By the way, that apple?? Still sits whole looking pretty as a picture!!

Friday morning. We slept in until about 8:30... a luxury for both of us (although 8:30 here is 5:30 Oregon time!) and after having some coffee, browsing our e-mails and waiting for it to warm up outside (kind of a gray day), we headed downstairs and outside. Bob (our "landlord") was downstairs doing some work on the downstairs of the jail.....apparently it is being converted into the administrative office for his wife's veterinary business. His wife's holistic veterinary practice, that its. Like she does animal acupuncture and treats them with Chinese herbs. Hmmmm..... Anyway, we were in search of a grocery store this morning, so Bob offered to give us a quick tour of the town in his ice-cream cone topped golf cart, the main part of town being only a block away and covering about a 5 square block area. We were also in search of a cup of coffee and breakfast and after our tour, (by now it was about 10:30) we were quite hungry and decided that we wanted to have brunch at the funky restaurant that I mentioned in yesterday's post, but they didn't open until 11 am. So we settled into one of the town's two coffee shops and lingered over cups of coffee until 11 and which point we moseyed down to The Winds Cafe. This place is everything that I love to find in a restaurant. It's quirky. There is art by a local artist hung throughout and the smells emanating from the kitchen are mouth-watering. One of us ordered the squash and pumpkin lasagna and the other ordered the Field of Sunflowers (not really descriptive of the dish). The lasagna is described this way in the menu: "roasted, mashed squashes layered with fresh sheets of pasta and cheese and baked, then drizzled with roasted shallot cream and fresh sage oil." (they should have just said a slice of heaven). The Field of Sunflowers is described thus: ".....a big bowl of rustic beans stewed with white wine, garlic, dark leafy cooking greens and Herbes de Provence (a French herb mixture), served with hot rice, a dollop of goat cheese and a spoonful of tapenade." Both were incredibly tasty and we couldn't eat it all, so we boxed it up to take home to snack on later. After this wonderful meal, we decided to check out the two bookstores in town. The first one, Sam & Eddie's Open books, was a little too New-agey for my taste. Books on Wicca, Gay and Lesbian relationships, reading Tarot cards, that kind of stuff. We didn't stay in that one too long. We then moved on to Dark Star Books, which has a "scary" name and we thought it would be the new-agey store turned out to be a much more normal used book store. It had it's own little quirks, however. The first being that I believe that they had outgrown their space. What would lead one to believe that? The fact that toward the rear of the store, there were books lining the floors in front of the shelves with cards pushed in here and there describing what category this line of books belonged to. The other quirky thing I noticed was that there books were shelved and categorized in this manner: Science Fiction and Fantasy; by Men. What? Not only by subject matter, but subdivided one step further, by gender of author. Upon asking, we were told later, that some people collect that way, so the owner decided to arrange the store in that manner. Kathi and I, who are both serious book people and have visited countless bookstores between us have never heard or seen such a thing. After browsing the books for a while, we were offered the opportunity to participate in the stores' "Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans" contest. This involved choosing a "bean" out of the bowl, and consuming it, then trying to guess the flavor. Now, I don't how much you all know about Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans (this is what jelly beans are called in the Harry Potter book series), but they include flavors like vomit, boogers, grass, etc.... Gross, I know, but there it is. So participating in this contest was a bit of a risk, but Kathi and I were both game. Kathi went first and after a few minutes of rolling that bean around in her mouth decided that hers was apple. She was close, it was pear. I chose a yellow bean and it took me a few minutes to determine, correctly, that mine was banana. It was a good thing I got that one instead of Kathi, because she abhors bananas and would have been likely to spit that one out!!

We finally made it to the grocery store and upon exiting and realizing that it was pretty darn cold outside, we decided to just walk back to jail and hang out there for a while. We made vague plans to go out later and listen to live music, but once we were settled in and warm and cozy in our "cell" we ended up staying in, doing a little scrapbooking, listening to music and watching some TV....both of us being somewhat addicted to crime shows, CSI:Miami in particular, because Horatio Caine is Kathi's boyfriend :-)

Oh, that apple??? Still sitting in it's entirety on top of the microwave.