Choices

           My choices for a title and title story this week are many and varied. Okay, Okay! Maybe not many many but definitely more than two and definitely very different subjects.

          “Like what?” you ask.

          Like, I was thinking about calling this one Now I Know.

          “What do you know?”

I know why, when I step on the scale, the numbers are going in the wrong direction!

          I don’t keep deserts on hand. Usually, if I want a little something-something, I’ll smear a half-tablespoon of peanut butter on two toasted rice cakes. But this week I decided to make not one, but two, different recipes that came up on my Facebook feed.

          A Butter Pecan Poke Cake came up a week or so ago and I had to wait until I went to the store to pick up the ingredients I needed. Butter pecan cake mix and pecan frosting were the only two things I needed.

I know I read through the recipe before I decided I was going to make it. It has to be easy or I’m not even gonna try.

Pecan cake mix and pecan frosting went on the shopping list app on my phone.

We get to the store and I found the cake mix but no pecan frosting. The third store we went to had Coconut Pecan but did I buy it? NO! The item I put on my shopping list was for pecan not coconut pecan.

“How hard can it be to make?” Me asks Myself, and I decide I’ll make pecan frosting.

While I’m setting up to make this cake, getting my big mixing bowl and hand mixer and beaters out, I’m perusing the recipe.

Surprise!

The frosting is coconut pecan and it goes in the cake mix, not on top of the cake!

“You really screwed up now!” Myself says to Me. “Now what are ya gonna do?”

“Well, I can always go ahead and make the frosting I was going to make anyway and put it in the cake.”

“Peg!” Myself is exasperated now. “What if it’s more than would be in a can?”

“Hmmm. That could definitely make a difference.” I thought for a moment. “I’ve got a can of vanilla frosting on the shelf in the pantry. I could add coconut and pecans to that.”

And Me, Myself, and I were happy with that substitution.

I made the cake. It’s easy and ridiculously delicious!

The recipe calls for the cake to be cooled completely before you slice into it but I didn’t let it cool long enough. It was still very delicate and fell apart as I took a piece out of the pan.

“Oh my gosh!” I told Mike. “This is so good!”

Mike stays away from sugar but to appease me, he took a bite.

“That is good,” he said and took a second bite.

Now you know it has to be really good to tempt Mike into a second bite — and me into a second piece!

Then I called the Kipps.

“I made a butter pecan poke cake. Can I send you some?” I asked Miss Rosie.

“Sure. We’ll give it a try,” she answered.

I got out my nifty-thrifty storage containers and portioned up the rest of the cake.

“How did you like the cake?” I asked the next time I talked to Miss Rosie.

“It was really good. Lamar said not to change a thing.”

That isn’t my plan. My plan for the next time I make it is to go ahead and buy the frosting the recipe calls for.

“What else did you make?” you ask.

What else did I make?

I found myself with a free afternoon at the end of the week so I made Slice & Bake Coconut Shortbread Cookies.

It only has five ingredients, butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, and coconut. I mixed up the dough, patted it into a twelve- by three- by one-inch block, wrapped it in parchment paper (I didn’t have the wax paper it said to use) and stuck it in the fridge for its three-hour chill time.

I think I must’ve stopped reading this recipe part way through because when I got it out to bake, I was surprised to see it had to bake for eighteen to twenty minutes.

“That’s a long time to bake a cookie,” Miss Rosie said when we discussed it.

“I know, right! So let me tell you what I did. I made the first batch and they were good, but who’s got the time to bake cookies for twenty-five minutes‽” That’s how long it took for them to become lightly brown on the edges in my oven. “So, the next batch I put in, I boosted the temp to three-fifty and set the timer for fifteen minutes. Guess what happened?”

Miss Rosie’s a good sport. “What?”

“They burnt!”

Miss Rosie laughed.

“So I decided to see what would happen if I baked them at three-fifty for eight minutes.”

“And what happened?” she asked.

“They’re different. Not as good as when I baked them for twenty-five minutes.”

“Is that what you did for the rest of ‘em?” Miss Rosie asked.

“That was it. I only got three trays of cookies out of it.”

So, let me explain the picture to you. The white arrow is the first batch baked at twenty-five minutes. The orange arrow is the second, and I bet you can guess, the burnt batch. The green arrow is the three-fifty for eight minutes batch.

“You wanna try them?” I asked Miss Rosie on our Saturday morning love call.

“How will I know which is which?” she asked.

