Cra-Cra

          Cra-cra is slang for crazy and what a crazy, crazy, week this past week has been. It seems like all we did all week long was run. Before I get into that though I want to start at the beginning — a good place to start, don't you think?

          The end of last week, beginning of this week, I did something I've wanted to do for more than a year now. I made my own suet cakes for the birds. I bought a couple of them from Wal Mart and saved the plastic trays. Last year I'd bought a cheap brand of peanut butter for this project and it's sat on the shelf all this time. Then a few months ago I'd bought some walnuts and when I opened them up I found out they were already rancid. Rancid won't necessarily make you sick, but it doesn't taste good. The birds won't care, I thought, and I've been chopping and adding them to my bird seed since then. Once the store bought suet cakes were gone, I decided it was time.

          A Google search turns up tons and tons of suet cake recipes. You can pretty much put anything into them you want. I used hamburger grease, oatmeal, raisins, walnuts, birdseed (sitting in the cottage cheese container), peanut butter, and wheat flour. I didn't measure anything. I just chopped a bunch of nuts and added a little of this and a little of that, mixing as I went. I spooned it into the plastic containers and had some left over. I took an old coffee cup and put the rest of it in there. I added a piece of dowel rod for a perch and put everything into the freezer.

           A couple of hours later I popped one of the suet cakes from the mold and put it out for the birds. The coffee cup — I added a bit of string and hung it from a branch. Then I sat back and waited. All day last Saturday I watched and waited. The birds were at the feeders, but not the suet cakes. Maybe I over-did the peanut butter, I thought. Like I said, I didn't measure. I just spooned a couple of gobs out — big spoonfuls!

          It was the next day, Sunday (a week ago now) when I saw the first little Downy Woodpecker on the suet cake holder. 

And I'll tell you what! He kept coming back to the suet cake all day long! He likes it! I was pleased.

 Then the secret was out and there was some competition for the peanut butter suet cake.

          It wasn't until Wednesday that I saw anyone on the suet cup, then it was a Starling while a Grackle was on the cake feeder.

          I wasn't the only one watching the birds. Little Miss Cleopatra sat and watched too!

          It's been a week now and they have the suet cake almost gone.

          While I'm talking about the birds, let me say that I saw a Robin this past week. And I saw Red-winged Blackbirds with red wings! Aren't they pretty!

          Monday we were up early and off to C.C. Allis for enough tongue and groove knotty pine to finish the ceiling in the kitchen.

          This time I took a picture to show you how far out in the middle of nowhere this place is. It's nothing but farms and fields for miles around.

          "You know, Peg," Mike says on the way home. "We can't really go very far until we finish the furnace runs..."

          "You wanna go to Sayre? We could pick up your meds at Wal Mart and get the ductwork at Lowe's?" We had tried to call his prescriptions into the Scranton store but the automated menu wouldn't accept his prescription numbers and the pharmacy was closed.

          So it was off to Sayre we went. I didn't take many road pictures but here's one.

          It was a wasted trip. We get to Wal Mart and find out we can't get Mike's prescriptions refilled until the 12th because the insurance won't pick up their share until then. Then at Lowe's they didn't have the aluminum-clad flex duct that Mike wanted. We headed over to HEP, another business in Sayre where we picked up the diffusers but they didn't have the kind of flex duct Mike wanted either. 

          "We might just as well shoot over to Vestal," I said. "We're closer to it now then if we go home and go to Scranton."

          So that's what we did.

          On the way home I took a few pictures for you.

          I see the old fridge against the window to the right of the chimney. If I zoom in on the window to the left I can see some old metal kitchen cabinets. I wonder if the cook stove is between them.

          This is at a house on the edge of Wyalusing. He must be an odd duck. He's got the tire with a skeleton cradled in it hanging from a tree and now I see he's got something else there too. It's some kind of head on a pole with an Over The Hill hat taped to it and he's holding a checkered flag.

          I don't know what those round things are that're hanging there with him.

          This guy has had run-ins with our small town government.

          WYALOSERS BE DAMNED he's painted in white block letters on the side of his garage.      

          Go ahead, tell us how you really feel about Wyalusing!

           On Tuesday we got the sweetest surprise in our mailbox. Our grandson sent us a care package.

          "Andrew saw this candy and wanted to send it to you..." the accompanying note said. We also got family portraits, which I love and will frame. I miss these sweet faces.

          "Mom!" I hear Kevin exclaim. "We sent you more bite-size Snickers bars than that!"

          I know, right! We may have eaten a few before I thought to take a picture. I had no idea we needed a Snickers so bad!

          Speaking of sweet...

          I was flipping through an old cookbook given to me as a gift by my oldest and much-loved sister Patti many years ago. I was looking for a coconut macaroon recipe to add to the next care package I sent to my mother. I didn't find what I was looking for but I found something called Condensed Milk Kisses that sounded interesting. It only had four ingredients; sweetened condensed milk, coconut, vanilla, and a dash of salt.

          In the meantime, I'd made my Miss Rosie green birds for St. Patrick's Day. I like to make her things because she loves my glasswork, so I look for excuses to make her something. I finished well in advance of the holiday and posted a picture on FaceBook. I asked if they thought she would like it.

