Sunday, January 4, 2015

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year!

Can you believe it? Can you believe it’s 2015. I remember once, when I was a little girl, some of my brothers and sisters and I were sitting around on the living room floor, looking at books or something, and we figured out how old we would be in the year 2000.

“How many years away is that?”

“Thirty years,” one of the older kids said.

“I’ll be forty!” That sounded ancient to a ten year old.

And now we are fifteen years beyond that!



Let’s start with Letter Facts.

This is the start of my eighteenth year writing to you. Last year I wrote 47 letters. I missed a week in February, a week in May, two weeks in June and a week in September. Besides my weekly letter I wrote eight extra stories, never posting two of them. Josh and Myra unlocked an interest in me that I didn’t even know I had.

Most of my letters were four pages long, but the six-pagers ran a close second! So, for one year, for just one of you, I printed 302 pages. I print nine copies every week and mail between five and nine copies depending on where we are located in this big ol’ beautiful country of the US of A. In those 302 pages were 406 photographs.

Besides the physical letters, I post to an internet web log called a blog and I send it by email to 45 people.

All of this for the love of friends and family.

My current desktop photo is winter flowers with hoar frost on them.

 

Monday, when I took the girls out first thing in the morning, I saw we had had a hoar frost. Hoar frost, by definition, is the white frost that forms on grass or leaves in the morning when the dew freezes. Also called white frost. I did not know that. I did not know that it was also called white frost.

I felt kind of bad that I hadn’t been out taking any photos for you so mid-morning I hooked up Itsy and Ginger and we went for a walk. Besides taking photos of the frost on plants and leaves, I saw cardinals…

 

…and a pretty junco posed in a ray of sunlight for me.

I even saw two turkey buzzards, sitting in a tree watching me.

So, hopefully my bird photos will make up for my lack of photos last time. I know some of you really look forward to seeing what I’ve photographed during the week.

Oh my goodness! I feel like I could do a whole ’nother letter based on goofs and extrapolations from my last couple of letters!

My biggest goof is one I deeply regret. When I told you of the new additions to our family I missed my niece Erin. She gave us this beautiful baby, Luke Matthew Dieter on December 22^nd.

 

And I knew better too, that’s the kicker!

I had a list, right here beside me and did I double check it? NO! But in case you are interested in excuses, I have one. By the time I got to that part of my letter I had been writing for hours. I was getting tired. That combined with the fact that I am being constantly interrupted by one thing or another makes me lose my train of thought.

Do you know when I realized I had forgotten Erin? After I had gone to bed. I forgot Erin. That thought woke me up from sleep. My heart sank and I felt so bad. I got up and fixed it in my blog, but I couldn’t do anything about all the emails I had sent.

Forgetting isn’t what I deeply regret. I do regret that, but what I deeply regret is the feelings I may have hurt. You are all so precious to me and I’d never knowingly do anything to hurt any of you.

I also found out that I will not be the only young great-grandparent in our family. My cute little red haired brother Richard and his wife Cindy will also become great-grandparents this year.

When Richard called me we also talked about the family tree. He would like to bring it up to date but he needs help. Richard needs names as well as birth, marriage and death dates. That includes middle and maiden names. If you need an email address or snail-mail address for Rick, let me know. Or call Momma. She’ll give it to you too.

When I was talking about making an ABC Book out of vinyl for Andrew, I was remembering something that my cute little red haired sister had made for my kids when they were young. Diane made them a big fat cloth book that taught them how to button, zip, tie and I forget what else. It was a fun book and one that the kids played with a lot!

 

Another cute little red head in my family is my niece Bambi.

She recently shared with me her famous crab dip recipe-a big hit every place she takes it and a favorite of her brother Gatlin’s-and I made it for Christmas. Bambi didn’t know the amounts on some of the ingredients, it was a some-of-this-a-little-of-that kind of recipe. That scared me. I will normally make a recipe the first time according to the directions. After that all bets are off. I’ll adjust it to suit me.

I know! I thought. I’ll Google it! I found a recipe on the Old Bay website that was very similar to Bambi’s and it gave me an idea of what I was looking for. So I made it and it wasn’t bad. I thought it could have been a little moister and spicier but did I add more stuff…No! Don’t ask me why. It would have been easy enough to do at the time. Instead I covered it and put it in the fridge. Maybe the flavors need to marry, you know what I mean? That’s exactly what I thought when I made my now infamous horseradish sauce. The flavors needed to mix and mingle and become good friends in the fridge for a few hours. But did I think of that until ten minutes to serving time? NO! Doggone it! Why didn’t I make this yesterday! I thought when Mike hated it.

My story of confusing garlic and horseradish in my head tickled some of you and you laughed right out loud, you told me so.

What a compliment that is!

Momma laughed too, she told me so on the phone the night she read my story. “But what I don’t understand is why you didn’t know it was garlic and not horseradish,” she said.

I didn’t know the answer to that but with my need to fill the pause with sound, I came up with this. “I like garlic.” Yeah. Like that explains it, right? Sometimes my talker gets ahead of my thinker, or as my father used to say, “My alligator mouth overloaded my canary brain.”

“But they don’t taste anything alike!” Momma exclaimed.

But it did taste like I expected it to, except did it need another few drops of lemon? More salt? Pepper? Do you put pepper in horseradish sauce? I don’t know, but I did. I like pepper. Hence, the reason I asked Mike to taste it.

In retrospect, maybe my subconscious knew the whole time exactly what I had done.

What am I going to do with all this sauce? I wondered. I couldn’t have made just a little could I? No! I made a BIG bowl of it cause I knew we liked it and we had four pounds of prime rib to eat. I wasn’t going to have to mix up any more of it.

The advent of Mike hating it left me with an even bigger problem. Not that I have any problem eating sour cream and garlic on crackers--mm, mmm-but I didn’t need to eat it. Then I remembered that I had a bowl of crab dip in the fridge that Mike wouldn’t eat either, and it needed a little something-something…Do you see where this line of thinking led me? I mixed the garlic sauce into the crab dip, sprinkled cheese on top and toasted it. I liked it and Mike’s helper Gary helped me eat it.

Monday we diet.

Oh! I almost forgot! One more thing about Christmas 2014 and then maybe, hopefully, we can leave it there, in last year and move on.

I wanted to thank everyone who took the time and expense to send us a Christmas card. Especially my cousin Lorraine. After picking up the mail from the post office box, we always sit in the car and open it. I laughed as Lorraine’s Christmas wishes came tumbling out of the envelope to land in my lap like so much glitter. Oh, wait, maybe it was glitter.

 

I read and enjoyed each and every card then I took them home and hung them on my kitchen cupboards.

The piece I wrote and submitted to the newspaper was printed. I was disappointed when I didn’t get a by line and when I contacted the editor about it, I was told it was an oversight. Sorry.

 

“As the Strip develops, and you know of more progress like George's project, you might let me know so I can do a story,” the editor told me.

I don’t know what to make of that.

My staging area for my Cricut creations is full. Next week I’ll get some of these in the mail and that will give me room to keep on creating.

 

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike