this little life of mine

Last Friday was the Quarterly Atascadero Art and Wine Tour downtown Atascadero. My mom and I went, and had a really good time! The weather was fantastic, and it stayed light until almost 8:00 PM. There were actually quite a few people there (I saw about 25 - 30 people, but I haven't seen an official count yet), and there were a few new wineries as well. Unfortunately I didn't take any notes, so I'll just have to try to remember what we tasted.

I don't recall if August Ridge Vineyards has been on the Tour before. They're located out towards The Yellow Rose Inn where my Grandpa stayed for a time. Mom and I kept saying we should stop there when we'd go out to visit him, but we never got around to it, and now there's no reason to go out that way, so we probably never will. So, it was nice to be able to try one of their wines. I want to say it was a Viognier. Whatever it was, it was delicious! 

One of the new shops to open up downtown is Maui Teeth Whitening. They didn't have a winery, but did have an artist, Daniel Hernandez, who made this lovley, beachy sidewalk chalk drawing.

Pomar Junction is one of our favourite wineries! Sadly they didn't have their Picnic Chardonnay this time, which we love, so we tried something else. I believe it was their Viognier and we loved it as well.

There was an artist set up by the Pomar Junction table with what looked like watercolour prints and postcards, as well as a table of small BBQ chicken sliders, which were delicious! I'm not sure who the chef or restaurant was who made them, though.

Mondo is a new-to-us winery which was set up in the 805 Boardshop along with a woodworking artist named Janine Stone, who had some really cool stuff! Check out her Etsy shop: If You Give a Girl a Saw.

Stellar Vapes had Ruby Cellars pouring, again. I can't find a link to that winery, though, but I believe I tried a really good Zinfandel and my mom had either a Sav Blanc or Chardonnay, because she's not really a fan of reds.  

Indigene Cellars was pouring at the newly redecorated EmPOURium. They've got a bank of wines for sale, as well as a tasting counter in the back, and several tables where customers can sit and sip. The other section had wine-themed gifts and trinkets as well as a cooler with cheeses and meats.

Burbank Ranch was pouring at Arlyne's Flowers and Gifts, and I think it was the Grenache Blanc we tried. It was delicious, and will be one I keep an eye out to purchase! 

Lone Madrone was set up in a brand new clothing store called Farron Elizabeth   It was an aesthetically fantastic store - minimalistic and very much like a boutique store or art gallery you'd see in a big city, or even a small one like San Luis. Her stuff appeared to be all for teeny tiny people, though, but I did see a couple gorgeous scarves I might go back for. As for the wine, Lone Madrone is one of our favourites, so naturally we loved our tasting (whatever it was)!

Another new-to-us winery, Felten Cellars, was set up in Violette's Wings and Gifty Things, and their selection was quite good, too!

J&J Cellars seems familiar, so I believe they've participated in this event before. I believe I tried their Autumn Flight Barbara red wine and really liked it. (Of course, by this time we've pretty much hit every winery, so I would probably like ANYthing!)

I don't know who this guy is who was singing outside Eden's Attic, but he was pretty good. We sat and listened to him for a few moments before going inside. Hidden Oaks was supposed to be there, but apparently they didn't make it. Bummer, because we always like their wine!

Finally, we stopped into the little antique store next door, and discovered an olive oil tasting taking place with the Legacy Olive Company. I tried a Chipotle which was yummy and had just a little kick at the end, then tried the Garlic infused, and loved that one so much I bought a small bottle! I can't wait to cook something with it!

And, my TGIF/Vino Tasting Outfit of the Day: Floral printed jeans by Lane Bryant, back lace top and statement necklace by Torrid, and one of the newly purchased wine glass holders mom and I just bought Friday night at a booth set up in 805 Vintage and Thrift (a newly opened thrift shop which appeared to have a "For Lease" sign in the window! I swear they just opened a couple weeks ago! Hopefully they just haven't taken the sign down, yet!). I believe her name was Traci Decastro (because I have her business card and don't know why else I would've picked it up), but I don't see anything up at her Etsy shop right now, so don't quote me on that.

So, anyway, it was a super fun evening, and I'm looking forward to the next Art and Wine Tour coming up in June! Do you guys like to go wine tasting? If so, I highly recommend San Luis Obispo county, particularly the Paso Robles area. There are tons of wineries as well as shopping, hiking, parks, and beaches. It's a pretty cool place to live!

Cheers!

