At home

thinmints, thank you for the thoughtful and well-crafted post.

Hitting the bars on a regular basis sounded good to me too when I was single and in my early 20s. At that age, I definitely did not care about birds, flowers, gardening, and cooking. Fast forward 10, 15, or 20 years, and tastes change. I need a backyard. Nothing large.

Our backyard is tiny, but my wife and I enjoy the flowers, the garden produce, the birds at our feeders, and just general relaxing in our backyard. Some evenings, we start a fire in the fire cage, listen to tunes over the iPhone, and chill with a gin and tonic.

I love our Oak Openings native plants, and our hostas do well with all the shade that we have from the numerous oak trees.

Our tall coreopsis plants have done extremely well this year. Many stalks are at least seven feet tall with dozens more at least six feet tall. Currently, the coreopsis herd is a fireworks explosion of blooms.

Monarch and Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies visit our flowers, along with the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. I've observed some amazing bird sightings in our yard and at our feeders over the years.

Our garden, finally, we picked some tomatoes this evening. We have a lot of green tomatoes. I guess the cool summer has slowed things a bit. But we've been harvesting egg plant, cucumbers, peppers, and green beans from our garden.

See, as you get older, eating fresh produce from the backyard garden is a better experience than visiting a bar.

In my 20s, I would have never thought that I would one day take baking classes and enjoy making my own naturally-leavened sourdough bread and Neapolitan-style pizza from scratch.

Always Be Learning. Or as the Tool song Lateralus states, "Spiral out. Keep going."

6th_floor: "Possibly the deadest Mon-Thursday night I've ever witnessed downtown."

You should stopover here then. We always have wine and gin on hand. After hacking code, I relax by drinking booze while I knit. I wonder how many scarves I need.

Yep, I learned to knit this year. I took classes. I even have a Ravelry.com account. But I'm not a fan of purling. I like Perl the programming language, but not purl the stitch. I enjoy visiting the Yarn Cravin in Perrysburg. From what I have observed thus far, knitting is a chick-dominated activity, so that's something for the single guys to keep in mind.

Another crazy night here in West Toledo this evening. My wife and I bought milk at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, and now we're making ricotta cheese and yogurt. Tonight's "dinner" will include the ricotta, spelt crackers, and tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden. And, of course, wine.

Lately, I've been using our homemade ricotta on our homemade pizza. Another amazing snack is the homemade ricotta cheese spread on toasted homemade bread, topped with our homemade cranberry butter from last fall. It could be a cure for depression.

Right now, we're waiting for the cheese to curdle. My wife has Blackfoot playing over Spotify on her docked iPhone speakers, and the wine is flowing. Only one phrase can describe this:

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