Bread Recipe

I'm baking bread today.   Well, kind of.   I'm actually going to make pizza for supper but I start with a recipe for bread.  

I've had this recipe for almost 45 years.  It was in our paper sometime in the mid 70's.  The article with the recipe starts out by saying with the rising price of gas, possibly going to .60 cents a gallon,  we may be looking at returning to doing things like baking our own bread.  

Wouldn't that be wonderful?   Of course our salaries would not be what they are today either.  At that time we lived on about $800 a month.   We had four kids and one about to enter college. 

ANYWAY...today I'll be making pizza with a very old bread recipe and thinking about how nice it would be if we only had to pay .60 cents a gallon for gas.

WHAT'S IN THE ATTIC?

We have something in our attic,
We know not what it is,
It makes some funny noises,
And creeps me out -

I wish we knew what the little varmit was
and what it thinks we might have to share.
There is no food or bedding for it up there.

I think it's kind of smart as it becomes quiet as can be
When Ted walks in to listen and maybe see.

SO...I know not what this critter
Thinks we have for it up there,
We have no bed for it to use,
Nor even a chair.

Winter Forecast

The headline on the paper this morning said we would have lower heating bills due to a milder winter.   YEA

Then I opened the paper and saw that people that "read" persimmon seeds say it is to be a terrible winter, colder than last year.

When I was growing up not 20 miles from where we live my mom used to say you could predict the winter by the color of the wooly worms coats.   Well, I've seen some pretty darned dark wooly worms lately. 

So...I'm not going to fool myself into thinking this winter will be all sunshine and roses.   I've got a lot of yarn here to knit prayer shawls, 15 jigsaw puzzles to put together and how much fabric to sew I do not know,  but I bet I can get a couple of quilts out of it.

Happy Winter all.

Memories

This morning I was reading my Sunday School lesson when I saw a post on the back of the book by an author I was privileged to meet one time.   I was working at a Publishing House at the time and she had several books we published for her.   She was the mother of seven children.   Her husband was a Dr. and they decided to show their children how to live OFF THE LAND. 

They butchered their own meat and grew most of their own vegetables and ALL their children had to help.   There were stories of them driving tractors, bringing animals into the barn in winter weather, a funny, funny story about them butchering a cow one time. 

I LOVED her writing.  It was always funny but also always had a message.  She would write a short story about one of the children and you always laughed while reading it, sometimes cried, but you ALWAYS came away thinking about the message she left you with.

I have not read any of her books in awhile.   Maybe time to search Amazon.com for some of them.

Summer Time and the Livin Is Easy

All of a sudden we have more vegetables than we can eat.   I've frozen corn, green beans, eaten corn, eaten green beans, and now we have tomatoes and zucchini.   If it's not from the Farmer's Market, we have these things given to us.

It's been warm but not overly hot.   Flowers are blooming nicely and we are getting more done to the house.  Ted has worked in his garage so hard.   It looks like something out of HGTV.   I bet they'd like to have him do a show for them.     Tomorrow we get a new furnace and A/C.    I wonder what we will do next year if we get all the projects done we have on our list.

Maybe next year we can wash the windows.   Keep thinking we will do them but something else always seems more important.

Our two first born    

came for a visit by themselves.   We love their families but, oh it was nice to have them here alone.  We giggled, looked at pictures, went garage sailing, and giggled some more.  Kim took a SELFIE of us and we giggled again.

School will be starting before long and then everyone is busy and before we know it it will be cold weather and we won't get outside at all.

I hate to see Summer end.  

Sick and Tired

I just pulled up my email account and there on the side bar is a good looking woman with short shorts on and a pair of really high heels sitting on the ground resting next to a car tire.   Can you guess what this was for?              CAR INSURANCE    Could someone please explain to me what she has to do with buying CAR INSURANCE?

Before we moved to Illinois I turned my computer on one day and the side-bar had several pictures of good looking middle aged men.   The headline was:  " Ellen,   there are 145 men in Chapel Hill that would like to meet you.:"     I burst out laughing because Chapel Hill probably didn't have 145 men in the little town and none I had seen were as good looking as the guys pictures they showed here.

I pull up my Facebook account and young women I watched grow up are whining because the government won't buy their contraceptives.   Next I guess they are going to want the government to buy their tooth paste and shampoo too.

I used to hear people say they hated to watch the news and I never quite understood it.  I do now.   I really don't understand why we have to hear about the WORLD CUP for 16 weeks AFTER we lost or watch the same news on the local channel as we do the National News program.  

I think I'm getting old.  I'm tired of hearing some young women whine and sick to death of commercials for Viagra or Cialis.

GET OVER IT people.

   

Newss

I wish SOMEONE wuld give us some NEWS sometime.  All we get are a bunch of people that tell part of the news, find something they think is funny and laugh like a bunch of kids. 

Then we get 10 minutes of commercials.   There is ALWAYS a commercial for a guy to take to get an erection, someone that needs good smelling kleenex, a car or two (that's proably going to be recalled within a year for some malfunction that can kill you), another guy that can't get an erection and then some magic pill that will make me thin .     Of course all these medication have just the most scary side affects - bleeding, dizziness, nausea, or maybe if you are lucky death.

What is wrong with us that we let this crap continue.  If a news anchor interviews a politician about something very serious they try to put words in the politician's mouth.   I'm not saying politicians are always right but for heavens sake, let's at least give them a chance.  

I'd like to know some news  people.   

The Past 70 Years

Our papers and T.V. are full of accounts of the Invastion at Normandy these days.   Today marks the 70th Anniversary.

