It's A New Day

We Found Jesus

We found Jesus...and Mary and the Wise Men too. But most importantly, we found Black-Eyed Joseph, much to the delight of everyone in the family. Let me explain.

When Wayne was a boy, he made this nativity scene in art along with all the other fourth graders in his class. At least he thinks it was probably fourth grade because his teacher that year was Clarabelle Buzzard who really liked art and constantly had her students doing art projects. And yes, Clarabelle Buzzard was her real name, not some nickname the kids pinned on her. She was memorable for both her name and her love of time for art.

The students mixed plaster of paris, poured it into molds and then painted the pieces once they had hardened. It's fun to turn the figures over and see Wayne's initials etched some of them or his name written on the bottom of others. We think the stable came some time later but it's been a part of the set for years.

There's quite a bit of detail for a fourth grader to paint, especially a fourth-grade boy who really wasn't into art, but he did a good job. His brush strokes gave the plaster figurines some depth and personality, just what every artist wants.

I'm not sure what happened with Joseph, however. Perhaps all the strain of being turned away at the inns got to him as instead of little black pupils he has large black eyes. Both of them. As a result, he was forever known in Arnall lore as Black-Eyed Joseph.

None of this mattered to Wayne's mom. She proudly displayed Black-Eyed Joseph and the rest of the figures every Christmas along with her other treasured Christmas decorations. Moms do that sort of thing, you know; overlook imperfections and find beauty in the creations of their children. She gave the boys most of the things related to their youth, once they were grown and had families of their own, but she never parted with Black-eyed Joseph.

Wayne has specific memories of this nativity scene in the house in which he grew up, and I remember it in the house on Frazier and the apartment, both places his parents lived after we married. And at each holiday there were loving chuckles at the story of Wayne painting Joseph with two black eyes. Stories like that take on a life of their own...and that's a good thing as far as families go.

I wasn't really thinking about all that when we started through boxes of Christmas stuff in Wayne's Dad's apartment several weeks ago but it wasn't long before one of his brothers hollered I found Black-Eyed Joseph! There were a lot of smiles and good memories shared that day before these tiny works of art were tucked away in a box headed for Florida.

Some of those same smiles and memories resurfaced again today as I quizzed Wayne for more details about the set as I packed it in with our own family's Christmas decorations today. He'll be quick to tell you he isn't an artist but that doesn't matter. I fully expect Black-Eyed Joseph and the rest of this nativity set to have a permanent place in our house this Christmas and every one thereafter. Brad and Kayla are going to love it's charming imperfections as much as Wayne's mom did. It is, after all, a family tradition and one I'm happy to carry on.

Essentially, It's Relaxing

I'm sleeping really well these nights. Not that I didn't sleep well before that as going to and staying asleep is seldom an issue for me like it is with some of my friends. But sleep these past few nights has been particularly restful.

Some of the credit may belong to the spritz of Quietude Calming Mist I've been spraying into the air over the bed just before I turn out the lights. The tiny bottle is only about as big around as my finger but contains a cocktail of fifteen essential oils that creates a space of peace, calm and relaxation. At least that's what the literature said that came with it when I found it on my pillow at the hotel in Louisville. My disappointment that it wasn't chocolate was soon replaced by intrigue as I seem to come across more and more about essential oils these days.

The spray was one of three products in the package designed to encourage rest, relaxation and recharging...all probably more appropriate for weary travelers than chocolate although there are times nothing soothes quiet like a piece of dark chocolate melting in your mouth. Also included was an aromatherapy facial moisturizer and a balm to sooth aching feet and limbs. These were basically samples with no more than one or two applications except for the spray. It's not large but since it only takes a squirt or two, it will probably last for two weeks or so.

Lavender, grapefruit and thyme oils are common to all three, although there isn't a full list of ingredients for the spray because the bottle is so small. It isn't perfume-y, just pleasantly fresh...at least to my senses anyway. Everyone is different as I learned in my yoga class. The girl who subs for the regular instructor frequently sprays essential oils into the air at the beginning of class and a different scent at the end. One member of the class asked that she discontinue the lemongrass as she didn't care for the scent but I liked it. I need smell-net so I could share.

The first night I used it I slept so deeply I didn't hear the alarm when it went off. I'm usually a light sleeper although I can go right back to sleep after waking but the music played on the clock radio for almost ten minutes before I heard it. I was shocked. That was, however, a one-time occurrence.

Google tells me not to get too attached to Quietude; it isn't available for sale in the U.S. Of course, I could just spend another night in a nice hotel and replenish my supply but sleeping at home with no more trips on the near horizon could be part of why I resting so well too. For now I'll just continue to enjoy my little spritz of essential oil and drift off to peaceful slumber while it lasts.

What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get

We here in Florida are used to paying more for gasoline than our neighbors in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. In fact, we almost always are paying more for fuel than anywhere else we've visited this year. That inflated price is due primarily to high gasoline taxes we have so you Disney/Everglades/Key West-bound visitors can contribute to our state treasury. It's a trade-off for residents, however. We don't have a state income tax so it's hard to complain.

Still, I'm always happy to find cheap gas when we travel and we found plenty of it on our trip to Ohio. We never paid more than $2.88 a gallon and the final fill-up on the way home was with $2.75 a gallon gas. That was a more than $.30 a gallon savings over the cost of gas when we left home, although it has dropped below $3 now. Needless to say, we were happy about this unexpectedly low price...and judging by the number of cars lining up at every pump at the Pilot station in Lebanon Junction, Kentucky, so were a lot of other people.

I wanted to document our bargain gas, although I'm not sure I had a clear idea of why I needed to do so but I did. I whipped out my cellphone and snapped the picture but when I looked at it, I didn't have what I expected.

While I would have liked $2 a gallon better, that wasn't the price. Some of the numbers didn't show up. So I snapped another one.

It would seem as if gas was getting cheaper as I stood there but that wasn't the case. I could see $2.75; the camera couldn't.

I tried one more.

At least I managed to capture two out of the three numbers on the third attempt.

I'd never thought about big signs like this having a refresh rate but obviously they do. Our eyes compensate for this flickering and we see it as a constant source of light, just like when your computer monitor or television screen refreshes. If you take a photo of a screen like that, you'd often get a black bar marking the progress of the refreshing process. You can avoid that with a faster shutter speed but I was using the phone on my camera. I think you can adjust the shutter speed in some apps or maybe in the new IOS8 but I have neither.

What I do have is Photoshop.

Voila! Gas at $2.75 a gallon...and a lesson in big electronic signs.

Along The Way

Our time in Ohio wasn't the only relaxed portion of this recent journey; we took some extra time getting there too. It included an overnight stay plus half the following day in Louisville, Kentucky.

When my family history research turns up a book I'm interested in, I print out details on the book from WorldCat and tuck it away in a folder for future travel. WorldCat, if you're not familiar with it, is a cool way to find the nearest library that has the books I'm looking for or to see if any of the books are located in cities we'll be visiting. And, fortunately for me, several were available in Louisville. My morning plans were set.

It didn't take Wayne long to figure out what he'd be doing; he'd cache and he set out to gather an inventory of interesting caches to find in a new city. It wasn't long before he came looking for me. He'd located a cache in Cave Hill Cemetery and he thought I might be interested in going with him as not only was it designed as a garden-style cemetery with winding paths, lakes and beautiful architecture but it's also on the National Register of Historic Places. Interested? Heck, yes...because not only did it sound beautiful but I knew he had relatives buried there.

Well, at least Find-a-Grave said he did. Find-a-Grave...there's another handy website. It's an online database for cemeteries all over the country. Volunteers canvas individual cemeteries recording information off of the headstones then uploading it to the website. Often other information is added, such as names of related family members and even links to their Find-a-Grave entries. Find-a-Grave said Wayne's ancestor was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery but the cemetery's searchable database did not have him listed. Wayne emailed the individual who prepared the Find-a-Grave entry and got the section and lot where Nickolaus Herchenroeder, his great-great grandfather, was supposed to be buried.

To say there are winding paths would be an understatement. First of all, the cemetery is huge! It's more than 120,000 graves spread over 296 acres and they are still actively burying people there. To complicate matters more, it's not laid out in straight rows either. Above is the map so you can see all the curvy, loopy roads which, for the most part, circle around small hills, statues and landscaped areas. The graves all follow those same curves. If you could see it from the air, it must look like a giant, swirly flower

And it is beautiful. I've never seen so many large personal mausoleums, some the size of small houses. And there were elaborate personal monuments too, some stretching nearly two stories high. Everywhere we looked there were intricately carved headstones, each one more unique than the last. More than 5,500 soldiers killed in the Civil War, both Union and Confederate, are buried there and a famous colonel of another kind, Colonel Harlan Sanders, is among the famous Kentuckians buried there too. I could have wandered through there for hours but we had Nickolaus and a cache to find.

The former proved much tougher than the latter.

Here's a map of Section A with a red X marking the lot where Nickolaus was supposedly buried. Section A is at the very bottom on the right in the overall map above, giving you some idea of the scale of this place. You can also see how the plots all bend and curve with the streets. There are anywhere from four to eight headstones in each plot, depending on the size of the memorials and stones. We found Section A easily but it took us a while to figure out the system and locate Lot 94. When we did, it was obvious Nickolaus wasn't resting where we thought he was.

Back we went to the security guard at the front gate. Yes, there's an entire security force for this cemetery. Some of them may be needed to rescue visitors lost in the maze of roads. He tried searching the onsite database and could only find the son Nicholaus Herchenroeder, who died six years after his father. He suggested we visit the office to see if the actual paper records would reveal the answer.

A very nice man at the administrative office looked in his computer, checked several filing cabinets of records and then announced quite assuredly that Nickolaus Herchenroeder, the father, was not buried there. His theory was the one grave they had under that name was the father who'd died in 1888 but was buried elsewhere then reburied in 1894, thus producing the entry in the computer. We were skeptical but he seemed so sure. Then he suggested we follow him out to where the 1894 grave was located and we'd see what was on the stone. It sounded like a plan.

I couldn't tell you the route we took because we made so many twists and turns but about half-way there, another car pulled up to the administrative man we were following. They talked for a few minutes but I didn't think much about it, figuring it was other cemetery business. Then the car pulled off and the administrative guy followed him. With us in the rear we had our own mini-procession.

When we all stopped, we were surprised to see the security guard we had talked at the entrance jump out of the lead car and bolt over to a small stone, pointing at it with an enormous grin on his face. He'd found our Nickolaus Herchenroeder. Acting on a hunch, he went to the very back corner of Section A in what is called Range A then walked up and down the rows until he located the grave.

This will give you an idea of how far away we ended up from the place where we started looking. The location of Nickolaus Herchenroeder's grave is marked with a blue X.

The security guard was obviously proud of his discovery and rightfully so. It would have been easy for him to stay at the front entrance and figure it was someone else's job to solve our mystery but he didn't, and for that we are grateful as we'd have never found it on our own. And the administrative guy was unusually quiet, obviously a little taken aback that his records were lacking although I suspect the information is in there in some other form. The name Herchenroeder has been spelled a dozen different ways in what I've been able to find on the family. The grave we were heading for was just across that little road and down a stone or two and it is definitely Nicholaus, the son. It was close but not close enough we'd have likely found the father without the efforts of the security guard.

It didn't take Wayne more than a couple of minutes to locate the cache he was seeking in another part of the cemetery...he had the GPS coordinates for it. Neither of us minded that it took us a good bit more time to work our way out of the cemetery as there was something unusual and intriguing at every turn.

For two people who have no intentions of being buried, we sure spend a lot of time in cemeteries but you never know what adventures lie between the tombstones.

A Fall Trek

If our family had a motto, it might well be A rolling suitcase gathers no moss.

We've been on the road again. Fortunately for us, we traveled highways other than the ones we've been on this summer on our trips to Kansas...and that was a welcome change. The fact that we got to spend some time with our buddies, Dr. Dale and Carol, as well as take in some fall color just made this little getaway all that much better.

We didn't let a little drizzle slow us down one bit as we wandered the back roads of Ohio's Amish country. The leaves were not quite at peak but there was still plenty of color to be seen as we drifted from one little town to another. There are plenty of those towns too as you'll find one every few miles when you're off the main highway, but then a large number of the customers visiting the stores in those towns come by horse and buggy.

The days were relaxing and easy going. There are seldom any hard and fast plans when we visit Dale and Carol; we just go with the flow. Sometimes that means letting Wayne find a few caches along those back roads and sometimes it's letting Carol and I stop in at one of the Amish bulk food stores. It could even include a trip to the Amish furniture store to admire their amazing craftsmanship on our way to the back room where they were serving big bowls of warm apple cobbler topped with homemade vanilla ice cream. It was delicious! It's an annual event for the store so our timing was perfect.

Good food. Great friends. A peaceful setting. Lots of laughter. New memories to mix with the old ones we've made on previous trips. Yep...this fall trek to Ohio was delightful. But I'm ready to see if moss really would grow on that suitcase if it didn't roll quite so much in the weeks ahead.

A Keepsake Just The Same

I've been rearranging. No, not furniture. You'll pretty much find in exactly the same spot it's always been unless there's a compelling reason to move it. What I'm shuffling around in this case is some glassware and assorted keepsakes displayed in an odd corner of our living room.

We brought home a few things I picked from Wayne's mom's china cabinet that I wanted to add to these glass shelves. I'm really not much of an antique collector but I do treasure the old family things when I know the connection. Or sometimes it's just a pretty piece of glassware that I think will look good with what's already there, some of which came from my side of the family. This area isn't quite complete yet. There's an old pair of wire-rimmed glasses that need a stand and an antique pocket watch in the same boat.

There's a second grouping too although I'm not sure all of this is going to stay here. If you needed a lesson on the cool color of natural light (with just the light directly over the shelves on) vs. the warm color of artificial light (i.e., lights in the room after dark), these two photos would be good examples. But back to the keepsakes.

We didn't have a formal system for dividing up the items in the china cabinet among the four children; we just kinda did it. In 2010 I had taken everything out of this cabinet and washed it just days before Pansy had her heart attack and as I did so, she told about first one piece and then another. If I knew then what was going to happen, I would have been making notes but, of course, life doesn't work that way. So I relayed what I remembered and the boys threw in some things they knew about the items too. We loosely took turns picking things we wanted or were special to us.

The day I was cleaning Pansy had told me a very detailed story about the china cup and saucer in the bottom photo. It had been her mother's, she said, and each place setting was a different flower. She went on for some time about how beautiful the table looked when set with this mixture of colors and blooms...a giant bouquet, if you will. Upon Grandma Blaine's death, the dishes had been divided and Pansy had chosen this pink daisy-like pattern because it reminded her of her mother.

I didn't remember all the stories for all the items in the cabinet but I remember that one and after sharing it with everyone, I asked if I could have the cup and saucer as I didn't have anything that belonged to Grandma Blaine. No one objected and it was soon wrapped and packed away in our box of Kansas treasures.

Part of the rearranging process was to wash and polish everything, old and new. That's the one drawback about these shelves...they are open. Things sure look pretty on them, however, when the light reflects on the glass.

As I turned the cup and saucer over, I noticed some writing on the bottom of the saucer.
        To: Pansy
        From: Your Friend Lil_ (either Lila or Lily, it's not clear)
        2005

I had to laugh; the china wasn't Grandma Blaine's at all. My sweet mother-in-law suffered with some memory issues in the last years of her life, although she was never diagnosed with Alzheimer's or any other memory-related disease. But she usually just forgot things, not made things up. Wayne doesn't remember any set of flowered dishes at his grandmother's house so I'm not sure where her detailed story came from. Perhaps her friend Lila or Lily had such a set and she was simply confused about whose dishes they were.