“You’ll know. They look different. But I’ll mark ‘em for you.” I knew that Lamar was gone to his men’s meeting at church. “Maybe Lamar will stop up and get them when he goes out to get Charlie Cheshire’s mail this afternoon?” He’s done this before.

“When it comes to food, I’m sure he would,” Miss Rosie said.

Later, I heard Raini carrying on in the dog run. It sounded different to me so I went out to check. A truck was stopped on the road in front of our mountain home.

Uh-oh, I thought. He hit a cat and stopped to get it off the road. In my head, I was running through which of the cats it might’ve been.

As I get a little further out, I see he’d only stopped to chat with my handsome neighbor Tux who was walking his human, Lamar. When the truck left, I called to Lamar.

“Mornin’ Lamar!”

“Mornin’ Peg!” he called back.

“I’ve got cookies ready for you if you want to pop up and get ‘em.”

“I’ll do it!” he says and points to the back driveway. Instead of coming on up the front, he backtracked to come up the back driveway. Way okay with me. For being the end of January it was a beautiful day, which is what the guy in the truck stopped to talk about.

I’d intended to call Miss Rosie a little later in the day to see how she liked them. Me? When she sends me anything, I’m tasting it before Lamar’s out of the driveway. But in their house, they have more self-control than that. They’ll usually save it for dessert after a meal. And that’s why I was surprised when my phone rang and it was Miss Rose.

“We like the first one best,” she said. “The one you baked for twenty-five minutes.”

“Me too!”

“So, if you make them again, make them that way or you don’t have to bother making them at all.”

How bad were they? I wondered and asked. “So, you’re going to throw the other ones away?”

“Well, I don’t think they’re that bad!”

Yeah. They weren’t that bad but the lower temperature, longer cook time were definitely the best.

I’m thinking that either one of these recipes would be good to take to the next potluck.

And now I know and you know why my weight is headed in the wrong direction!

I have some Raini stories for you this week as well and could’ve titled my letter blog with something like, That Dog!

“What’s Raini been up to?” you wanna know.

I told you last time how she woke us up three times and Mike couldn’t go back to sleep so he went to the recliner to watch TV.

This week she did the same thing, but only on one night. It was near midnight when I accidentally kicked a sleeping Spitfire from the bed. He hissed, which woke me, and jumped from the bed with a barking Raini hot on his tail. Thirty seconds later she was back in bed.

Mike couldn’t get back to sleep.

“You can turn the TV on if you want,” I told my tossing and turning husband.

“Nah. I’ll go out and watch TV in the living room.”

I laid there and couldn’t get back to sleep either. Forty-five minutes later I picked up my e-reader and opened it to the Karin Slaughter book I’m reading.

“I thought it was a Will Trent book,” I told my morning peeps. “But I’m twenty-six pages in and there’s no sign of him.”

Will Trent didn’t make an appearance until chapter four, one hundred sixty-five pages later.

I read until after three and even then, I didn’t wanna stop. I’m getting to the end and that’s when it’s most exciting. That’s when they start to pull all the elements together and you find out whodunit. I knew I had to put it down and go back to sleep because my alarm clock would go off at six.

“Peg, you’re retired. Turn the clock off!” you say.

I know, right! But in this case, my alarm clock is one very whiney, early-morning-rising Blue Heeler.

“Raini always cries at me to get up,” I told my morning peeps. “She starts around six in the morning. If I ignore her, she'll lay down for a little while before whining at me again. For the life of me, I can't figure out why she wants me to get up. She can go out when she needs to go out. Foods on the floor in the kitchen. All she does is go from sleeping in bed to sleeping under my desk.”

“She thinks it’s her job to get you up and get the day going,” my oldest, much-adored sister, Patti told me.

Raini does like having jobs to do and it wouldn’t hurt me to get up at six.

I took Raini out with me off-leash one day to burn the papers. I got the burnables in the barrel and was getting ready to light it when I heard a truck on the road. Raini heard it too and turned her head to the road. In my mind’s eye I could see her racing after it like she does when she’s in her run.

“Stay here!” I said.

Raini turned and looked at me. I stared her down.

The truck was going past. Raini turned her head to look.

“STAY HERE!” I said once again in a stern no-nonsense voice.

Raini turned to look at me but she didn’t move. She didn’t chase the truck. And no one is more surprised than me. So that pleased me.

Raini hurt her leg. I didn’t see what happened, nonetheless I kinda-sorta know what happened. She made a leap for Spitfire as he sat on the butcherblock and when she came down, she caught her back leg in the wire of the kennel door.

