This week, this first week of March, let’s pick up some tidbits that have been accumulating in my photo file, none of which amount to a hill of beans.
Macchiato, sharpening his claws, is my desktop photo right now.
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Turkey! I thought. Then, when I checked turkey tracks online, I see these look a little bit different. They have a knob on the center toe.
Is it a certain kind of turkey?
Maybe it’s not turkey at all!
Now, I just don’t know.
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I asked Shannon for the recipe and she sent me a link to Instructables, the website where she got the recipe she uses. But something happened, I don’t know what happened, but something happened because when I made them, I used a recipe from the King Arthur Flour website. I have no idea how or why that happened.
The second time I made them, I went looking for the recipe again and when I clicked on the link Shannon sent me, I realized it wasn’t the same recipe as the one I’d used. The King Arthur recipe has more yeast, half the salt, a third less sugar, no butter in the dough, and doesn’t call to be brushed with an egg wash before baking. The technique to make them is a little easier than the Instructables one but I’m thinking I’d like to try Shannon’s recipe anyway, just to see which one I like best. With more sugar and butter right in the dough, I’m sure it’s good, but since they are so yummy, I try not to make them very often.
There are lots of recipes online and they are pretty easy to make, so don’t be afraid to try it for yourself. I highly recommend them. And did I mention that they are really yummy — especially when they’re hot, fresh out of the oven, brushed with butter and sprinkled with a corse salt?
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Check out this double beaver dam. The creek splits around a piece of ground and this is how the beaver— or beavers— decided to make it. The long arm has an arch in it, can you see it? And the beavers instinctively knew that an arch is stronger.
Impressive, isn’t it?
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We’ve been seeing robins for two weeks now and whole herds of geese have been flying overhead, going north.
“The true harbinger of spring isn’t robins,” Miss Rosie told me. “I’ve been told it’s the red-wing blackbird and I saw one yesterday. The animals think it’s spring anyway.”
Then on Friday the temperatures dropped. We had snow flurries on and off all day.
The roads, in parts of Pennsylvania, became so slick there were multiple multi-car pile-ups on the interstates 80 and 81. One man died. He was just 55 years old. Too young. It’s been all over the national news, so I won’t dwell.
Here at our Mountain Home, even though it came down sideways and heavy at times, it didn’t amount to anything. Then the sun came out and melted it. It tickled me when I saw the snow lingering in the shadows cast by a bush, making camouflage patterns on the ground.
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It doesn’t matter how many times we see them though. Every time we see them, Mike is taken with them. “Look at that wrecker!” Mike exclaimed. “Is that a second steering axle?” he wondered. “Why would they need a second steering axle?” He drove closer and stopped as he scrutinized the design. “I can’t imagine how they can even make it work.” He thought about it. “Unless it’s a stationary air-lift axle.” I clicked away with my camera as Mike admired this big boy. “The way the boom is made, with the base of it being just in front of the back axles, maybe it’s just for support.” He was quiet for a moment as he considered this. “That’s a hellofa wrecker now, let me tell ya,” Mike said as we started to move on. Mike drove slowly around the wreckers. I could see there were two wreckers there and I don’t know why, but I thought they were both the same. They’re not.
“That one’s a work-horse,” Mike said, stopping the Jeep again, and he proceeded to tell me how it works even though I’ve seen it plenty of times before on those towing shows he used to watch. “You see that thing right there, Peg?” he asked and pointed.
“Yeah,” I answered. I let him go on and tell me.
“It comes down and those sides come out, then they back up to where it’s just behind the wheels, then they bring’em in and pick up the front of the truck.”
“Uh-huh uh-huh,” I say twice in row just like that.
I guess it’s a guy thing. They are very handsome wreckers but don’t thrill me quite as much as they do Mike.
Me?
I loved a little side trip we took on a different shopping trip to Athens, where we normally shop if we don’t need to go to Home Depot.
Athens and Sayre, PA sit on the New York border with Waverly being just on the New York side. They are so close all three towns kinda run together and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. This was our first trip to downtown Waverly and I loved the tall doors on many of the old buildings. Waverly, like many towns and cities in this part of the country, is an old town. It was founded in 1854.
One thing I’ve noticed about businesses in these old towns is that they almost always have a step or three out front. I wonder why that is.
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I tried a technique called air chasing on a copper cuff bracelet.
You fold the copper in half and pound on it, then anneal it, which means you heat it up. Think of annealing as rush hour traffic. When everybody stays in their own lane, traffic flows nice and smooth. When you have a lot of lane switching going on, traffic becomes snarled. Annealing lines all the molecules up and that makes the copper flexible. As you bend it or beat on it, the molecules get all mixed up and it gets harder and harder, hence it becomes work-hardened. Once annealed, you open the copper up and pound it out on your anvil, being careful to not pound out all of the lovely texture you just put in it.
I took these pictures off the internet. They were all created using air chasing.
I wasted a bunch of hours making this bracelet. A beautiful lady I know, loves this bracelet and asked if I’d sell it.