I have a book that is a very good account of that day.   Some of it is hard to read.   I cannot imagine what that was like.    The book I have is "The Bedford Boys".   It's about the town Bedford, VA and how they lost 16 young men that day.  It describes just what it was like when these young men hit the water.

We receive a local paper and every week they have a section called "A Step Back In Time"  Now and then they also have a page on "A Little More History"  This week they have several articles about Normandy and also a section this week entitled   "D-Day Plus Twenty Years".    It  was written in June, 1964.

When I read that article and realized how close we were, even then, to WWII it made me sit up and take note.    I remember very little about the actual war.  I remember having "blackouts" where we had to pull all the blinds in the house.   The old dark green one's that were ugly and let NO light in.   We also had ration stamp books.   Sugar and bread were rationed, also shoes.   I still have a book somewhere with a stamp or two in it.

BUT...when I looked at the date "1964" and the headlines  "D-Day Plus Twenty Years"   I caught my breath.  The fact that I had been married just a few years after WWII shocked me.   I had not realized how much had happened in those twenty short years.   By the time the article was written I had two girls and my life was very full AND seemed very safe.   Ted, however, had served almost four years in Korea.  

Growing up in a small town was a wonderful thing but it also shielded me from the things that were going on in the world around me.   Of course we did not have T.V. and get the facts practically before they happened as we do today.     My main source of news came on the big screen every week at the movie.  

I guess the thing that shocks me the most is how I could live in that era and not realize all the terrible things that were going on in Germany and how lucky we were to be living in the United States.

Oh Well!!!!

Sunday is our 58th Wedding Anniversary.    Ted asked me the other day what I wanted to do and if I had anywhere I'd like to go.

I had been thinking now that we are living so close it might be fun to go back to Navoo where we spent our Honeymoon and eat at a place that was really famous at the time.   The name was:  Flora Thumbs Restaurant.

So a few minutes ago I Googled it and oh my, I got some weird answers.

The one that really caught my eye though was:   Flora  -  minus thumbs.   I'm not sure just what that was as I decided Flora Thumbs was closed and we couldn't take that trip back in time.

Oh Well!!!!!!

MEMORIES

Yesterday we buried another member of our family.   She was a niece on my side of the family and only 8 years younger than I am.   I did not know her children very well.   We moved to Tennessee while they were still young.   Her two living sisters and several other nieces and nephews were at the service.

This morning my daughter had a picture of several of the nieces and nephews on Face Book and the memories have been flooding in every since.

Some twenty years ago we lost the first grandchild on my side of the family.   He was just a neat kid and grew to be a pretty neat man too.   These two danced together for many years and my mother and I would come to Peoria every year to see their performance.

They were two of the funniest kids you'd ever want to know.   Well, I've had a few funny kids of my own by now but I thought these two were special when I was growing up.

I won't bore you with all my memories but I would encourage anyone that has a big family and have lost the parents to try and get together.   I'm hoping this summer we can arrange to have a family reunion of the ones left.   We have lost 5 of this generation and that's too many not to realize we need to keep in touch.

Happy Birthday, Winni

Today is a very good friends birthday.   She's in her 90's - I don't know the exact number, didn't ask, don't care.    She loved us from the first time she saw us.

Ted had gone to work for GTE and we lived in a garage that had been converted to a little apartment.   We had a picture window in our bathroom.    We lived there when Kim was born. 

One morning in January we woke to ice on the inside of our windows right beside Kim's bed.  So a search for new housing began.   We had very little money and the houses in Mt. Carmel, IL were too expensive.   Someone told us about a house in the country we might want to look at.  

We called the people and set a time to go see it that night.  When we arrived they had a roaring fire in a beautiful fireplace.   Their house was so pretty.   They said the electricity had been turned off at the rental house but Don would take his big beam lantern to show us the house.  It was hard to see at night but we looked and they said the rent was $45 a month.  Then I saw the kitchen and there were two sinks in it.   Also this Don guy stuttered and then here was this house with two sinks.   Good heavens I thought.   So...being the nice person I was (AHEM) I politely said, "We'll call you"  and at the same time Ted said, "We'll take it".    I thought he'd lost his mind.  

Little did I know what wonderful people they were.    They loved us from the first time we were there and did everything they could to help us.   The day we moved in Kim had not had a bath for three days as our house was just too cold.   So...their oldest daughter, Judy, kept Kim while we unloaded our meager furnishings.   During that afternoon Judy gave Kim two baths and I think Kim slept sounder than she had in days.

We did not have a television so they invited us over every Sunday evening to watch T.V. and every Thursday night to watch Tennessee Ernie Ford.    When we finally saved enough to buy our first T.V. I think they were about as sad as I'd ever seen them.

They furnished us a lawn mower, we had all the fruit we could eat or can - FREE and I couldn't begin to count the number of free meals we ate over there.   They really adopted us, they just didn't make it legal.   To this day we call Winnie - AUNT WINNIE and though Don died many years ago he was always UNCLE DON too.   Such wonderful people.   Loved us just for who we were and even though we smoked and I'm sure they knew we drank too they never tried to change us.   They just loved us.  

We were two very young, very lucky people.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

We knew 2014 would be a different kind of year for us and we would have snow.   We never expected SO MUCH snow.

 

This was just our first snow.   Since this 8" we've had a little warm weather, some ice and then another inch of snow on top of that, then last Sunday we had another 6" and then the temperature dropped to -12 degrees.    O.K. already!!!!!!

 

Yesterday we saw an inch of rain on top of the last snowfall making for one crappy mess to walk in OR drive in.

 

Today we were in beautiful sunshine and 40 degrees.  Tomorrow they promise us almost 50 degrees and I may see if they open the pool at the park.