View from Mt.Hood

OilMan and my brother had been hard at work arranging furniture, on paper, for a couple of hours when I got up this morning. (So that my brother could have our little guest room to himself, Ozzie slept in our bedroom and thought 4:30 was the perfect time to get up)

It took awhile to generate a master plan for the day but ultimately we headed out with Ozzie to explore the dog walking options around the new neighborhood. We drove up a windy (as in curvy) road behind our new house to the top of the world entrance to Mt. Hood Regional Park...which was closed due to road construction within the park. We were still able to walk down the road and enjoy the view which stretches all the way to the Ocean.

#1Daughter highly recommended a new restaurant called The Spinster Sisters so we decided to check it out for lunch, er, brunch as it turned out once we got there. It's very light and open with cement walls and floor and huge redwood slabs for the countertop where we elected to sit. It looked wonderful but hurt like hell when I hit my funny bone on the redwood burl attractively but inconveniently sticking out right where my elbow wanted to be. The food was wonderful--house cured salmon, bagel, cream cheese and capers for me.

On the way back to Sebastopol we dropped by the Matos cheese factory run by an elderly Portuguese couple who make a delicious cheddar-like farm cheese and sell it to the public for far less than it costs to buy it in the local market. The drive in from the main road passes by the herd of grazing dairy cows who, from the look of them, were ready to be milked. We parked in the farmyard next to a messy barn full of old tractors and cow manure and stepped into a spotless (and empty) building marked "Cheese Factory". Eventually the old lady emerged from the back where we could glimpse stacks of curing wheels of cheese. She wordlessly took out a hunk of cheese, cut us each a generous piece, called St.Jorge, to taste followed by a larger hunk from the single round of cheese under the counter, to buy, and we were on our way.

The cheese ladyin the market tells us that their daughter tried to get them to modernize and branch out with a website and more kinds of cheese, but the patriarch was having none of it. So things go on as they have for decades.

After a rest #1Daughter and her family will arrive at "the Gopher Farm" for polenta with St. Jorge cheese and tomato sauce.