Rather than writing a check to the Portland Clinic, as is typically the case with the medical maladies of retirement, I got a $200 refund in the mail.  Sometimes, it’s worth checking the mail, but often there are unexpected notices and surprise bills.  When good news arrives, you have to celebrate by buying something frivolous.  While I’m deciding what that should be, I’m slow cooking a pork roast for dinner tonight in barbecue sauce and Coca-Cola.  It’s what I call a cooking cop-out, similar to Beer Can Chicken and Osso Buco, a few minutes of simple preparation and then hours of roasting in a crock pot.  Anyone can do it, including me, and it’s a lot less stressful than an oven or grill that requires constant attention.  I can watch baseball, Outlander, and Ballers, while I’m “cooking.”

I could be in wine country today with my cousin.  I met him here in Portland yesterday for lunch.  Other than my mom’s funeral, we haven’t haven’t shared much contact through the years.   His mother and the two of us share a birth date, and I gave him a photo of the three of us with a birthday cake 55 years ago.   It was a fun reunion that included a tour of the Rose Garden and lunch at Deschutes Brewery Portland Public House.  He had some other business in McMinnville, so we parted ways again.  I told him about the UFO Festival that is celebrated there each year. Back on May 11, 1950, photographs from a nearby farm, owned by Paul and Evelyn Trent, showed evidence of an alien craft, and were published in Life magazine.  There was a great deal of paranoia associated with the release of these photos, fearing they had witnessed secret military aircraft, but the disk-shaped objects are still considered not to be part of a hoax.  To add to the mystery, Life magazine never returned the negatives as promised, claiming they were misplaced.  They were later discovered in a U.P.I. News file and are still the subject of much scrutiny. The Trent family apparently never received any compensation for the photographs, but a 2013 research study supposedly found evidence of a suspension thread above the object.  Nonetheless, the Festival is still a popular event, as it put McMinnville on the map right next to Roswell, New Mexico that houses the International UFO Museum and Research Center.

It was shortly after these controversial photos were taken, that David Lett and Charles Coury started planting Pinot noir grapes in the Willamette Valley.  In 1966, Lett planted a Vineyard in the hills outside of Dundee and established Eyrie Vineyards.  My cousin is hiring a car to take him on a tour of these vineyards today, before he enters UFO country tomorrow.  It’s still raining outside and quite overcast, so I decided to stay home and write rather than join him.  It’s about that time of year to harvest the grape crop, and just after the bottling of last year’s crop.  I know this because of my involvement with a friend’s “hobby” vineyard, located on their property.  For the last couple years, I’ve helped with pruning, bottling, and picking their grapes.  I’ve gotten a hands-on appreciation of the process, but it still hasn’t improved my impaired taste buds.  I’m not one to be able to distinguish a fine wine from an impostor, but I keep trying.  I just know that if you drink too much wine, you just might see aliens!  We’ve visited over 50 Oregon wineries since moving here three years ago, and have assembled a large cooler full of favorite bottles.  My wife controls what we drink, by labeling each bottle with green, red, and yellow stickers.  The green ones I’m free to drink.  Yellow and Red require her approval to open.  The wine I get as payment for helping with our friend’s grape crop is mine to enjoy.

I’m officially back to my retirement routine today, free from responsibilities of entertaining and appointments.  Tomorrow, our replacement plantation shutters will be installed, so I will have to work around their schedule.  Today is all mine, until I serve the Crock-Pot dinner to my hard working wife.  In the meantime, I’ll have some left-over veggie pizza from “Meatless Monday,”plus some potato casserole and lamp chops from Sunday night’s farewell to company feast.  I did enjoy yesterday’s “Yellow Belly Burger” that I ordered for lunch to celebrate “National Cheeseburger Day.” The root-beer braised pork belly on top of the burger was probably slow-cooked by a prominent chef like myself.   Somehow, I truly forgot it was “Meatless Monday” until it was too late, and promised to refrain from eating those leftover lamp chops until a full twenty-four hours have passed since the burger violation.  I just can’t keep track of the days!