I am SO sorry for not posting here lately, my lovely readers, but I've been just SO DANG BUSY lately (and, as a result SO DANG TIRED), that I just haven't been able to muster up the energy to write. At this very moment, things are a little calmer, but for the next month or so I'll still be very busy, so I'm not sure how much blogging I'll get done. Still. I will try.

For now, here's a quick five-bullet update for your Friday:

1.  This past weekend, inspired by Marie Kondo's Tidying book, my mom and I tackled the den, and by tackle I mean emptied all the bookshelves, put the books that "inspired joy" in 4 plastic bins*, and put the books that didn't inspire joy in approximately 10 paper grocery bags to be turned in to the used book store. (Yes, I had a LOT of books!) Then, we went through the craft armoire and I dumped, donated, or recycled tons of blank, patterned, and coloured paper, blank cards, several containers of glitter, embossing powder, and acrylic paints, stamping and crafting magazines, and various office supplies such as glue sticks, liquid white out, paper clips, and push pins, that we simply don't need tons of.

Some of it was hard (The books! THE BOOOOKKS!), some of it was easy, but all of it was necessary, and I am feeling pretty good about my choices. I still have quite a few items I need to scan before shredding (old web articles, photocopies of craft/stamping/gardening/etc. ideas/journal snippets, and novel ideas), but this little hand-held scanner I bought for, like, fifty bucks or whatever, is doing a pretty quick job of it all!

2.  Tuesday I went to the hospital and was injected with a radioactive tracer, then had a bone scan which will hopefully show my rheumatologist exactly where all the inflammation is in my body. Which means hopefully soon I'll get a firm diagnosis and can begin treatment, and get my life back. Or not. It's entirely possible that I will NOT get my life back; that this is the New Normal, and then I'll just have to deal with it, I guess.  In any event, I'm planning to pick up a copy of my results on Saturday, and I'm curious to see what a bone scan looks like!

3. This weekend is going to be pretty busy, too, as not only do we have to take to Goodwill all the stuff we got rid of last weekend, pick up my lab results, and do all our other usual Saturday Stuff, but we have to mow our lawn as well. It looks dreadful! It's brown in places already, but other parts are wildly overgrown. Since we didn't get any rain to speak of this year, we can't really justify getting brand new sod. Also, none of our neighbours seem to give a crap what their overgrown, weed-infested yards look like (except the lady kitty-corner to us, who is also the only homeowner left besides us; everyone else is a renter.), so I guess there's no point in putting any money into it this summer. Still, it's hard to look at because it's just so ugly!

4.  Tonight is the Atascadero Art and Wine Tour, and my mom and I are going. It was supposed to be held last Friday, but at some point they changed the date, and didn't bother announcing it to anyone. (I took a half-day off work, and we planned to get a room at The Carlton Hotel downtown so we could start the Tour right at 5:30 and be able to try all the offerings from all the wineries without worrying about driving home inebriated. At first I was afraid I had just read it wrong, or I was nuts, or the dementia was kicking in early, but it turned out I was not the only one: one of my co-workers, believing it to be March 20th as well, had invited several of her friends to come down for that very event. We didn't discover it had been changed until Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, and she had to call everyone and tell them it wasn't happening.) It'll be interesting to see how many wineries, artists, and food vendors bother showing up since the two art galleries Atascadero even HAD have closed down in the past two months, and the only new stores to open are both thrift stores, and several shops have stopped participating in the past couple years. 

le sigh.

 5. And, finally, here's a picture of some books that once sat on one of my shelves. Some of them will be back. Some will not. Have a great weekend! Cheers!

*The reason the books went in bins to be stored in the garage is that we're planning to get new carpeting fairly soon, and it seemed silly to put the keeper books back on the shelf, only to have to take them down so the shelves could be moved to put in the carpet in, like, a month or so.

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So, Saturday mom and I drove over to Cayucos with the intention of checking out the Sea Glass Festival, which I thought looked like a lot of fun, and seaglass seemed like a neat thing to start collecting in a vintage mason jar. The drive over 46 west between Paso Robles and the coast was gorgeous - the hills are so green and the trees are starting to come out adding to the fresh, clean, spring-like feel. In fact, when we turned on to HWY 1, the green grass on the hills was so bright it was almost blinding! I'm just sorry I didn't get any pictures of it, but I was driving, so it was impossible. There was a lot of traffic and tons of cyclist out as well, so there really was no safe place to pull off to take pictures. Ah, well. I'll have the memories!

