Month: May 2010

Spending the Minimum

This is a picture of the view from the Entrada clubhouse window. The window makes it look a little hazy. Anyway, the view is always great but the food at the restaurant is decidedly not. However, we have to eat the minimum which is $175 a quarter. That’s a lot of bad food. Our three forays into the restaurant have been two lunches and a dinner. The first lunch consisted of salads with grilled shrimp. My salad greens had seen better days and the shrimp on both of our salads was not freshly grilled. It was over-grilled to rubberyness at some point but not when we ordered it. Our second lunch was better. I had a Philly cheesesteak with fries and John had fish and chips. The sandwich was very bland. John’s fish was good. But the fries seemed to have been fried sometime earlier in the day. Perhaps for the big event downstairs? We sent them back and got some fresh ones. Lastly the dinner where I had a filet of beef and John had veal made me sick. We haven’t spent the entire minimum, and we are not going to.

Oh, here’s something they forgot to put on the menu! On our way to the car we encountered this snake. John said not to worry, it wasn’t poisonous. You know, I am so used to just accepting everything he says as the absolute truth, John being who John is. But why I would think that he also knows all there is to know about snakes? Nonetheless, we approached for a closer look but the snake slithered off into the flowers.

After totally overdoing it yesterday playing tennis for too long in the heat, we decided to have a quieter day today. But not a day doing nothing. After a leisurely early morning breakfast and sudoku, we headed off to the Utah Motor Vehicle offices to get our new registration. I know this doesn’t sound newsworthy but I would say that from the time we walked in the door until the time we left couldn’t have been more than about two minutes. Amazing! From there we headed off to Springdale (Gateway to Zion National Park) to shop at Worthington Gallery. Oh, so many things to buy! Ooh, salad plates that match our set! Wow, look at the fabulous bowl! It will go great in our kitchen in Pleasanton. We actually went there for a present for our German friends who are putting us up for a couple of days this summer. However, we did manage to acquire several other things for ourselves.

Then off to Oscar’s for lunch. It was a beautiful day and we sat outside enjoying the view.

The view was pretty nice looking across the table as well.

We had our standard phish tacos. The corn tortillas are really good. Today the fish was a bit overcooked but, hey, since this is Utah, we’ll give them a break. All in all a nice day in a beautiful place.

Today John and I decided to take a hike. The trail we took, the Broken Mesa Rim Trail, was only a few miles from our house here in St. George. We hiked uphill to the top of the mesa and were treated to views of Pine Mountain with the remnants of this year’s snow. The hiking was sometimes a little difficult since there was a lot of rock broken off from the lava flows. During our whole hike we were the only people around.

Along the way there were tons of wildflowers — desert sage, lupine, rosemallow, rattlesnake weed, mojave asters and this one, the sego lily. It is the state flower of Utah. The plant has an edible tuber which the pioneers (read Mormons) ate. The Native Americans shared this information with them. Seeing as how now the Indian population is smushed into arid reservations, it was probably not the wisest thing to do.

It may not be the most picturesque but this giant water pipe provided handy seats for us to have our picnic lunch. Although the pipe had been baking out in the sun, it was surprisingly cold to the touch.

During our hike, while looking at the ground so that I wouldn’t stumble over some debris, I found this rock. I immediately decided that it was an ancient artifact from some long ago people. Obviously they had used some flint tool to flake off the edges. Excitedly I took it over to John who told me it was just a rock. I’m saving it anyway.