KAT 15

          This is the sixth year since we lost Kat to that awful, heart wrenching car accident. The anniversary isn’t until July but things don’t always happen on anniversaries. Sometimes they happen before anniversaries.

Of all the recipients of Kat’s organ donations, this beautiful lady, Joan, is the only one who keeps in touch with me. She doesn’t take the gift of her life-saving lungs for granted and writes to me from time to time.  

This week, I got this note from her.   

“Good morning, Peg.” Joan wrote.  “I hope this finds you well and able to emerge from the last 12 months of isolation. We get our second COVID shots tomorrow. Our family has gratefully stayed well with our children and spouses in essential jobs. But to the purpose of my note. In January, our state added Donate Life specialty license plates. I was thrilled to order them for my car. They came yesterday and I can't wait for people to see them. I remain in excellent health and one would never know I received your precious gift. Rather than blast you with a picture of the plate, I thought I would ask you first if you wanted to see it. I don't want my enthusiasm to create discomfort for you.”

           And she signed it, “With love to you and your family.”

Phyllis (Kat’s other mother), that means you too!

Of course I wanted to see it! “I'd love to see it!” I told her. And her unexpected note touched me — so I told her so. I’m a firm believer that you should always tell others when you think of them, when you love them, when you appreciate them. I added, “And I love you for continuing to reach out to me!”

Joan sent me a picture of her new plate. “She rides with me,” she said.

Little did I know the impact this plate would have on me. I certainly had not anticipated it. It felt like a punch in the stomach. It took my breath away and brought tears in my eyes — and I told Joan so.

“I was concerned you might have a strong reaction, which is why I asked first. We are limited to five characters on the plate, due to the design. As I experimented with the characters, KAT with the year 15 reminded me of hurricane measurements. I like to think that together, we are a category 15. I hope that makes you smile a bit.”

And you know what? It did make me feel better! “It makes me smile a lot!” I told Joan. “What a great way to think about the impact my daughter had on your life. You are such a blessing to me.”

Now I want one of these plates! I can see KAT15 in Pennsylvania and I can see one in Minnesota, and maybe even one in Missouri too!

          If you want to reach out to Joan, Keeper of Kat’s Lungs, she has kindly extended permission for me to pass on her contact info to you.

>>>*<<<

          As naïve as this sounds, I’m going to tell you anyway. I had no idea they made something called a tortilla press. It was while I was searching for corn tortilla recipes that I stumbled on this bit of info.

          “If we’re going to keep making tortillas,” I told Mike, “I want one of those.”

          Mike is a good husband. He wasted no time in sitting down in front of the computer and researching it. Some are good for flour tortillas, some are good for corn tortillas, and some are good for both. Then he read through the reviews. It seems like all the reviews had someone who wasn’t happy about something about the press. In the end he decided on a cast iron, pre-seasoned press good for both flour and corn tortillas.

          It came this week and I was excited to try it. I mixed up the dough and made the balls.

          Mike pressed them.

          There were all kinds of tips online about what to use to press these with. Some people swore on wax paper, some on parchment paper, and some on a cut-apart plastic bag. I tried the wax paper and it stuck badly. I had better luck with the plastic.

          The tortillas came out perfectly round and it was much faster, easier, and less mess than rolling them out on the counter. 

         My only complaint —no wait, I have two — is I wish they were a little thinner. Thicker corn chips didn’t crisp up as well when I bake them, but when I made them thinner, they were too delicate and tore when I tried to separate them from the plastic. Then I had to re-roll and re-press them. Not the end of the world.

          The other complaint I have isn’t really a complaint, more of an observation. Once Mike had pressed a few, the novelty wore off and he walked away, tossing instructions over his shoulder.

          “Don’t press too hard, Peg.” One of the most often complaints about these presses is people were breaking the handles. I’m guessing they wanted thinner tortillas too!

          Corn tortillas weren’t the only thing I’d made. I was looking for other recipes using corn flour for my beautiful Miss Rosie and came across a recipe called Brown Sugar Sponge Cake. I mixed it up and popped it in the oven, reducing the baking time by five minutes. While it was baking, I searched for frosting recipes and found a dairy free, gluten free, coconut recipe — oh wait, that’s a lie. But I didn’t intentionally lie to you. The recipe calls for butter but I substituted butter-flavored Crisco making it dairy free.

          What if she likes the cake without the frosting? I thought. Momma was like that. She often times wanted her cake and cookies unfrosted. I’ll put it in a plastic bag, I thought, and she can cut the corner and pipe it on if she wants to.