When we got to Cayucos, the place was PACKED! Granted, it was a gorgeous day - sunshine, blue skies and about 80 degrees! - so tons of people were taking advantage of the great weather by going to the beach as well as the Sea Glass Festival, or just browsing the quaint-looking downtown area. Both parking lots I planned to use were full and closed, so we drove through town to see if there was any street parking. There was not. We decided it was not worth the continued effort and stress as well as having to enduring the inevitable "people poisoning" we were sure to get by dealing with the huge crowds at the Festival. So, we just drove through town, got back on the highway, and headed to Morro Bay instead. We do plan to return to Cayucos some weekend when there's nothing special going on, so we can explore the downtown, pier, and beach.

Morro Bay was bustling as well, but not as bad as Cayucos, and we found a parking space down by the Embarcadero right away. We noticed some changes to the Embarcadero right away. One restaurant was gone, and a new one was already starting to move in. I can't remember what it was before, but I was kind of surprised, because it had been there for a very long time. Another surprise was a new wine and olive oil tasting room that opened up. I don't remember the name of the winery - it wasn't familiar - but it was doing pretty good business. There appeared to be another tasting room getting ready to move in behind it. The fun little antiquie-thrifty-kinda-junky store was gone, and while I wasn't really surprised, I was disappointed because I enjoy looking through those kind of stores.

There were several kayaks and paddleboarders out in the bay, as well as these two who were hanging out beneath the Morro Bay Fish Company hoping for some lunch, and a pair of snoozing gulls who gave me some serious side eye!

Speaking of lunch, we decided to go somewhere different than The Dutchman or Dorn's, and after checking out the displayed menus of all the places along the Embarcadero (Fishbonz was apparently closed down, which is sad because we always planned to go there, but never made it), we decided on The Galley. It's small, but very nice with super nice, friendly people and delicious food. I had the fish tacos and mom had the grilled fish sandwich, and we were both impressed with our dishes and ate every bite! My only disappointment  was that despite having a full bar, they didn't have a drinks menu, so I ended up just having iced tea. (It was really good iced tea, though!)

We ended our trip by discovering another fun new store that I can't remember the name of, but it is full of eco-friendly items like seatbelt wallets, handmade candles, vintage books and toys, and display items like a old brownie camera and manual typewriter. I had a couple things I though I might go back for, but didn't this trip. Maybe next time! Finally we wandered around our all-time favourite MB store, The Garden Gallery. Mom and I always enjoy looking at all the fun planters, fountains, wind chimes, and other garden décor, and dream about being able to grow succulents (which we can't because it's too hot here). They had a really nice St. Frances statue I might go back for, as well as a really cool concrete koi fish that would look great in our dry creek, but they didn't have any small ones and the medium and large ones would look weird. Maybe next time.

So, all in all it was a really fun day away from cleaning, organizing, and tossing stuff out. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't get to the Seaglass festival, but maybe next year we'll go earlier, or better yet, stay over Friday night and not worry about parking at all!

What did you guys do this weekend? Did you have fun? Did you have to work? Tell me all about it in the comments! Cheers!

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.  Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read.

•Open to a random page.

 •Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. (I tend to go over this limit a LOT!)

•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Good morning and happy Tuesday! First I must apologize for the dreadfully out-of-focus shot of the book cover for this week's teaser, The Body Electric by Beth Revis. I was a) on the bus, and b) wearing my reading glasses, so I couldn't tell how bad it was. It's a pity because the cover art is really nice, but with the nook, you only get one shot at a shot of the cover art. After it appears once, it's gone forever! Why? I don't know. Typically you will only get to go back and get the title and author only, no pictures, but with this book, there's no title page at all. So, this is the best we're going to get!

Anyway, I am very very excited to be reading this new book by Beth Revis! I really enjoyed her Across the Universe trilogy, and I think she's a very good writer. Her stories are interesting and exciting, and her characters are also interesting and have a lot of depth. They feel like real people and you end up really cheering for them to succeed! So, without further ado, here's my teaser from page 53:

"Of course I'm afraid," I say immediately, without thinking. The words take even me by surprise, and I bite my lip, considering.

Wow! Pretty intense! I'm only on chapter four myself, so this is quite a teaser for me, too! Do you have any favourite authors who's books you look forward to coming out? Let me know in the comments; I love getting new author recommendations! Cheers!