Monthly Archives: September 2018

September, I Hardly Knew Ye

I’m sitting here with a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee laced with Pumpkin Spice creamer watching WPC56, a British crime drama on tv. David and I have a penchant for British shows, especially ones that take place in the middle of the last century when he and I were just babies.  We pretty much watched all they had on Netflix, quit Netflix and started Amazon Prime which has a large selection on Britbox.    One of my favorites I’ve watched in the past few weeks was the Village about a late nineteenth and early twentieth century British village and all the happenings in it. It was before women’s suffrage and during the first world war.    Very interesting.

But enough about what I’m watching. This month has flown by in a haze.  Earlier David and I had both gone in for eye exams and because I have had problems with one of my eyes and am blind in it, I figured the doctor would find something wrong with me, but instead, David found out he had very bad cataracts and had to have surgery to remove them.  He had told me a while ago that when we were sitting and bird watching that the birds looked a little blurry. I thought he just needed a new glasses prescription.  Surprise to us.  So, this week he had the first eye done and while the doctor was in there he fixed David’s astigmatism. After he gets his second eye done he won’t have to wear glasses any longer. Just use reading glasses.   I have only known him wearing glasses and I’ve known him since I was twelve, so it will be strange to see him go without them.  He has already seen a difference. Amazing what they can do nowadays.

My daughter has MS and has entered a new physical therapy study in Indianapolis and I volunteered to go with her two times a week for moral support.  Plus I have to get her scooter out of the car and put it back in again.  Let’s just say, I have very little upper body strength so it’s been fun getting that scooter in and out of the car. We practically have to take it all apart so I can lift it, but we get it done.  She has a very nice therapist whose name is Depak who is very inspirational and makes us both feel like he can help her movement a lot more.  So I’m looking forward to the next ten weeks as she is put through the paces.

I have been knitting up a storm.  David and I took a road trip to a little town that had a really nice yarn shop and I bought this yarn

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I’ve already knit one sock from this.

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This is knitting up into a beautiful sock.

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This is the yarn I am using. It was a bit pricey, but the yarn is wonderful and knits up so well and I can probably get a couple of pair of small socks from the remaining yarn when I get the larger socks knit.  As of today I have knit fifteen pairs of socks since January and hope to get several more done before Christmas.  I was thinking I would like to knit socks and sell them and was checking out what other people charged for handknit socks and the prices ran from $40.00 a pair to $65.00 a pair depending on the price of the yarn.  I may have to start selling some socks to feed my sock knitting habit I have acquired.   Believe me, the time it takes to make them, getting a pair of handknit socks is a wonderful gift.  I did knit one sock in a couple of  days this week only because I was challenging myself to see if I could do one that quickly.  I know there are lots of faster knitters than me out there, but I never thought I would ever be able to knit one sock, let alone dozens of pairs.

I am hoping to branch out into larger knitted items. I found this pattern at the same store. It looks fairly easy. Just knit rectangles and sew them together. I’m thinking of knitting it in a soft lavender.

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I had Thanksgiving dinner Sunday for my family since we will be gone on Thanksgiving this year.    I hadn’t made a big meal like that for months and it plum wore me out.  I baked a pie, homemade rolls, made homemade noodles and several other dishes to go along.   After I have cooked a big meal like that, I am not hungry until everyone goes home and then my appetite suddenly comes back and then I eat.   As you have read, cooking isn’t my favorite pastime, but I can do it when the need arises.  This next week I will be baking cookies for a bake sale.  One of our grandsons is in a club at school where they do things for others and they are having a bake sale and the profits will go to a charity they have picked, but they have to ask people to bake something for them so my grandson called me on the phone and asked me if I would bake something. Of course. I would do anything for my grandchildren if I can.  Glad they are teaching the children to think of others.    We need more of that.

I didn’t get any pictures of our “Thanksgiving” dinner only the aftermath.

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The table really looked pretty. You’ll have to take my word for it.  But I find I am living more in the moment nowadays and don’t think of taking pictures until it’s too late.   I used my Fiestaware dishes and it was a very colorful table.

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Then we gathered around the tv to see some videos of Disney World rides we will be riding( well, some of us will be riding) when we all go there together.   I’m afraid riding anything that drops suddenly is off my list of rides, but I am sure I will have plenty of things to see and do while we are there.  See the guy in the red shirt on the floor? That’s our oldest son. He is almost fifty and he loves amusement parks. He has a season pass to King’s Island in Cincinnati and goes there almost every day before and/or after work.  He’s ridden all the roller coasters. This is the kid who was afraid of heights and once when we had to sit way up in the uppermost seats at a Cincinnati Reds game, he was afraid.   Things have changed.

October will bring another surgery and more trips to Indianapolis.  I’m hoping to get some quilting done. Ever since we remodeled my shop, I have had hardly any time to just go out there and sew. I did finish sewing together a wall hanging today which thrilled me beyond all reason.   Plus we are getting our house painted and a new screened in back porch built.  It’s going to be another very busy month.

Hope your days are filled with some work and some play and that you will enjoy the Autumn weather because the heat will soon go away.  Halleluhah.   Bye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Eat or Not to Eat, That is the Question

I have never liked to cook.  I like to bake, but cooking just bores me, but it’s the one thing I have to do several times a week whether I want to or not or we’d just be eating sandwiches and salads.

