A Friday Night At Steener's Pub

8:00

The Return of Green(lawns) and Blue(waters)

Open Waters, Puffy Clouds In A Sky Of Blue

It's after 8:00 and I have been up for about forty five minutes, to an open lake, (get out the kayaks), gray skies, and a chilly 34º.  Occasionally, a family of buffleheads will float by, the lake surface, wrinkled by the wind.  Interestingly, the east side of Chautauqua Lake still has mounds of ice on its shoreline, a result of the heavy, westerly winter winds, no doubt.  Those of us on the western shores are mostly protected from the winds.

Warner Bay's Ice Mounds

Yesterday brought our continued effort to clean up our upstairs after a couple of weeks of painting. The day began, for me, with a good yoga class, four guys this time, one younger guy wearing his baseball cap during class.  Hey, 'let it go.'  Afterwards, I got a coffee and made my bi weekly trip to Wegman's to pick up things for dinner for the next few days.  I bought meat for the first in awhile at Wegman's and am always surprised at the price, how it has gone up precipitously over the past year. We usually get our meat at the Lighthouse or at Sam's Club, where you can still get a deal if you buy something in large enough quantities.

When I got home, Evie was finishing up putting a layer of Murphy's Oil Soap, then Liquid Gold  on our banisters, making them look rich and shiny.   Lunch was a salmon salad;  I look forward to this salad as much if not more than the previous night's broiled salmon.  We finally finished up the upstairs bathroom, painted silver sage, our last room, Evie washing the trim and floor, me putting on the various plates, the mirror and, as usual, we had a devil of a time putting the plastic shield on the fan/light, the last step in the process.  Why can't things be easy?

Barb and Evie

All the rooms are neat and 'tidy', ready for the hard part, deciding what to put up on the walls.  And Evie's still into the painting mode, and some of our furniture may be painted in the future, so things match in the bedrooms.  In retrospect, it probably was irrational to spend all this time and money, the angst, on rooms that are hardly used now that all the kids have fled the nest.  But the idea of 'freshening up' our home appealed to both of us, so viola, we now have a newly painted upstairs and a couple of rooms downstairs. Now all we have to do is get used to color, after living in a neutral color home for twenty years.

Dana and Barb Johnson

Everything was done by 4:00, so we both showered and got ready to enjoy Friday night with Barb Johnson, our friend who painted our upstairs and her husband Dana.  We drove over to their house around 5:30, for a beer and some appetizers, brie and mini shish kebabs of grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil, sprinkled with balsamic vinegar, a perfect spring time dish.  They live in a great home, set about 100 yards above their lakefront, a home where both Dana's parents and grandparents lived.  They have five acres of woods, gardens, and a pool, for their grandchildren of course and a great, old red barn.  It's the best of both worlds, acreage, woods, and lakefront.  We loved their house, the colors of course, and the focal point of their living room, a meticulously exact picture of a sawmill, made from small, various colored pieces of wood.  When Evie first glimpsed it, she asked out of nowhere if that was the picture that hung in the Lenhart Hotel's Lounge.  It was! Dana bought it from them years ago.  It's by Dana's industrial art teacher from Bemus, the reclusive Cecil Rhodes, an artist who became well known for these objects de art.

Wood Art by Bemus Point's Cecil Rhodes

After a couple of beers, we drove to Steener's Pub,  a place they told us about.  It was packed, both the bar and restaurant, with groups of people standing around waiting for tables. Even the Bemus Point girls baseball team was waiting for a table.  Somehow, there were two open seats at the bar for Evie and Barb, and two more opened up next to them within ten minutes, so we were happy because we had seats at the bar.  We were introduced to Bill Steener, the owner, and met a number of others who Barb and Dana know.  Dana and I had cajun fish fries, with their amazing french fries.  It's worth going there just for the fries, and Evie and Barb shared a chicken salad and an order of fries.  It was a fun night to sit at the bar, get to know the Johnson's better.  Both are from the area so they know all the haunts, everything about Bemus and Jamestown, lots of locals, so different from most of our friends who, like us, have moved to the area after having grown up somewhere else.  Evie, of course, made a new friend, Craig, a guy sitting next to her who happens to own the French Creek Tavern, near Findlay Lake.  I guess he likes to come to Steeners, a respite from running his own Tavern.  We dropped Barb and Dana off around 9:00 after a great evening and look forward to seeing them more often, especially when it gets warm and we  can both get our boats in the water.

Enjoying Steener's Pub with Dana and Barb

We were home just after 9:00 and both of us with a sweet tooth, so I had a small dish of a new flavor, a hazelnut gellato, interesting.  We watched Bill Maher's Real Time, before going up to read and sleep on our new mattress.  We both like it.  Thank god!