Good Things List No.77: Crescent City, Barn Refresh, Preserving Wins, Book Reviews & More

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch. This month’s list includes things to do in Crescent City, California, an easy barn refresh, wins in the preserving kitchen, six book reviews and more!

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Are you embracing all things fall yet? I’ve had to break out some warmer clothes, especially in the mornings, but I’ve yet to do more than change out our pillows and add a couple of pumpkins to the table. And maybe that’s all I’ll do this year – who knows?

I always hold on to the summer things as long as possible, but the turning of the month to October means I can’t pretend any longer, ha!

Thankfully there are things I look forward to when as it cools down, too, like baking more (and waking up my sourdough starter!), crisp mornings, fall foliage, and wearing boots and cozy sweaters and coats again.

I’m going to cut back some of the summer blooming plants in the sunken garden to clean it up a bit and let the fall bloomers have some room and I’ll be making another batch of lightened up Three Bean Salad with the green beans that have had their “second wind” and are producing again for a few weeks.

Here are some of the things I enjoyed last month. I hope the start of this new month finds you doing some good things you enjoy, too!

Good Things List

Things to do in Crescent City, California

I planned a special family vacation for Brian’s birthday to a place he (and our daughter) could surf and it turned out great! The view above is from the deck of our Airbnb in Crescent City – it had a wall of windows with a panoramic view of the ocean, which was wonderful any type of weather.

We had a week there with our daughter and our son and his family were able to join us for a weekend, so it was a sweet time for us. We’d never been to Crescent City so I thought I’d share the things we enjoyed doing and seeing there:

1. Starting with viewing the sunsets like the one pictured above. Many people would bring folding chairs to sit and watch the sunsets each day on the bluff across from our house – it was nice to see people just enjoying nature.

2. One of the things I loved doing every morning was walking along the beach with our dog, Jynx. It was just a 2-minute walk down the road with some stairs down to a quiet beach that I often had to myself.

3. Surfing! If you like to surf there are quite a few beaches that are good ones for catching waves. Even if you don’t surf, it’s fun to go to a beach with surfing and just watch – some of them are so amazing how they can ride the smallest wave (the water is cold, like Oregon, though, so wetsuits are required!).

4. Visit giant trees! You travel through the Redwoods of California to get to and from Crescent City, so it’s a great place to stay if you’d like to see more of these huge, old trees. We took a couple of hikes and the size and shape of the trees and forest is truly amazing. One of the hikes we took to Stout Grove turned out to be super fun for our grandson with large fallen trees to climb up, around, and through. There was no fee to park at any of the hiking trails we visited in Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park.

5. See a lighthouse on an island – if you can time it for low tide, you can even have a tour! Battery Point Lighthouse has been active since 1856 and lighthouse keepers still live there. It’s a different lighthouse than we’re used to on the Oregon coast – this is much more like a house with a light cupola than the tower lighthouses. It’s so picturesque, don’t you think?

6. And if you drive north on Pebble Beach Drive to Point St. George you may see a family of raccoons who are obviously used to people feeding them! They come out of their hedge on the side of the road if you stop and then start to walk towards the car. Apparently even their nocturnal habits can change if they are given food during the day.

I will end with saying that while the town itself isn’t anything to write home about, the location between the ocean and the redwoods is ideal. There are good restaurants, including the SeaQuest Brew Pub, and everything is easily accessible.

Barn Refresh (in Progress)

One of the two outbuildings we have on our property is something I call a barn because it has barn doors. Brian calls it a shop because he stores his tools in there. It was in desperate need of painting and a few other easy upgrades which we decided to do in September – and while we were at it, why not add more barn character so we could both just call it a barn? (By the way, this is totally how my brain works – what else can we do/add/accomplish? Poor Brian.)

We started with replacing the old aluminum windows with double-paned vinyl windows we pulled from the farmhouse during the renovation. We removed all the oddly placed lighting and covered the holes and patched those left from a basketball hoop. And then we painted it white to match the farmhouse:

So much nicer, right?? Ahh. And now comes the “barn” part. Soon we will add wood molding “X’s” on the doors painted dark green (like the side door I’ve painted). The new lighting will include a large black barn light over the sliding doors and a smaller one over the side door.

I think those two things will show everyone that this building is a barn – don’t you? (We will not mention that there are no animals in it…). Stay tuned – I’m planning a whole post dedicated to the steps and before and afters.

Preserving Kitchen Wins

The end of August and all of September are prime preserving weeks here in western Oregon. The tomatoes are finally producing enough to can and freeze, the green beans and zucchini are going crazy, and the hot peppers all need to be taken care of before they go bad.

When I thought about it, I realized there are a few things that I’ve really used and appreciated throughout this busy time of the year, which I’m calling “wins” in my preserving kitchen:

1. Etekcity Food Kitchen Scale (56k reviews, 4.5 stars!). You need a scale for many preserving recipes to measure the amounts of produce needed. I’ve used a vintage scale for years, but this inexpensive digital scale is more accurate so I turned to it more and more.
2. Stainless Steel Glass Lid Water Bath Canner. No surprise to many of you, since I’ve gone on and on about this since 2016 – it was a HUGE upgrade from the rocking enamel canner for not a lot of money.
3. Flat Canning Rack. Oh when I think of all the years I used the divided rack that was too big for smaller canning jars so they just rocked around in the spaces – AND I couldn’t add more than 7 even though there was lots of room! My canning life is better with this small change.
4. Manual Food Chopper. New this year! I actually bought this last year during the Black Friday deals and didn’t really use it much since. In fact, I was thinking I probably needed to give it away. BUT THEN I tried it with a big batch of tomato sauce for all the onions and for dicing peppers to freeze and realized it saved me a TON of time vs. hand chopping. I will use this always for the preserving recipes I need a nice dice for – it was the STAR this year.