“She’s limping but it’s worse when she first gets up. Then she hops around on three legs,” I told Patti right after it happened.

“Is it swollen? Tender to the touch? Does she yip when you touch it?” Patti is my go-to since we lost Momma. She’s practical and way smarter than I’ll ever be!

“No. Other than the limp and hop, it doesn’t seem to bother her.”

“She probably pulled a muscle or tendon and those can take four to six months to heal.”

It hasn’t slowed Raini down much at all and now, a month later, she’s still a three-legged hopper when she first gets up. Once she’s moving, she seems to walk okay. The limp is mostly gone.

I haven’t been letting Raini run on the treadmill because I don’t want to stress her leg. Even so, she’s been getting on and walking behind me.

She cracks me up.

I’ll be plodding along at three miles an hour, she’ll be playing with Bondi, then she’ll hop up on the treadmill and walk behind me. Pretty soon I feel her bump the back of my calf with her nose. Then she bumps the other leg. Bump, bump, bump. Back and forth she goes, rhythmically bumping the back of my legs as we walk along. I have no idea why she likes to do it; she could walk beside me. But she’ll do it the whole time she’s walking, which might only be three or four minutes before she jumps off.

We bought a security camera. We’ve been curious as to what the dogs do while we’re gone. I can open an app on my phone and see the room the camera’s in. The girls never seem to be in the room we’ve put the camera in. We bought a second camera and set it up to cover the kitchen area. They’re pretty cool. You can open the app and see what’s going on. You can set it to give you an alert when it detects motion. And you can set it up so it follows the motion.

“We should get one for outside,” Mike said.

And that is how Raini came to have two boxes to tear up this week!

“You’re doing a good job!” I told Raini after she settled in with her box.

Mike hates it when I give her things to tear up. He thinks it encourages her to chew up whatever she wants. But so far, she only chews her toys or the occasional box I give her to chew.

“Peg!” my conscious exclaims. A picture flashes in my mind’s eye.

Oh. Yeah. I forgot about the tube of hydrocortisone she took from the table beside the recliner. I usually keep it and my hand cream in the drawer of the end table but forgot to put it away one day. Raini came trotting out into the kitchen and laid down at me feet. I didn’t see her with it and I don’t know what made me look but look I did and took it away from her. It had teeth holes in it already. I could see myself putting some on and having it squirt spaghettis out the holes in the side.

We had snow!

And that could also be a title and story all its own with all the pictures I took!

Mike had a doctor’s appointment up in Sayre so we’ve got snowy road pictures.

The neighbor’s pond.    

                          

The Kipps’ house.

Partway down, the trees don’t have much snow on them and they aren’t as pretty.

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge I can see the snowline. 

Through Wyalusing and climbing out, I was again seeing snow-shrouded trees — and other things.

And that’s the road pictures I took of our trip to Sayre.

Mike’s doing well and it was just a checkup with his doctor.

 While we were in Sayre we had lunch at McDonald’s. It’s the first time in months that Mike’s ordered the chicken nuggets and we were surprised by how thin they were.

“Why’s it been months?” you ask.

I downloaded the McDonald’s app on my phone and for the last few months they were giving us a free Quarter Pounder when we bought a Quarter Pounder. That offer has expired so it was back to McNuggets and McDoubles for us.

Shrinkflation hasn’t struck one of my favorite snacks, ten ounces is still ten ounces, but they did change my oyster crackers. They went from a fat little cracker to a thinner, crisper cracker. They’re still good and I still eat them way more than I should. Heck, I’d rather eat these over potato chips. Mostly because I can eat as many as I want and I don’t get a tummy ache. And now we know another reason I can’t seem to lose any weight.

Something else I did this week that could be a title and lead story was making directories for our church.

Two weeks ago, I put together a sample copy and had everyone check their information to make sure I had transcribed it correctly before I printed thirty copies.

There were a few mistakes.

This week I sat down to make the corrections and those thirty copies and I couldn’t find my file anywhere on my computer. Granted, I did clean up my desktop after I’d made the file but I’m pretty sure I moved it to the church file on my external storage device. It wasn’t there!

I spent hours looking and I couldn’t find it.

The cool thing about computers is you can tell it to search and it will search every file on your computer and I have thousands! I asked it to search for Moxie Directory and it gave me a list of files where either the word Moxie or Directory appeared. I went through them one by one and none of them were the completed directory.

I did the search on two other drives and still didn’t find it.