Yes, I may revise the grouping on the counter but the cup and saucer is going to stay. I smile every time I look at them as I know Pansy is up in heaven chuckling over her memory lapse too. I still don't have anything from Grandma Blaine but that's OK. The cup and saucer, and my mother-in-law's story that go with them, are a keepsake just the same.

I'm Trending Trendier

When it comes to the latest trends, I'm not very trendy. I'm clueless about the latest fashions, preferring comfort and my own style guidelines instead. And I don't do Twitter, Instagram, Vine or Snapchat although I do have an idea of what they are, thanks to family members a generation or two younger. You won't find me in line for the new iWatch or glasses with computer chips in them. Yep...I'm decidedly unhip and I'm OK with that.

I am, however, trending trendier. I saw the movie that currently holds the top spot at the box office and I've read the novel sitting atop the best seller list. Of course, it helps that they're essentially one in the same. The book is Gone Girl and the movie is the screen adaptation of the novel.

This was a book I almost didn't read. I started it while Wayne was in rehab after his knee surgery and put it down twice. I just couldn't get into it. Then I picked it up again when I didn't have anything else to read and I'm so glad I did. Once I was hooked, I couldn't put it down. I loved the plot twists even though I hated all the main characters. Following the story was like riding a roller coaster; just as you get used to leaning right, it jerks you left.

The movie was just as good, and that evaluation comes from someone who never re-watches movies or TV shows I've already seen because I know what happens next. My friend Bonnie and I had a girl's night out the day the movie opened, another trendy thing out of character for me. We both commented we didn't remember so much bad language in the book but when reading I suppose we could have just skipped over it. Or they added it it the movie for the shock value. At any rate, the film is rated "R" so consider yourself warned.

I doubt these two recent related events are going to elevate me to trendsetter status but I'm enjoying my moment on the cutting edge.

The Family Patriarch

Wayne is the oldest of four boys. Well, technically four kids as there were no girls in the family. Sadly, Dean, Boy #2, died in 2010 of complications from diabetes but Maurice (#3 and on the left in the photo above) and Bradley (#4 and on the right) were with us in El Dorado when we cleaned out Dad's apartment. Since they all live in different parts of the country, it was really good for all three of the boys to have time together, even if much of it was crazy busy.

I'd be willing to bet that when they were boys, things rolled downhill. By that I mean that when there was a task nobody wanted to do or blame to be placed, the older boys put it off on the younger ones...to a degree anyway. Wayne is fourteen years older than Bradley so obviously he couldn't be blamed for some things when he was just a baby.

The younger tried to get their revenge, however. More than once in our time in Kansas I heard them tell Wayne he needed to do some task or make some decision no one really wanted to tackle as he was, after all, the patriarch of the family now. They even bestowed Great-Grandma Bessie's cane on him to prove it. It was all in good fun, of course, as any decision of any consequence was made by all of them together.

After we got back home, we did some looking. It seems as if Wayne really is a patriarch. As best as we can determine, he is the oldest living male descendant of Thomas O. and Bessie Arnall, the great-grandparents. There are older descendants, two in fact in his dad's generation, but they're both women with married names, not Arnall. And going through the children of Wayne's generation, he appears to be the oldest living male.

That and a dime will get him a cup of coffee. Except he doesn't drink coffee and you can't buy it for a dime anyway. It's a dubious honor, to say the least.

Just In Time For Halloween

When the calendar flipped to October, the Halloween decorations began to show up on houses in the neighborhood. Oh, not like Christmas, of course, but there are orange lights on bushes and giant black cats in more yards this year than I remember in the past.

Pumpkins and fake spider webs are all in good fun; we did, however, have some seriously spooky happenings Tuesday night: A dead body in the golf course parking lot. For real!

I know! I'm as shocked as you are! We don't live in a high-crime area; in fact, people move to this county because the crime rate is so low. And ours is a gated community filled with houses equipped with alarm systems. Usually the most crime-ridden event that happens around here is when someone speeds around a curve, annihilates a mailbox and doesn't stop to 'fess up. A dead body is serious stuff.

There are two versions of what happened making the rounds but they both start from the same point. A husband dropped off his wife at the pizza place a block or two down the road from the entrance to our subdivision. She was going to order their pizza while he came to meet someone in our neighborhood, then he'd join her in a few minutes to eat dinner together. When he didn't return for an extended period of time, she became concerned. It's a little fuzzy whether she first called a family member who found the body and they called the Sheriff's Office or she called law enforcement directly and they discovered her dead husband but the end result is the same. He was dead in the parking lot and had been run over by his own car which was still running when officers arrived.

Cue some eerie music in your head and I'll toss out the theories behind this unfortunate event.

The official version relayed by the detective who came out to interview our friend Hiram, the golf course owner, was that the man had indeed visited someone in the neighborhood and on his way out suffered a medical emergency, perhaps a heart attack. He realized his situation was getting worse and he pulled into the parking lot, probably to call for help. Somewhere in that process, he got out of his car without putting it in park, fell or passed out, and the car rolled over him. His death was determined to be from natural causes.

The explanation making the rounds among the resident-golfers, however, is much more creative. In fact, the folks at Castle might want to adapt it for an upcoming episode on their television show. In this version the deceased man is affiliated with some drug treatment program and he was meeting a new convert when things went wrong. The perpetrator threw his victim to the ground and ran over him with his own car, thus making it murder. Maybe instead of a mystery plot, this should be an lesson for a psychology class: An example of how a story gets distorted with each retelling until it morphs into something bearing little resemblance to the truth.

Me...I'm waiting to hear what my across-the-street neighbor, who seems to know everything that goes on in the subdivision (and in great detail too), has to say about it. He just returned from being out of town so it may take him a few days to catch up on things. Stay tuned...by Halloween this tale could be very scary indeed.

Golden Days

El Dorado High School, El Dorado, Kansas, Class of 1964...that was an awesome reunion! I'm not sure how it could have been five years since the last time we got together let alone fifty since we graduated but it is.

This 1964 version of me was young and naive but then I suspect almost everyone in our class was. Life has a way of changing that.

Our senior year was bookmarked by the assassination of President John Kennedy near the start and the departure of so many of our male classmates for Vietnam at the end. We went our separate ways as the ensuing years brought us bell bottom pants, Watergate, a man on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the increasing use of technology that both connects us and isolates us at the same time. Post Office shootings --"going postal"--came and went; school shootings are with us still, continuing to break our collective hearts. And 9/11 rocked us all.

We were the first wave of the Baby Boomers, raised on television and rock and roll and unaware of the impact we as an age group would have on social, economic and political change. There's a lot of water under the bridge since graduation. A lot of growing up and seeing life differently...for all of us. We're still that first wave but it's a silver tsunami now.

Fifty years is a great vantage point. The early reunions were too pressure-packed. In fact, the ten year was my least favorite. Too much drama left over from high school crept in. Who would speak to you? Who got a decent job? Who got married or maybe more importantly, who got divorced since graduation?

But at the fifty-year mark, everyone who showed up has won the dark war of attrition. That fact was driven home when the list of classmates who have died over the years was mailed with the invitation to the reunion. Officially, our class numbered 196 although I don't ever remember the count being that high. With about 45 names on the list, it's sobering to realize we've lost almost 25% of our class. All of the attendees wore red name badges with our senior pictures on them but there were black ones like them for all the deceased classmates. Spread on a separate table at the banquet, it was a sea of forever-young faces who are no longer with us. It made my heart sad.

The 77 of us there share a lot of history together. With a class of less than 200, we pretty much knew everyone...at least enough to put a name with the face. We spent the same Friday nights dragging Central, wore the same red and black socks with our Pep Club uniform (red on right), and poked the same fun at Mr. Grove, the biology teacher who looked like he belonged on the shelf with some of his specimens, and Mrs. Newcomer, the Latin teacher who always had her hand inside the neck of her dress tugging at a slip strap...or something.

And when we asked How are you doing? now, we really meant it! No one cared if you put on weight or had gray hair...or no hair at all; we were just grateful to be there and glad to see everyone who came. I can't remember a reunion where everyone, and I do mean everyone, talked so much to everyone else. Gone are the times when we all stayed primarily in the group of friends we hung around with in our school days; we wanted to hug and see and talk to everyone. The photographer had a problem getting us to shut up long enough to take the class photo, as you can sense from the picture above...and that was only half of us. I made the rounds but there were people I didn't get to see or didn't get to spend as much time talking to as I would have liked.

There was, of course, time for my special gal-pals...the two Connie's and two Linda's. It's a friendship that goes back to grade school and one that despite the miles between us continues to be a close one. We had some time together outside the reunion to catch up and reminisce but it's never enough.

And after fifty years, the truth finally came out about who set off the cherry bomb that blew up the toilet in the boys' bathroom. I won't commit it to print but let's just say it wasn't really a surprise. I was however, shocked to hear the story of how he and some of his cohorts put the English teacher's Volkswagen up in a tree along with several other similar escapades. That was news to me but then, as I said, I was naive. Those pranksters grew up to become computer specialists, teachers, engineers and even a high school principal. Yes, Class of 1964...we turned out pretty good after all for a bunch of kids from small-town Kansas.

The halls we walked are empty now. When the new high school was built, the middle school took over what we knew as old EHS and now with a brand new middle school, the building is up for sale or maybe even demolition. Both my parents and Wayne's parents sat in those same classrooms so while I'm filled with nostalgia for the memories made in that building, it's another reminder that we can't stop time on its march toward the future.

Fifty years. It's a lifetime on one hand but it went by in the blink of an eye on the other. There's so much more I want to remember about the weekend but mostly it is that the golden anniversary of our high school graduation was the best reunion ever. Class of 1964...I can't wait for the 55th!

Special thanks to Linda and Jim for the use of their reunion photos.

Dad Is On The Move

One of the best things Wayne's parents did for their children late in their lives was to execute living wills. They spelled out in black and white just exactly what they wanted in terms of end-of-life issues. It was a blessing when my mother-in-law had an unexpected heart attack which resulted in her death two days later, and it was a blessing when my father-in-law's health problems multiplied and doctors suggested hospice. Although living wills isn't really the point of this post, I'd be remiss if I didn't encourage you to sign your own as it will simply make a difficult time slightly easier for your family at some point in the future.

Both expressed a desire to be cremated and not to have any service. We fudged a little with my mother-in-law and held a small family memorial about 10 weeks after she died. We just thought Wayne's dad, who wasn't much of a touchy-feely guy, needed a reason to be surrounded by family who were scattered across the country and the closure a memorial would provide would be good for him too. We divided my mother-in-law's ashes up into pretty little floral boxes and anyone who wanted one could take one home to scatter in a place that was meaningful to her or to them or that they thought she would have liked. She's everywhere...the Atlantic Ocean, the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, a prayer garden in Montana and buried with her son in Texas, just to name a few.

We haven't scheduled a memorial for Wayne's dad and it's unclear if there will be one. We've had general discussions about finding someplace in the center for a family reunion of sorts so we all have a similar distance to travel but it's nebulous at this point. Frankly, we were all under such pressure to clean out the apartment that we didn't have time and probably the emotional energy to plan beyond that.

That doesn't mean, however, that Dad is just sitting around collecting dust. Far from it; he's on the move.

His first trip was to Florida with us when we came home two weeks ago. Since then, a part of him has winged his way to Massachusetts and another part may be going to Texas. He always did like to travel.

As you can imagine, the USPS has very specific regulations on the shipment of cremated remains. The package must go Priority Mail with next-day delivery. We're thinking Dad probably enjoyed that first-class-and-then-some treatment given that he worked as a mail carrier in the 1950s. He got the chance to see the workings of the U.S. Post Office from a different perspective. You have declare the package as containing cremated remains and the clerk affixes a sticker which she keeps under the counter to the box identifying it as such. I can envision several reasons by they keep the sticker under the counter as spelled out in the USPS regulations but those guidelines didn't spell that part out.

The rest of Dad is going to hang out with us in Florida for a while. Eventually some of his ashes will be mixed with the last box of Pansy's ashes and jointly scattered at one of their favorite camping/picnicking sites in El Dorado. Some may end up scattered in Chelsea where many of his ancestors are buried. And if someone in the family has another location they think would be fitting, he may be off to a new location.

His final years left him pretty much confined to his apartment and now he's off on new adventures. It makes me smile to think that death doesn't have to be the end of wanderlust.

On The Lone Prairie

Oh bury me not on the lone prairie
Where the coyotes wail and the wind blows free.
And when I die, don't bury me
Beneath the western sky, on the lone prairie.

We've been in Kansas...again. The plan all along had been to be there the end of September for my high school reunion and while I suppose we could have just stayed after the apartment-clean-out was done, we were anxious for our own beds and life at home, even if it was for only six days.

Reconnecting with classmates consumed most of my time there (more about that in another post) but I did join Wayne on two occasions as he set out to finish the Cemeteries of Butler County geocaching challenge he had worked on during previous trips. To do so meant he needed to find a cache in fifty different cemeteries, only fourteen of which he had completed. I never realized just how many little country cemeteries there were until I tagged along with him on the dirt roads last weekend.

One of my two trips was early on Saturday morning. The sun was up but just barely and it was a beautiful time to be driving the back roads across the prairie. Waves of meadowlarks flew up ahead of the truck almost like water being parted by a boat and as they turned, we caught the flash of yellow of their underside in the golden morning light. A coyote bolted up out of the ditch but quickly scooted under the fence and disappeared in the tall grass. And where the road crossed a small wash, we came across a big flock of turkeys. There had to be twenty or so, most of them not quite full grown. It must have been a good spring for turkeys.

I got up early to join Wayne on this trip because he was going to Chelsea Cemetery. It's a really old cemetery, maybe the oldest in the county, and while I've been before, I appreciate its history and quiet beauty. Wayne has ancestors buried there...his great-grandparents, Thomas and Bessie Arnall; his great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Butts Arnall; and his great-great-great-grandfather, John Vaught. John Vaught's grave is among the oldest as he died in 1872 but the very first grave at Chelsea was the infant son of George and Eleanor Donaldson who died in 1861. Eleanor was John Vaught's daughter so the connections to this particular burying ground run deep.

The land was, however, in jeopardy when the new lake was built in 1981. It incorporated two smaller lakes that were already in existence and there was talk of moving Chelsea Cemetery as it is in the flood plain. You can see the dike they built along the edge of the cemetery in the background of the photo above and even then, water fills the swale between the graves in the front and those in the back. We're not sure if they moved the remains of those who had been buried there or if there simply were no graves there. Standing on the dike you look down at the waters of Lake El Dorado on the other side.

Wandering among the old tombstones wasn't the only way I spent my time in Chelsea.

I had a cache to find. Well, Wayne could have found it without me but I was more than happy to climb up on the roof of the truck to retrieve it from the crotch of the tree at the cemetery's edge. He added it to the Found list and before our time in El Dorado was done, he had his fifty cemetery finds and then some.

During the course of our three days there, we were in lots of small rural cemeteries. The wind there blew free but then it always does in Kansas, and while we saw more than one coyote, we didn't hear them wail. As I stood in these secluded plots of land carved out of the prairie, I listened to the meadowlarks call to one another and watched the sunflowers dance in the breeze. It didn't seem lonely at all.