Through the fifty years we have been married I have probably spent thousands of hours in the kitchen doing that which I find boring.  It’s a necessary evil and someone has to do it and I’m that someone.  I’m a pretty good cook, too. That is what is amazing. I did have a good teacher when she could get me into the kitchen.   My mother.  She was the best cook around.  I still miss her fried chicken.   My chicken doesn’t hold a candle to hers.  My mother wasn’t all that fond of cooking either and yet, she spent most of her life in the kitchen cooking up big meals for our family of eight and huge dinners for company which we had quite often. I always thought people showed up right at dinner or supper time on purpose to eat some of my mother’s cooking.    I did it a few times myself after I got married. Mom always had something good to eat and always a dessert.

Now when I cook for company there is a whole new dilemma.  What to cook.  Today so many people are on diets or special diets or can’t eat certain foods or are diabetic or can’t have salt or are lactose intolerant or eating gluten free or on the keto diet.  I find cooking for company isn’t at all fun anymore.  I can’t fix several different things to fill all the needs of everyone.  When my mother cooked, she didn’t ask what one could or couldn’t eat. She cooked a meal and you ate it.  If you couldn’t eat something, you didn’t say anything.  Now you have to take notes on who can eat what.

So many people are dieting all the time now.  I know it’s healthier to be slim, but there is fanaticism to it one didn’t see years ago.   I’ve been on every diet in the book and I just gave up and eat pretty much what I want.  Even if the doctor says don’t eat this or that.   I’m going to die some day anyway, I might as well die happy.   My husband eats everything with lots of salt and is skinny and hardly ever sees the doctor.  His grandmother was a thin woman and lived into her nineties, so I think he takes after her.  And if he does go on a diet all he has to do to lose weight is leave out a slice of bread and he’ll drop pounds.  Life is not fair!

So do you have a special diet? Do you love to cook?  How easy is it for you to plan meals?  That’s another thing.  Planning all the meals just makes me have to think of food all the time. When I ask my husband what he would like to eat he always says, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” so that is what we will have one day.  A plate of I don’t know with dessert being I’ll think about it!   Hope he likes it.

I don’t even know why I am writing about food and diets and all that anyway. I think it’s because I am about ready to go grocery shopping and the whole vicious cycle will start again.  What to eat or not to eat.  That is the question. Bye.

Where Were You?

Today is September 11th.  A day we Americans remember with sadness, some anger, and hope that it never happens again.  It was a day like no other I have experienced, when for just a little bit of time we Americans were banded together against one enemy.  An enemy who thought nothing of flying two airplanes into office buildings and murdering thousands of our citizens.  An enemy who used our airplanes to attack the Pentagon and would have done more damage if some brave souls on one plane didn’t fight back.

Now years later, we are still fighting this enemy while allowing many of them into our country. Something I just don’t understand at all.  Would we have welcomed Nazis during WW2?  I don’t think so.  And less you try to tell me all muslims are not terrorists, just know that almost all terrorists are muslims.  I watch them torture and murder Christians in several countries.  What would happen here in the United States if we were under muslim control?  May it never happen.

Where were you when the attack happened?  I was cleaning our church at the time. I would go in at two o’clock in the morning and work until nine or ten that morning. On 9/11 I was taking out the trash in my car when I heard that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. My exact thought was, “What nut flew an airplane into that building?”  I was thinking a small plane.   I didn’t know until I got home and turned on the tv that it was an air liner and I saw the second one fly into the second building and I knew we were under serious attack.  I sat glued to the tv all day.  I had so many emotions that day. Grief, anger, disbelief, fear.  When the pentagon was attacked I thought it was all out war.  Maybe it should have been. Maybe we should have annihilated the enemy once for all in the days afterward.  My heart broke for all those who lost loved ones that day. Remember all the pictures and messages posted on fences and walls by family members looking for their loved ones, hoping they had survived the attack?   Those pictures still haunt me.

But true to form, the Democrats and Republicans could not remain as one voice for very long and soon some were for protecting all muslims at any cost while some wanted to bomb muslim countries into oblivion.   Maybe if we had done that then, we would not be having the continuous threats to our country and many other countries around the world with muslim infiltration.   I read about rapes going up in European countries because of muslim infiltration.  In Sweden, rapes have sky rocketed in that small country.  All because of their leaders allowing so many muslim men into their country.

I don’t know what the answer is.  I ask God to protect our country from those who would destroy us.   Just this week a hundred Banglesdesh people were stopped at our border.  People are flooding our borders as never before.  I heard today that since 9/11 border patrol and ICE have turned away eleven million people at our border. Millions more have come into our country illegally. Muslim Terrorists were even found living  in a compound right on our border, who were training children to attack our schools.  Our president is trying to stop this with a wall, but, as usual, the politicians can’t come together and get it done.   I hope there will not be another 9/11 to wake some up.

This day brings many thoughts.  If you live in a country being invaded, you understand what I am writing about.  If you believe muslims are a peace loving people, and many are,  that is your right, but the religion was founded on conquest and destruction and taking over people by force, if needed.   The culture of Islam is not compatible with free countries.   I never really thought much about Islam before 9/11, but I have thought a lot about it since and I have done some studying of it and nothing has proven to me it is peaceful.  It’s only peaceful when kept in control.

So, when you ponder where you were and what you were thinking on this day, just know we must all come to some conclusion one day about who the enemy really is and what should be done about it.  I pray we never have to endure another horrible day like 9/11 ever again.

Say a prayer for those who lost loved ones this day seventeen years ago and pray God will protect our countries from any more harm.  Bye.