          The buzzer went off and I opened the oven door in great anticipation of a cake that would need a few more minutes or maybe it would be lightly browned. Instead, I was confronted with a very brown cake. Uh-oh, I thought. It’s over-baked. Now it’s gonna be dry.

          While the cakes cooled on wire racks (it was made in two round pans) I mixed the frosting. It was too stiff and lumpy to be piped on so I opted for a washed out and saved plastic carry-out container. Then I packed it up, tucking the recipes between the cake and frosting, and took it down to Rosie.

          “I haven’t tasted it,” I told her.

“I have a knife and some plates,” that handsome Lamar volunteers. “We can taste it right now.”

I think I kinda sorta ignored him, but not out of rudeness, more like I forget stuff if I don’t say them and I had something else to say. “I suspect it’s over-baked, and I don’t know if coconut frosting goes with corn cake or not, so I didn’t put it on.”

          “Thank you,” Miss Rosie said, accepting the gift.

          “It’s still warm so you might want to open the foil so it doesn’t get soggy.”

She handed the frosting to Lamar and opened the foil. “You didn’t keep any for yourself!” she exclaimed when she saw the whole cake.

“I have one. It made two. One for you, one for me, and I halved the frosting.”

Back at home, I cut a piece of cake. It was dry. It was really dry. And it tasted like it was made from corn flour. Imagine that! I slathered a bit of frosting on and that helped a lot! You couldn’t taste the corn as much so that was definitely the way to go. I finished frosting the cake, cut it into portion sizes, and froze it. I’ll get a piece out when I want a little dessert.

“How did Miss Rosie like it?” you wanna know.

          She thought it was fine.

I’ll probably not make it again, although I should to see if it’s better when not over-baked, and Miss Rosie has the recipe if she wants to make it.

“…a washed out and saved plastic carry-out container,” I told you. And sometimes I get carried away saving things I might need or intend to repurpose. Some people might call these things trash and I’m not gonna tell you all that I’ve been saving because it is trash — to most people. Some things I have a lot of! I really should stop saving these, I think and throw the next one away only to come back and pick it out of the trash five minutes later. I might need more, I justify, and if I don’t, I can always throw it away later. And I pity poor Kevin and Kandyce. If I die before I follow through on all my plans, they’ll wonder what I was saving trash for. I’m not going to go into details about all the things I’ve been saving, but I will tell you one.

Red beets, or rather, red beet cans.

I love red beets and they’re good for you! Beets boast an impressive nutritional profile. They’re low in calories, yet high in valuable vitamins and minerals. They help keep blood pressure in check, may help fight inflammation, improve digestive health, support brain health, and may even have some cancer fighting properties.

“That’s a lot!” you say.

I know, right! For me, I have to like something to stay with it (and I think everybody’s a little like that), it has to be easy, and not too expensive. Red beets fill the bill! I’ve been eating them almost daily for my afternoon snack. A quarter-cup cottage cheese with a half-cup of red beets, sprinkled all over with Farm Dust. There are three half-cup servings of beets in a can. As you can imagine, it hasn’t taken me long to have a shelf full-to-overflowing with empty red beet cans!

          So, this week, on a whim, I got Mike’s tinsnips and cut the bottom off a can, cut it up the side, flattened it, got my black Sharpie and drew flower petals. I cut ‘em out and bent ‘em back. The sharp, pointy pieces I’d cut out, I glued inside, between the petals.

Still needs something, I thought, opened up another can and cut out more petals. I test-fitted them and liked the way it looked. Now I moved on to painting them.

          “You’ll have to wash it with vinegar or something first,” Mike offered up his advice, “or the paint won’t stick.”

          At this point, I didn’t even know if it was going to pan out or not. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to do that right now but if I see I need to do it, I’ll do it on the next one.”

          Mike seemed satisfied with that and left me to my creating.

          “Can I use the leftover paint from the house?” I asked.

          “I don’t know if it’s any good.”

          “All the more reason to try it. If it’s dried up, we can get rid of it.”

          Getting the tops off the jars we’d stored the dabs of leftover paint in turned out to be a huge challenge in and all of itself. Finally, with the help of a hot-water bath, a giant pair of channellocks, and a big strong husband, we got the top off.

          “It doesn’t look like it’s any good,” Mike said.

          “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed, found a paint stick, and stirred. And stirred. And stirred. After five minutes or so, I called into the living room where Mike was watching TV, or maybe he was napping, I don’t know. “What can I thin this with?”

          He cleared his throat. I suspect he was napping. “It’s water-based paint, so just some water.”

          I added water and stirred, and added more water and stirred. It was lumpy. I considered getting out my immersion blender (which I own because my sister loves hers so much) but it was just a passing fancy. I really didn’t want to use it for paint, although, now that I think about it, it probably would’ve worked and cleaned up just fine.

