Hello, hello, hello!
My current desktop photo is a twisted vine holding a winter flower. Okay, okay! It’s a dead leaf, but don’t you think ‘winter flower’ sounds prettier?
Let’s do February birthdays.
Stacey Lea Soden Ammerman, 2nd; Brenda Jane Bowers Smith, 3rd; Ella (Elsie) Lewis Smith, 5th; Aunt Ester Stanton, 12th (Momma’s aunt); Hope Cosentino, 17th; Anthony McDonald, 17th; Marie Isabel Soden, 19th; Angie Smith Kraft, 23rd; Kevin Lewis Kraft, 25th.
YAY! Happy birthday everyone!
Especially my beautiful Aunt B who turns a beautiful 70 on Tuesday!
No one had any insights in how to keep your butter from picking up refrigerator odors. So I think I’ll switch to margarine. I’ve just about stopped eating butter anyway.
Only one person had any ideas at all about the name of my newly created FaceBook Page HIM and that was Jenn, our neighbor’s daughter from down the dirt road of our Mountain Home there in Pennsylvania.
“How about TIM; Those I Meet or TOM; Thoughts Of Mine?” she wrote.
Both very clever ideas.
Momma, once she had admonished me to keep my mind on what I was doing-told me I used the wrong spelling for the word sight.
“S-i-g-h-t is like eyesight and s-i-t-e is site as in place,” I said proving I did know the difference.
“That’s right,” she said, “and you used the wrong one.”
“I did?”
“You did,” she confirmed and proceeded to tell me where it was in my letter and you know what?
“What?” you ask.
She was right (but I bet you knew that).
Not the first time I’ve made that particular mistake and it probably won’t be the last time either!
One of our favorite things to do on Saturday morning is to go to the Golden Corral with our friend Margaret for breakfast. We are usually standing in the entryway at 7:25 waiting for them to unlock the doors at 7:30.
As you can imagine, when you see the same people there every week and every week, you become friends with them. Sort of.
There is the elderly couple who come in close to the time we are ready to leave. They are a very handsome and dignified couple. They look like they have been together for a hundred years. In fact, they often times dress the same. If he has a red shirt, she has a red blouse-adorned with a pretty necklace. It may not be an exact match to his shirt but it will be some sort ‘a shade of red. Often times they both wear khaki slacks with a belt-his manly, hers feminine and petite. He may sport a sweater vest and she a sweater. They compliment each other and just look like they belong together.
He helps her with her coat.
She gets two glasses of juice.
He spreads plain white paper napkins on the table for placemats with all the care of fine linen.
She gets the silverware.
Table set, they sit together on the same side and share a few minutes of quiet conversation before they hold hands and bow their heads in prayer.
“Oh no,” we were told when we asked about them. “It’s a second marriage for both of them. His wife died and her husband died and they got together. They’ve only been married for a couple of years.”
There is the young man who comes in and sits by himself. If he gets there before us, he takes our table, then we have to use our backup table. He is dressed for work and he never makes eye contact or tries to engage anyone in conversation. He just sits there quietly, by himself, eating and getting up only to refill his drink glass or get a fresh plate of food. Then you look and he’s gone, a dollar bill sitting on the table.
There’s the elderly couple who are just so danged delightful. He was Navy and he liked my second-hand-store Navy tee-shirt. That’s how he started talking to us. We speak almost every week now, exchanging pleasantries as they stop by our table on their way to the door. They brought their kids and grandkids in for breakfast over the holidays. They are a very handsome family.
And the elderly lady who always shows Mike what’s on her plate as she passes by. It’s a game they have developed over time and now play every time she’s there. She’s a hoot.
There is the pair of elderly men who come in just about every Saturday and most Sundays too, I suspect. Bob and Jim. I had a hard time remembering which name went with which gentlemen for a while and Bob was getting aggravated with me, I could tell. But he has since forgiven me as I haven’t messed up their names in a long time now.
Bob is a bit of a local celebrity as his picture has been in the paper several times over the last month or so. He was recently honored with a Community Impact Award for his involvement with Hope House.
