and worked it so they would twirl and send twinkles of light throughout the entry. I sighed and puffed up and down the stairs . . . putting on lights is hard work, especially if, like me, you like LOTS of lights, it is hard work . . . but so, so worth it in the end. We had a little Christmas lighting up the house!
Stairway: DONE!
Years and years ago, like thirty years ago, I took a lot of time embroidering this Christmas wreath, so up it goes, every year: DONE
Life was on the fast track when I got back from Seattle, so I did a little bit every day, like “on the first day of Christmas prep, I hung the reindeer . . . ”
Then, it’s counter-intuitive, but I needed to get the outside lights up. Like how can it be Christmas if you don’t share? I’m annoyed that the icicle lights don’t match the tree lights; I’ll have to deal with that . . . next year 🙂
Done!
Now, to drag out all the boxes for the Christmas tree inside, and oh, what an adventure, always, to find forgotten treasures and to remember where we got the ornaments. I find all the pieces of the tree and set it up. I hate using an artificial tree, but the real trees get SO dry, especially when Pensacola experiences an unseasonal warm spell. It’s like you end up with large branches empty of needles, and you find needles strewn on our carpets for months to come.
Tree: done!
We saved a few ornaments for Q to “help” and three was just the right number, four was one too many, LOL!
The camel my friend in Doha made me – a Wise Man’s camel, following the great star, laden with gifts for the new baby:
Brass Christmas ornaments from the Women’s Cooperative in Damascus, along with a manger scene from Germany, and a cross – another cross – from Kuwait. Yes, yes, if you knew where to look, there were Christmas ornaments all over Qatar and Kuwait:
An Italian Creche and a tiny French Santon Creche, jumbled with collected camels and wise men . . . who says there can be only three wise men? I like LOTS of wise men come to greet the new baby Jesus 🙂
A Nurnberg angel from our first year of marriage and a Damascus tablecloth from our last trip to Damascus:
Rosenthal angels; I think I might have had these even before I married AdventureMan:
Have to have a nutcracker – or two, or three . . .
Some antique German glass ornaments, too fragile to be hung on the tree:
A total mishmash of all the places we have been, so much fun. Hard work, yes, pulling it all out every year, but every year we grin when we see our old friends and think of all the good times we have had in so many different countries!
Welcome, Jesus! Welcome, all who celebrate the season of your birth!
Done!
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