A Real Live LOL

If I were making a list of the rules at our house, one you'd find near the top would be There shall be no cooking on Friday nights. I don't think it pre-dates our marriage but it started soon afterwards. The work week was over, there were no night classes to attend and, most importantly, Friday was payday. It didn't matter so much where we went, just that we weren't cooking and cleaning up at home.

That tradition has continued long after jobs ended along with the paydays that went with them. So it was a normal thing this past Friday night to find us heading to Pensacola for dinner with our friends, Michael and Charlotte.

We decided we'd try out a new Mexican restaurant...so new, in fact, that it was only their second night of service. A good number of other people had the same idea as there was a crowd waiting to be seated but we were happy to dine outside on the patio where tables were available. A cool front had brought gentle breezes and lower humidity so it was a delightful place to wait longer than we might have otherwise liked for our meal to be served.

Big signs out front and on the menu were promoting their signature drink...margaritas in lots of pretty colors and tasty combinations. While Friday night means eating out, it seldom means drinking too but we could see things weren't moving very fast so we decided to imbibe.

A young man in the most neon pink shirt you've ever seen came to take our order. I swear we didn't need lights on the patio where we were seated; his shirt glowed enough to light it all up. Around the table we went, making our selections of Mexican spirits which he attentively wrote down on his pad.

Then he paused....and asked for our IDs.

I laughed. And laughed again. I seriously thought about getting up and going over to hug him as I can't remember the last time someone required proof that I was old enough to drink. Then again, it hasn't been that long ago that someone thought I was my brother's daughter, not his sister. I laughed then too...and again every time I think about it.

Actually, we all laughed at the waiter's request as we all are retired. The joke could have been on me, however, as I was the only one without an ID. As I told the waiter, I was with Wayne. He was driving and he was paying; why did I need to carry my purse? Apparently my head full of gray hair was enough to convince him I was of a legal drinking age. My twisted margarita (sangria and traditional margarita mixed) was quite refreshing when it finally arrived.

I'm guessing the owners had impressed on their new staff not to guess at ages and to ask for ID on liquor sales and that's an admiral policy to have. I'd rather they card me than sell alcohol to a teen who looks older than she is. Wayne had a different theory: The waiter was dishing out compliments in the hopes of a bigger tip. I don't think Mr. Neon-Pink-Shirt was that shrewd.

The request did, however, add an amusing twist to our Friday night dinner...and who doesn't need to laugh out loud now and then.

Company Comes In Many Forms

Wayne's folks moved into their apartment the same year we moved into this house...1991. We were both looking for a different lifestyle: More room and golf course living for us; less to maintain and no yard work for them. And while I still love my house, sometimes their idea sounds pretty good.

It is a senior apartment, meaning people had to meet certain age and income restrictions, but it isn't assisted living. Everyone is supposed to be able to fend for themselves although some, like my father-in-law these last few years, depend on outside help for some tasks associated with daily living. There are two buildings across the street from one another, each with five floors with about fifteen apartments on each floor. In essence, they have their own little community right in downtown El Dorado.

But it became apparent to me as we conducted our "garage" sale in the apartment last weekend that sometimes that community isn't enough. Quite a few of these people hungered for the companionship and attention of others...and we were filling that bill.

We had plenty of shoppers who used walkers or canes and even more who looked like maybe they should be so we often found ourselves being human shopping carts. We followed along side tottering men and women, holding their purchases as they made their way from room to room.

Part of our motivation was we didn't want anyone to fall; after all, the apartments are small and we had stuff strewn from here to there hoping they'd see something to buy. But we're a family of softies too. We all had parents and inlaws who needed an extra hand to get from Point A to Point B with several objects in hand so we were happy to lend ours. We joked that between us all we must have been in over half the apartments as we frequently accompanied our shoppers back to their place with their purchases. Delivery service at no extra charge.

Maybe it was that close proximity or the fact that we were doing something extra for them but I was struck by how many of these people just wanted someone to listen to them. Like the lady who told me how she became a volunteer grandmother at Head Start because her own grandchildren wouldn't bring her great-grandchildren to see her any more. She'd suffered some seizures at one time and even though they were a thing of the past, the parents were afraid it might happen again and didn't want the little ones to see it. It broke my heart but I could see how happy she was to be able to shower love on the children in the Head Start program.

Or the lady who begged me to catch her dog as it raced from her apartment down the hall to where I was standing. That was easy; the little bit of white fluff was clearly used to being picked up. As I handed the runaway to her, she was almost in tears then told me the dog was her constant companion and she didn't know what she'd do if something happened to her. I'll spare you the details of the dog's recent digestive problems which she relayed to me in far more detail than I wanted to hear.

Most likely everyone else in the apartment community had heard these stories and more from our shoppers and other residents too...probably more than once. Or maybe they never really listen to one another. Sort of like letting them go in one ear and out the other then coming back with stories of their own. Whatever the reason, we were a willing set of ears who smiled and nodded and asked just enough polite questions to show we were paying attention without being nosy.

Hopefully having someone to hear their stories or brag on how good the chair they just purchased from us looked in their little space was a day-brightener for them. I do know that the deeper into our days of sorting, selling and cleaning up went, the more animated and friendly they became. It got to the point that they were even coming by the apartment to see how we were doing, both personally as well as with the sale. Our own personal cheerleaders I'd guess you'd say.

I frequently say that getting old isn't for sissies and while the usual reference for that observation is the failings of our bodies, it can apply to other things as well. Those apartments are tiny but they must seem cavernous when you're in them all by yourself every day like so many we came in contact with over the weekend. And while we didn't sit in their living rooms and truly visit, we were company nevertheless.

When we closed the door on the empty apartment, it felt good to know that some things from there had gone elsewhere in the building for a few dollars less than we might have gotten otherwise but they were going where they'd be used and appreciated. Maybe they'll be the source of conversation with the next bit of "company" that comes their way. And that's a good thing.

Where's Waldo?

We're getting more windshield time, rolling our way toward Kansas. The next few days will be filled with cleaning out Wayne's dad's apartment and tending to other related business. It will be difficult on some levels but we'll have family we seldom see to make it better.

The route is more than familiar to us at this point. We stop at the same places for gas, dine in the same cities (although we do try different restaurants) and sleep in the same hotel.

Except for last night. The usual place was full. No problem; we'll just go another 30 minutes down the road to the next city.

Like the good Boy Scout that he is, Wayne plugged the address shown on the national chain's website into the portable GPS he uses in the truck and off we went. When we got close, I fired it up and let the friendly lady inside give us her turn by turn directions.

The first clue she didn't know where she was going came when she directed us off the highway into an area void of neon and commercial development. We were only a mile from our destination but in the midst of a residential development. Ever trusting, we forged on. When she announced "you're here" in slightly more professional language, we were at the entrance to a neighbor park. A nice park but I didn't think the slide looked like a very comfortable bed. Besides, the was rain in the forecast.

While Wayne backtracked, I brought up the website on my phone. We'll just use the mapping feature there to direct us, I thought and soon it was instructing us to drive seven more miles down the highway.

It wasn't long before the happy little lady on Google Maps was telling us to get off at the next exit and showing us that the hotel would be right next to the exit ramp. Easy peasy, right? Wrong. There was a hotel there; it just wasn't the eight one.

Now we're experienced hotel-hunters so we set off on our own on search of our prey. A short distance down the road the Google lady like yielded only darkness so we reversed course. We stalked a nearby shopping area, scanning the horizon with the hopes of sighting a tall familiar sign. Nothing.

Finally, it was time for the big guns. I called for directions. We were close but couldn't see the building because it was behind a civic center which was behind the shopping center.

The girl at the desk said we weren't the first ones to have this problem and they had repeatedly asked the company to fix the errant address/mapping instructions on the website. Obviously without success.

The room was nice once we got there but we could have done without the extra adventure of finding it. It's highway time again today. Raining and a high of 59. Gotta love Kansas weather.

The Kind Of Catch I Like To Play

I have a love/hate relationship with Walmart. I can put plenty of things in the hate column, ranging from rickety grocery carts to them eliminating shelf space for products I like but not enough of their other customers buy. Under the love column, however, there are only two: It's convenient to my house and it has the best prices. Technically I suppose there's a third but I'm lumping my gratitude for the fact that when they came to the area a whole lot of other businesses did too into the store's convenience. It's still the prices that drive me to Walmart.

Comparison shopping is not my strong suit. Oh, I'll glance through the ads for weekly specials but only for Publix, Target and Walgreens. I'm at Publix each week anyway (for things I don't/can't buy at Walmart) and Target and Walgreens are easy stops along the way. Sometimes I'll make an extra stop for a good price and even more infrequently I'll ask Walmart to price match the ad. But the reality is I'm not the best bargain hunter.

And now I don't have to be, thanks to Walmart's new Savings Catcher program. I just scan the little square code at the bottom of my receipt into the app on my phone and Walmart goes out looking for a lower advertised price from competing stores in the area then gives me the savings if there's a better deal elsewhere. Heck of a deal! The app is free or you can set up the account and key in the numbers on the code for the same result.

The first week it compared prices with 55 competitors in my area and gave me back $4.70. Well, actually it put that amount into my account that I can redeem upon request. You can let it build up or receive it frequently...your choice. When you redeem it, you receive a bar code in an email which you will print out and present to the cashier at checkout. It's like an e-gift card.

You learn your savings within 72 hours of scanning your receipt but you don't get a breakdown of what products had a lower price or where. And I don't expect to receive that much every week. I could pretty much determine my $4.70 came off one item as it was the only sizable purchase I made on that receipt but I'll take whatever money they want to save me, especially if they make it this easy for me.

Today I scanned my receipt into the app before we were even out of the Walmart parking lot. It can't get much easier than that. The confirmation message said it was comparing prices with 62 other stores. Maybe more stores means more savings. Go, Savings Catcher, Go!

Getting Organized

Let me start with a big "Thank You" to all who left comments, sent emails or just offered up a silent prayer for us at the loss of Wayne's father. We were overwhelmed by your thoughtfulness. I seldom think of where the words go when they leave my computer screen so responses to posts like the last one are heart-warming but also a bit of a surprise. A good one but a surprise no less. Your kind words are appreciated and did much to help us deal with the loss.

One of the other things that has helped is the mass of photos we'd brought home from Kansas a few months ago. I'd already planned to spend Wednesday sorting them as the scanning is now complete. Well, except for a handful of photos we don't know the identities of who's in them. It would be easy to just skip them as they're all really old but I can't do that. They're all somebody important enough that Grandmother Arnall kept them together in a special box so they're going to be scanned, even if they're label as Unknown with a number afterwards.

There are plenty of photos of Wayne's dad among that collection, from his infancy to late in life, and it's kind of therapeutic to go through them right now. I suppose that's why funeral homes encourage some sort of photo board or video montage for the service. It's probably as beneficial for the family to collect the photos as it is to see assembled presentation.

As far as photos of Gene, this one might be the biggest surprise. He enlisted in the Army Air Corp in WWII and trained as a tail gunner. I love the goggles, ascot and all the fur on the uniform. He looks very debonair, almost like he belonged in Hollywood. But that's very out-of-character for him...and maybe that's why this might be one of my favorites.

There were other treasures too.

That's Wayne's Granddad Connie there on the left, the same little boy that was in the photo I restored in this post. This one could use a little TLC too but that's a project for another day. What makes this picture so special is that the woman on the right is his mother, Fema Augusta "Julia" Ballew. If my name was Fema Augusta, I'd pick another name to go by too. Anyway, this is the only photo we have of her.

And there's this one of Wayne's other grandfather. He's pictured here with at least five of his brothers, maybe six but there's only a forehead of one man so it's hard to be sure who it is. More importantly, that's Granddad Mart's mother and father there in the middle row on the right. The note on the picture said it was taken at the Arnall family homestead. I love that essentially the whole family as it existed in 1924 is in the photo. Sadly, T.O. Arnall died shortly after it was taken.

There were other treasures too. There was an entire album of cards, including a few really old picture postcards like the one above. Some of T. O.'s sisters and their families went to homestead in Alberta, Canada, for a while and the children wrote to Granddad Mart on postcards like this one sent in 1907. What a hard life they must have had.

All in all, we'll have 1500 photos, clippings and documents to share, give or take. I was putting little individual pictures of each ancestor into my family tree program and was surprised to see that Wayne has photos of all his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents plus seven of his great-great-grandparents and one great-great-great-grandparent. That's pretty amazing.

When we got all those photos, there was no system for how they were stored. They were in drawers or boxes or files and all mixed up. I put off sorting until we were done scanning, figuring it was easier to  work our way through what we had in the original folders or boxes. Wednesday I cleared off kitchen countertops, put down sticky notes with names and went to work dealing out pictures.

Here it is in action...well, part of it anyway. It went on around the other side of the stove too.

It's always tricky to come up with a system since with multiple people in a photo you could put it in one of several piles but here's what made sense to me:

Mom
Dad
Mom and Dad (both together)
Family (boys and anyone in the photo with them)
Grandmother A
Grandfather A
Grandmother and Grandfather A (both together)
Grandmother B
Grandfather B
Grandmother and Grandfather B (both together)
Grandmother A's direct ancestors
Grandmother A's other family (sisters, brothers, their children & others)
Grandfather A's direct ancestors
Grandfather A's other family (sisters, brothers, their children & others)
Grandmother B's direct ancestors
Grandmother B's other family (sisters, brothers, their children & others)
Grandfather B's direct ancestors
Grandfather B's other family (sisters, brothers, their children & others)
Unknowns & Miscellaneous

Fortunately, I didn't have 1500 items to sort as some of that number are in albums, on scrapbook pages or in some other form of storage. We did not label each of these photos but the file name on the digital image contains the names of the relevant individuals in each photo. Now we just have to fine tune the digital organization and copy the files onto some form of media to distribute.

It's been a big job but such a rewarding one. It's cool to see the entire history of a family unfold before your eyes in pictorial form supplemented by clippings and documents. And I love that all this will go to each family in what is now the current generation to pass along to their children rather than dividing it up.

Now if someone would just help me get through the eight-inch-high stack of files marked "Genealogy" we brought home too. I suspect my dear mother-in-law shared it all with me years ago but I'm to check just to be sure.

Peace

Gene Arnall
1924-2014

No person is truly ever alone.
Those who live no more,
Whom we loved,
Echo still within our thoughts,
Our words, our hearts.
And what they did
And who they were
Becomes a part of all that we are,
Forever.
                        --Richard Fife

Rest in peace, beloved Father, Grandfather and Great-Grandfather. Your suffering has ended and in that we find great comfort.

It's Addicting

I'm a sucker for puzzles/games with little squares. There's the daily Sudoko I religiously fill in after lunch every day and the crossword puzzle from my USA Today that I complete every evening. My theory is these aren't time wasters; they're exercises for my brain cells. I rationalize well.

Lately, I've added another set of boxed brain aerobics to the mix although it doesn't enjoy the same regular play, mostly because I tend to get lost in it and sit there far too long playing it. It's a fun diversion when I'm killing time in a hotel room or waiting for the washer to finish it's last cycle.

It's quite simple really. It starts with numbers appearing randomly in two of the sixteen boxes in the grid and you use your arrow keys (or swipe the screen on an iPhone) to move them around, a little like a slide puzzle. The object is to combine two identical tiles to make a bigger number, hoping to build up to a 2048 tile...hence the name of the game.

