To restart our G pursuits, we headed off to visit a new area and a new restaurant.

2 points: GRANITE PARK and GOOD UNION BBQ

Granite Park is a not so new but new to us section of our city. Designed to resemble a waterfront oasis, it has shops, restaurants, a Hilton Hotel and businesses but its main draw is The Boardwalk. Complete with wooden planks and beach chairs and tables assembled by the edge of the pond, it creates a genuine feeling of a boardwalk.

In keeping with G month, we chose to eat at the Good Union BBQ, which touts locally sourced food and craft drinks and has ample outdoor seating to enjoy the Boardwalk vibe.  Our brisket sandwich was tasty and we were introduced to Maine Root beverages, which are organic sodas that use 100% organic sugar cane from Brazil as the sweetener. We tried the Mandarin Orange – light and delicious.

2 points: New author

Sometimes you can surprise yourself by liking something unexpectedly. We found the book “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” by Bryn Greenwood to be fascinating and captivating. It was a provocative story about the relationship between the daughter of meth dealing parents and one of the father’s cohorts. As one of the reviews says, “The whole premise should be off-limits, but strangely, it’s not.”  We’re trying to give nothing away so it’s hard to say much here. The book was definitely influenced by the life experiences of the author whose father was a meth dealer. The author believes that “Not everybody has a nice, neat suburban childhood, but they deserve to see their experiences mirrored in fiction as much as anybody.” This story reinforced our belief that so much more can be learned by listening to and seeing the world from another person’s perspective. Understanding is not the same thing as accepting but it definitely stretches your range of emotions.