Sure I would, but I have no idea how to price it and since she just had a birthday, I think I’ll gift it to her.
I also made this style bracelet. If you can’t read it, it says, XOX LOVE XOX. I didn’t quite get the letters centered and I should have separated my hugs and kisses from my LOVE but — it was my first and we will call it a learning experience.
I’m not the worlds best crocheter by any stretch of the imagination, but I saw this stitch on my Facebook page and it looked like it had lots of fabulous texture so I decided to give it a try. I love the homemade dishrags but find they get stinky after a day’s use. So I change my dishrag every morning. That means I need to keep at least seven in circulation and they do wear out. Sometimes, when washing a sharp knife, I may inadvertently cut the yarn. Then you get a hole. I crocheted my new purple dishrag the size I thought I wanted it, tied off the ends — for my dishrags I don’t fool around with weaving the ends in cause I just don’t care that much — then I washed a sink full of dishes.
“What’s the verdict?” you ask.
I’m so glad you asked! It’s a little heavier and bulkier than other stitches I’ve used. Not a bad thing, just different. The instructions called for this stitch to be used for a body cloth, aka washrag, and I’m thinking about making one of those for Mike. He likes lots of texture on his ‘body cloths’.
Speaking of Mike…
“Peg, look at this,” he said to me one morning as he dressed in the new thrift store shirt I bought him.
“What?”
“The bottom button hole is sideways.”
“Really!” I exclaimed and got up to go look. “It is!”
“Why is that I wonder?” Mike asked but I didn’t have a clue.
“Let me get my camera.” Mike waited patiently to button his shirt as I got my camera and made him hold it out so I could get a picture.
Mike thought about it for a little while. “Maybe it keeps it from becoming unbuttoned,” he guessed.
And what did I do? I got on Google and asked, Why is the bottom buttonhole sideways on a man’s shirt?
“Because horizontal buttonholes take horizontal stress with less deformation of the buttonhole shape and offer much less likelihood of the button pulling out from such stress than do vertical ones,” Google told me. So Mike was right.
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Moxie Community Church is where I go to praise and worship our Lord on Sunday’s. In November I attended a Bible study titled Prophets and Kings with Pastor Mike being the leader. At the end of the very first Bible study, we stood for the Word of God. As I struggled to get to my feet, I thought, I need to lose some weight. I looked at the lady next to me and thought, She needs to lose weight too! A light bulb went off in my head. We should do it together!
And just like that, it came to me. I could lead an exercise class.
NOOOOO! Every fiber of my being shouted. I DON’T WANT TO! I don’t really like to put myself out there like that, don’t you know. I’m a much better Indian than I am a chief.
But the idea was there and I couldn’t shake it. It even kept me awake at night thinking about how I’d do it if I led a health and fitness class.
“What qualifies you?” I hear you ask, and trust me, I’ve wondered the same thing myself.
I was the circuit coach for Curves for about three years.
I lost 42 pounds! Yay!
I’ve gained 30 of those back in the last two years. Not so yay.
During my employment at Curves I took and passed a class offered by the Cleveland Clinic that qualified me to be a coach for their diet program called Curves Complete.
“So why am I fat?” you wonder. Yeah, I know you were thinking that, even if you are too polite to say it right out loud.
The long and short of it is this. Accountability.
And that’s why I thought a ladies fitness class would not only help me, but it could benefit other members of the congregation too. After all, our physical health goes hand-in-hand with our spiritual health, don’t you think?
I really didn’t want to do it and after struggling with it for a week or so, I beat the idea down until it was barely a whisper in my head; easy to ignore. Then one day, about a month later, I was chatting with Rosie Kipp when all of a sudden, and all of it own volition, out of my mouth came, “I’ve been thinking about starting an exercise class at our church.” I was shocked! I had no intention of mentioning that! Like I said, I didn’t really want to do it.
Miss Rosie considered it for a moment. “I think that would be a good idea.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’d come.”
Now that the cat was out of the bag, I couldn’t put it back in. So onward I forged. Early in December I presented my idea to the church elders thinking we could get started at the beginning of the new year.
“These things take time,” I was told.
So when I didn’t hear anything back after the board met, I’d assumed they turned it down.
January comes and I think I’m off the hook.
The board held it’s monthly meeting, but I didn’t think anything of it.
At the next Sunday service, Pastor Mike mingled at the end of the service, as he normally does and when he spoke to me, he asked, “Did Lamar talk to you about the exercise class?”
Lamar Kipp is a board member. “No,” I answered. “What was decided?”
Pastor Mike sniffed and swiped at the tip of his nose in the way that he does and said, “I’ll let Lamar tell you.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “If it was good news, you’d tell me.”
“Let him tell you. He knows you better than I do.”
“Oookay,” I acquiesced and Pastor Mike moved on.
Going out to the Jeep I’m smiling and thinking, Yes! He only thinks it’s bad news! It’s really good news! Did I mention that I didn’t really want to do this anyway? So now I can pretend to be sad about it and say, Oh well! I tried!
