Even the Dull Days can Shine
We’ve run the gamut on Killin’ the Empty Nest this spring, and shown many of the events, get-aways, and weekend activities we’ve enjoyed… But part of what we haven’t highlighted is the less exciting part of being empty nesters. Both of us are working full time jobs, maintaining a home, and caring for two geriatric dogs. We also make sure to keep engaged with our adult children and baby-boomer parents as much as we love doing things just the two of us. A large part of the motivation for the blog was to inspire other empty nesters with similar demands on their time to highlight fun activities and the mundane alike, while keeping a little online scrap book of some of the GREAT times we’ve had.
We hope you’ve found some entertainment and maybe some inspiration in the posts so far. I know we had a ton of fun making every one of those memories!
But there are other memories we’ve made along the way that weren’t quite as sensational… The other weekend we had to go grocery shopping, drop off some Amazon returns, and order some concrete wall blocks for one of our home projects. We went together to do these errands, and figured we’d stop for lunch somewhere along the way. Part of our killin’ the empty nest is having the time add a little something fun in the midst of non-glamorous day-to-day life… like choosing to stop for a nice lunch in between errands.
We’d planned to take care of about half of our errands and then grab lunch at a little cocktail bar in downtown Puyallup. Well it turned out the cocktail bar didn’t open until 4:00 that day, so lunch there was out of the question. We still needed to get to Home Depot, Grocery shopping, and maybe Costco… Denice mentioned that Bonney Lake has Home Depot, Costco, and Fred Meyer… and there was a cute little bistro she’d seen when we were at the Firehouse Pub in Buckley watching Billy and the Dirt Angles. So up Highway 410 we went!
Since Costco and groceries included frozen or refrigerated items, we decided to go to Home Depot first and then lunch. We ordered the wall blocks at Bonney Lake Home Depot (great service there) and headed to the Main Street Bistro in Buckley, just about 10 minutes away. Well, we discovered a new little gem! Turns out that a time or two a month they have live music in the evening, and this was one of those times. Being there for lunch, we weren’t going to see the live music, and with geriatric dogs at home we weren’t going to be going back out that evening (this was the weekend it was 90+ degrees)… But we had a chance to enjoy the setting and learn about what was coming up!
We ordered flat bread, charcuterie board, and Denice’s favorite, a salad (inset laughing emoji here). Of course, we paired this with some good red wine! We were rather impressed by the selection of wine they had.
The food was fantastic, the atmosphere was warm and inviting, the staff was great and engaging…I even met the UPS delivery fella, who dropped off the packages and asked me to make sure they got them… ( I love small towns) and the prices there were extremely reasonable. After finishing the food and wine the rest of what we had to do didn’t seem so daunting. We finished our errands and headed home to make sure the Hot Dogs (not the Oscar Meyers from the grocery store, but our pets) had cool water and an opportunity to come inside to cool down in the house and watch us practice some new dance moves.