Swiping doesn't just move a single tile however, it moves the entire row and then some. So in the example screen, a swipe to the left would combine two "2's" into a "4" on the bottom row and two "4's" into an "8"on the row above it. Those new tiles would be on the far left side. Swipe to the right and you'd still get the same new numbers but the "8" would be next to the "8" that already exists. Swipe right again and the two "8's" become a "16." Each move puts another tile on the screen so you have to keep combining them or you run out of room. It's been described as Candy Crush for math geeks but really the game does all the math for you. You just have to figure out the strategy.

Wayne plays it too. In fact, he managed to obtain the coveted 2048 tile first but I claimed the first 4096 tile. A message comes up on the screen with the 2048 tile telling you you've won but you can keep on playing until you run out of moves.

The game was already loaded on his laptop but I downloaded a free app from iTunes. There are free versions you can play on the Internet as well. Don't blame me though when you become hooked on landing that 2048 tile; it's addicting.

Who Knew!

There was more to Wayne's decision to take the truck to Kansas than just to see how it did on the highway. Turns out, he had some caching plans in mind...on dusty, gravel-y roads where Momma doesn't allow her car to go. But then, that's why he has a truck.

We stopped for a couple of caches just across the Kansas-Oklahoma border in counties where Wayne hadn't found one before so he could cross them off his list. The ultimate goal is to find a geocache in every county in Kansas just like he has in Florida and Alabama.

And we stopped at a couple not far from El Dorado that met the criteria for other challenges. One of those is to find a cache is all the cemeteries in Butler County...and that's a bunch as there are a ton of little country cemeteries in out-of-the-way places you never knew existed. Don't worry; the caches are generally hidden in trees or along fences surrounding the cemetery so it's all done in a respectful manner. And you learn something about the history of the cemetery or the area in the process. He looks for caches and I wander among the oldest tombstones reading names and dates.

The info with the little cemetery near Beaumont said to be sure to check out the barn and pasture across the road so we walked over. There we found these guys:

They're zonkeys. Who knew there was such an animal but it's what happens when a donkey and a zebra become more than friends. Apparently it's a somewhat rare hybrid of an animal as a donkey has 62 chromosomes and a zebra has between 32 and 45, depending on the species. There were probably four of them up close to the fence and another four farther out in the pasture.

Some of them were lighter colored, like the ones pictured above, and the legs were about the only places where you saw the zebra markings. Others were like this guy with darker, more prominent markings.

He was far more interested in the fresh hay he'd found by sticking his head through a hole in the fence than he was in us.

From the front they had the cutest faces. Wayne was wielding the little camera to capture these images and I wish I had made sure he got a good one of their faces because they just made me smile. Their big, oval ears stood up tall and framed a shock of zebra-like mane. I think they thought we were bringing them a treat as they were watching us eagerly.  Maybe next time. And there will be a next time as Wayne didn't find the cache on this trip. Sticking one's hand into an overgrown thicket when the history log warned of snakes just didn't seem like a good idea. We'll go back after it freezes.

I'd never heard of zonkeys until Wayne went looking for this cache so it was a fun surprise. Dr. Seuss was right: There's no limit to how much you'll know, depending how far beyond zebra you'll go.

If you're local and want to check out the zonkeys, head east on U.S. 400. The turn-off to Beaumont is well marked. Don't turn there but the road you want is about a quarter mile east of that intersection. Make a left turn onto Weideman Road. You'll see the pasture and barn on your left and the cemetery is at the first intersection, just a short distance down the road.

'Mater Man

I'm not sure at what point in our dating relationship we were when I figured out that Wayne loves tomatoes but it was early on. I do know, however, that we were just married when I learned he ate them peeled. It's not his fault; his mother and grandmother spoiled all the men in the family by peeling their tomatoes but I'll admit they're really good that way. And those tough skins slip right off when the tomatoes are fresh from the garden and have ripened on the vine.

He doesn't get them peeled much any more. The tomatoes we get around here just aren't the same as good ol' Kansas tomatoes, both in terms of that thicker skin and the real tomato-y taste, and they're rarely left on the vine until they're truly ripe. And he misses them.

One of the things he hoped for when we planned a return trip to Kansas in August was to find some fresh local tomatoes. We rode around the outskirts of town one evening, hoping to find someone with stand in their yard offering up these red gems but alas...no luck.

It was a happy surprise the next day then when I was scanning through the shopper's guide newspaper and saw an ad for a local farmer's market. Even better, it was that very night. Would there be tomatoes?

Yes, there would and a small basket of Kansas tomatoes was soon ours. I wished I could have bought more as it all looked so good but my mouth was salivating at the thought of those tomatoes. We headed straight to the deli department at the grocery store and were soon dining on baloney-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. It's a once a year indulgence made all the better this year with tomatoes that tasted like the tomatoes from our youth.

But the story doesn't end here. The route home went through Missouri where we spent the night with our friends Tom and Durlene. You probably didn't know that Tom is the best tomato-grower on the planet but he is. I wish I'd thought to take a picture of him next to his garden so you could see the tomato plants that are taller than he is. And they're loaded, both with fruit and with blooms promising more to come. Dinner that night included a huge platter of freshly-picked beauties...peeled, no less! Tom spoils him too, or maybe he spoils Durlene. We ate a lot of good food that night but we devoured those tomatoes.

One of the best things about long-time friends is that they know you as well as you know yourself, and Tom knows Wayne loves tomatoes. He had a stash ready to send home with  us. We had to go to the Dollar Store just to buy a container big enough to hold them all. Thanks to Facebook, I was able to snag this picture Durlene posted of us wrapping tomatoes for their journey to Florida.

This is just some of the ones still waiting to be eaten. If you're thinking we'd be tired of them by now having eaten them for lunch and dinner just about every day since we got home, you'd be wrong. With the first bite at every meal we look at one another, roll our eyes and say These are so good! And they are.

Tonight's dinner was our favorite roasted tomato pasta made with the grape tomatoes Tom sent home with us in addition to those in the box. Best. Pasta. Ever. I could eat this pasta dish once a week and be happy but it was even better than usual with homegrown tomatoes. We've learned over time that the dish is better with more tomatoes, more garlic and more basil so be generous with the ingredients if you make it...your stomach will thank you.

And we're pretty much thanking Tom every day for his generous supply of homegrown tomatoes. He probably can't hear us all the way back in Missouri but he might read it here. My 'mater man has a grin from ear to ear these days. Well, when he's not chowing down on fresh tomatoes, that is...peeled or otherwise.

Paper or Plastic?

We rolled in about bedtime last night, another successful trip to Kansas under our belts. Short, more frequent visits seem to be the best option now so we'll stick with that plan as long as it continues to work.

I was behind the wheel of Big Bro when we came through Jackson, Mississippi, about 4:30pm. Yes, you read that right. We took Wayne's new truck to Kansas this trip and it was a pretty good ride. And yes, he let me rack up a few miles driving it too. I get credit for determining just how far down on the "E" the gauge will go before the low fuel light comes on...always an important thing to know. Wayne's mom, who was notorious for watching the gas gauge from wherever she was sitting in the car, would have been a nervous wreck but how else are you going to find out if you don't get there.

We like stopping in Richland or Florence on Jackson's southern side because they always have the cheapest gas we find on the entire trip. This was no exception; $3.03 a gallon both going up and coming home.That's $.25 a gallon cheaper than the price in Pace.

Wayne pumps and I wash the windows, although it's almost more than my short little legs can manage on this big ol' truck. I inherited another job, however, when the pump kept saying it had a network error and couldn't process our credit card. I'll go in, I offered. And when I got there (along with half a dozen other people), I learned the station's Internet was down and they couldn't process any cards. It was cash only.

You should have seen the panic-stricken looks that came across people's faces when the attendant relayed this message to them. It's like they'd forgotten how to pay with cash. One guy said he rarely had more than $5 on him most times but he'd just come from the bank so he whipped out an envelop full of bills. People buying drinks and cigarettes scurried to their cars in the hopes of scrounging up enough cash to pay for their purchases. Many just left period, off to another station down the road where they could use their plastic.

I was struck by the number of people who didn't seem to grasp the concept that an Internet connection was required for all cards, not just credit cards. One young girl waved her card around as she stepped to the counter, asking for $25 on Pump 12 and a package of cigarettes. The clerk went through his spiel (why he hadn't placed a sign on the door so he didn't have to repeat his message to each customer I don't know) and the girl paused, looked at him and said OK, I'll just take the cigarettes. Thinking she was going to pay cash for them, he rang up the purchase and gave her the total. She again offered the card and he again explained why he couldn't take it. It's a debit card, she said indignantly, as if everyone knew debit cards didn't need the Internet for processing. She left without her cigarettes. I resisted the urge to tell her not buying those cigarettes was a good thing as they were bad for her health but she didn't look like she'd take my message in the motherly spirit it was intended. Besides, I knew she was just going on down the street to get them anyway.

I had an opportunity to observe all this because I was standing right next to the register as Wayne was filling a very big and very empty gas tank with fuel. Having been forced to hand over a wad of cash to the attendant in order for him to turn on the pump, I wasn't moving until the transaction was complete and he returned the unused portion of said cash. I didn't want him to forget how much I'd given him.

It was, however a great vantage point for a study in human nature and how in this day and age of plastic, how few people have actual money in their wallets. It gave new meaning to the phrase Paper or Plastic?

A Sweaty Shirt Here, A Damp Towel There

August in Florida means I can sweat through multiple outfits in a single day.

Just the other day, for instance, I think I changed clothes half a dozen times or more. Outfit #1 was yoga clothes followed by Ensemble #2 consisting of a T-shirt and shorts for walking. Sweaty from cruising the neighborhood, I jumped in the tub then donned Selection #3, a different shirt and shorts to tackle some things around the house. After lunch, it was Group #4, nicer clothes for some errands in the public eye followed by Outfit #5 for mowing, if you can call an old pair of torn jeans and a shirt that probably should be in the rag bin an outfit. We won't count the swimsuit as a separate outfit but I couldn't get in the pool in the mowing clothes. Well, I have on occasion but not usually. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to cool down. There was another bath before re-dressing in Section #3 which lasted until I put on my pajamas at bedtime.

Whew, that's a lot! And all that putting on and taking off, not to mention the associated towels, leaves me convinced I need a clothesline.

During summer the shower enclosure and edge around the garden tub are littered with sweaty clothes and damp towels waiting to dry. Each morning I clear it all  off, tossing the clothes in the hammer and the towels in the laundry basket but those surfaces are full again by nightfall. It's just one more component of summer's curse.

Growing up, a clothesline ran the length of the back yard and I remember running a damp rag along the length of the metal lines before starting to hang the clean laundry up to dry in the sunshine. After I got tall enough to reach it, that is. The best part of Monday was crawling in between the clean sheets that smelled as sweet as all outdoors. That won't be happening at my house; the neighborhood covenants prohibit outdoor clotheslines. My sister-in-law Barbara would be out of luck as she still hangs her laundry out to dry, weather permitting.

And I don't know that an outdoor line is totally the answer anyway. In our humidity, clothes might never be dry enough to toss in the hamper if they were hung outside. I just don't want them dangling from every surface in the master bath like some poorly-decorated Christmas tree.

I tried following my friends Carol and Bonnie's leads...they wash a load or two almost every day. I hated it. It seemed like all I did was laundry and the ironing was never caught up. I do a load of towels every few days but as far as our clothes, I'm old school, I guess. My mother did the week's washing on Monday then ironed on Tuesday and so do I. Well, sometimes the ironing hangs around for another day or two but Monday is all about clean clothes. I just need somewhere to stow the sweaty one until then.

Pop Quiz

With school just ten days away for student around here, it seemed only appropriate to catch up on the last week or so in test format. Let's see how you score.

1. There haven't been any new posts on the blog because:
        a. I've been sick since Saturday and being at the computer isn't the only thing that didn't get done during that time period.
        b. We've been entertaining a certain young lady (and her family too) for an end-of-summer visit. Blogging and everything else take a back seat when Kayla is in town.
        c. There are only so many creative things that can be said about weeds and critters although if I had been quick with the camera, I could have had a photo of the big armadillo the neighbor caught in his trap.
        d. All of the above.

2. Which of the following statements best describes exercises that can be done when an individual seeks to avoid spreading germs at the gym:
        a. Who needs crunches; my abs are sore from coughing up a lung all the time.
        b. Sprinting to reach the nearest box of Kleenex when the faucet in your nose unexpectedly opens full tilt is a great way to work the muscles in your legs.
        c. Bicep curls can be done with medication in one hand and a glass of water in the other. It's not the weight that makes this effective; it's the number of repetitions.
        d. All of the above.

3. After binge-watching The First 48, what advice would you give to someone about to commit murder:
        a. Leave your cell phone at home. The police are going to look to see what towers your phone was pinging off of in order to place you at the scene.
        b. Pick a really remote location. There are security cameras EVERYWHERE, some of which don't look at all like cameras.
        c. Act alone. Any partner-in-crime is sure to rat you out when it comes down to your neck or his.
        d. All of the above.

4. A man and a woman go shopping at a department store together. The man selects two shirts and two pairs of shorts in less than fifteen minutes; the woman selects the same number of items but requires more than an hour to do so. The reason for this time discrepancy is:
        a. The man is less particular; khaki is khaki is khaki.
        b. There are fewer choices in the men's department than in the women's.
        c. Sizes vary greatly between brands in women's clothes, requiring multiple trips to the dressing room.
        d. All of the above.

5. It will likely be a while before the man in the situation above willingly goes shopping with the woman.
        (    ) True                       (    ) False

6. My first experience driving Big Bro produced which of the following results:
        a. Wayne had to back it out of and drive it into the garage at the beginning and end of the trip.
        b. I chose to drive to Milton where there were less shopping options rather than the wide variety of stores in Pensacola as the road to Pensacola has two narrow lane-shifting sections of construction that have to be navigated.
        c. I had to make three stabs at parking that big truck in the store parking lot to get it between the lines.
        d. All of the above.

7. Surprising a granddaughter and her father with the family-favorite homemade cookie which is normally only available at Christmas makes them very happy.
        (    ) True                       (    ) False

8. Confidence in his new knees and a dependable set of wheels has Wayne thinking about geocaching again. Which of the following statements is correct:
        a. He left early and came home late for a geocaching event on Saturday in Alabama.
        b. He was at Perdido Beach at sunrise on Tuesday to collect a few new finds.
        c. He's plotting a course for a caching run on Sunday, the destination still to be determined.
        d. All of the above.

9. Explain in 100 words or less the phenomenon of where the purchase of a new vehicle immediately triggers defects in major home appliances. Two service calls in two consecutive days this week. Note: There is no right or wrong answer to this question but bonus points will be awarded if you can outline the steps necessary to assure this trend does not continue.

Classified Reading

HELP WANTED: Immediate opening for a snake charmer/handler for homeowner in Florida Panhandle. No experience necessary although the ability to recognize pygmy rattlesnakes is a plus. Training available. Neighbor of homeowner who killed two last week is a willing adviser. Son of homeowner who killed one in homeowner's yard today available for consultation. Snakes seen to this point are juveniles but adult relatives of said juveniles will be the target objective for this position. Must not be a member of PETA; snakes found are to be eliminated. Salary negotiable; benefits include homeowner's eternal gratitude.

HELP WANTED: Immediate opening for experienced shrub trimmer for homeowner in Florida Panhandle. Must be willing to step in small openings between bushes and navigate the space between the bushes and the house in order to perform the job. Those afraid of snakes need not apply. Salary negotiable and will increase if more snakes are seen or the position above remains unfilled.

