Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...

Paradise ponders: just another nice day edition...  We did lots of running around today: to Home Depot for parts (they had everything I was looking for), to the dry cleaners to pick up our quilt we had cleaned, to the barber shop for me to lose about 3" of hair (where I still have any), to the grocery store for turkey-and-biscuit fixings, to the post office, and then to Valley View Granite where they've been storing part of a slab we bought three years ago to make our bathroom vanity.  Every single stop involved an enjoyable interaction with one or more people, which is one of the joys of living here – so many gosh darned nice people, wherever you may go.

We've long had plans to use that leftover granite slab – beautiful rock that Debbie located while we were building our new bathroom in 2014.  We had to get it shipped from San Diego to Tremonton, where Valley View granite is, and then they worked with us to get us exactly what we were looking for.  They did spectacularly good work; that vanity top is the centerpiece of our very pretty bathroom.  But it only used about 1/3 of the slab we bought – the prettiest 1/3, but the remaining 2/3s was still beautiful rock.

So today we drove down there to claim our slab remainder, and to start the process of fabricating shelves from it.  Those shelves are going to go in my office, where I'm in desperate need of storage space.  They'll make gorgeous shelves!  I'm going to make wooden corbels from 4x6 sections to hold them up; it should be an attractive combination of materials.

While we were in Tremonton, we had ourselves a little lunch, at a restaurant we've never been to before: The Grille.  We both had the smoked pulled pork sandwiches.  Debbie got hers with fries, I got baked beans.  The sandwich came with a very fresh cole slaw, the sauce the perfect blend of sweet and acid.  For me the highlight of the meal was an unlikely one: the baked beans.  These are obviously homemade, with lots of meat (cubes of ham, pieces of bacon, and bits of beef) and veggies (mostly onions and green peppers).  The sauce had a smoky barbecue flavor.  I could easily have made a meal of a big serving of those beans!  But the smoked pulled pork was also excellent, as was the bun it was served in (homemade, we think).  The sandwich came with a selection of six different sauces to put on it; I liked the plain barbecue, and Debbie liked the “barbecue ranch”  – a 50/50 mix of barbecue sauce and ranch salad dressing.  We were both very happy with that meal, and I strongly suspect we'll be back there again when something takes us to Tremonton...

When we got home this afternoon, I installed two shelves that I purchased from an Etsy shop.  These arrived yesterday, and I got them up in about an hour, right over my desk.  They're made from reclaimed wood – barn rafters, in this case.  They came with a matching steel invisible mount, which was easy as pie to put up.  The biggest challenge was making them level. :)  I'm very glad to have even this little bit of storage – when you have none at all, a couple of square feet feels rather luxurious!