          "She'd be crazy not to LOVE it," my cute little red-haired sister replied.

          "If she doesn't know where to put it, tell her to swap out the star on the steps," Rosie's daughter Jenn commented.

          "Peg, aren't you afraid Rosie'll see it on FaceBook?" you ask.

          Nope. Rosie and Lamar don't have and don't want a computer or the internet.

          "But won't someone tell her?" you wonder.

          Nope. No one I know would ever want to spoil the surprise for this sweet lady.

          So I had these two things rattling around in my head; a new cookie recipe I wanted to try, and Miss Rosie's gift.

          In the meantime meantime, we got to work on the ceiling again.

          It seems this section of ceiling is dead set on giving us a hard time. We've got a macerator pump in our master bath. It was a million times easier to put the pump in, go across the ceiling, come down the kitchen wall, and hook into the gravity flow system than to have to jackhammer the concrete up and try to get the correct fall, which Mike said we could never get. We have vents in the system and yet every time the pump runs in the bathroom it sucks the water from the trap in the kitchen sink causing an annoying gurgle.

          "Let's put a cheater vent under the sink," Mike said.

          "What's a cheater vent?" you ask.

          It's a valve that allows air to come into the line but won't let anything come out. We put the vent in a month ago and it didn't help.

          "Maybe we need to add it to the line that comes across the ceiling," Mike guessed. "We'll have to do it before we put the ceiling up."

          So we spent a whole morning gathering all the parts and tools we'd need, flushing the lines and putting the vent in. Our expectations were high as we ran water until the pump ran. Our expectations were quickly dashed as water backed up into the sink making what was just an annoyance into a real problem.

          "It's letting the water run faster," Mike said.

          We spent the next hour digging through spare plumbing parts boxes looking for caps, then cutting off the cheater vents and capping the lines. Now we were back to square one, which is way better than having sewer water come up in the kitchen sink.

          Mike was so frustrated and discouraged that he collapsed into his chair only to be bombarded with critters. If you think this is an everyday occurrence, it pretty much is. The only thing that changes is the number of critters in his lap. This time he had Smudge lying across Spitfire, Itsy, Ginger, and Molly.

          "I think I'll go to town and get a haircut," Mike said after he'd rested a bit.

          Well, you may remember that I had a couple of things rattling around in my head. I had a new cookie recipe to try and I had a gift for Miss Rosie.

          I didn't feel inclined to wait until St Patrick's Day to give Miss Rosie her gift. I thought it might be better if she got to enjoy it for a few days leading up to the holiday in case she wanted to put it away afterward. With Mike gone I decided to make the cookies and when he got home, we'd pay a visit to the Kipps.

          I followed the directions on the cookie recipe, greasing my Teflon coated cookie sheets, and used a teaspoon to drop the cookies onto the sheet. It says to bake them at 375 degrees for 15 minutes.

          "Peg, that sounds awfully hot for awfully long," you say.

          I know, right! And my oven has been running hot lately. I tested it with an oven thermometer after burning some frozen pizza really bad last week. I adjusted the temp and put the cookies in. After about 10 minutes I could smell them burning. When I tried to get them off the cookie sheet they were stuck on tight! Maybe they didn't have nonstick bakeware in 1948, I thought as I scraped with a plastic spatula. Maybe I didn't have to grease it all, I thought. Maybe I should have greased my old tin cookie sheets instead, I thought dropping the cookie sheet in the sink and filling it with hot water and a squirt of dish soap. In the end I decided to use parchment paper, which did the trick. I turned my oven temp down even more and kept a close eye on the next batch of cookies. After what I thought was about eight minutes I went to see how much time was left on the timer and found out I'd neglected to start the timer. I checked the cookies but they weren't done. I closed the oven, started the timer — just so I didn't totally lose track of time, and did something else for a few minutes. When the timer went off, the cookies looked pretty good. So for the final pan of cookies I put them into the oven and set the timer for the required 15 minutes thinking I'd had all the wrinkles worked out.

          Yeah.

          No.

          They were burnt too.

          Pretty soon Mike came home.

          "Can we go see the Kipp's before we start working on the ceiling again?" I asked him.

          "What for?"

          "I want to take them some cookies and give Rosie her gift."

          "Okay, let's go."

          "Wait! I have to call first!"

          "Hurry up then."

          I called. "Hey Lamar, it's Peggy," I said when he answered. They don't have caller ID either.

          "Hi Peggy," he greeted.

          "Are you guys busy?"

          "I'm not busy," he replied then he turned from the phone. "Rosie, Peggy wants to know if you're busy."

          I could hear her in the background. "I'm just reading the paper."

          Lamar turned back to the phone. "She's not busy either, she's just reading the paper."

          "Can we come down for a short visit?" I asked.

          "Sure. Come on down."

          I bagged up most of the non-burned cookies and some of the least burned ones too, grabbed my coat and the gift I'd made and met Mike at the still warm Jeep.

          She likes it! I could tell.

