Let’s Gab: April 2023

Happy Spring, friends! And if hosting a boozy Easter egg hunt on a sunny day with mimosas in hand isn’t spring, I don’t want it.

I served canned cinnamon rolls on a 5 gallon paint buckets and hid eggs and beers around the yard and vowed to make this an annual event.

Then we headed down to Texas for a quick visit. Well, long drive, quick visit. (Welcome to my non-aesthetic office, somewhere in New Mexico from the passenger seat of a 1997 Toyota Tacoma).

The thing about 14 hour drives is, you as the passenger feel like you should help drive. And even if you’re *maybe not that good* at driving stick, you’re confident you’ll be fine once you get it up to speed on the highway.

And your ever patient boyfriend wants to help you learn so he agrees. But then you grind the gears a little bit and then suddenly the clutch no longer works.

So anyways, you is me. I’m not good at driving stick. And I broke the clutch. Just north of Lubbock, Texas. 5.5 hours from our destination. On a Friday afternoon.

So with almost every auto shop closed until Monday (and tows to San Antonio costing upwards of $1500), we called up every mechanic-oriented person we knew. We spent a few hours getting our hands very black in a gas station parking lot, replaced some parts, held our breathes as we started the truck…still broken.

Defeated, we explored the college town of Lubbock and camped in the truck.

In the morning, at the advice of said mechanic-oriented persons, we drove the 5.5 hours to San Antonio…without a clutch.

Well, Texas boy did. I mostly just white knuckled the handle the whole ride.

We eventually made it to San Antonio (turns out, we had fixed the truck in that gas station parking lot but hadn’t “bled the lines” correctly).

I was fed potato pancakes at Künstler and all was well again.

A few days later we continued even further south to the Texas coast, where Rhubarb got to celebrate her 2nd birthday doing her favorite things – chasing seagulls on the beach and riding along in the ocean kayak. She met pelicans and smelled blue bonnets and still has sand in her fur.

When we arrived back home to Denver, we got the biggest surprise since buying the house in February…the renovations have begun! I mean, yea we knew the contractors had been there. But they got so much done in the short time they were at the house!

This white room is the old closet that we’re converting into a master bath. The framed out room is an odd bonus room that we’re turning into a walk-in closet.

So I spent the rest of the month spending more time looking at bathroom tiles than I ever thought possible, while trying to fit the contents of our closet into every nook and cranny of our 1,000 square foot work zone of a house.

And amidst all that, the Live Eat Learn headquarters have been business as usual! I’ve been cooking up reader recipes for our upcoming Reader Recipe Week (this bruschetta pizza though 😍).

And, upon realizing I didn’t have a single rhubarb recipe on the site, called every grocery in Denver until I found the one that said they had rhubarb and bought as much as I could carry. Recipes coming soon!

That’s all for now! I hope your spring has been delightful and delicious. I’m so happy you’re here!