Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: Welcome Jacob

Welcome Baby Jacob, welcome to our world.

This very handsome couple is my youngest brother John and his beautiful wife Eunice along with their first baby Jacob Daniel.

"When was he born? How much does he weigh? Was Eunice in labor long? I'm a woman! I need to know this stuff!" I told John.

John laughed a little but gave me the details anyway. "He was born at 1:46 am on January 10th, weighs seven pounds two ounces, and is 19 inches. Mom's sore but good. We went to the hospital at two pm. We thought it was gonna be a little faster but it's all good. And he's as handsome as his dad."

I'd second that one and third and fourth it too. Dad is handsome and Jacob is beautiful.

I've been reconnecting with my old girlfriend Trish in the past few weeks. One of the things I shared with her is my favorite bread recipe. It's an easy no-knead bread recipe that my daughter Kat shared with me. I remember the first time she made it for me. It was so good we ate both loaves and Kat had to make it again the next day. I've been making it ever since and will never go back to the old way of making bread.

Talking about it made me hungry for it. There's only one problem though.

"What's that, Peg?" you ask.

If I make it, I'm gonna eat it! I love it hot out of the oven slathered with butter, I love it toasted, slathered with butter. Wait a minute! Maybe it's the butter I love!

That evening I picked up Rosie for exercise class. "Miss Rosie, if I make bread do you want a loaf?"

"Well yeah!" she says without even having to think about it. She's in the same boat with me, she loves homemade bread.

The next day I pulled down my crock bowl and set a batch to rising. I'll get a picture now and one when it's out of the oven, I thought.

So here's the before picture...

And here's the after...

Wait. There's not an after picture. As soon as it was pulled from the oven and turned out, I wrapped one in paper towel and took it down to the Kipps so Rosie could have it warm too. Then never thought about it again until my loaf was half-gone.

Dagnabbit!

It was cold here last Monday. Six, outside my kitchen door. The frost was heavy so I went in search of pictures.

The sun was starting to come up and shining on the dried milkweed pods as I headed to the upper barn.

A thorny whip with a frost-flake flower on the end of it.

I walked around the barn...

...and headed for the Bittersweet. The sun wasn't high enough to shine on this part of the path.

Frost on the Bittersweet.

I went on down to the pond. It's nice and full and has a skim of ice.

As I walked around the pond, I got to a spot where the sun was behind a tree and thought it looked interesting.

The cattails frozen in place where the wind knocked them down, the first rays of the sun landing on the taller ones.

I didn't want to go in the front door, opting instead to walk around the house and go in the kitchen. Right inside the kitchen door is where I'd kicked off my slippers and put my boots on. Now I could reverse that, kick off my boots and put my slippers back on.

I startled a flock of birds as I came around the house and didn't think to snap a picture until they were almost gone.

We made a trip to town and the Susquehanna was adorned with flatcakes of ice.

The DOT uses the old mill site to pull trucks over.

On the way home, we see they have a second truck pulled over.

Although it was cold outside, I walked Ginger down to the creek.

The creek was frozen over.

As fast as the water is when it comes rushing out of the culvert, it still froze.

I found another good deal on exercise videos. I got all 18 of these for $17.27 and that included the shipping — which was free. Seven of them were brand new, still wrapped in cellophane.

I opened the box, inspected them, and was so pleased I contacted the seller. "I'm very pleased with my order and the condition was just as you said they were. I gave you a good review on eBay and I won't hesitate to order from you again. And just in case you're wondering what I'm going to do with all the DVDs, and even if you're not I'll tell you anyway. I run a ladies exercise class through my church and we get bored doing the same DVDs all the time. This should give us a good amount of variety."

She wrote me back. "I'm glad you're happy with your order. I try to make the bigger sets similar yet not repetitive. Now is a good time of year for indoor exercise. Let me know if you need anything else. I can make custom sets too."

There is only one DVD that I won't try at all and that's because it's Yoga.

"What's wrong with Yoga?" you ask.

Oh, gosh. It's such a controversial subject. Let me see if I can give it to you in a nutshell.

Yoga is a Hindu discipline that promotes spiritual unity with a supreme being through a system of postures and rituals.

That's the definition.

This 'supreme being' that the Hindu's worship is not the God of the Bible.

"But I practice Christian yoga," you say.

That's an oxymoron. The mere act of doing the yoga poses is an invitation to the Hindu 'spirits".

I'll leave it at that but if you want to know more, reach out to me.

Mike and I took our weekly breakfast to a new restaurant. "Let's go to the Pink Apple then go on into Tunkhannock and do a little shopping," he proposed.

"Fine by me." I'm not stuck on eating in the same place all the time.

Sitting alone at the next table was this guy. He was making calls on his old-timey flip phone and had a hospital wristband still around his wrist. I thought his hat was interesting.

I think Mike just needed to get out of the house.

"We'll drive down through town and see if there's any other place you want to stop."

It was too early in the day for any of the antique or thrift stores to be open and there wasn't any other place I wanted to stop.

Mike, however, wanted to wash a few layers of Robinson Road off the Jeep so we went through the carwash. I'm always fascinated watching the soap bubbles and rivulets run down the windshield.