          The paint was lumpy and I was tired of fussing with it. It’ll just give it character, I think and use it anyway. Mike didn’t have any other colors I wanted to use so I got out my little bottles of craft paint. If I put it out in the weather, I thought, the paint might come off. I’d better seal it.

          I dug around in my supplies and found a very — very-very old jar of yellowed polyurethane. It’ll probably give my project a yellow tint but I don’t care. This is a test run to see what works and what doesn’t work.

          I couldn’t get the jar open even with the help of the pliers. “Can you get this open for me?” I took it and the channellocks and a grippy pad in to Mike. He used all his muscle and failed me — for the first time ever!

          “I think I bent the lid,” Mike said.

          “Should I put it in hot water?” I asked.

          “You can try.”

          Out in the kitchen, sitting in the sink, was a plastic bowl I’d had a piece of my corn flour cake in. That’ll work, I think and run the water hot as it’d go, turned the jar upside down and put the lid portion in the hot water bath and waited. About ten minutes later Mike came out to the kitchen.  

          “Let’s give it another try,” he said.

          I turned the jar over and was immediately confronted with a sticky mess. The lid was leaking and making everything it touched sticky!

          “Help me hold the jar,” Mike said and together we tried to get that lid off. It wasn’t budging.

          “Should I throw it away?” I asked.

          “I guess.”

          Then I thought about the ramifications. Maybe it’s like paint and has to be dried up first so it doesn’t pose a threat to the landfill. But we couldn’t get the lid off so how was I going to do that? Then I had it. “I’ll just put it in a pan and break the glass,” I told Mike. “It doesn’t do me any good anyway.”

          I got out an old lasagna pan that I’d saved — SEE! You never know just when you’re gonna need something like that! — laid the old peanut butter jar on its side in the pan and decided I didn’t want polyurethane all over my hammer and I certainly didn’t want it splashing all over me either, so I got a double layer of paper towels and laid ‘em on top. Then, since I was breaking the jar anyway, I might just as well save what I could of the polyurethane. But what am I going to put it in? I wondered. Another screw top jar would just create the same problem down the road. Then I saw the plastic bowl I’d given it a bath in — the one that had polyurethane leaked into it. I’d worry the polyurethane may have leached into the plastic so I’d never use it for food again. I’ll use that, I decided and took the whole kit ’n caboodle out to the patio where a mess wouldn’t matter as much.

          Tentatively I hit the jar. Nothing happened. Granted, I didn’t hit it very hard, so I hit it again with more force. It still didn’t break. I hit it a few more times, a little harder each time. Then I saw the claw on my hammer and got an idea. Why not use the claw to rip a hole in the top! Why not indeed! A few whacks and I had a hole in the top and poured it into the plastic bowl.

          Back in the house I went, feeling rather proud of myself for working that all out, sealed my flower petals, and stood them against the side of the pan so the polyurethane wouldn’t puddle as they dried.

          The next day the polyurethane was still tacky, Maybe, because it was so old, it would always be tacky. I put my flower together anyway.  I got out my nifty hot glue gun that my beautiful feisty redhaired neighbor had given me, and plugged it in. When the glue was hot, I stuck one petal on, then another. Putting the third petal on, I knocked the second petal off. Then, with a slight tug, the first petal came off.

          “The hot glue doesn’t stick to the polyurethane very well,” I told Mike as he scrolled through Facebook Marketplace on my computer. I got out some steel wool and took the bottom part of the petals back down to the metal. You won’t see it anyway, I thought. Then, when I tried again, the glue stuck!

          For the center I used a plastic syrup cup I’d saved from having breakfast at Mark’s Valley View more than a year ago now. Before I glued it in place, I punched a couple of holes in the can bottom and threaded a wire through. I know this isn’t everyone’s cup ‘o sunshine but the things I used were mostly all trash. Now it’s a flower I can hang on my fence. What do you think?

          I made face masks this week too. Tiger helped.

          I made some for my best girl in Missouri and some for my best girl in West Virginia.

          Then, since I had a bunch of the Southwest pattern left, I made matching face masks for Mike and me.

          “Now we can go twinning like the Kipps!” I said. The very first time we wore them in public, maybe the second, we were complimented.

          “I think your matching masks are pretty cool,” the checkout gal said.

           I smiled but I don’t know that she could tell I was so I gave her a thumbs up as I walked out the door. Then I thought, what an idiot! You should’ve said thank you! I don’t know about me sometimes, you guys.

