Sylvia's Scenario

My birthday this year was one of my most fun yet.  It was simple but quite effective as I delivered on my vow to do a cold plunge in Puget Sound.   I'm pretty sure I have not been swimming in Puget Sound since I was a teenager.  The reason is because it is so freakin' cold!  Notice how we are the only ones in the water...the only ones crazy enough, I should say.   It actually was not that bad.  On this day, it was 59 degrees so it wasn't so cold that you turned numb.  I remember turning numb when swimming in Puget Sound in the summer.  But, hey!  In this day and age of global warming, I do believe Puget Sound is getting warmer because we were all able to plunge in at least three times.  And each time it felt better and better.  In between plunges, we recuperated in a mobile sauana by  Suana Moon  in a balmy 200 degrees.   We've seen the mobile sauna down at Alki beach before and I knew the first time I saw it that I w...

I haven't done a New Year's Resolution in a couple of years but I think I have one this year.  I've been pondering what makes for a festive holiday season with lots of holiday spirit and what makes for a stressful holiday season.  Everyone wants a low stress holiday season with lots of fun times and memorable moments, of course, and I feel fortunate that that’s how mine has been.  For me, I know the most obvious reason is because we haven't traveled anywhere.  It’s been really nice staying home to relax and enjoy the holidays.  Our last trip was in September for Bruce's birthday but we haven't gone anywhere since.  I get in a good routine when I’m home and I have a nice, low stress frame of mind.  My diet is more healthy and I exercise regularly.  I'm not going to say that my New Year's Resolution is to not travel, however.  There's more to it than that.  We also had friends and family come over for dinner parties more than usual so the...

We picked twelve cups of blackberries the other day while we had visitors here and turned it into blackberry coffee cake.  This recipe used 3-1/2 cups of blackberries so I also made two loaves of  blackberry bread   and the most popular  blackberry cobbler  that got eaten so fast I never got a photo of it.  And I still have blackberries leftover.  All these recipes are from a very old cookbook of mine called Wild & Free Blackberries that I've had since around the mid-1990's.    And this is definitely the time of year that this little cookbook is sitting out on my kitchen counter.  We picked them at our local golf course because Bruce sees how plentiful they are when he plays golf and he has been eager to get us out there to pick and we finally did. Our visitors have returned home now but they had three children who LOVED picking blackberries and also LOVED eating them.  They were children of Bruce's nephew who was here with his ...