HELP WANTED: Position available for landscape designer who can make untrimmed shrubs seem attractive for homeowner in Florida Panhandle. Estimated start date is August 15 if both the positions above remain unfilled. Salary negotiable.

HELP WANTED: Position available for shrub remover-er for homeowner in Florida Panhandle. Must be willing to jerk any and all shrubs which require trimming out of the ground, taking all snakes hanging out in said shrubs with them. Estimated start date is August 16 if all the positions above remain unfilled. Salary negotiable. Only serious candidates need apply.

Goodbye, Ol' Blue; Hello, Big Bro

The hours of sitting in dealer showrooms and answering salesmen's telephone calls are over. Wayne bought a truck.

Grinning ear to ear, he was like a kid with a new toy as he drove it off the lot late Friday. It was exactly a week ago that he walked into the Chevrolet dealership to begin looking for Ol' Blue's replacement and I knew then he'd buy another Chevrolet. Oh, he was open-minded enough to look at Nissans and Toyotas and give them semi-serious consideration but deep down he wanted the Chevy. The very first car he bought was a 1955 Chevrolet for which he paid $600 and the brand has held a special place in his heart ever since. If only we could buy a car for $600 now...and have it run.

Ol' Blue looks pretty good here as Wayne was ready for the last ride in her. I think she thought she was headed for the dump as we drove down Highway 90 towards Milton when, in fact, we were planning to dump her. I'm sure I saw a tear trickle down out of her headlights as we walked away for the last time.

I looked high and low for the picture I know we have of Wayne with Ol' Blue the day he bought her. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't put my hands on it. This one, however, is close to that time frame even if you see little of the truck. Wayne threw the grill in the back of the truck and brought it down to the scrapbook store when we owned it, grilling burgers in the bed of Ol' Blue for the gals attending the Saturday night crop. Fun times.

We'll make new memories now with the new truck which I have tentatively dubbed Big Bro. Where Ol' Blue was a truck, this new dude is a TRUCK. It's wider, longer and higher than the little S10 it replaced, hence the Big part of the name. And since it's another Chevy, we could say that makes it a big brother to the one it replaced. The official name of the color is Brownstone Metallic but on the registration is just says BRO. My better half may come up with his own name for his new truck but for now I'm calling it Big Bro.

I needed to take another step or two back down the driveway for this photo as I didn't quite get all the truck in the frame. It's pretty but it seems strange to have to use a step to get in it. And man, are we high up in the air as we drive down the road...comparatively speaking, of course.

There's good news/bad news about a big new truck, both of which can be summed up in five words: We cleaned up the garage. That wasn't in the plan while truck shopping but it soon became obvious we'd have to when he settled on a full-sized truck. The truck fits in the garage but only without all the stuff that used to live in front of the little S10. My car is now nose to nose with the generator, wheelbarrow and aerator. A clean garage is an added bonus although I probably wouldn't have picked an afternoon in July to do it otherwise.

We introduced Big Bro to the grocery shopping routine on Saturday morning and there have been a couple of trips to the gym already too. The golf clubs are loaded for the first official trip to the course so before long all the regular haunts will be covered. Once we get used to the size, I think Big Bro will fit into the family just fine.

Happy Birthday, Mother

I've been thinking about my mother a lot today. It would have been her 90th birthday had cancer not claimed her life. She was just 69, far too young to leave this world but then I suppose all of us wish we could hang on to loved ones longer.

As I've mentioned before, my mother and dad and Wayne's mother and dad were all in the same high school graduating class, making their 90th birthdays all falling in 2014. We celebrated my dad's in April and, with luck, we'll do Wayne's dad's in September but both Wayne and I are left with only memories of our mothers on their 90th birthdays. They're both gone.

My mother was the youngest of seven children. There aren't a lot of pictures of her as a child, in part I suppose because she was the youngest and also because snapshots just weren't as common then as they are now. When you get right down to it, there aren't a lot of pictures of her period. She wasn't a fan of having her picture taken. I'll spare all of you who feel the same way the lecture of how you should just get over that as your children will cherish every one they have after you're gone.

I don't remember looking through old photo albums when we were growing up so the pictures of her in her youth didn't come to light until three years after she was gone. I'm guessing this one is probably her dressed for her high school prom but I don't know that. I do know that it was taken in the front yard of my grandparent's home but like a lot of old pictures, there are more questions than answers.

Her first marriage ended in divorce but she had a long and happy second marriage. At least, it seemed happy from my perspective. And while he was legally my step-father, her second husband was always Daddy to me. I was blessed to have two men glad to have a little girl in their lives. That curly-haired munchkin is me standing next to my little brother John. Oh, the memories that house and yard hold.

Mother had talent in every cell of her being. She could bring any song to life on the piano, either by reading the notes on the sheet music or picking the tune out of the air after having heard it on the radio. Growing up she played in a little dance band that was well-known in El Dorado and surrounding cities. Most Saturday nights they would be serenading the crowd doing the fox trot or the jitterbug at the local Elks, VFW or Moose while John and I were being spoiled by our grandparents. I always thought her beautiful and glamorous all dressed up for her evening out, even if it was work to her.

And when my brother and I left the nest for college and lives of our own, she went back to school, enrolling in art classes at the local junior college. She said she had always wanted to paint so she did. Old barns were her favorite subject but she painted other things too...on canvas, old saw blades, ceramic crocks and even shirts. We used to joke that we had to keep moving as she painted everything that didn't. Before long, she was teaching art classes in her home.

And it was the same way with the organ. She had played piano since she was a kid and taught lessons all the years we were growing up but she became the student to learn to play the organ. I think she loved the creativity of making so many different sounds from the songs she liked to play. She played an occasional wedding or church service but mostly it was popular music. And as with art, she became the local organ teacher.

She was a homebody. When Walmart came to town, she refused to shop there because it was too far to go so she continued to shop at Safeway or Dillons.  El Dorado's population is only about 12,000 and you can get from one side of town to the other in no more than ten minutes but Walmart was too far. She wasn't very big either. She had to work to keep her weight above 100 pounds. These photos make me smile almost as much for the hairstyles as the moments they captured. And I can guarantee you that she tie-dyed that shirt she's wearing.

This is probably the last picture taken of me with Mother. We were home for a visit in the summer of 1992 and although we were home again after that, I don't think we managed to get any photos then. She died in December 1993. I've grieved that loss but then I suppose the death of one's mother leaves a hole that never really goes away. I wish she'd been around when my scrapbook pages were being published as I think she would have delighted in that. And I wish she'd lived to meet Kayla too. It just wasn't in the cards.

Some years her birthday totally slips by unnoticed but not this year. She's been on my mind all day. Happy 90th Birthday, Mother. I'll toast you in a blue glass and listen to boogie-woogie in your honor.

Fun and Games

We're new-car shopping. Well, technically it's new-truck shopping but the process is the same. She's been a good one but after 15 years, it's time to retire Ol' Blue.

That's something of a record, really...we've never owned a vehicle for that long. And I suspect if we used her in a different way, we probably would have replaced her before now. She's great for going to the dump, has plenty of geocaches under her belt and hauls golf clubs up to the course with regularity but her age makes her an unlikely long-distance companion. That and her faulty air conditioning.

Ol' Blue is a Chevrolet S-10, a small pick-up truck with few bells and whistles, and the original plan was to replace her with something similar. Then we started looking. It seems everyone in the truck-driving world wants a big truck so small trucks are almost non-existent. Only Nissan and Toyota still make them so we're looking at full-sized Chevrolets too. I say we because I'm tagging along but we all know who's driving the truck and at this point the car to get to look at the trucks.

It's a lot of sitting in showrooms, listening to sales people give the hard-sell disguised as the soft-sell and trying to figure out which four wheels will be the right fit for us. Don't get me wrong, I love the smell of a new vehicle but I don't love getting to the point of taking that smell home with me. Wayne, however, does. We're in the wait-them-out stage, wagering among ourselves how many days will pass before the saleman calls us offering to sweeten the deal. At least that's what we hope will happen.

In the meantime, Ol' Blue will be making her bi-weekly trip to the golf course as usual in the morning. We'll see if it's her last.

I Love Ancestry.com!

I haven't had any time the last two months for family history research. Well, clearly all the photos from Wayne's parent's apartment that we've discovered, scanned and labeled adds to what's known about the family history but it kind of came to me. I didn't have to go looking for it. And, actually, I didn't have to look far for the most recent finds either, this time on my side of the family.

This is my grandmother, Mary Melinda Barry Hedrick. She was a tiny little thing, barely making 4'10" on a good day. I don't have a date for this picture but I'm guessing early to mid 1950s. My mother was the youngest of seven children with the oldest being 14 when Mother was born so Grandma was a little older than the grandmothers of most of my friends. She died in 1968 at the age of 87 so I didn't hear a lot of stories of her younger days.

This picture makes me smile because it's just the way I remember her and I chose it as the profile picture for the information about Grandma in my online tree at Ancestry.com. The tree is public, meaning others with Ancestry memberships can see whatever I put out there as well as attach photos or documents to their tree. I'm OK with that; what I put out there I'm happy to share. Plus Ancestry tells me exactly who is adding that information and to what tree.

I got just such a notice recently telling me that someone had added Grandma's picture to their tree. Curious what our connection would be, I went to check it out. Oh, my, was I ever happy I did! Not only did she have Grandma's picture from my tree, but she had others of Grandma I had too...like this one.

That's Grandma in the front and her sister Rosa (or Aunt Rosie as we always called her) and Nellie Fuller in the back. Only I didn't know the name of the third young lady until I found Marlene's tree. As it turns out, Marlene is Aunt Rosie's granddaughter.

I sent Marlene a message through the Ancestry channels thanking her for posting the photo as it gave me a name I didn't have. She replied, telling me Nellie was a friend of the two sisters. Then she also added that Grandma and Aunt Rosie lived at the Fuller Boarding House in Woodward when the family first came to Oklahoma. Great-Grandma Bell would not let her daughters live on the "God-forsaken prairie" while the parents homesteaded.

Those few sentences gave me a lot of information. I had no idea my great-grandmother went by the name of Bell when her given name was Rachel Isabell. And I didn't know Grandma had lived in a boarding house in Woodward. It didn't do Great-Grandma Bell a lot of good, however. It wasn't long before both girls married and lived on the "God-forsaken prairie" on homesteads that adjoined the parents. The two sisters were Great-Grandma Bell's only children and they remained close all their lives.

Marlene had this photo in her tree and while I haven't uploaded it yet to mine, I have a copy of it as well. That's Grandma and Grandpa on the left, Rosie and Herb on the right and Great-Grandma Bell in the middle. My records say it's my grandparents' wedding photo...and Marlene has this labeled as her grandparent's wedding photo. We may both be right as the couples married just two months apart. It was fun to zoom in on the photo after I scanned it to see that the two wedding dresses are either identical or nearly so.

A few more messages made their way back and forth between us when Marlene shared more stories about my grandmother that I knew nothing about. The Ladies Guide To Needle Work is a textbook from the finishing school Grandma and Aunt Rosie attended in Goshen, WV. Aunt Rosie said the first summer after they graduated they worked for a milliner in Louisville. According to Rosie, Grandma had a talent making hats that Rosie didn't share. Everything Rosie made was rejected while Grandma's were all accepted.

A finishing school? Working for a milliner? It's a side of my grandmother I never knew. She even gave me an address Aunt Rosie wrote on the inside of her book of where the girls lived in Louisville. Who knows where that might lead.

It does, however, put this photo in a different light. While my grandmother may have captioned this photo of her in a giant hat as Shade of the Gay 90's on the front, on the back she wrote Louisville 1901. Do you suppose she's modeling one of her creations? The photo had to have been taken just before the family set out for Oklahoma as that occurred in 1901 as well.

All these stories would never have made their way to me had it not been for Ancestry.com. I have photos of Great-Grandma Bell to share with Marlene and hopefully she has more stories about Grandma and Aunt Rosie to share with me. Sometimes the world wide web is a wonderful place.

Yogi? Is That You?

Wayne was quite excited to get to the golf course last week right before we left town. It had nothing to do with golf really, although he does enjoy the company of his cronies and the friendly bet of the winners drinking a Coke paid for by the losers. No, he was anxious to talk about what he'd seen on the way to the golf course.

As a frame of reference, we live on the fourth fairway but holes five through eight make something of a circle coming back near our house. You can stand in our backyard and see the fourth green then go stand in the front yard and see the eighth green. Well, if you look between the houses across the street from us, that is. The road to get from our house to the golf shop (and eventually out of the neighborhood) goes right by the eighth green...where the cart path crosses over to the ninth tee.

And that's just where he was approaching when he saw a strange vehicle parked not quite in his lane of travel but not up against the curb either. It was an odd place for a vehicle to be stopped but odder still was the fact that the door was standing open, as if the driver made a hasty escape.

Wayne slowed, looking around for someone associated with this red truck and wondering what emergency had caused him to bail out and not close the door but he didn't see anyone. As he passed the truck, however, he noticed the name decal on the door: Bear Relocation Service.

Bears? In our neighborhood? That would be a first. Deer, foxes, feral hogs and wild turkeys, yes but this would be a first for bears. Black bears are known to inhabit the vast acreage that is Eglin AFB about 45 minutes from here and they're frequently spotted in the neighborhoods that adjoin it but Pace is not the place for bears. He asked around when he got to the golf course but nobody knew anything about why a bear relocation service would be in the neighborhood. It remains a mystery.

I saw a family of three armadillos in that same exact spot about two weeks ago. Maybe the bear relocation business is slow right now and the company has branched out to capturing other nuisance wildlife. I'm all for relocating armadillos although eradicating the pesky creatures might be even better.

Perhaps Yogi Bear is spending his summer vacation in the Florida Panhandle. Dealing with all those tourists in Jellystone Park is bound to get tiresome by this point in the season and he just needs a break. He would know our corner of the world is a lovely place to escape the madness of ordinary life because he is, after all, smarter than the av-er-age bear.

Do you think Boo Boo came too?

Yes, Toto...We're Not In Kansas Anymore

We've been in Kansas again. I didn't see Dorothy but we did spend some time with Wayne's dad who's doing about as well as can be expected under the circumstances. He told us a few stories we hadn't heard before and it was nice to be able to leave town feeling good about our time there.

I didn't see any tornadoes either but we drove through one heck of a rainstorm in Tulsa on the way up. Throw in the fact that the highway there is under construction and the lanes have shifted to a new location every time we drive through and it makes for an edge-of-the-seat driving (or riding) experience.

Glinda, The Good Witch, was nowhere to be seen but I did sneak a little time in with Connie, The Good Friend. It was fun to see all the quilts she's been making and hear about plans for our class reunion scheduled for the fall.

These frequent visits are giving us plenty of bonding time with my brother and sister-in-law, John and Barbara. I can't liken them to the Scarecrow, Tin Man or Cowardly Lion so I guess they'll have to be Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to keep with the theme I've got going here.

And munchkins? I can come up with those too with a bit of a stretch. We enjoyed an hour or two with Wayne's dad's cousin who helped us identify some of the wee images on some very old family photographs.

On a lark we spent thirty minutes one afternoon at the sale barn watching the livestock auction...something of a trip down memory lane as Wayne used to go with his grandfather as a kid. I swear some of those Black Angus steers who obviously didn't want to be in that pen had the same sneer as the Wicked Witch of the West.

