First Aniversary

One year ago today I started this blog. Wow, a year has passed. I have written 355 posts over the past year. That is almost one each day. Lots of words and pictures. We'll see if I can keep it up and not run out of things to write about this next year.

Lately I haven't had much to write about as I haven't been doing much other than watching lots of movies and riding my brother's bicycle. I've seen more movies than I can remember, and what I remember are blurring together.

I have seen a number of Jean Harlow movies from the 1930s and have come to be impressed by her movies. I had her pegged as a glamor girl and sex symbol and not an actress, but have come to find she is pretty good, and pretty funny.

The romantic comedies from the 1930s are far better than most of today's romantic comedies. Maybe that is due to the passage of time and style of comedy; maybe it is because the 1930s women seem to be strong, witty, and equal to strong leading men in their own way, while many of today's romantic comedy women seem to be self centered and neurotic and their leading men are wimpy and not the leading ladies equals.

I also mentioned bicycling. After 10 days the middle of January of not riding (due to the time it took to rid the virus from my brother's computer and the cold snowy weather) I have gotten back on the bicycle the past week. I need some physical activity to counter the time watching movies and reading. I rode 111 miles this past week - not back for the third week of January in North Dakota! But then the weather here has been nice as it has been sunny and cloudless most of the time and relatively warm with high temperatures in the 20s F each day.

Tonight I visited my friend Rod for supper and to help him bottle his raspberry wine. Between football games Rod's wife, Barb, made a delicious supper. Barb is a big football fan while Rod and I don't care to waste time watching football. Rod made bread for our meal. Also very good. As I am a more adventurous eater than his family, Rod made a Thai peanut sauce for the two of us to go with the chicken his wife had cooked. Again, very good.

With the meal Rod served wine from a local Minot winery, the Pointe of View Winery. This winery was North Dakota's first winery. (There are more wineries in North Dakota now). According to the wine's label, North Dakota was the last U.S. state to have a winery.

Rod served two wines from the winery, a mead (honey wine) and a Cherry wine. Both were good, though sweet and with a slight syrupy feel to the liquid, especially the mead. These are not wines one overindulges on.

Then it was on to filling the bottles with the Raspberry wine Rod had made. After we taste tested the wine, Rod readied the wine while I rinsed the bottles with a sulfate solution to act (I believe) as a stabilizer and preservative. Then after Rod filled each bottle I corked them. We filled over 25 bottles of wine.

For helping I got several bottles of the wine along with a bottle of apple wine Rod had made earlier this Fall.

Rod has three more batches of wine brewing: cherry, blueberry, and banana. When Rod takes up a hobby he goes all out.

After we finished the wine making Rod showed me recent photos he had taken. Another of his recent hobbies has been bird watching and taking photos of the birds. With his camera's telephoto lens he has gotten quite a number of interesting bird photos. I never realized the variety of birds here in this area.

Frost had started to form on the pickup's windows by the time I drove home. The frost was starbusts and not solid so I didn't have to search for my brother's ice scrapper to clear the window before driving. Besides the distance was short. Still I had to be careful as I found the overhead street lights would light up the frost as I passed underneath them.