In my past few blog posts, I have made vague allusions to being in Boulder with my sister Jen last Saturday. In fact, I think in yesterday’s post, I mentioned lunch and shopping in Boulder. I think it’s important to clarify something. I don’t shop.

In fact, I think it’s safe to say that any combination of my sisters and me would never go shopping the way most women go shopping. There would never, for example, be a time when either Jen or Bec would call me and say, “Would you like to go wander around XYZ Mall and try on clothes?” I think it’s safe to say that shopping for clothes is, for us, kind of like going to the dentist. It ain’t fun, but you have to do it once in a while. And you have to do it alone.

So, while Jen and I shopped, we didn’t come even thiiiiiis close to clothes shopping. Our idea of shopping is spending an hour or so at McGuckin’s Hardware Store – an amazing hardware-store-on-steroids in Boulder at which you can buy almost anything. After looking at garden supplies and various household items for an hour, I purchased a colorful rug for my kitchen…..

…..and a couple of plastic containers that I have a hard time finding, and in which I love to keep leftover soups or stews. They’re also good to take food to shut-ins. While it’s true that I don’t know a lot of shut-ins (mostly because I’m mostly a shut-in myself), I did have occasion to take food to my sister-in-law following her accident this winter. And I took it in one of those containers.

Following McGuckins, we spent the next hour at the Peppercorn, an astoundingly awesome cooking/kitchen store. We meandered through the store, touching things, reminiscing about things Mom owned, chatting about things we own but shouldn’t, talking about cooking. At Peppercorn, I bought a portable electric can opener, and came mighty darn close to buying a couple of smallish rocks glasses for martinis on the rocks, but remembered that I have a dining room table full of glasses we took out of our family room cabinets when we removed them and which we plan to take to Goodwill. I’m pretty sure if I had walked in with new glasses, Bill would have immediately called a recovery therapist.

For any combination of the three sisters, so-called “shopping” would really mean walking through a few stores and then having lunch. So we had lunch. Hapa Sushi, right down the street from the Peppercorn. We ordered what we considered to be an obscene amount of food that included a large bowl of poke for each of us, an order of shishito peppers (which are the newest Thing in appetizers and which I thought sort of ordinary, though Jen assured me that she has eaten some that were scrumptious),…..

…..pork gyozas, and a spicy tuna roll. We warned the server that we were ordering a lot of food. When we finished ordering, he looked puzzled and said, “Ladies, I hate to disappoint you, but that really isn’t that much food.”

Well, we didn’t eat it all, Mister Smartypants. Apparently he must wait on sumo wrestlers.

But, Boulder being Boulder, we were entertained by a man (who I would guess lives in Colorado NOT because of the mountain scenery but because of its herbal offerings) create “art” by putting a variety of leaves onto the side of a water feature…..

We were further able to observe a 10- or 12-year-old boy grab a bunch of the leaves and run away, while his parents looked on. While I perhaps shared the boy’s sentiment, I think I would have whooped his bottom (oops, I mean given him a time out) nevertheless. But I’m not the mom.

All-in-all, we had a very pleasant day in Boulder….

By the way, the closest we came to clothes shopping was when we talked briefly about stopping into Fresh Produce.Yeah, it didn’t happen.

And, for your consideration, here is a link to a recipe for shishito peppers.