Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: Whatever

We had two mini-crises in my home recently, neither accompanied by pictures, but both accompanied by a solution.

I ran out of brown sugar.

"Peg, you call that a crisis?" you ask.

I do when I'm in the middle of baking something before I realize I need it and (I probably shouldn't admit this) the older I get the less I want to leave my house — even to run to the store.

I wonder if there's a substitute. I got on Google and found out that brown sugar is basically sugar and molasses. The amounts vary depending on the website you use but it's one cup sugar to either one or one and a half tablespoons molasses, pulse in the food processor or blender or use a fork. If you want dark brown sugar, use even more molasses. I used the lesser amount of molasses, one tablespoon to one cup sugar and thought it was enough. I have to tell you, it was awesome! I'll never again buy brown sugar. This is cheaper, tastes better, and isn't hard to make.

Crisis and trip to the store averted.

At night, as we're getting around for bed, we turn on the ceiling fan light and turn off the overhead lights. Once settled in bed we can use the remote to turn the light off. Well, the other night we turned the light on and couldn't turn it off! The batteries died in the remote and there's no pull chain or switch on this fan. Mike opened the remote and found it takes a 12-volt A23 battery. Checking the battery box, he found we had a spare. He changed the battery and guess what. It was dead too!

"I guess I can take the globe off and unscrew the bulb," Mike said. He got up on the bed and was preparing to do just that when he remembered it didn't have a bulb. It was LED and had a diode. "Got any spray paint?" he asked.

I laughed. He knew I did because I'd just bought a couple of cans to make luminaries with. "I do! I've got blue and green and purple."

"No black?"

"No black."

"I guess I can turn the breaker off. Wait, what else is on that breaker?" he wondered.

While all of this was going on I put 'get one more use out of dead battery" in Google search. Don't 'cha love the 'information highway' — the internet!

"Mike, it says here you can get one more use out of a dead battery by dropping it on the floor or hitting it with a hammer if it's not lithium."

Mike took the battery and hit it on the bed frame a couple of times, put it back in the remote and we were able to turn the fan light off. "Now don't turn it back on until we get new batteries," he admonished.

Speaking of my luminaries...

I made a Christmas scene to go with my fairy and spooky Halloween. Things change as I gain experience and knowledge. The first one I painted using straight acrylic paint. It looks fine. Then I read a website that mixed the paint with glue. I did the fairy that way. I guess the glue gives it better sticking power.

I was filling my printer cartridges when inspiration struck. What if I mix printer ink with glue? I mixed it and painted Santa and his reindeer first. I put it on kind of thick and wondered if it would run. I was pleased when it hadn't. The ink glue mixture is shinier, that's for sure. And I loved the way it flowed off my brush. When I painted the houses, I put it on pretty thick again because I had confidence it wouldn't run. Nonetheless, I set it on a piece of paper just in case. It's a good thing I did too because it flowed right off the bottom of the jar.

"Do you think I should repaint it?" I asked my beautiful Miss Rosie.

"Naw. It looks interesting this way."

A candle reveals it's even more interesting as you can see some of the colors that make up black. Then I got fancier and decided to paint the windows yellow but when I tried mixing yellow ink and glue, it didn't work. It became almost transparent. I went back to the other method of adding paint to glue and painted a warm light in the windows of the village Santa is flying over. I think I should go back and paint reins between Santa's hands and the reindeer though. That would make more sense as to why his hands are sticking straight out like that.

I also made a witch's hat and boot this week. My hand is in the picture so you can judge the size of them.

And that's all for the crafty me this week!

Tux.

I'll tell you what!

The Kipps new dog loves to sit in laps and he likes Mike's lap. During a recent visit, Tux jumped in Mike's lap and was enjoying Mike's ministrations so much that he laid his head on the table.

"Awwww!" Mike exclaims. "Is he supposed to have his head on the table?"

I got the most adorable picture of Lamar getting on eye level with Tux — then Tux gave him a kiss.