I repeated the search several times, varying the words and spellings.

I gave up and tried it again the next day. I searched the same place five or six times like it’s just going to magically appear.

Laugh, would ya! Well, in the end that’s exactly what happened.

“I’m going to have to re-create the file,” I told my morning peeps.

“You’ll find it after you make a new one,” my beautiful neighbor Steph said.

I’m just thankful our church doesn’t have a couple of hundred people! I probably spent less time remaking the file than I did searching for it.

I was telling Patti about it on the phone one day when she called to chat. She offered me a few suggestions on where to look. I pulled up the program I used to make the directory and clicked on the button to open a document for me.

Now mind you, I’d only done this very same thing at least six other times, but this time a file named Directory appeared on the list. Just like magic. I swear it wasn’t there before. I clicked on it and there it was. Just as Steph had predicted. Now that I didn’t need it, I’d found it.

“It says it’s in my One Drive folder,” I told Patti. “But I looked there!”

“You have to look at the whole address,” she said and told me how to do that.

That’s when I found out that my computer had saved the file to the internet and I’d only searched the files on my computer.

“I never save things to the internet,” I told Patti. “I don’t even know how to use it.”

“It’s in the settings,” she said. “It’s probably set to do it automatically every so often.”

Making the directories was a joy to me. It falls right under the heading of creating that I seem to crave.

I printed thirty covers. I printed thirty pages with the Pastor’s family and info. Then I set up to print the eight pages of the parishioners and bind them as they came off the printer.

Tiger helped.

I have a box of transparency film. When I picked it up for a quarter at a yard sale this past summer, I had no idea what I was going to use it for.

“What’s ‘transparency film’?” you wanna know.

It’s a clear sheet of plastic that you print or draw on and project up onto a screen. My teachers, a hundred years ago, used them in some of my classes.

I punched holes and used them on the front and back of our directories. And now I know why I was compelled to buy something I had absolutely no use for at the time. It was perfect.

There was a learning curve in punching the plastic. It’s got a paper strip on one side. I figured out pretty quick which way I had to have it in the punch so I didn’t end up with pieces of plastic hanging on.

I found out later that I could’ve removed that strip of paper but it’s way too late now. They’ve been bound, delivered, and passed out to the people at church.

I printed on cardstock. Amazon had a pack of three hundred for less than fifteen bucks. Thirty copies times ten pages per book equals... yep. You guessed it. Three hundred. It left no room for error but I have a few sheets of cardstock if I needed it.

“I have a pack of cardstock that you can have,” my beautiful friend Jody told me when this whole project first came up. “I’m not going to use it. You might just as well have it.”

I’m so thankful she did. I had two more people to add and that pushed the pages to eleven per directory. Plus, I found out that my twenty-year-old pack of cardstock had yellowed with age. That wouldn’t’ve looked very good.

Then twice I didn’t have my page seated before I punched it.

Tiger was so persistent that I had to give him a paper of his own to sit on.

I spent two afternoons printing and binding the directories. I could’ve probably done it in one but I didn’t want to get my printer too hot. I did that once. I was printing pictures — a lot of pictures and it got to a point where I was getting streaks across the photos. It wasn’t until the next day, when the pictures were coming out perfect again, that I figured the printer was just too hot.

I pulled the punch tray out and got punches all over the floor!

I get out my little dust broom and pan, get down on my hands and knees, push a face-kissing Heeler out of the way — I think she thought I got down there to play with her — and swept up the bits of paper.

Next time, I’ll empty it over the trash can! Methinks.

Experience is a great teacher.

We had another snowstorm move through our area. We got a lot less snow than they were calling for, then it changed to rain.

          I was out with the girls and saw the rain had knocked over and frozen on my watering can full of fake Glads. I thought it might make for an interesting picture so I went back in for my camera.

          I got Raini out of the way...

..got down into a squat position for the shot I wanted, lost my balance and nearly fell over! I got a wet hand which was way better than a wet butt. I thought I’d have to put one knee down to keep my balance but I didn’t really want a wet knee either. The next time I squatted down, I leaned my shoulder against the side of the building. I get my shot lined up and doncha know! I got a Chiweenie tail!

          Aye-yi-yi!

          I did get my shot and I don’t know if it was worth it or not, but after having had to work so hard for it, I’m going to show it to you.

          Another choice I had for title and title story would’ve been an update on last week's letter blog.

          Y’all were very kind in that you heeded your mother’s sage advice.

          “What advice is that?” you ask.

          The one that starts with, If you can’t say something nice...