In the Wal-Mart, Mike pointed out a display of marinade and dipping sauce. "It's not just for wings anymore," the label proclaims.

We get up to the front of the store and whom should we meet?

Peggy!

"Are you a Peggy or are you a Margaret?" Mike asked her.

"I'm a Margaret," she says.

Mike points at me. "So is she!"

"What's your middle name?" Peggy asked.

"Mary. What's yours?"

"Ann."

"Did you see the sauce with our name on it?" I asked.

"I bought some," then she leaned in and quietly added, "and it was awful."

I wouldn't let that stop me from trying it if I really wanted to. Everybody's different. Everybody has different tastes.

Our trash company doesn't take recyclables anymore. I didn't ask why but I'd been thinking about going someplace else for a while now because they were so far behind in getting the stuff baled. The only problem is, I don't know where else to go. Recycling reduced the amount of trash we threw away and now we have to pay for at least one more bag every week.

Mike sold the John Deere that we bought last fall. "I hate it," he told me. "I can't get on and off it."

This guy doesn't live too far away so he came and drove the tractor home.

"You wanna go for a ride?" Mike asked a little while after the tractor was gone.

"No," is my first and automatic response. Then I thought about it. "Where?"

"Let's go see if he got the tractor home okay."

It was a chance for road pictures so I made a cup of travel coffee and off we went.

The tractor made it to its new home just fine. Since we were out, we decided to pop in on Mike's friend Vernon. More road pictures!

We didn't find Vernon at home but found him visiting in his son Aaron's store.

I love the deer Tracy, his daughter-in-law painted.

On the way home, we see this new plant going up.

"I bet it's the new power plant at the Walker's," Mike guesses.

"No way!" doubting Peg exclaims. "We're miles from the Walker's!"

"By road maybe, but not as the crow flies."

So what do I do? I ask Tracy. "Do you know where this is or what it is?"

"I think it's off the Walker's gas pad," she tells me. "Aaron thinks it's the power units."

Mike was a little smug when I told him what Tracy said. "Did you tell her that's what I said?"

"No!" But then I did. I told her that's what Mike thought it was too. I guess I could have asked the Walker's since Jenny is my friend.

We had a dusting of snow Thursday night with a forecast of a giant snowstorm to hit over the weekend.

"Let's go to Lowe's," Mike suggests on Saturday.

"What for?"

"I want to get some stuff to work on the garage."

Another road trip! Some weeks we don't go anyplace and other weeks all we do is run. More road pictures!

As with all of our road trips, I was watching the trees for hawks.

"There's a hawk!" I don't always get my camera up in time but this time I managed to get off two or three shots.

"I guess you don't know how this works," I told Mike.

"What?"

"When I say 'hawk' you're supposed to slow down if not pull off the road and stop."

He gave a snort. "Yeah? How's that working for ya?"

"Not very well," I admitted.

The snow started Saturday night. They were calling for up to 21 inches. Many Sunday services were called off ahead of the storm.

Sunday we woke to three or four inches on the ground and rain. Then the temps dropped. Guess what happens then. Yep. It freezes. Mid-morning I went out for pictures. The snow had a crust on top and I crunched my way to the upper barn.

The needles of the pine trees were coated in ice making the branches so heavy they were bowing down, the lower ones on the ground.

And no trip up on the hill would be complete without a shot of my Bittersweet.

The snow blew up under the patio awning and blanketed the turtles.

Maybe I was just looking for an excuse to make homemade bread again or maybe a day as cold and wintery as this day just screams for a steaming pot of chili and hot homemade bread, don't you think?

This time I remembered to take pictures. I wanted to show you that the way I make bread, no-knead, doesn't make the prettiest looking loaf, but they sure are yummy.

I use Momma's old bread tins that she gave me when she gave up making bread and I rested the hot loaves across the top the way she always used to do. It occurs to me that she did this because she didn't have a wire rack. I do and I still do it this way because that's the way it's supposed to be done.

And chili? Momma always put a dollop of sour cream in her chili.

"It tames it down," she told me when I asked why.

Personally, I think she just liked sour cream because I don't make spicy chili.

Once I tried it this way, it's just about the only way I eat it. Oh! And you have to put Fritos Corn Chips in the bottom of the bowl before you put the chili in. Frito Pie it's called and it's really good. But I'm a little ahead of myself.

I was standing in the kitchen, simmering the chili, and watching the birds outside the window. A Starling and Blue Jay landed on the ledge of the feral cat house and squabbled over the morning's left-over cat food.

The Jay flew off...

... but came right back. This time he stood his ground and got a few bites...

... in before something spooked him and he took off.

After we had lunch I took the second loaf of bread down to Miss Rosie.

"I made us a pot of soup," Rosie told me. "This'll go good with that."

My Miss Rosie helps me with my diet as much as I help her with hers. I left there with two pieces of her homemade Boston Cream Pie.

I think we ended up with about seven inches of snow. Mike is a good husband and drove me around just for the sole purpose of getting pictures. So let's end this time with snowy pics from my part of the world.