Getting into the Jeep one morning, I see this guy. It took a little searching but the fact that he curls his abdomen made the search a little easier. This is a Meal Moth.

"Dad fishes with mealworms," I can hear our youngest and very handsome son Kevin say. "Is this what they turn into?"

Great question Kevin and one I wondered too but the answer is no. Mealworms are the larval stage of a beetle.

What kind of beetle? Why a Mealworm Beetle of course!

We're having issues with Itsy. A couple of weeks ago, or it may be even longer ago than that, I don't know, and it doesn't really matter, but Itsy started to have problems making it outside first thing in the morning. She'd lose her urine as soon as she'd get up out of bed. I didn't scold her. She's 14 and we chalk it up to age. I tried getting up before her and scooping her out of her bed and taking her out and that works so long as I'm up before her. I'm not always. It didn't take long before that got old, let me tell ya! Especially when there's a bonus along with the pee.

"Mike, I'm so tired of cleaning up messes first thing in the morning," I told him. "Let's kennel Itsy. Then she'll have to stay in bed until I get up."

Mike's like, "Whatever."

I got the kennel out, cleaned it up, put a pet bed in there along with a bowl of water and a puppy pad and at bedtime, I put an Itsy in there.

She was not happy! She cried off and on until about 2 a.m.

"Did she pee in there?" you wanna know.

Hard tellin. The water bowl was empty so the moisture was one or the other.

"Smell it!" you say.

No. I don't care that much.

The second night she woke Mike up with her whimpering. He'd only been asleep for about an hour and I was still reading. He got up, went out and gave Itsy a little shot from the spray bottle and told her to knock it off. She did.

The third night was worse than the other two! Around 2:30 she was so upset that she woke me up. If I take her out now she'll be able to make it until morning, I thought and got up and took her out. The next morning — Oh! My gosh! What a trail of stress diarrhea that girl left me! And despite having to clean up such lovely messes first thing in the morning, I felt sorry for her.

My beautiful sister Phyllis had an older small dog that wasn't housebroken, a rescue, and she had to diaper her. "Mike it isn't worth it to have Itsy so upset. What if we diaper her?"

Mike's like, "Whatever."

A trip to town, small baby diapers, and Itsy gets diapered that night. Three times I diapered her, three times she shimmied out of it. The fourth time I made it as tight as I dared. When I checked her before rolling over and going to sleep, she was sleeping in her bed with her diaper on still. With a grin of smug satisfaction, I went to bed.

The next morning Itsy came and got me up and she was naked! She'd shimmied out of her diaper yet again sometime in the middle of the night. But there were no messes to clean up.

I can't have her getting out of the diaper and I don't have any onesies to keep it on so I put a shirt on her and pinned the diaper to that. She wasn't happy but she was way less unhappy than if I'd put her in the kennel.

She was dry the next day and the next. Now I'm confused. If she can hold it, why wasn't she!

Itsy has another annoying habit. In the evenings, when we're settled into our recliners watching a TV show or a movie, she'll woof at me to take her out. Not once. Not even twice. Sometimes she'll want me to take her out four or five times in the span of a couple of three hours.

Since the scare with the gray fox being so close to our house, I don't leave the girls outside alone anymore. I try really hard to be patient with Itsy during this nightly ritual but often times she just stands in the yard and barks; at what I don't even know.

"ITSY! STOP IT!" I yell at her.

She'll stop then just sniff around in the yard then comes back in and hasn't done any business at all. It's frustrating.

One night, after three 'fruitless' forays into the back yard, I ignore her requests — and she makes me pay for it too! She peed and pooped on the floor!

That's it! I'm thinking as I clean it up. From now she gets diapered earlier in the evening! I think it was a revenge poop, although experts say animals aren't capable of that.

And that was the third night of diapering her.

