Word of the Day

I read an article yesterday about a man who was eulogizing his grandfather who had just passed away at 101 years old.  He was talking about what a remarkable man his grandfather was and recounted a story of how his grandfather always carried a pencil and notepad with him.  One day he was with his grandfather (and his grandfather was 91 years old at the time), he saw him writing something down in his notepad.  He asked him what he was writing down and his grandfather answered, "I heard a word a while ago that I don't know the definition of and I don't want to forget it.  I want to write it down so that I can look it up in the dictionary." "Why?" the grandson asked.  "To improve my vocabulary, of course!" the 91 year old grandfather explained!

Well, The Word of the Day is - Quinquagenarian: One who is 50 years old.  Yep, that's me today. I've never head of that word, but now I know what it means.  As they say, if you stop learnin', you start dying.

Speaking of dying, I was dying to get home to see what my wife made me for my birthday surprise. Wow! Tricia and Benjamin sang Happy Birthday to me and then presented me with a homemade Italian Creme cake with cream cheese icing that she made from the rich cream from Daisy Lou, our Jersey cow.  Tomorrow I may show you how she made the cream cheese.  Then there were some chocolate dipped strawberries...  She saved some of the chocolate to drizzle in our coffee tomorrow morning.  Nice.

But it didn't stop there.  Also on the lineup was a wheel of brie cheese baked in a puff pastry and if that wasn't decadent enough, a new recipe she tried from Southern Living Magazine: Roasted Bacon Pecans.  What's not to love about that?!

Tricia knows that the old adage is true: "The way to a man's heart... is through his stomach!"

In addition to using Daisy's cream to make the cream cheese, she used a lot of pecans from last year's crop of pecans.  We don't have much inventory left, but that's okay as the first pecans of the season have started falling.  We'll have to pick them up before the squirrels get them.  Or maybe we'll just 'thin-out' the squirrels.

I'm going to bed tonight fat and happy!