Pretty Sink Organization

We all have things next to the sink we need – soap, sponge, and brushes. They can just sit there OR you can place them in coordinating containers on a little footed wooden tray to make them look good while keeping you organized.

Obviously I chose the pretty organized route, lol. My containers are vintage (old mason jar, ironstone) and white which contrasts nicely with the dark walnut stand. Since this is an island that can be seen from many places on our first floor, it’s worth it to me to make it look good (plus I like looking at it, too).

• This is the footed wooden tray/stand I bought.
• These are the natural bristle, wood handle brushes.
• I’ve been loving the coir bristle bottle brush for cleaning out mason jars this year.
• My sponge is the walnut scrubber sponge from Grove (cut in half to get twice the life out of a sponge!).
• The popup brush and container are also from Grove.

By the way, I’ve ordered from Grove for years, usually every couple of months, for things like sponges, soap and detergent. I like that many things do not have plastic. If you are new to Grove you can get 30% off your first order here.

September Books Read

Ghosts, Dolly Alderton. I’ve seen this book recommended in a number of places so I put a hold on it at the library. It was just okay. I think I was expecting more of a rom-com and this was more sad and depressing. I liked the story of the main character’s family dealing with dementia and communication than I did any “romance” (in quotes because there wasn’t really any…). The author doesn’t like men and besides the father all men were basically written in the same pen – flaky, drunk, non-communicative, bad dads, etc. I’ve been married to a wonderful man for many years and so have my sisters and many friends – NOT all men are like this!

The Late Mrs. Willoughby, Claudia Gray. This is the second in a cozy mystery series that includes many of the people from Jane Austen’s books. The focus is on Darcy and Elizabeth’s son and the daughter of friends he meets when they work to solve a murder. In this book they are again together in the same town when another murder happens and they work together to help find the killer. What I like about the books is that the author has made the son with autistic/neurodivergent characteristics and we are able to see things from his perspective as well as his companion. He’s been belittled and bullied – his behaviors can be very odd – but we understand where he’s coming from and it’s refreshing when she understands, too. I can see the start of a romance brewing, so I’ve reserved the next book in the series!

Finding Dorothy, Elizabeth Letts. I’m pretty sure this will make it onto my best-of list since this hit all the right spots for me! The story was engaging, the history interesting, and the fact that most of the story was spot-on with what really happened always makes an historical fiction book the best. This tells the life story of Maude Baum, the wife of L. Frank Baum who wrote The Wizard of Oz, in flashbacks and then the story of how Mrs. Baum worked to be a part of the making of the movie in order to help it stay true to Mr. Baum’s vision. So we have their super interesting story of how they met and married (Mrs. Baum’s mother was a well-known suffragette) and the way things were in the late 1800s, and then the 1938-9 time of making the movie, complete with a teenaged Judy Garland. We get to see how the movie industry worked in it’s infancy, how the Baum’s life served as a basis for the story and characters in Oz, and the great love between the Baums. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of historical fiction!

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot Diaries #6), Martha Wells. Brian and I are working our way through these audiobooks (#7 is next, which I think is the last for now) and this entry in the series is sort of a stand alone mystery. It doesn’t pick up where #5 left off, but instead shows a short period on Preservation Station where murderbot is protecting Dr. Mensa and gets pulled in to help solve a murder. It’s a bit quieter and slower than the other novellas (with my f-bombs, sadly), but the story was still good.

Menopause Manifesto, Dr. Jen Gunter. My doctor recommended this book after I told her I had read The New Menopause which had a lot of current research and was very positive. I appreciated that this book had a lot of specifics about hormone treatment and all the other options, including supplements (most don’t do anything, but a few do). I did not appreciate the strident, swearing, political bent of this book, though, and found myself skimming much of it to get to the parts I was interested in. I do think it’s important to gain knowledge in this area and I have a list of things to talk about with my doctor, so if you’re of a certain age, I’d recommend reading one of these books.

The Earl’s Hideaway, No Ladies Allowed, Esther Hatch. After reading the first book in this series and not being as taken with it as other reviews I read, I decided to give the second book a chance. I did like this better than the first and found it easier to follow. But I never bought the whole contrivance, even though I cut a lot of slack to light, fluffy, romances like this, lol. Both the books are sweet, closed door romances and are a nice HEA read when you’d like one.

Watching

Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot movie. This uplifting movie was not what we expected – we thought it would be a feel-good type of movie. And while it ends in a good space, there is a LOT to go through with this story of a community that takes on adopting many of the hardest foster kids (77 in all!). It’s totally worth it though – so much honesty and challenging. You can watch this free by signing up for an account at Angel Studios or you can rent/buy it on Amazon.

High Potential series, ABC. Brian and I gave this new series a chance because of it’s comparisons to Monk and Psych which we love. And after the first couple of episodes we are enjoying the characters, the dialog, humor, and the mysteries.

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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