The next morning I pick Itsy up and head for the door. I slip her diaper off and set her down outside all in one smooth motion, then drop the diaper on the patio table thinking it didn't feel wet at all. Everyone back inside, breakfast out of the way, Mike and I were playing cards and I kept smelling poo. Twice I looked around under the table but the only thing there was the girls. A little later, I had an occasion to pick Itsy up and realized her butt was a mess. I shampooed her then went to check the diaper that was still outside. She hadn't pooped enough on the floor (although it looked plenty enough to me!) and had finished in her diaper. I'm so glad she had a diaper on. Shampooing her butt is way easier than cleaning a rug.

And I'd like to say that diapers are the best thing ever! No mess to clean up and Itsy is hardly upset at all that she has to wear one. She whined a little the first night or two and that was it.

Speaking of critters, this is our tabby Macchiato. You can buy all the expensive cat beds you want but there ain't nothin better than a plain old cardboard box.

Silly cat.

I have a few road pictures for you.

There's one of those wacky balloon guys in the vineyard down the road. No, wait. They're not balloons. I think it's fans that keep them inflated. What do they call those things?

"Peg. Google it," you say.

I know, right! Google says they're known as Fly Guys, Sky Dancers, or Wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing tube men. But the most common name for them is Air Dancer.

I wonder if it's supposed to keep the birds from eating the grapes.

Turkeys! We had to stop for them.

One by one, as the turkeys got to the side of the road, they took flight.

Colorful metal yard art.

And now we get to the part in my letter blog that I know you've been waiting for. The bridge.

This week they took the crane apart and brought it over to our side. We watched Matt help on one side, make his way down the bank, cross the creek on stepping-stones and take the crane pieces off the trailers on our side. It takes about thirty minutes for the trucks to make their way around and Matt didn't sit and wait for another truck. He'd get off the track hoe, cross back over the creek, and help until another truck showed up on our side.

The company doing the bridge work sometimes calls outside companies for truck drivers to help haul loads and that's what they did for the transport of the crane.

This driver shows up on the opposite side of the creek. "Who's that?" Mike asks.

He knows I can't see but I have a zoom on my camera. I raise it, zoom in, snap a picture. "I don't know but there's something funky about his face." I made the picture bigger on the touch screen of my camera. "I think there's a hole where his nose should be."

Mike and I debated about how he might've lost his nose. "Drugs?"

"Could be."

"Car accident maybe. I once knew a gal who lost her nose and lips as a result of going through a windshield. But she had her face reconstructed. I wonder why he didn't."

We asked one of the guys on the job site about this truck driver and his nose but he didn't know. "I didn't ask," he said.

I debated whether to even show you his picture but I have to tell you, this guy didn't hide his face. He didn't avoid people. He'd walk right up to the other guys and talk to them. And he didn't hide from my camera either. So I figured if he didn't have a problem with it, then I wouldn't either.

Watching them drop the counterweights was interesting. There were a lot of steps they had to go through, one of which was to lower the back boom the whole way down. "I wonder what difference that makes?"

"I don't know," Mike answered. "But it must make some kind of difference or they wouldn't do it."

Piece by piece, the crane came over to our side.

"I wonder how they're going to get the truck past the crane," Mike mused as we watched the lowboy unhook from the truck and they walked the crane off. "The road isn't that wide, is it?"

But they pulled the crane over and the semi was able to get past.

Lamar took the field as he came back from a walk with Tux.

Mike and I sat in the comfort of the golf cart, parked well out of the way in Vernon's driveway. Putting the wheel weights on was a team effort, one these guys must've done plenty of times before. No one told anyone else what to do. They just all worked together and got the job done.

The crane stacked the counterweights.

The weight of each one was clearly stenciled on the side. Mike pulled out his phone with his trusty calculator app. "What's the top one?" he asked.

I zoomed in with my camera. "Forty-four hundred."

"And there's two of those, one on each side," he said as he tapped the numbers in. "What's the next one?"

"Twelve one," I said then thought I should clarify. "Twelve thousand one hundred. One-two-one-zero-zero." I couldn't decide which way was the easiest way for him to understand.

"The bottom one?"

"Thirty-two thousand one hundred."