Monday, when the Kipp’s stopped on their morning walk, I brought the subject up. “So, I can’t do an exercise class?” I asked Lamar.
“Oh no. You can do one,” he answered and went on to outline the board’s wishes to me, ending with, “…and you might have to have them sign a release.”
Through all of the subsequent discussions, not only with Lamar but with Pastor Mike, it was decided I could offer a class on Monday, Tuesday and Friday nights. Wednesdays and Thursdays were already taken up with a youth program and Bible study.
Mid-January, at a Sunday service, with no warning at all, Pastor Mike asked me to present it to the congregation. I stood and started babbling and I don’t even remember what I said but at the end of the service I had five or six ladies approach me, all interested in participating in a weight loss journey with me.
Two weeks later we started.
The first class was spent weighing in and going over a diet plan and other helpful materials that I’d printed out for them. We talked about tips and tricks to employ to help us lose weight.
The next class, and every other class since then, we spend our hour (or more) exercising to whichever DVD we’ve decided to do that week.
I picked the first DVD. I wanted to do a DVD by Beach Body called Slim In Six. I’ve owned the program for more than fifteen years and I remembered that the very first time I put it in my DVD player, I could do most of the routine, so I thought these ladies would be able to do it too. I was reasonably sure I knew where it was, and when I went looking for it, I did find it, right where I thought it was, but when I opened the case, the first DVD of two DVD set was missing. I obviously never put it back. I’m not surprised though. Whenever I decide I’m going to start the routine again I just leave the disc in the computer so it would be there the next time, the next day, when I’d use it again. I bet you know how that works. You do it for a while, then you miss a day, then you miss two days and before you know it, it falls by the wayside.
I spent a lot of time looking for the missing disc but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I picked a different workout DVD and hoped we could all do most of it. There was a lot of laughter and chatter that first week as we tried to keep up with the instructor and imitate her steps.
Friday, the end of that week, I told the ladies, “Monday is weigh-in day!”
There were a lot of groans. “There goes my weekend,” someone grumbled, pretending to be mad. “Why can’t we weigh in on Friday’s?” someone else asked.
“Because it will help keep us accountable over the weekend,” I told them.
Someone else picked a DVD for the next week and week two was pretty much a repeat of week one with chatter and laughter. Some of us are not very coordinated and rhythmically challenged to boot so we found it hard to follow the dance routines.
After class one day, as we critiqued the program, there were a lot of complaints about the complexity of the program and how we couldn’t follow it and ended up just marching in place a lot.
“I really wanted us to do Slim in Six but I can’t find my disc’s,” I said.
“I have that one,” Joan said.
I perked up. “Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll bring it Monday.”
From the very first class that we plugged in Slim In Six, the ladies didn’t do much chattering as we followed Debbie Siebers through the routine. And we could all do pretty much the whole routine.
“I really like that one!” and, “I felt like I got a really good work-out!” were the comments after the class and we have been progressing through the program since then.
At the end of the month we lost a collective of forty-five point seven pounds. “Monday is weigh-in day!” I told the ladies, “And it’s picture day too!”
Talk about groans! “Do we have too?” I heard more than one say.
“Yes! You’ll be glad for it when we all get skinny,” I told them.
“I’m going to wear my I BROKE UP WITH GYM shirt,” Miss Rosie told me.
Monday, I set up my tripod, attached the camera, turned on the self timer and took several pictures. One of my regular gals, Tammy, wasn’t there.
“Can we do it again?” Felecia asks. “I’ll tell Tammy she has to come tomorrow night even if she just comes for the picture.”
“Sure,” I tell her, then I let the other ladies know that we would be repeating picture night the next night.
Rosie was a little sad. “I wanted to have my picture taken with my I BROKE UP WITH GYM shirt on.”
There was no help for it though, and Rosie got over it.
Tuesday night, Rosie wore a shirt in her favorite color. All of my regular gals were there, plus one. Leann doesn’t come all the time. She’s still in school and participates in sports, but comes to class when she can.
We set up and took pictures until everyone was happy with it, at least as happy as they could be.
At home I downloaded the pictures and looked through them for the best one. With thoughts of Rosie’s “I wanted to have my picture taken with my I BROKE UP WITH GYM shirt on,” rattling around in my head, I thought, I bet I can cut and paste it. Boy! Won’t she be surprised!
I did it — and I hated it.
I mean, it looks like it could have been printed that way, but I didn’t like it. I need to color around the words, I thought and went back to the drawing board. I spent a good hour on it until I got something I liked then I named our group, added the date and pounds lost, and printed a copy for each of the ladies.
Rosie?
She was pleased. She really loves it. “I wish it really was that way!”
The other ladies thanked me for the keepsake and it was decided that we would take a monthly photo.
Let’s end it this time with a little prayer…
Thank you, heavenly Father, for taking me someplace I didn’t really want to go and thank you for bringing these Godly ladies into my life. They are truly a blessing.
And let’s put a stamp on it before we send it off.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
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