“What is Hope House?” you ask and I don’t blame you. If you don’t live here you wouldn’t know what it is.
More than a decade ago, Bob joined a group of local pastors and community leaders to open Hope House, a non-profit organization that offers a food pantry, emergency aid and a thrift store to assist the needy. Today, Hope House serves more than 600 Lake-area families every month.
There are others that we see on a regular basis too but you know what? As I write this it occurs to me that I have used the word ‘elderly’ a few times. In fact, it seems to be a reoccurring theme here. Thinking about it, I guess us old people get up and around earlier than families with kids do. However, they do start to trickle in about the time we are ready leave.
Roger is the manager at our Golden Corral. Yesterday morning Roger greeted us as he unlocked the doors.
“Is Sue here?” I asked. She’s our favorite waitress.
“Of course!” Roger answered. “Sue’s always here.”
“One of these days we’ll come in and she won’t be here. She’ll be sick or something,” I speculated.
“Oh no,” Roger said, “she’ll be here even if she is sick. If you stay home you don’t get paid.”
Ain’t that the truth. And in fact, Sue did have a headache that morning but she never let it stand in the way of taking good care of her guests. That’s us. That’s what they call us you know.
We continued our conversation on the way to the register. “I bet you wouldn’t know what to do if we didn’t show up here on Saturday morning,” I teased.
“Sure they would,” Mike joined in. “They get along just fine without us when we go to Pennsylvania.”
“Yeah, but I have to go for grief counseling every time you leave,” Roger said with a straight face and I laughed.
Hey!
Check out my new pickled red beet egg jar. Isn’t it cool? It will hold twenty-four hard boiled eggs and two cans of red beets.
Miss Helen had me do a few things for her last week with one of those things being cleaning some old jars out of a cupboard.
“I’ll never use them again. Would you like to have them?” she offered.
And I was tickled pink to have her old jars. This one is just perfect for
making homemade pickled red beet eggs. Another one, with a pretty lid, I can see holding beads or baubles in my glass shop. And I will always think of this special lady every time I see the jars.
Sometimes, when I’m writing, I need a little break. After I finished writing about the jars Miss Helen gave me, I decided to do just that. Take a little break and call my mama. After she had given me all of her news and with my new pickled red beet egg jar fresh in my mind, I decided to mention it to Momma.
“And I even made my own pickled red beets,” I proudly told her. “I bought the plain beets and that way I could control the sugar and other additives. It doesn’t need all that sugar, does it?”
“I don’t know. It makes it good though,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “How did they taste?”
I hem-hawed a little bit. “Okay…I guess.” Not as good as I remember them being, but I didn’t say that.
“Did you use salt?” she asked. She knows of my proclivity to not use any salt. She believes food needs to be cooked with salt to taste good and she is absolutely right. However, you do get used to the taste of food without salt.
“Whatever Betty Crocker said to use,” I told her. Holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, I pulled the cookbook out and flipped to the right page. “It says ½ tsp salt. I four timesed the recipe so that would be two teaspoons, but I honestly don’t remember putting any salt in it at all.”
“Does it taste plain?” she asked and you know what? It did. I couldn’t have told her what was wrong with them but she nailed it anyway.
“Yeah,” I said but I didn’t want her to know how surprised I was that she guessed so I just said ‘yeah’ like it was no big deal.
“Salt makes sugar sweeter,” Momma said. “If you use salt, you don’t need as much sugar.”
“So you think I should put some salt in it?” I asked.
“You don’t have to put salt in the whole thing,” she said. She didn’t even sound condescending. “You can pull a little of the juice out and add a little salt to it and taste it.” (You might be surprised to know that that would never have occurred to me. Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.)
So, yeah. I did that. After I hung up the phone with her, I did what Momma suggested. And I’m guessing I forgot the salt because that was exactly what it needed. I had to call her back and tell her so. She laughed, but I suspect that she knew it the whole time. She is such a smart lady and beautiful too!