I didn't see the Emerald City but I saw plenty of emerald countryside. Kansas has had plenty of rainfall and while it came too late for the wheat, it's made the soybeans, corn and grasslands lush and green.

We did drive right by the Yellow Brick Road. For real! In fact, Sedan, Kansas, owns the title of the longest yellow brick road. I was going to have Wayne stop so I could take a picture to go with this post but actually it's a brick inlay in the sidewalk with a painted yellow border on the sides. It didn't make me want to sing We're off to see the Wizard at all.

And if I'd found the Wizard, I'd have asked him to expedite my trip home too. The drive doesn't get any shorter by doing it every few weeks.

I suppose Kansas will always be home in one sense of the word, but home is Florida now. And it's nice to be here...until the next trip.

Summer Weeding 101

I've been on a mission this past week: Clean up the flower garden inside the pool enclosure. There's a reason there aren't many herbs in the herb garden...or flowers in the flower garden part of it either. More than one when you get down to it.

Ice and 36 hours of below-freezing dealt a mortal blow some of the plants living there for starters. I put off replacing them until the house and pool cage were washed which was later than usual this year. And when it was washed, he sudsed it down multiple times, dousing everything is more than the normal amount of chlorine. What it didn't kill, it wounded and the plants have been slow to come back. Throw in weeks where it rained buckets every day (we have had over 60" already this year!) and the normally colorful looking area out my sliding glass doors was looking weedy and sad.

I was merciless. The weeds were a given as I wanted to put down some Preen but anything else that wasn't thriving or looking like it had the potential to went as well. This wasn't an afternoon project; it was a week-long one. And if you're going to pull weeds in the heat and humidity that is Florida in July, there are a few essentials you need to get the job done...and survive.

A container to hold all the rejects. This five-gallon bucket is a repurposed bird seed container but it's my regular companion when I do yard work. And see the gold paint there at the bottom? It also made a handy surface when turned upside down to hold something that needed a coat of spray paint. Who says garden tools don't belong in the craft room?

A yoga mat. Well, it may look like a kneeling pad to you but I'd rather sit than kneel and most of that sitting is essentially Easy Pose so I'm calling it a mini yoga mat. Easy Pose would be basically Criss-Cross-Applesauce to today's primary teachers. It's another two-fer: I can stretch and clean up the flower bed at the same time.

Keep cool. With heat indexes well over 100 on several days, shade and a nice breeze are essential but they're also hard to come by in this location so I made my own. The canopy tent is just the perfect size to cover this narrow flower bed and it's surprising how much cooler it is under it. Especially when I kept that fan just a few feet away from where I was working at all times.

Focus on the positives. The weeds are gone, the Preen should help cut down on their successors and the plants that are left have been trimmed up and fertilized. Do I wish the stones were power washed and new plants lived in all the bare spots? Sure, but I've given myself permission to let that go for now. July and August aren't exactly the best time to be putting in new plants, especially with us going to Kansas every few weeks.

Relax and enjoy it. The pool is absolutely perfect right now. The water is warm enough you don't have to ease in yet cool enough to be refreshing. I think I ended each day here and there's no better way to cool off from those hours in the heat...except perhaps with a glass of freshly-made Sangria blended by my favorite bartender.

Summer weeding is hard work but the results are worth it. I'll be OK though if there's less of it in my future after this week's efforts.

If Chocolate Is The Answer, The Question Is Irrelevant

The contents of the bag of dark chocolate pieces that resides on my kitchen countertop have been dwindling at a faster than usual rate lately. I blame the extra time in front of the computer scanning pictures. Normally I consume just two of them at the end of lunch but lately I find myself hopping up from the desk for an extra piece of chocolate or two...or three or four. Chocolate fuels creativity, you know. It's a proven fact; well, in my house it is.

I do love me some chocolate. My favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate. My favorite cake is Red Velvet which is a variation of chocolate. Heck, in my younger days even breakfast included chocolate. It was always a Hershey bar with almonds and a Coke. Almonds...chocolate...sounds like health food to me. Yep, there aren't very many things you can do with chocolate that wouldn't appeal to my taste buds.

I'm undecided, however, on the idea behind a restaurant that just opened in L.A. called ChocoChicken. The name sounds a little like some cartoon superhero. You know, Mighty Mouse's new best friend. I can hear the announcer's booming voice now: CHOCO...Chicken! But I digress.

The premise is just what the name suggests. Chicken that's infused with chocolate flavoring, both in the brine and the breading, then fried up to a (what else) chocolate brown. Sort of a Milton Hershey meets Colonel Sanders. They claim it's not mole but a whole new food concept. I know, only in California...right?

Cocoa powder in the breading might not be all bad but that isn't the only chocolate offering on the menu. There are chocolate-flavored bar drinks, chocolate deserts and duck fat fries dusted with chocolate seasoning and a chocolate ketchup for dipping them in. That last one has me raising my eyebrows in a questioning manner. The white chocolate mashed potatoes, however, are a definite turn-off. I love my chocolate but apparently even I have limits.

The explanation for this concept is that restaurant success has become more and more about appealing to Millennials who are all about unusual tastes and are quick to snap a photo of the meal in front of them to share on social media. I'd say ChocoChicken hits that nail on the head. Me? I'm clearly in a different demographic.

Fried chicken isn't on my July 4 menu nor will I be celebrating National Fried Chicken Day on July 6 but if I were, good old traditional fried chicken would be my choice. Chocolate, however, is on the menu everyday. After all, man cannot live on chocolate alone...but woman can.

Perfectly Imperfect

Life around here isn't all about weeds and yard catch-up, although that was certainly on yesterday's agenda. Saturday, however, I spent the afternoon scanning pictures and that's pretty much what Wayne did all weekend. We've passed 1100 now and while we're not done yet, the number of books and piles waiting their turn is not nearly so daunting. We've uncovered some real treasures and I can't wait to see what become the favorites of the different members of the family when they are all shared.

We have a good number of studio portraits which are beautiful but I think I like the snapshots best. While they leave a lot to be desired from a pure photographic standpoint, they tell the story of real life as these lived by these people we love, some of whom we never had a chance to meet. They aren't as sharp and clear as today's pictures but that's OK. There's still something magic about them.

Like this one of Wayne's Granddad Connie taken in 1929. I just want to smile right back at him. Seeing the washtubs hanging on the wall made me remember my own grandmother's big washtubs. Now there's a memory only someone of my generation or older would have...real, put-to-use washtubs. The picture is an odd shape because my sweet mother-in-law, bless her heart, trimmed it down substantially and rounded the corners. Little did she know there would be people like me who wanted to see what else was in the background.

Same with this one of her taken in 1925. I'm intrigued by the figures and houses in the background and wish more were shown. But the photo is still perfect to me mostly because I don't have any pictures of my mother at this age. And I also know there's a box of Pansy's baby shoes among some keepsakes so I'm anxious to compare them to this picture.

Look at this gem of Wayne's grandmother from 1919, before she and Granddad Connie were married. She's the one on the left. I find myself pouring over the details of her dress and shoes and wondering if the house with the board falling off of it was her home or that of her friend Irene. For all the complaining we've done about my mother-in-law hanging on to stuff, she did record a lot of useful information too. I don't know that I would have recognized this young version of Grandma Blaine otherwise.

I would, however, have recognized Wayne's dad in this undated photo. He's the one on the right, and while I can make a guess that the boy on his left might be his cousin, I don't know that. In fact, I don't know much about this photo at all and I wish I did. Is that the home where he grew up in the background? What was the occasion to be dressed up? What's hanging from the tree above the unknown boy's head? Questions without answers...but I love Dad's little outfit.

And sometimes the background is almost more important that the people in the photo. The older woman seated on the right is Wayne's great-grandmother, Bessie Arnall, and the others are a distant cousin and her family, none of whom are looking at the camera. That's OK; we're not too interested in them anyway. In fact, the first thing Wayne said when he saw this picture wasn't about Grandma Bessie, whom he remembers. It was about the cabin in the background. Everyone who lived in El Dorado back then has memories of those shelters at the lake. They're gone now, under the water of a big reservoir that offers more than a couple of stone buildings for picnics and memories. It's kind of nice to have some photographic evidence of it to trigger those memories.

Bessie is in this photo too although it's easily 30 years or more earlier. This one with her husband, Thomas Oliver Arnall, was taken in 1920, and while I'm intrigued by the glider and the curtains in the window, I'm mostly looking at him. He died in 1924 so there are only a handful of pictures of him. If I didn't know it already, the tan lines on his forehead and arms would tell me he earned a living working the land.

And then there's this one. It's a terrible picture on some levels as hardly anyone is looking at the camera, it's blurry and there's none of that background to tingle my curiosity but I love it anyway. In fact, it's one of my favorite finds. The little boy is Wayne's dad being held by his mother (Wayne's grandmother) Mary Elizabeth Pippig Arnall. On her left is her mother, Cora Hobbs Pippig (Wayne's great-grandmother), and on Cora's left is her mother, Margaret Elizabeth Freeman Hobbs (Wayne's great-great-grandmother). Four generations, circa 1926...amazing. I keep studying the faces as if they're going to tell me something more about themselves beyond their names and relationships but, of course, that isn't going to happen.

There's a lesson in these photographs: Perfection is over-rated. Sure, it's great to have ideal lighting, spot-on focus and a smiling close-up of those you love...and as a long-time scrapbooker, I'm guilty of working hard to get that many times, too. But while future generations are going to appreciate it, they're not going to dwell on it. Instead they're going to see the funky wallpaper in the background and remember childhood dinners at Grandma's table or a decades-old car off to the side and remember Grandpa teaching them to drive. Those imperfect pictures trigger a host of memories that aren't all that well-focused either.

So take those pictures, people! Future generations are going to find them perfectly imperfect and will thank you for them even if you are long gone. We'll talk about my worries that they're all going to languish and die on hard drives or outdated cellphones another day.

Wild Things

I'm still in catch-up mode around here despite the fact that we've been back from Kansas for ten days now. The bushes and weeds grow faster when I'm away, you know. Actually, when I stop to think about it, I'm behind from April as there are still Spring chores in the ol' job jar but who's keeping track. I just pick the job that needs doing the most (or that I'm the most inspired to do) and jump in.

This week it's been a little bush whacking trimming but mostly weed treatment. With hot summer days and daily thunderstorms there's been plenty to treat. I mixed up some Round-Up for the flower beds and some Weed-B-Gon for the unwanted plants that have taken up residence in the lawn. They're particularly bad this year precisely because of all the rain we've had. The street gutter has overflowed into our yard on numerous occasions, bringing seeds of who-knows-what from who-knows-where. I'm fighting the war on weeds but so far they're winning.

But a funny thing happened as I was preparing for the latest weed killing battle. I'd measured my water, poured in the concentrate and was pumping up my little hand sprayer when I heard the call of a Red-bellied Woodpecker. That's not unusual...they're pretty common around here. In fact, I see one fly into one of the trees in the yard most times I'm outside. And even if I don't see them, I hear their distinctive call. It made me smile.

I sprayed some of my mixture and when the pressure in the tank was low, I stopped to pump it up. There was the woodpecker calling again.

It took two or three more repetitions before I realized the woodpecker was answering the screechy noise the sprayer makes as you pump it up. If you've ever used one, you know exactly the shrill sound the sprayer makes and you work the handle up and down to build up the pressure. It really does sound a little like one of these woodpeckers. Well, at least mine does.

So I tested my theory; I pumped up the sprayer and waited. Sure enough, the woodpecker answered back. I have know idea what my sprayer was saying in bird-speak but it didn't matter, the woodpecker seemed to be enjoying the conversation. He didn't stick around for the full contents of my tank, however, so perhaps I inadvertently insulted him.

Here for your viewing pleasure is a very short little video of a Red-bellied Woodpecker I found on the world wide web. He seems to be talking to himself, however. I'll bet he'd have more to say if he could hear me pump my sprayer.

 

Conversations in the Laundry Room

My hot water heater is smart. You can tell that just by looking at this photo of it I cabbaged off the Internet. It's much more intimidating with the dark lighting pictured above than the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs in my utility room. Besides, hangers and an ironing board, both of which reside in close proximity to my water heater, totally detract from its high intelligence quotient.

You could say it's smart because it's very energy efficient and you'd be right. We noticed a drop in our power bill as soon as it with its heat pump technology was installed. Three years ago now, I think, although the way the years fly by it could be more. We refer to it as the supplemental air conditioner because while it's doing it heat-the-water thing, it's pumping cool air into the room. Thankfully we live in a corner of the world where that's desireable 9-10 months of the year.

I say it's smart because it talks to me. Well, maybe talks isn't the right term but it certainly does text me. Just tonight it began beeping at me as soon as the fan shut off. This was new; usually I have to initiate the conversation...like when I want it to take a vacation while we're out of town. Tonight, however, it wanted to talk to me.

The air filter needed to be cleaned. It isn't a big deal to take it out and rinse it off. In fact, I usually do it periodically but life's schedule has been a little unpredictable of late so I hadn't gotten around to it. My smart hot water heater had, in fact, reminded me that the job needed to be done. In a matter of minutes the filter was lint-free and back in place.

The hot water heater must have been lonely though because it wasn't done talking to me. This wasn't just social small talk, however; it was checking up on me. There on the screen was this message: It is assumed the filter has been cleaned before replacing. Hit Enter to confirm. Skeptical little thing, isn't it. Did it really think I was going to go to the trouble of taking the filter out and then put it back in without cleaning it?

Maybe it isn't as smart as I think it is after all.

The Nose Knows

I took advantage of the extended daylight to walk on the golf course after dinner tonight. The extra distance from the street makes it a quiet walk and while I'm usually aware of the sights and sounds found there, it was the smells that drew my attention tonight. Clearly, the nose knows summer has arrived as I could smell...

...freshly cut grass. More than one homeowner was taking advantage of the extra minutes of sunshine to finish up some yardwork in the relative coolness of early evening. Relative is the key word there. It was still warm but nothing like the 100+ heat index we had at noon and it went up from there.

...grilled meat. Saturday night + summer = the perfect excuse for a cookout. Our grill had cooled by the time I walked but my mouth still watered as the scent of someone else's dinner wafted through the air.

...chlorine. A pool party here, a family swim there. Nothing says summer quite like time in the pool. And while I love the quick cool down the water offers from the mid-day heat, there's something deliciously indulgent about an evening swim.

...cigar. Yuck! If I had a cigar-smoker in the house, I'd make him do it outside too. I held my breath as I walked past that yard.

...wet ground. We're in a traditional summertime weather pattern where the heat of the day produces a thunderstorm almost every afternoon. Sometimes its a quick shower but the last couple of days it's been a pretty good downpour. Low-lying areas with lots of shade have a distinct earthy scent. It's not bad, just earthy.

...watermelon. It brought a smile to my face. Not because I really like watermelon (I can take it or leave it) but because it made me think of sitting on the back steps eating watermelon as a kid and spitting the seeds out into the yard. Clearly someone in the neighborhood had enjoyed this traditional fruit of summer outdoors for me to be able to smell it.

...snakes. OK, so maybe snakes don't have an odor but I still think I could smell them as I walked along the swampy area between the 13th and 17th fairways. Or maybe it's just that I know that area is a favorite snake hangout. I had to walk with one eye watching where I was going and one looking sideways for snakes in case any decided to come out and say "hi."

...fabric softener. I suppose the smell of clean laundry coming through a dryer vent isn't unique to summer but when the days are hot and long, the dirty clothes just seem to multiply. At least that's the way it is at my house so it must be the same for everyone. Sometimes evenings are a time to catch up on chores like that.