"That's fifty-three thousand pounds of counterweight!" Mike exclaimed.

They backed the crane up to the weights and went through the process of attaching them to the crane again.

It was an all-day job getting the crane, it's components, and the job boxes brought over to our side.

The next day they drove piles. We didn't watch much but we were watching as number four went in. See Matt sitting on the last two?

"Why's he holding that rope?" I asked Mike.

"It shuts off the pile driver."

Just about that time, the other guy gave him a signal, Matt got up and pulled the rope, shutting off the pile driver.

I had a chance to get closer to the job site and could see exactly how the template worked. I do wonder why they made square holes to put round pipes into.

One of the piles hadn't been driven in as far as it needed to go so now they went back to that one and I watched as Matt positioned the carrier over the template and that cleared up another mystery for me. If they used a steel template, what were the spikes on the bottom of the carrier for? Matt guided those into their place on the template.

At the end of the day, all six piles were driven into place.

I have to tell you. The Kipps' house is like right there. All the pounding gave Miss Rosie a headache when they were working on the other side; she knew she wouldn't be able to stand it when they drive them in on this side. She used it as an excuse to spend the day shopping.

"Did it knock anything down?" I asked her later.

"It knocked one of my little pumpkin shelf sitters off his shelf and broke him. That was before we left to go shopping. So I moved a bunch of other stuff I thought might be in danger and we didn't lose anything else," she tells me.

There isn't much room on this side of the creek. Since they were done with the pile driver, they loaded it on trucks and got it out of the way.

"Where will they take it?" Mike asked.

"Just down to their yard in Dushore," Duane said of Insinger who hauled it for them. "When we get ready for it at the other bridge they'll bring it back.

The rest of the week was spent preparing the site to pour concrete. A truckload of rebar came in. Some really long straight pieces and some interesting shapes.

Justin, one of Duane's men, picked up a couple of plastic bottles from the ground, crushed them and tucked them into his back pocket.

I took a picture of that. I know. I'm weird.

The mailman has been having issues making it to the Kipps' mailbox. Lamar never complained. I'll tell you what. You'll never meet a kinder more gentle soul than Lamar.

We were watching the work one day when Rosie and Lamar came back from their walk and Lamar missed his mailbox.

"Where's my mailbox?" he asked one of the guys.

"We moved it."

They did. They moved it out of the work zone. Lamar walked right past it and never saw it.

I never said he was observant.

My church hosted an event they called Cowboy Breakfast even though it was scheduled for four in the afternoon. But who doesn't like breakfast for supper? Not this girl, let me tell ya! Although I generally reserve my weekends for visits with you, picture making, or paparazzi-ing, is my official church position. I can't imagine why, can you? And I feel a certain amount of obligation to go to these functions.

Bacon, eggs, sausage, biscuits, home fries, pancakes, all set up buffet style.

And let's not forget the cowboy coffee!

One of the guys made a calf for calf roping.

I'm not going to tell you that he's a sheep farmer. But I'm not complaining! I think he did an awesome job — way better than I could've done.

One guy brought his gun.

I'll tell you what. I loved photographing this very handsome couple.

And this girl. Miss Barbara. She's always so accommodating when I point my camera at her which makes me love to photograph her too!

This little cutie patootie sleeping on her daddy's shoulder is another favorite of mine.

My beautiful friend Jody.

Pastor Rick.

The people at my church are getting used to me hanging around snapping pictures. They're more relaxed and I got some really nice shots. And maybe, just maybe, they have confidence that I won't show any unbecoming shots of them. Unless you're the dishwasher.

Or me.

"I can't get everyone in the shot!" I complained.

"Get up on the table!" came a shout from the peanut gallery.

A short little fat woman ain't got no business being on top of a table. Especially when the timer on the camera is set and she only has a certain amount of time to make it to her spot in the shot. Luckily, there was a knight in shining armor that came to my rescue and made sure I got down safely.

Thank you, Shawn. You're awesome!

And so is my whole church family.