Where's the Beef Bourguignon?

Nothing fosters introspection quite like being asked to write an article for publication that includes tidbits of one's own life. That happened this week, and although it's really no biggie, I thought I'd like to wrap things up in a small 3-to-4 paragraph package. It occurred to me that it wasn't going to be too difficult to do that. Right now, I'm living the most narrow, regimented life of my entire existence. Four days a week I feel completely committed to Afton Station, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. On the other three days I have dialysis until about noon, and that covers my most energetic and hopeful hours of the day. (I've always said that, for me, it's all downhill after 12-noon!) Taking a vacation -- I mean a real vacation -- is too much of a hassle these days, with scheduling remote dialysis, etc. So, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are what's left of my "free" time. One of those days needs to be set aside for laundry, cleaning, errands, etc. That leaves two afternoons for playing. And so I'm supposed to expound upon my exciting life? What exciting life? I don't think so!

My remedy for the inability to get very far into anything exciting is to take short close-to-home trips where I can see something new and different and observe the rest of the world, if just for a couple of hours. That was my plan for today, a trip to the Tall Grass Prairie, but it never materialized. The weather wasn't cooperating. When I got out of dialysis, the skies were black and it was drizzling, the remains of an overnight thunderstorm. Although I was pretty sure it would clear up later in the day, I made the decision to stay home, and further decided to use part of the day making Boeuf Bourguignon from Julia Child's recipe. And so I did. It's in the oven now, smellin' mighty tasty, and I'll serve it on Friday night to Ron if he feels like coming over. It's one of those dishes that gets better over the course of a couple of days "resting". Being a Julia recipe, it was kind of labor intensive, as was her Onion Soup that I made last week. I even flamed the cognac without singeing my eyebrows or arm hairs! By the way, it's a perfectly nice day outside now. Oh well....

Photo du jour:

You may remember that I wrote an early blog post about the Pryor Creek Bridge in Chelsea, but yesterday I had to run past it again and take another picture for the article I'm writing, and it looked kind of haunted in the early morning fog. Here is is. To refresh your memory, the truss bridge was constructed in 1926 and was on an early alignment of Route 66.