Something that has been on my ‘books’ for a while now is the last family night that we had with the kids.
Mike and I had done a little antiquing in Jefferson City (the capitol city of Missouri) and we found some antique stores that had been there for a long time but we hadn’t known they were there.
One of the most remarkable items that we found was an actual branding iron with an L brand. In all of our travels, all over this country, it is the first and only branding iron I’ve ever seen. Mike’s last name-as you well know-is Luby. It was an omen. A sign.
“Mike, you should buy this,” I told him. As much as we both wanted it, it was just too much money to sink into a dust collector at the time.
“We could brand Itsy,” I kid even now as I reminded him of our find.
“We could brand you!” he was kidding too (I hope).
Yeah. I wouldn’t like that, but the image of cowboys branding little dogies flashes through my minds eye.
We walked around this huge-wait a minute-HUGE!-antique store and I spotted this old fashion rocking horse. I wanted to buy it for Andrew.
“He has all kinds of riding toys and you think he’ll be happy with a rocking horse?” Mike asked and made me realize how silly I was.
I dismissed the idea. Maybe I just like the idea of a rocking horse and Andrew wouldn’t really enjoy it. But the longer we walked around looking at things, the more I thought about the rocking horse.
“It’s really in pretty good shape,” I told Michael, “and it’s only four dollars.” The thing that kept going through my head is that high-tech equals high stress. Sometimes-a lot of times-simple is better. It let’s you decompress, you know what I mean? And if he doesn’t like it…heck!…what’s four bucks?
“Whatever,” Mike says and to me that means yes. So I picked it up and handed it to him.
Another thing I found and felt like I might be wasting a dollar on was a wooden box full of…I don’t know what they are, nor do I know what they were for. But they were bright and colorful and there were a lot of them and what’s a dollar? I picked them up intending to ask you about them.
“What Peg! What are you talking about?” I hear you ask.
I’m talking about a wooden box full of plastic pieces in different shapes and colors, all with notches in them. Andrew played with them some but Kevin made some pretty cool sculptures while we were playing Skip-Bo.
So how about guys? Have you ever seen these before? If so, what are they? And no, there was nothing in or on the box.
Andrew…
My little heart.
Andrew is so smart!
The evening was winding down and Mom and Dad were thinking about heading for home.
“Get your coat,” Dad told Andrew.
Andrew, in true kid fashion, deployed the distraction method. He got on his rocking horse and started rocking.
The adults continued conversating er, conversing.
Andrew got off the horse.
“Let’s go home,” Mom said.
And guess what Andrew did?
If you guessed got back on the horse, then yep, you would be right. He got back on the horse and started rocking again.
We continued talking. Thinking we were sufficiently distracted, Andrew got off the horse again. He hadn’t gone more than three steps when Dad said, “Get your coat buddy.”
Andrew made a little noise like ‘oops’ or something, then he did an abrupt about face and jumped back on his mighty steed.
This continued for three or four more rounds until Mom and Dad had had enough.
Skip-Bo…
What can I say about Skip-Bo?
I love Skip-Bo. Mike and I play several times every day. Our deck is almost completely worn out! In fact, Mike’s has gotten me out of bed at 6:30 in the morning by sitting at the table and shuffling the cards. And I hopped out of bed and joined him in thirty seconds flat. Okay, maybe it was longer than that. I don’t know which one of us likes the game more.
We have taught Gary, our maintenance guy how to play and almost every morning he comes up for coffee and a round or two of Skip-Bo before they get on to whatever jobs they are going to get into that day.
Mike is so stinkin’ lucky! I’m tellin’ ya! He wins more than his share of the time and he also gets more skips than the rest of us.
“He’s such a skip magnet!” I told Gary.
“You mean chick magnet,” Mike corrected, but no, that isn’t what I meant.
Gary and I have tried all kinds of ways to foil Mike’s luck including choosing his stock pile for him to letting him choose and then swapping with him. It doesn’t seem to matter though. He always ends up with lots of skips.
Let’s call this one done.
Lots and lots of love,
Peg and Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment