Dear Folks, I guess to most people I live a truly boring life. I'm retired, I sleep until noon, I check my email, I eat lunch (too late for breakfast), I take my medication, I pour myself a glass of chilled Chardonnay and I go into my living room where I curl up with a good mystery book. After I get a bit achy, I go back to my computer, check my email again and then continue to edit the stories that I want to include in my book. Achy again I go back to where I left off in my mystery book. After a few back and forths, it's time to heat up my dinner. I check my freezer and this evening I decided that pork and sauerkraut sounded pretty good to me. Yes I had the leftover pork I had cooked up several months ago but no I didn't have any sauerkraut left. Not only that but I didn't have any leftover frozen mashed potatoes to go with it. However, I did have frozen little dumplings and sauerkraut juice. Yes, that would do nicely. Well, frankly it didn't do nicely. In case you don't realize it, dumplings have very little flavor of their own and what made it worse is that when I originally cooked up a pot of pork and sauerkraut, I had added too much water to the pot. Therefore, there was barely any flavor to the sauerkraut juice. (sigh!) So here's where the highlight of my day came in. I had known for a long time that the sauerkraut juice lacked virtually any flavor at all. So tonight I thought it was high time I did something about it. I got out a pan, dumped all of the frozen juice into it, set the burner on high and eventually it all came to a rolling boil. I turned the burner down, let it boil up a bit more and then when I had reduced the juice by half, I taste tested it. Now THAT was what sauerkraut juice was supposed to taste like! The juice is now in a bowl in the refrigerator and tomorrow I'll freeze it up again in small portions. Yes, that was the highlight of my day. However, I don't have any stress in my life. I no longer have a job that stresses me out, I have no children or grandchildren to stress me out and I don't have any nasty neighbors that annoy me. Boring life yes (if you want to look at it that way), but stressful life, absolutely not. To me these are my golden years even though there are many moments when I feel they're my rusting years. I wonder what tomorrow's highlight will be? :-) vee