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Showing posts from May, 2007

Snake Story

Last night, my husband fixed a wonderful dinner of gazpacho soup with shrimp, a green leafy salad and crusty bread. While he, my crazy mother and I sat talking the conversation somehow turned to snakes. Here is another story about my Mom that must be preserved. We were living in Mountain Home, Idaho. My father was stationed there at the newly reopened Air Force base. The base was out in the country and not too many people had been assigned to the base yet, so they were a really small community. Mom had to go down some steps to the outside to her washing machine. (It was an old ringer washing machine). One day, when Dad was gone on a mission somewhere, she went outside to do the laundry and when she opened the lid, she found a large rattle snake curled up inside the the washer. She slammed the lid back down and ran upstairs to call the MPs (Military Police). Five MPs came out. They were all from Chicago and New York. She says they knew less about what to do about a rattle snake than she

Crocheted headband

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I saw this on someone else's blog and I lost who it was, so I share it with you with full disclosure that it is a copy from another crocheting blogger. The instructions are simple. Make a chain long enough that it measures the same as the headband. Single crochet down one side and then chain one and turn Single crochet down the other side of the chain. Now, fold the two sides of single crochet together and slip stitch them together so you form a tube. Don't close one end of it. Slip the headband into the tube and stitch the end closed. That's it. I am going to make one for each of my granddaughters.

Friends (SPT)

Having been raised in the Air Force, I have grown up with the mentality that you make friends while you are there and when you leave, you leave everything behind, including your friends. Consequently, I have 4 women who come to mind when I think of good friends (outside of my family). Becky, Connie, Gwen and RoseAnn. None of them are on the computer like I am, so our friendship must be sustained by letter and phone. I am terrible at that. However, every time I get together with one of them, it is like time never passed. Okay, I have it all figured out--blogging friends only know the side of you that you want them to know. That makes these friendships kind of like being a grandparent. Why do grandchildren love their grandparents so much? Because we have no issues, we don't need to correct them, we don't need to monitor them, we just need to listen to them and love them and spoil them and send them home to reality. They only see the side of us that we want them to see. But serio

Mother's Day (SPT)

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I did not have a normal childhood. My mother is crazy. Now, don't get the wrong idea, she is crazy in all the right ways. She is full of life, full of energy (even at 84), full of opinions, actively seeks education. She is a compassionate person giving the last she has to help someone who has less. So, why do I say she is crazy? When I was in high school, she woke up one morning and decided we needed a day off in the middle of the week. She took my sister and I up in the mountains for the day. We didn't do anything spectacular or amazing, we just drove up into the mountains, had a picnic and took pictures of each other. I love those pictures (mom is the one beating her chest like Tarzan). Then she wrote an excuse for the Principal which my sister and I gleefully took to school the next day. When the Principal read the note, the sparks flew--the Principal just knew my sister and I had written the note and signed our mother's name, surely a mother would not just take her chi

dieciséis de septiembre (cinco de mayo for real) (SPT)

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Googled Cinco de Mayo (so I would be sure to post my first SPT properly) and found that it is much like St. Patrick's day. Celebrated in America but no so much in Ireland/Mexico. "A common misconception in the United States is that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day ; Mexico's Independence Day is September 16 (dieciséis de septiembre in Spanish )." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinco_de_Mayo ) The discovery that it is simply a celebration for the sake of celebrating allows for this celebration. I bought the tickets to go to Germany for 12 days--June 2-14. Whoohoo! This is a birthday present for my husband. Did you know you have a golden birthday? It is the day when the age you turn is the same as the day in the month you were born. My golden birthday was December 31, 1977. When was yours?

Independence

It is difficult to “let go” and yet, that is the very thing we must do to allow our children to be independent, functioning members of society. After the initial shock of leaving my children alone with a babysitter and finding out that they would survive, the next life changing event happened when I had to allow my first born to go off to school alone. We registered for school and visited the classroom. We met the teacher and the principal. We found out what bus he was to ride and where to pick it up. We talked about what to expect and prepared in every way possible. We walked to the bus stop with him to be sure all went well. Then the day came when he felt confident to catch the bus alone. (This was in 1972, when the world was much safer—I would never allow this to happen in 2006.) His Dad was home because he worked shift-work and this was a sleeping day and working night. I had appointments all day and was gone early. Brian confidently, independently, left to catch the bus.

The Dentist

So, there I was, prostrate on the dentist’s chair (well actually I was neither face down nor on the ground, but I felt that I was more than just lying back, ya know what I mean?) and suddenly I realized what a grotesque view of the world this man must have. I asked him a thought-provoking question related to something of interest to him in order to encourage him to carry on about something… anything… rather than ask me questions (causing him to quit his torturous actions, and remove his instruments for any amount of time, thus prolonging the agony) expecting me to respond. He was waxing poetic about the fact that most of his clients have a natural reflex with their tongues and that they can close off their throats with them and that every once in a while he has a patient gag, you know, that kind of stuff, when he took his right index finger and pulled my lower lip down in a position to which I hope it never becomes accustomed, and began chipping away at the inevitable plaque buildup on

The Good Old Days?

Recently, some friends were engaged in a conversation about how poor they had been as children. I thought how lucky I was to have never suffered a poor day in my life. Then I began to think about it and I realized that we were dirt poor and I didn't even know it. We lived in a house out of the grace of a dear friend for little or no rent. We ate out of another dear friend's garden as much as we wanted. He told us we would be doing him a favor to eat out of his garden, he always over planted and it was a lot of work. We weeded and harvested. We bought our groceries from the local grocery store on credit and Mom paid when she could. We got sacks of food when the man running the Bishop's Store House thought we might be needing some. He always told Mom he was just going to throw it out and if we couldn't use it maybe we knew someone who could. I suppose he knew Mom wouldn't take it if she felt it was a handout. All of our clothes were homemade out of the least expensiv