October 30, 2016

Dear friends,
If you've visited the Retreat in the past year, please go to www.yelp.com and write a review! Thanks!


 I start my morning with the Lord's prayer and quiet meditation. Sometimes we have to look deep inside ourselves to find strength and comfort in dealing with the challenges of life.  Our philosophy is to keep on working, keep smiling, keep on hoping, keep on praying, and we know everything is going to be OK in the end.  We appreciate the blessings in our life and the opportunities we have to share those blessings.


The Retreat was booked up for the weekend of October 14-15, some  guests here for the cheese festival, some who just came out for a getaway weekend.  The weather was very nice other than a strong wind. For breakfast I made a frittata with a layer of hash brown potatos, eggs, sliced fresh tomatos, a light layer of cheddar cheese, garnished with fresh rosemary. Bacon on the side and fruit. We're still getting cherry tomatos from the house garden plants, basil, rosemary, and arugula. 


I spent that Friday morning in town and "interviewed" some of the vendors and some of the crowd, ate a smoked pork sandwich, and ran into several couples who had previously stayed with us at some point during the year.  You can take the word "wine" out of the name of the Watonga Cheese & Wine festival but that doesn't change the fact that Oklahoma wineries bring a huge crowd to the festival. What goes better with cheese (other than chocolate -- ah ah, there's an idea for a booth for next year)! On Saturday I worked the fundraiser booth for the Kiwanis Club, selling cheese.  This year the festival was spread out, with different activities at different locations other than Main Street, so I didn't have the chance to go to see quite a bit of the activities.   


This past week I decided to use some of the cherry tomatoes from the community garden for our dinner.  We've had a good crop and  I've given away two baskets of tomatoes so far.  We have some sweet potatoes planted in the beds there, and some okra, which is producing in spite of the late start.  Next year we'll get started  planting in the spring and hopefully have more young people come out to garden.  So, I used the cherry tomatoes, basil from our home garden, a little chopped rosemary, cubed mozarella cheese, garlic, a little pepper, some snips of green onion from my window "garden".  A splash of balsamic vinegar and some extra virgin olive oil, and voila, a salad to go with the spaghetti squash Drew made for dinner one evening.   We are blessed by the bounty of God's nature.


Our next house concert is Dan Martin, from Tulsa OK, on December 7.  I booked him to play at the cheese festival a couple of years ago, when I was in charge of entertainment for the festival, and we are excited to have him come out and play at our place.  We are currently asking for donations to Phoenix Circle Foundation so that we can continue bringing musicians out here (SEND MONEY PLEASE!!  See the Phoenix Circle Foundation facebook page).  This past week Andy and I went to OKC for an evening of networking with musicians and artists, and we toured the 21C Museum art gallery.  We made lots of contacts for future House Concerts, and got some ideas for our art gallery and studio space Andy and Drew continue to work on. 


Now it is Halloween.  The kids decorated the house and we plan on spending the evening reading  "scary" stories out loud. 


As for movies for the holiday, forget Nightmare on Elm St. and the Exorcist. Here is my list of creepy, scary movies:
Stir of Echoes (with Kevin Bacon)
Frailty (with Matthew McConnehey)
 Jennifer Eight (with Uma Thurman)
Suspect Zero (with Ben Kingsley )
Primal Fear (with Edward Norton and Richard Gere)
Seven (Brad Pitt)
The Cell (Jennifer Lopez)
The Gift (with Cate Blanchett)
The Skeleton Key (Kate Hudson)
and of course, Rosemary's Baby.  


HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  
/Linda