You know I wasn’t proud of my first attempt at a portrait. I debated about even showing it to you. But I don’t want you to think I’m good at everything I try to do so I decided to share. You only fail when you stop trying.

I don’t know what I expected you to say but I think I was expecting something! Criticism isn’t easy for anyone to take but I swallowed my pride and steeled myself to listen to whatever anyone had to say.

Do you know what I got?

Crickets!

“I guess they’re taking their mother’s advice,” I told Mike.

Mike had seen it. Watched me paint it even. It was only then that he offered his two-cents.

“It’s way better than anything I could do,” he said.

Miss Rosie, when she got her copy of Peggy’s Jibber-jabber a day or so later, was the only other person to offer an opinion.

“I think you’re brave for even trying,” she told me. “I don’t think it looks like Kat but at least you’ve got a face. Any time I ever tried, it didn’t even look like a person.”

She went on to say that she’s glad I didn’t throw it away, that she thinks I can fix it.

For right now it just sits here, staring at me. I’ve moved on. Valentine’s Day is coming and I’ve got to make a few glass suncatchers for that.

My beautiful cousin Lorraine has quite a story to tell us about the pajama factory I had in last week’s letter blog.

“Peg, in your letter blog yesterday you had a picture of the pajama factory. This was Mark's father's factory.” Mark is her handsome husband. “It was called Dushore Lingerie. It was my first job and I started in 1979 at $2.90 per hour. This is where Mark and I met! I worked there until I got married in September 1983. Mark always worked for his father and thought the factory would be his life's work. One by one the sewing factories closed. Everything was being produced offshore. Dushore Lingerie closed in 1985.

The large building behind Dushore Lingerie was part of the other sewing factory called Sullcraft. The actual sewing factory was on Carpenter Street. It's the street that leaves Dushore going towards Colley. I'm not sure what they did in the large building.  Maybe packing and shipping or a cutting room. Before that it was Dushore High School.”

  So, I was right in guessing since it was on School Street that the building used to be a school. But now I was curious and wanted a little more info.

“What job did you do there?” I asked Lorraine.

“The funny thing is that I never sewed at the factory! When I first started working, I turned things right side out! Mostly belts and collars for pajamas. The belt turner I used was a pipe with a smaller rod inside. I would put the belt on the top of the pipe and then push a lever with the outside of my knee which moved the rod and turned the fabric right side out.

Then I got moved upstairs to the finishing department. I did pressing of the garments after they were trimmed and then they were bagged and hung on racks for shipping. It was hot upstairs in the summer and then add a hot steam iron, made it even hotter.

  They did a lot of work for Sears and JC PENNEY. Women's robes, nightgowns, nightshirts, and muumuus.

Later on they did expensive nightwear for Christian Dior, Baby Dior, Saks fifth avenue, Carol Hochman. A lot of satin material with piping and lace trim. When work was getting slow, they made bullet proof vests for police officers. The company was called Point Blank Body Armor.

Mark was an assistant production manager. He moved bundles of garments in a cart along the sewing floor. Then they went in the elevator to the finishing department.

The other factory was called Sullcraft. We called it the pajama factory. But I don't know if it was for men, women or children.”

I found the whole exchange very interesting.

I belong to a Facebook group that shows a lot of history of this area. In the middle of the week they posted pictures of the Dushore Fire.

I passed the picture on to my family and Lorraine remembers it.

“The Dushore fire. I remember waking up and seeing the glow coming from town.  It was contained to the one block at the corner of 220 South (also known as South German Street where we lived) and Main Street. The Sullivan Review was saved. It used to be the library and a barber shop next door. The fire companies did an amazing job.

 Because the factory work was slow, I worked Friday nights and Saturdays at the Ben Franklin. Only part of the sign melted and some of the siding was damaged. The bank was across the street and the thermometer read 97 degrees in January! The Green Swann was the hotel/bar/ restaurant on the other corner. Little if any damage. Next to that building was Lambert's gas station and Ford dealership going north on 220. Next was the park.

We moved in1992 to Tyrone. I don't know what year that the Green Swann, Lambert's, and that whole block up to the Super Duper was torn down and the Acorn convenience store was erected. Where the Pump ‘n Pantry is used to be Meehan's gas station and the building next to that was the old post office with apartments above. Dushore has changed but there’s still only 1 red light in the county!” 

I have a couple of small critter stories to tell yet and a picture or two to show, but we’ll save them for seed. Let’s call this one done.

Done!