          "Jenn says if you don't know where to hang it, to swap it for the star at the bottom of the steps."

          "Okay," Miss Rosie says and I follow her in the living room as she goes to hang it.

         The star has hung in this window for many, many years and has been usurped by two cheeky green birds! Maybe after St. Patrick's Day the star will get his place back.

          We sat and visited with Rosie and Lamar for a little while. Rosie tried a cookie and thought they tasted like macaroons.

          "These aren't burnt," Lamar declared. "They're good."

          "That's because Rosie burns everything and you think it's normal," I said remembering the stories I heard of over-baked goods. I don't think it happens as much anymore since Rosie got a new stove.

          When I made Miss Rosie's birds, I'd planned on making a second one for my mother as an Easter gift, only I was going to use one green bird and one yellow one. In fact, I'd already had the birds cut out before I'd shown them to Momma.

          "I'm making you one too," I told her during one of our daily conversations. "If you want one, that is."

          She laughed, pleased. "Sure!"

          "I can make the birds any color you'd like..."

          "I like the green ones," she said so I made her green ones too. That left me with a single yellow bird.

          I took some wire and made him a vine all his own to sit on and I thought he was pretty cute. Then I decided I'd make a few more in pretty pastel colors, just like Easter. Yeah! Then I could give them as Easter gifts to my family.

          And a memory comes unbidden into my head.

          "Giving stuff away devalues it," I was told once. "If people pay for stuff then they value it more."

          What do you think about that?

          Mike and I were putting up the tongue and groove knotty pine that we'd purchased on Monday and right away Mike notices there's something wrong with it. "There's an extra piece on some of these," he told me. "Someone didn't have it in the machine right."

          If you look at the picture, the board on top is wrong and the one under it is how the tongue portion should look. It creates a few minor problems for us but nothing we can't compensate for. I think.

          We get about halfway done with the kitchen and Mike decides he'd like to do something different with the heating system than we were originally going to do. Originally he was going to put a diffuser in the ceiling just outside the pantry but the more he thought about it the more he thought he'd like to run a heating duct into the pantry area.

          "What would it look like if we mounted an external duct and ran it under the beam and into the pantry?" he asked.

          Frankly, he wanted all of our ducts to be mounted to the ceiling in the living area, giving it an 'industrial' look. I know lots of business you go into these days have done that. "It's more efficient," he says. "You recapture any heat loss through the pipes that way," he says. "And it doesn't blow cold air when it first comes on," he says. It wasn't what I wanted and I don't know why he didn't do it that way, if it was because of me or some other reason, but I agreed if he wanted to run a surface mounted duct into the pantry then he could do that. Unfortunately, it meant another run to Scranton for parts. 

          I took more road pictures for you.

                    Construction of a pipeline.

               A walking trail beside a creek.

       Krispy Kreme bus. 

    

       Old fence.

          We were stopped at a stop light when I spotted these guys swimming in the creek beside the road. There's three of them there if you can see them.

          Another stop light in the middle of one of the little towns we pass through and I see whatever this is laying on the sidewalk. "Mike what is that?" I asked but he didn't know.

          An old concrete.... What? Wall? Foundation? Abutment? It looks like it has a red steel rim around the top.

          This building used to house a Laundromat and Mexican — or maybe Asian — food store; I forget which. Now the place is filled with all kinds of stuff, most of it sitting out in the weather.

          "Why would he just let all that stuff sit outside and get ruined?" I asked Mike but he didn't know the answer to that one either.

          Friday we put enough ceiling up to put the ductwork in. Have you ever put sections of steel duct together? One end is crimped and is supposed to slide into the end of another pipe.

          Mike got the pipe cut to length, attached the flex duct above the ceiling, but no matter what he did, he couldn't get the elbow to slide in.

          "Peg!" he yelled for me. "Will you come and hold this for me? Please?"

          I tried to hold the section as he pushed against it but he's stronger than I am and I couldn't hold it. "Maybe if you crimp the end a little more?" I suggested.

          "A furnace guy would have a crimper," he said and had to settle for adding a few cuts to the end, bending them in and trying to make the diameter a little smaller. Michael cut, bent, pushed, banged, cut some more, bent, pushed, pounded, and it still wouldn't go together. "Maybe we could flare the end of the other one out a little?" he suggested. So he cut that end of the pipe too, bent, pushed, banged, pounded, and we still couldn't get them to go together.

          In frustration, to see if we were doing something wrong, we turned to YouTube, a video website on the internet where you can watch videos on how to do just about anything. While Mike watched videos, I took a new elbow and section of pipe and slowly, carefully, keeping it even the whole way around, slid the two pieces together with no added cuts, bends, pushing, pounding, or banging.

          "I did it," I said calmly, belying the exuberance I felt.

          Mike turned in his chair and saw I had indeed put two sections together. "Good. Think you can do the same thing up there?"

          "I can try."

          Back up on the ladders we went. Mike held the downpipe and carefully, I lined stuff up, making sure to keep it even the whole way around and it slid together easy-peasy.

          We will see what Monday brings and hopefully my kitchen ceiling will get done this week.

          Let's call this one done!