...nighttime air. It was nearly dark when I reached the house. Before turning the handle on the door, I turned and took one last deep breath. The humid air was heavy with the sweet scent of my neighbor's neatly-tended flower beds mixed with the unkept tangle of the woods beyond.

Welcome, Summer...it's nice to see smell you.

Back On Track

It's a day of catch-up here. Laundry, grocery shopping, mowing. And when an afternoon thunderstorm thwarted my plans to fertilize the lawn, I pulled out the iron instead. Pool maintenance and the fertilizer are on tomorrow's agenda but I'm not sure when I'll catch up on the weeds and the bushes that need trimming. All good things with time is what I keep telling myself but I also know this go-to-Kansas-then- catch-up loop is likely to be a routine for the immediate future.

And we stopped at the little neighborhood produce market on the way home from the grocery store this morning to pick up some tastes of summer. They grow much of what they sell themselves and what they don't raise themselves, they buy from other local farmers. I love that I can load up on fresh greens still wet from being washed as I see members of the family that owns the market hose in hand giving the last crate of beans their clean-up before putting them out for sale.

Fresh has more than its usual appeal after a week on the road. Don't get me wrong...I enjoy having someone else do the cooking but it doesn't take long before I want food that isn't over-salted, over-sauced and overworked. Tonight's dinner included the corn and green beans you see above as well as a salad of cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and basil fresh from the garden. Throw in some grilled chicken breast for Wayne and grilled portobello mushrooms for me and it was both healthy and yummy.

We can't catch up on everything in one day but we're getting life back on track again and it feels good.

Evening In Paris

Cheese and fresh fruit in a dimly-lit room. The soft refrains of music drifting in from the background. Just the two of us sitting close together. It was a perfect way to spend an evening in Paris.

Okay, okay. So the room was our hotel room, the music was the theme to Wheel of Fortune on the TV and it was Paris, Texas, not Paris, France, but the rest of it is true. Don't let anyone tell you my better half isn't a romantic.

Kansas just seemed like the place to be this Father's Day so we've hit the road again. It will a quick trip but will give us a chance to spend a little more time with Wayne's Dad. And we have two boxes of sorted materials to return.

The real Paris is on my "someday" list but El Dorado is today's destination.

All In A Day's Work

Things are progressing here at Scan Central as we work our way through the boxes and files of pictures, documents and other memorabilia we brought home from Kansas. While it's a lot of work, it's a lot of fun too as we keep uncovering such cool things, many of which we not only haven't seen but didn't know existed. An unexpected blessing.

The scan total is 508 now. Lots of photos, plenty of documents and a good number of clippings. Wayne's done the biggest share of those by far. I get the problem children; you know...the ones that need extra attention. My mother-in-law was good about getting a lot of pictures into books, usually with names and dates. She was bad, however, about cutting them into strange shapes or simply down so small it's hard to do much with them. I've been scanning them at super-high resolution then resizing the dpi down in increments as I raise the photo size up in the hopes of retaining some quality. Well, as much quality as you can have working with old snapshots.

And then there ones like this:

Isn't it just a treasure? Little boys in giant bows and young men with wide lapels. There's something about old photos that set my heart a-twitter, especially when there's a connection to someone in them. In this case, that sweet little boy in the lower left is Wayne's grandfather, Clarence Commodore Blaine, otherwise known as Connie. Pictured with him are his seven brothers; the three sisters must have felt left out.

This photo would fall into the happy surprises category as we didn't know of its existence, and I suppose that's what makes it all the more disappointing that it was damaged. Not only is there the obvious fold-mark across the top, there are what appear to be pen marks on it as well. I suspect someone was writing on the back of another photo (since there is writing on this one as well) and simply placed it on top before the ink had set, transferring some lines onto it.

There's also some stains and other signs of aging. This photo was taken about 1911 so it's over 100 years old. That kind of damage isn't that unusual.

So I spent my Sunday afternoon trying to restore it. Here's the result:

It makes me happy.

I use what is now an older version of Photoshop but you could do the same thing with Photoshop Elements. It's mostly two tools...the clone stamp and the spot healing brush. The clone stamp is just what it says: You "dip" your cursor in an undamaged portion of the photo that matches what you're trying to fix then you "stamp" your cursor on the damaged area. You're cloning the pixels, in this case to make the repairs.

The spot healing brush is similar but you only have to click once. The tool looks at the surrounding pixels and fills in the area with pixels that are similar colors. Depending on the nature and size of the damage, one tool works better than the other and sometimes it takes both. You can adjust the size of both tools to vary the size of the area you're working on but generally speaking, smaller is better.

There's a little cut and paste too as I needed to manufacture a chin for Elmer and a mouth for Dewey. That was just a guess. I looked at face shape and sizes as well as age then duplicated that element from someone else in the photo. I wouldn't have done this if it was the face of a direct ancestor that was damaged, lamenting instead the loss of the chance to see what they looked like at that particular time. Since it was grand uncles, however, I thought it worth the effort. And I added an explanation to the names to reflect that it was a digital restoration using composite features for those two individuals.

With a little patience and some trial and error, I was able to get most of the damaged areas restored. It's like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it. There are some areas that are beyond my amateur skills, like the stains across the plaid suit worn by the boy on the bottom right. And I think there's a water stain on the right-hand portion of Grandad Connie's bow and shirt but I just couldn't get a handle on what it was supposed to look like without the stain so I abandoned that effort. At least for now.

Obviously not every photo will get this kind of attention but I just thought this one was too special not to try. Besides, it feeds my love for old photos so it really wasn't work at all.

Good-Bye! Adios! Farewell! So Long!

Last night I fell asleep on the couch before 10pm. While it's not unusual for me to drift off there, that's a good bit earlier than usual but then I'd worked outside in the heat for most of the day. That won't be happening tonight...or any other night for that matter because THE COUCH IS GONE!!!!

My excitement is pretty obvious, isn't it. Actually, I've been lobbying for its removal for more than two years but my bunk buddy wasn't keen on the idea. Somehow he had a change of heart on Thursday and relented, promising to send the sofa on its way on Saturday. I must have caught him at a weak moment.

The couch was a good idea when we got it close to 20 years ago. Having latched onto his bedroom when the youngest moved out, I was converting it to my "playroom." A sofa seemed like a good idea: Some seating for lounging and watching TV with a bed to accommodate extra houseguests.

The problem with hide-a-beds, however, is that they're terrible to sit on and even worse to sleep on. I think the only person who enjoyed spending a night on it was Ben, our then-five-year-old grand nephew and he might have been so enamoured with the fact that the couch made into a bed that the thin mattress on an unforgiving metal frame didn't bother him. The fact that he weighed next to nothing didn't hurt either.

Sitting on it was no picnic either. The bed below really didn't provide much support so it always felt like I was sinking into a hole. I tried shoring it up under the cushions but it wasn't very effective. Despite its age, the fabric was in great shape but I was ready for it to go.

Enough so that I was willing to cut it up with the chain saw to get it out of there if necessary. Hubby had a better idea; we'd take the bed frame out of the couch first.

See, the couch had to stand on its end to make two funny little turns in the hallway leading to this room. I watched two professional furniture movers struggle to get it in here when they delivered it and knew there was no way Wayne and I could manage to get it out in one piece.

But the bed portion came free without a great deal of effort. With the door off the jamb and a lot of patience, we manhandled it past the tricky little corners in the hall to where we could get the furniture sliders under it. From there it was a piece of cake. Well, as much cake as a full-sized couch can be. Having the "guts" out of it helped tremendously.

I intended to take a picture of it all loaded and tied down in the back of the pickup as we were ready to head to Goodwill but forgot until we were about a block away. Wayne offered to go back but I declined; I didn't want him to decide we should keep it after all. Hopefully, someone else will get some use out of it and if not, perhaps Goodwill can generate a little cash by selling the bed frame for scrap.

Needless to say, the room looks bigger now that it's gone. For the time being, I'll be reading my USA Today in a glider-rocker that normally lives in our bedroom until we make some decisions about new living room furniture. That doesn't have to be today, however.

As for the couch, I say good-bye and good riddance! I don't think I can fall asleep in the rocker...and that just might be a good thing.

We Don't Need A Pet

George is back. You know...George the Giant Lizard a/k/a Godzilla Jr. We hadn't seen him since he tried to be a houseguest a few weeks ago but apparently he didn't go far when he bolted from the patio after that encounter.

We'd been in yard working all day. Mowing, edging, trimming, weeding...the whole shebang. Between the rains and road trips, it was seriously in need of some TLC. We'd managed to keep up with the mowing but hadn't either had the time or had the weather cooperate to do much more. Happily, it looked much neater and tidier by nightfall.

But in the midst of it all, I headed for the garage to put the string trimmer away. As I rounded the side of the house, our scaly friend was waiting just a few feet inside the open garage door. Oh, no you don't! I hollered as I started toward him. But he did anyway. Like an ornery two-year-old who knows what he's doing is wrong and does it anyway, the lizard made a beeline for the back of the garage. I swear there was a smile on his little red face as he turned to see if I was following. I was but I might as well have saved my time. He soon disappeared first under one thing and then under another. I beat and banged around on everything in the corner but failed to roust the reptile.

When I shared this event with my better half, his response was that having a lizard in the garage was actually a good idea. He'd eat bugs. Never mind that everything I open the door to go out there, I'll be cutting my eyes in every direction looking for him.

And to make matters worse, Wayne said he saw two of these lizards scurrying across the grass while he was mowing. George and Georgette, perhaps? I just hope there aren't any Georgie-Porgies out there. I suppose watching for a lizard is better than watching for the big snake Wayne saw at the edge of the flowerbed a few days ago. Oh, wait...I'm watching for it too.

A Battle Plan

While the well-known historical version of D-Day is just around the corner, we have thirty days to our own personal twist of that get-it-done occasion. Perhaps ours should be called E-Day. There will be no invasion; we're evacuating...Wayne's dad's apartment, that is. And while there is an acknowledgement that his physical condition will prevent him from returning to it, the real impetus is financial. The plan is to have the apartment empty by the end of the month.

Like any good military operation, we did a little recon while we were there. It's a tiny little apartment really as the entire building was designed for senior living. Just four rooms, one of which is a bathroom. Don't let that fool you though; Wayne's mom was a pack rat...and I say that with love in my heart. She was a master at tucking stuff into drawers and closets and cabinets and shelves. Stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. It was never cluttering the living areas but still it will all have to be sorted and divided.

We brought home four moving boxes of scrapbooks, photos and family history-related paperwork. And a portable file box. And a giant storage binder of more scrapbook pages, photos and paperwork. The idea is to divide the scrapbook pages so each of the four boys' families get back the ones that relate to them, and that's mostly been done. Well, at least for the scrapbooks we brought home. There's probably six or eight more books stored in the cedar chest that we simply didn't have room for in the car.

There are, of course, a lot of scrapbook pages that might relate to two or more families or have photos of grandparents or other subjects that are near and dear to everyone's heart. There's an answer for that: A scanner. We'll be able to put scrapbook pages in the hands of their new owners by the end of the month; the scanning of photos and such, however, will take much longer.

So while I might have shook my head at the saving of what surely must have been 1,000 safety pins with the little ones all neatly pinned onto the larger ones, I'm loving her pack rat tendencies when it comes to photos, memorabilia and family history. We've found some real treasures. Like a photo of Wayne's grandfather and five of his brothers taken in 1917 we'd not seen before. And the paperwork where his other grandfather sold one of his patented inventions to Skelly Oil for $100 in 1944. Heck, she even had a photo of my 1990 Mazda Miata. I've always lamented the fact that somehow I never got a picture of that fun little red convertible. Now I have one along with a whole lot of other pictures and papers unique to the people and events of our lives and those who went before us.

Separating it all and getting it in a form that can be shared with everyone is going to be a task of epic proportion. My dining room looks a little like a war zone as we divide photos/family history memorabilia among the brothers, organize what goes back with us on the next trip to Kansas and separate what will need to be scanned. At this point I don't know if we're climbing the mountain of paperwork or being buried under the avalanche of it all. Right now just having a battle plan is enough.

Around Here

Around here I'm glad to have my walking shoes on again after a week of car riding and sitting. I've missed the movement and fresh air, even though I got caught in a downpour this afternoon.

Around here I'm craving fresh fruits and vegetables. A week of restaurant food will do that to you. Fortunately, it's the time of year where there are plenty of choices to satisfy that craving. Yum!

Around here I'm hoping I can beat the birds to the blueberries growing in the backyard. If so, it will be a first as they pluck them as soon as they begin to show any color at all. I may have to invest in one of those nets so the berries will have a chance to ripen.

Around here we're playing lots of catch-up. One of the first things on the list was to rid the car of smashed bugs and road grime. A clean car makes me happy.

So does neatly pressed clothes although getting them to that point doesn't necessarily. Around here the washing and ironing is all caught up...at least for the moment.

Around here the corner of the back yard smells divine. The gardenias bushes are covered in creamy white flowers that fill the air with their heavenly scent. I could stand down there and smell them all day but then who'd do all those catch-up chores.

Around here the first thing I noticed when we pulled in was the new fronds on the sago palm. It looks almost like a crown...or maybe a feathered headdress. No matter which I'm happy to see our long-time friend rebound from the ice storm.

There's a long list of things to be done around here. Good thing Mother Nature is giving us more rain.  Not that we need it but it's a good excuse to stay inside and whittle away at that to-do list tomorrow. If you're looking for me, I'll be around here.

Journeys, Part 2

We spent the twilight hours of Saturday evening wandering around the cemeteries in El Dorado. They weren't our destination as we worked our way back to the hotel but with Memorial Day coming up, it seemed like a good idea. The original intent was just to drive by and look at the flowers and the flags but we were moved to stop. It took a while but we finally located the graves of both sets of Wayne's grandparents at one cemetery before moving on to the other where finding those of my mother and step-father were easier. It's been far fewer years.

If it seems like we just got home from El Dorado, it did to us too. A flurry of phone calls concerning the latest health crisis for Wayne's dad caused us to pack quickly and hit the road. We drove all night Tuesday night, taking turns driving in 1-2 hour shifts. We used to make the trip home by traveling overnight, back when we could tuck little boys into the backseat and they'd sleep the majority of the journey. We were younger then; we got old wise enough to break it into two days.

But we needed to be there as soon as possible so we drove through the night and actually, it was better than we anticipated. There's not a lot of traffic on the back roads of East Texas in the wee hours of the morning. You do, however, see some interesting people buying gas at a Walmart in Texarkana at 2AM. Breakfast in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, consisted of maple Long Johns and chocolate iced donuts. Don't judge; we needed something to keep us going and sugar was the choice. Seventeen hours after walking out of our house, we were in El Dorado, ready for a quick clean up and change of clothes.

The news from the hospital on Wayne's dad's condition was sobering at best. Acute kidney failure. A mild heart attack. A small stroke. All within the few days between when we left and when we returned. Added to his long list of other health problems, it did not appear medicine had much to offer him beyond comfort care. We were blessed by the fact that Wayne's dad had made his wishes clear some years ago and signed a durable medical power of attorney so the boys could carry them out.

Hospice and funeral homes weren't necessarily on our radar when we left home but soon were, and with those arrangements finalized, we turned our attention to a plan for everything in his apartment. It will have to be cleaned out before the end of June. Almost ninety years of life in a few rooms....it's almost overwhelming.

