Lenie cooks 95 percent of the meals at our house, but I’m the main weekend breakfast cook. I have one specialty: fried potatoes, which are sliced thin and cooked in hot olive oil so they get nice and crusty. In a separate pan I cook up sliced onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and carrots in Canola oil. At the end of cooking, I marry them together in one pan, then drop in some scrambled eggs that our chickens probably layed the day before. This morning Lenie made up a nice fruit salad of grapes, melons, bananas, cantaloupes, nectarines, and plums. With three different types of hot sauce and ketchup, it was delicious. We eat good at our house, often barbecuing off one of the decks. Eating is one of life’s great pleasures, and Lenie loves to cook. The only rule at meals for the boys is you can’t eat, then bolt from the table. You have to stay awhile and have conversation. We typically eat off our large front deck, which is one of three Trex decks I’ve built onto the house. I chose Trex because I was tired of scraping and refinishing a wood deck every few years. The price was comparable to good grade redwood. I built the underpinning of the decks with twice as much wood and fasteners as most people use, so they will outlive me, my kids, their kids, and the house. When you jump up and down on them, there is not the slightest movement. “Built like a tank,” is my motto. We’ve got an acre of lawn off this deck, and I actually enjoy cutting it with my ride-along if it’s not too hot. It’s too hot today at 90 degrees plus, so I’ll do some indoor jobs and read and write. Beyond the lawn we have a nice conifer forest that is now home to about a thousand golf balls my boys and I have hit into it from a pad on the deck. I really like this place. Five acres is just about the right size piece of land for us because we’re so busy putting out the magazine. We have a large garden and 14 chickens. We’re surrounded by forests, with our nearest neighbor on one side a half mile, and on the other three quarters of a mile. We have no neighbors looking out about a mile to the ocean, and our back door has forests clear to the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. There are lots of locations like this in America, believe it or not. Our 6373-mile trip just completed a week ago revealed many of them, just looking from the highway. Can you imagine what’s out of sight of the highway!