Even though it’s the same size mask I’ve always made for Mike, he thought his was too big. “I’ll wash it, it’ll shrink.” They’re cotton so they had to be ironed too.

>>>*<<<

Hey! I saw Trapper John this week! He’d gotten a big beaver and stopped to show it to me. This is what a 49-pound beaver looks like!

I didn’t take this picture. I didn’t get one of Trapper holding his beaver so he sent me one. I did get a picture of beaver feet though. “They open their feet and as you can see, they have webbed toes. They’re excellent swimmers.”

Me? I’m over here wondering how I can repurpose beaver toenails.

         “Does it make you a little sad when you catch a big ole granddad beaver?” I asked.

          “No. It just makes room for the other beavers to come up.”

          Keeping populations down is important in any species of critter. Overpopulation leads to starvation and disease.

>>>*<<<

          This week, someone in this house wanted tacos. Taco Bell tacos. “It’s not like I can’t make tacos,” I told my beautiful friend Jody.

          “With homemade tortillas as well,” she pointed out.

          Sometimes, it’s more about the journey than the destination. I think he just needed an excuse to go somewhere. Can you say road pictures?

           We went through the drivethru, then pulled over into a parking space to eat. A couple of crows landed in the grass in front of us and I watched as they scavenged for lunch. I didn’t think they were having much luck until I saw this guy come towards us with a piece of something in his beak.

          He dropped it in the puddle.

          “Was it too hard for him?” I asked.

          Mike grunted an I don’t know as he chewed a bite of taco.

          After swishing it a couple of times ole Mr. Crow picked it up and moved it to a different puddle. I’m guessing there wasn’t enough water in the first one for him. He tested it a couple of three times then started pulling it apart and eating it.

           Some of the following pictures were taken the same day and some were on subsequent days but they’re all road pictures.

          My first yard sale sighting of the year. We didn't stop.

           Going down a road I’ve been down many many times, I see something I’ve never seen before.

          “That looks like a spring!” I told Mike and thus ensued a challenge to snap its picture as we sped past at a hundred miles an hour. Okay, that’s a lie. Mike doesn’t drive that fast anymore. Okay, okay! That’s another lie. Mike’s never driven that fast — at least not with me in the car. I can’t attest to his whole life.

          My attempts to get a picture through the trees failed several times. “If there’s nothing behind us, could you slow down?” I asked.

          “I’ll do better than that. I’ll pull over.”

          I didn’t intend to walk down to it, but I did.

          I didn’t intend to look inside it either, but I did that too. I thought I’d see a pipe coming out of the hillside, or a maybe this was some fancy-schmancy kind of culvert. Boy was I surprised to see it was a basin of some sort. I don’t know what this was for because if it was for water, I’d expect to see a pipe to feed it.

It wasn’t until I was looking at the images on my computer that I notice there’s a date on one of the stones. Then I notice there are initials too. Then I notice there are initials on the other side as well. 

“Someone’s fishing,” I voiced as we crossed the river and I snapped a picture.

 “Yeah?” Mike says.

          Well, if he questions that, then I can probably think of another reason they were at the river. “Either that or they're throwing dead bodies in.” Maybe passing a truckload of deer carcasses affected me in a subliminal way?

         I’ve been trying to get pictures of this place for a while now too. These aren’t separate buildings, they’re all connected, like a warren. It reminds me of a dream I had once — maybe it was nightmare.

          Spring is coming!

          The robins are back! I think the black birds are too but I haven’t gotten a picture of them yet.

          We had a couple of really nice days — hit almost 70 one day! — and the daffies are popping!

          You know, you have to be careful when you’re doubling letters in your writings and typing mostly on auto pilot. Doubling the wrong letter before adding ing changes the whole meaning. I can’t tell you how many times, especially with making the word pop progressive tense, that my fingers want to double the wrong letter. We really can’t have my daffies pooping now, can we.

          Spring is coming!

         Mr. Mister is spending more time in the sunshine on the kitchen patio.

         "Look over that way, buddy,” I told him and pointed. He looked.

This is the first time I noticed that at some point in his life, he’d had a torn nose — again, thanks to seeing it on the computer screen.

           Spring is coming!

          Mike got the golf cart out and we took a ride down our little dirt road.

          Someone dumped a load of stuff down over the bank.

          “Why do people think it’s okay to come out here and dump their trash?” I asked. I was miffed, but once again, looking at my pictures on the computer makes me see things I hadn’t seen when I took it. I realized it’s all wood. I think the tires had already been there. It still doesn’t make it right but the wood will decompose sooner than other materials and is more natural than a lot of others.

           We’re gonna save more cute Tiger pictures for another day.

           Let’s call this one done!