Every child will face this situation at some point but knowing that doesn't make it any easier. Fortunately, we have Wayne's brother and sister-in-law to share the load.

The good news is we had a delightful day with him on Friday. He's back at the nursing home and surprisingly okay with being there. The Hospice people came in the afternoon to present him with a pin and certificate honoring his military service and he seemed to enjoy the attention. He even told a few stories about his war experiences.

Saturday, however, was another story and the doctor's warning of weeks, not months, seemed all the more real. Perhaps that's what drew us to the cemeteries after saying our goodbyes. We've loved and been loved by some amazing people, and while we never wanted to let any of them go, we were powerless to stop it, just as we can't stop what is happening to Wayne's dad. It wasn't death we thought of as we stood reading those names on the headstones; it was holiday dinners, funny stories and a host of other happy memories.

One day it will be that way for Wayne's dad but we're not there yet. The journey continues.

Leapin' Lizards, Daddy Warbucks! Where'd That Come From?

It's been a quiet weekend here at the ranch. The usual errands, a few productive chores, a pleasant lunch with the oldest. You know...nothing too exciting. Unless, of course, you count those few minutes on Saturday where we were squealing, laughing and running around like mad men.

I was headed from the living room to the kitchen for something or other as often happens during the course of the day. Our house has a very open floor plan; the living room flows to the family room which is separated from the kitchen by only a long counter. I love it because I can stand at the kitchen sink located in the middle of that counter and look through the oversized sliding glass doors out into the pool area, backyard and the golf course beyond it. And I often glance that direction as I walk from one room to another, checking to see what's happening outside or just appreciating the view.

That's just what I did on Saturday; then I stopped dead in my tracks. Wayne! I shouted. You need to come here NOW! Staring back at me from that sliding glass door I love to look out was this:

I was in shock for a couple of reasons. One, I've never seen a lizard that big anywhere around here and two, I was in my house. Just to give you some perspective, it's 3" from the floor to the top of that white metal base on the door so we're talking about a fellow who is close to 9" long. We have little anole lizards who regularly scurry across our patio and they're usually only 4"-5" long. I'm fine with them; they eat bugs. This guy was huge...and he was in my house! Had I not been so repulsed by this idea I might have stopped to appreciate that he was kind of pretty as lizards go. He wanted out but not nearly as much as I wanted him out.

My knight in shining armor came to my rescue prepared to slay the dragon catch the lizard. Trouble was, he was armed with a shell net that probably wasn't any bigger than the lizard. I offered another plan: I'd go outside and open the sliding glass door a few inches; he could "herd" the lizard in the direction of the opening. I envisioned us capturing our unwanted house guest in the bucket I intended to place in front of the opening and we could return him to the wild. I was hoping to avoid two things: Having the lizard on the loose inside the pool enclosure where I'd think about him every time I went out there and, worse yet, chasing a runaway reptile throughout the house.

Do you think he could wait for me to open the door before springing into action? In a word: No. Bucket in hand I approached the door only to see him moving one of the chairs next to where the lizard had been. Our trespasser was obviously hiding behind it.

As I turned the corner coming back inside, I spotted Wayne waving his net and the wily critter sprinting across the middle of the room towards me. Block him! my hunting companion shouted. With what! I wasn't armed and while I'm not necessarily afraid of a 9" lizard, I wasn't about to take on this wild animal without something in my hands. I shrieked and ran the other way as our visitor took cover behind a different chair.

Then I headed for the weapon any self-respecting housewife would choose: A broom. Determined to keep our reptilian intruder at bay (remember, it's an open floor plan), we become more stealthy in our attack. That is, until the sucker made a lap around the chair he'd been hiding behind, running up over my foot in the process. Irish folk dancers ain't got nothing on me; I can move my tootsies pretty darn quick too. It didn't help that my partner in crime yelled He's on your foot! well after the fact and then almost fell over laughing at my ensuing panic.

We finally succeeded in herding our uninvited friend out the door and although he missed the bucket, he was last seen bolting under the screen door. Well, last seen by me; Wayne followed him on out and saw him jump off the porch into the bushes.

Our porch/pool deck is probably 2' above ground level but this fellow was just big enough he must have been able to climb the steps. Once on the porch, he had to have entered the pool enclosure the same way he went out: The gap at the bottom of the screen door. The weather has been ideal the last few days so we've had the doors open. He apparently decided to come in for a look-see and then was trapped when we closed the house back up.

Had we been filming this adventure we could have released our own version of Godzilla. I hear the Hollywood version is a hit. Needless to say, ours would be a comedy.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Lower Cholesterol

It was the semi-annual prove-I'm-pink-and-warm day...a/k/a six-month check-up with my primary care doctor. I made the round-trip, did my time in the waiting room, saw the doctor and was back home 45 minutes later. It doesn't take long when there aren't any serious health issues hanging over my head.

Most of the conversation in the exam room centered on my blood work. Well, to be more precise, what great numbers were showing up on my lab results. I'm sure I broke out in a huge grin when I found out all the categories that make up my cholesterol levels were in the normal range for the first time in quite a while. Woot woot for me!

I've made multiple changes in my lifestyle and eating habits in an effort to bring those numbers in line. More fiber, less meat. More fruits and vegetables, less junk. It isn't that what I ate five or ten years ago was highly unhealthy but it could stand some improvement. It's not a diet...it's just better eating and it's nice to see the effort I've put into that is paying off.

But sometimes it's hard. Not in terms of feeling deprived or eating foods I don't really enjoy. I love fruits and vegetables and wasn't much of a carnivore anyway. There are more and more meatless meal options all the time.

Except when you're in El Dorado, Kansas.

I've commented before that it's a challenge to eat healthy when we go home. Most of the restaurant choices there are fast-food outlets and the few true restaurants there are have menus that are basically the same foods on a plate. We sometimes make it to Wichita where there are more options but bottom line...we eat most of our meals in El Dorado.

And let me tell you, I could feel the difference after four days of consuming foods I've eliminated from my diet. The first bites of that chili cheeseburger might have tasted good...or maybe it tasted of memories of days gone by...but it laid in a lump in my gut for hours afterwards. And it wasn't the only meal like that. By the time we got home, I felt sluggish and bloated and generally un-well. I was seriously craving something light and fresh.

I think it surprised me that what I saw as comfort food from my past left me feeling so uncomfortable. Apparently, my body has settled into this new eating routine and likes it. Or maybe it's just proof that the foods the experts keep talking about really are bad for us once we break our digestive track's addiction to them.

I'm not on a campaign to take away anyone's burger and fries. We're all adults and entitled to make our own choices. I just know that my time in El Dorado was a reminder that I feel better when I eat better. And now I have proof that doing so produces better results too. Funny...better is my word for the year. I got that message.

Happy Endings

The contents of my inbox usually contain one or two genealogy newsletters each week. For the most part they promote the resources of the organization that sends them, something that really doesn't benefit me since I'm not a member. But they're free and there are enough tips, surveys and interesting bits of information to make them worth reading.

Like the story last week about two long-lost relatives finding one another...one living in England, the other in Oregon. As you can imagine, their reunion was the result someone's interest in crawling around in the branches of the family tree.

That would be a heart-warming story in and of itself but this tale has a Hollywood-like twist. The two relatives are, in fact, twin sisters, separated not long after they were born in 1936. Their mother Alice was an unmarried domestic servant who knew she could not keep her infant girls at the English manor where she worked. She intended to place both for adoption but Elizabeth had curvature of the spine, a condition thought to make her unadoptable so Alice kept her even though others were responsible for her care for much of her youth.

Ann, the other twin, was adopted by a British couple and learned of that fact when she was 14. She speculates that her adoptive mother didn't tell her about her twin sister because she probably didn't know it herself. She remained in the English town where she was born, marrying and raising her own family there.

Alice and Elizabeth moved several times as Alice changed employers, and then Elizabeth married a Yank after WWII and came to the United States. She remembered her mother telling her she was a twin but the papers and other information that might have helped her track her sister down were lost or destroyed.

Ann's efforts to find out more about her birth mother eventually led to Elizabeth although the journey was long and far from direct. But then that's how family history research goes. The important thing is that they found one another. They talked by phone and exchanged correspondence for a year before meeting for the first time on May 1, 2014. Don't you love a happy ending?

Technically, their story doesn't end there. They spent two days together in California meeting with Dr. Nancy Segal, a psychologist who has been researching twins for more than two decades. She's hoping to delve into their similarities and differences as twins who have been brought up separately are of great interest to scientists examining inherited or genetic influences on behaviour. One makes-you-go-hmmm thing she'll find is that they both married men named "Jim."

You can read the full story of Elizabeth and Ann here along with a little about how many similarities twins retain even when raised separately. It was pretty interesting. Don't worry; there isn't much genealogy stuff in it at all...just a family's story and why science is interested in it.

So far I've found relatives in my tree who appear in history books or who set off to homestead uncharted lands. They've had hard lives and suffered tragedies but I suppose their stories have happy endings because the family line continued through it all. I don't have any twins-separated-at-birth stories but you never know; I've still got a lot of names to look at. How cool that Elizabeth and Ann have such an amazing story to pass on to their children and grandchildren. It's a happy ending indeed.

Difficult Journeys

I was conspicuously absent from the blog last week because we were in Kansas. Obviously this antique postcard of Main Street was taken about 1960 but really, the view isn't that different today. The cars are newer, some of the business names have changed and the theater has closed even though the sign is still there. Sometimes when we drive the streets of this town where both Wayne and I grew up, I think time has stood still.

But, of course, it hasn't. It's a fact that is painfully obvious when in the presence of my father-in-law.

Wayne's dad is just a few months younger than my dad, and he'll celebrate his 90th birthday this fall. An interesting bit of trivia is that my mom and dad and Wayne's mom and dad were all in the same high school graduating class. Both of our mothers are gone now (mine in 1993, Wayne's in 2010) but we're blessed to still have our fathers.

April has not been kind to my father-in-law who does not enjoy the same state of good health my dad does. At the beginning of the month he was comfortable ensconced in his little senior apartment, and while he had chronic health issues, he was living semi-independently. His "girl Friday" (as he called her) came to do light housekeeping, shop for groceries and help with some meal preparation but he was getting by on his own.

In the span of just over a week, the bottom fell out. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He developed a particularly nasty case of the shingles covering a substantial part of his right side. And then he fell, breaking a vertebra in his back. It's a slippery slope those health issues in the elderly. One minute they're navigating the road just fine; the next they're in the ditch.

He's in a nursing home now on a 60-day rehab status. And he's very angry. Angry that the medical authorities wouldn't let him go home. Angry that his body is failing him. And angry that he's lost control over so many of the decisions affecting his daily life. He's pretty much a loner so the idea that he has to live his days among strangers is particularly reprehensible.

Along with Wayne's younger brother and sister-in-law, we spent our days in El Dorado shuffling between medical tests, doctor appointments and time at the nursing home. His other health problems severely limit what treatment options he has so the goal now is the relieve the pain and make him as comfortable as possible.

Leaving to return to Florida was hard. If you've had a parent in a similar situation, you know what a difficult journey this is. And if you haven't, I can tell you that you just do the best you can. Can my father-in-law turn this around and make enough progress in rehab to return home? It seems impossible but he's a stubborn man. I wouldn't count him out just yet.

Our suitcases are in the closet for now but we know they won't stay there for long. This journey still has a long way to go.

You Can't Get There From Here

Mmmmmm...I love the smell of chlorine! OK, so maybe not every day but I'm loving it today because it's responsible for this:

That's a very clean and shiny pool cage and, best of all, I didn't have to do the work to get it that way. Unless, of course, you count writing the check to pay for it.

We had the house washed today and had the pool enclosure done as well. I can do the sides and last year managed to clean the angled pieces but I just couldn't manage the top. In our hot and humid climate it doesn't take long for algae and mildew to accumulate and while we have the house washed every year or two, we've never done the top of the enclosure. When a friend mentioned what a good job the housewasher had done on his (we use the same company), I knew that's what we needed to do. After an afternoon of mowing and moving everything back onto the porches, I sat back there and admired how pretty and white it looks again, inhaling the leftover chlorine fumes...and loving it.

Then because it was late when we got that all finished, we decided to run into Pensacola for a bite to eat. Getting home proved more difficult than we expected due to the floods from Tuesday night's rain.

We thought we had a lot of rain out here but it was nothing compared to Pensacola itself...and we're not that far apart. Rain gauges in one part of the city reported 26.7" of rain. On the official side, they had 15.6" on April 29, setting a record for the most rainfall in a single day and, of course, rain continued on for hours after midnight. At one point late Tuesday, 5.7" of rain fell in just one hour, something weather authorities said was a once in 200- to 500-year occurrence. We had more rain out of this week's storm than we've had out of the last two major hurricanes to hit the area.

Photo: Pensacola News Journal

One of the most enduring images of the damage from so much rain is the photo of the collapse of a section of Scenic Highway. That must have been some ride for the drivers of the two vehicles traveling on it when this occurred. The road is a popular one with locals, in part because there aren't a lot of traffic lights and the speed limit is 45 mph most of the way. The view, however, is another draw. True to its name, it's scenic, offering peaceful vistas of the Escambia River which would be to the right of this picture. It wasn't the river that eroded the roadway, however; it was rainwater coming from the left that undercut the roadbed in two separate places causing the collapse. When I worked downtown, this was my primary route to get there and the closure of a section is going to impact a lot of people.

But our dinner plans didn't require us to go downtown so we weren't expecting detours or closed roads. In fact, we took a rather circuitous route going, mostly because we were talking. After eating, we headed down Olive Road, expecting to catch Scenic Highway north of the closed section and scoot home. Imagine our surprise to find Scenic blocked north of Olive too. I don't know if they have more collapsed or unstable areas or if they were simply giving it a very close look-see just to be sure.

So we turned around, intending to take Olive to Johnson Avenue to get back to Davis. This is what we found:

Photo: Pensacola News Journal

I thought when I grabbed this photo that this was Johnson but upon further study, we think it's the other section of Scenic. The point is Johnson looks just like this; a cavern in the pavement where water undermined the ground below it. We were forced to go all the way back up Olive to reach Davis and eventually home.

Our neighborhood handled this excessive rainfall pretty well all things considered. The cart path on the golf course just down from our house collapsed in much the same fashion as the roads above but with a little less drama. The water overran the curbs in many places so we all had plenty of debris to clean up in the yards and rumor has it the frozen yogurt place across the highway from the subdivision took on a little water.

I can't, however, get images of this Pensacola neighborhood out of my mind.

Photo: Pensacola News Journal

That's a street...or what's left of it...and an example of the power of water. There isn't a nearby river or creek to overflow and undermine this entire road; it's just hours of heavy rain.

Photo: WEAR-TV

This before-and-after view of another part of the same street says it all. I look at these photos and wonder how it could have happened as I'd consider this neighborhood to be on high ground.

Like every disaster, there are stories of both bravery and loss that are both heart-warming and heartbreaking. So many homes had water in locations that not only have never flooded but weren't in flood plains where flooding was even deemed a possibility.Tales of water coming up in homes so fast the residents could barely get out and of people having to cut holes in the roof to escape after seeking refuge from the floodwaters in their attic.

An afternoon thunderstorm can dump several inches on us any summer afternoon and we think nothing of it. A tropical storm can bring five times that much and we prepare for it. This was unexpected...and unprecedented.Thank goodness for our sandy soil as the water itself disappeared as fast as it came. The effects, however, will be felt far longer.