Home Cookin'

We made the trip home from the hospital yesterday, and Mom is feeling better. (She says 110% better at home!) I didn't go to school today, but maybe tomorrow if she continues to get some strength back. Lying in a hospital bed for several days really saps the strength right out of a person. I made a big kettle of beef and vegetable stew, and she thought it was "da-bomb"!!! I'm glad to sleep in my own snuggly bed! Hugs!

Rainy Saturday

Hi... just a bit of my personality at the thought of my location! We have encountered a roadblock to our happy Saturday drives today. I mentioned Mom had been ill, and we have wound up in the hospital for tests and recuperation. Not sure what's wrong yet, but we are in the cardiac wing for a part of it. Everyone is very sweet, and I spent the night in the big comfy chair... (!) Watched Footloose on TVLand last night. Then I looked up where are they now... Age has wreaked havoc on several of those movie stars... However, since it is a cardiac wing, NO CAFFEINE--- even for guests. I begged a cup of real coffee this morning, and am living for another one in the afternoon.
Tonight is Prom at school. We are doing Midnight Masquerade similar to this shot from the catalog.... Storms across the Midwest today... Bad for Prom babes...
I will have to catch it via Facebook.... Hugs!

It's Earth Day! May we guard our planet...

What a week. I have been home two days with Mom. She's under the weather. Today looks formidable with the dark glowering clouds in the west. I have a batch of bulbs and flowers arriving every second from her purchases, and I was so in hopes she'd feel great when this year's arrived. I'm NOT the gardener, as we all know... So tonight I'm going to take everybody out of the boxes and place them with a few kind words on a prepared table in the sunny back porch where they can look out the window at their future home, the back yard... This little playhouse/smokehouse is mine for reclamation if I have the heart (and the knees) for it... Hugs to all!

My cousin's farm

My cousin has a nice, peaceful farm about six miles from me. Here, she has a little cottage by their pond. Sometimes it has been a haven for her granddaughters, so they have called it a playhouse. In the distant past when her own children were teens, she and I used to go out to a similar building with hot, steaming coffee mugs and sit and talk... We used to laugh that WE were the ones in the playhouse and her kids were watching television
She has a lovely dock, and anyone who comes usually catches a fish or two in her stocked pond.
Turning down her drive, we are welcomed by a cowboy couple on both sides of the road.

Her hubs was once a pickup man for a rodeo, so we see signs of the horses, the spirit of the cowboy, the old West, here and there... I used to go out often for a cup of coffee and a pit of peace. She also came to my house for the same. Sometimes when she was a bit moody, she'd holler at me to turn off my mournful music... (Celtic, Enya... I love that kind of soul filled songs)... she/ not so much.

Yesterday and the day before she brought down her mower and her daughter, and they worked on Mom's yard while our mower is in the shop... Ah, the delights of summer grass... It never ceases the cycle, eh?

Saturday's Drive Through Amish Country.. .

One thing my mother loves to do is to drive through our neighborhood Amish farms, so since Saturday was one of those perfect spring days, we decided it would be fun to see what the gentler folk were doing. I want to say I have a lot of respect for our Amish friends, and I've posted about them before. I never take a close-up or photograph of them that shows their faces.
My vow about this was tested. Guess who was driving this team of two horses as they whirled through a garden patch? Oh, dear hearts, it was a wee Amish boy of about five years old... Such a mental picture I hope I never forget.


A little one room school. This looks very similar to the school I attended for seven years!!! Ooops... I am showing my aged age....
No kidding around here!
Their woods were full of these flowers. What are they? Sweet Williams? A type of violet? We didn't know.



This family far afield (below) and with my zoom (above)... We think they may have been planting potatoes? We sure don't know, but they were pretty on the spring hillside.



Their corn cribs look untouched, but I'm sure they had even more last fall.

This farmer was a good half mile away walking toward his barn... Such compliant and behaved horses just waiting for him to return.
We saw another family close to the road, about fifteen of them in one huge garden with a clothesline of dark shirts and dresses flying in the wind... I took yet another mental picture of those little ones dressed in dark greens and dark violets, the older ones in the traditional blues.

Sunday Dinner

This is my old "climbing tree." I wasn't much of a tree-climber (just a hair afraid of heights, I guess)... but this one was safe up to the second branches.... Looks pretty high to me today!
Is there anything more enticing than a slow-cooker of farm roast beef, quartered white onions, potatoes, and carrots? I love to get up early early (about four a.m.), peel the vegetables, and put it all in the crock-pot with some salt, pepper, ketchup, a bit of water, and white cranberry juice....I add just a whisper of home-cooking love... Then I admire to slip off to bed again with that comfortable knowledge our dinner is well underway...
Today was such a morning...
Add in corn casserole, broccoli, cheese biscuits,
and a lovely green salad.... and we're all set...
just simple home cooking... this is a meal my sweet dad would have loved (except the broccoli!)....
Earlier I took a huge mug of coffee out the back door and ventured into the back yard. It was a refreshing moment, profound with something I hadn't felt in a while... I have been avoiding the back yard, Daddy's haven... and I hadn't realized how long I'd been absent... It felt like a date with an old beau after a long stint apart. I used to summer in this yard, piling up in the hammock, building a tent, sitting on the yard with my dog, playing in the little smokehouse.. With Mom on a walker and my status as AWOL, the yard is in horrible repair... This will be my third summer here, so it's time I ventured out and reclaimed the territory this spring and summer...
The back tree row is much farther in person... I used the zoom to capture those little evergreens...
Long ago, when I was a little girl, we planted this lilac from a sprout from Gramma's big lilac bush... This one is now as big as hers was then... Heady fragrance...
Winter winds have broken down this redbud and the other trees... But they are still giants of my childhood...
Magic gnomes and fairies delight in little communities around the roots of this old tree... I'm sure I saw a few today peeking out at me and remembering me from long ago. I think it's really lucky that fairies and elves have such great memories... and nobody grows too old or different to be recognized.... I dunno... I'm beginning to wish for a dog again... Quick, somebody remind me how much trouble they are!

Words to Live By

Our redbud in bloom! What a taste for the wintry palate... I love our old corn crib in the background. I spent a lot of afternoons playing around that area because we used to have a huge lumber stack there, and it was totally a multi-level dwelling (haven) for me. The crib was simply the threshold to that "nether world" where fairies lived and did my bidding---- since I reigned the queen, captive to some troll or another, but none-the-less in charge... I respectfully and reverently enter this quote for the day!

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. - George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860


Hop over to Tracey's A Cottage Industry for more wonderful quotes to live by.

Mom's wonderful oatmeal cookie recipe

I love these cookies. They are a tiny bit chewy, crisp a bit on the outsude, and soft inside... My favorite recipe that doesn't include chocolate!
--------------------------------------
2 sticks butter

1 c. brown sugar (packed)

1 c. white sugar

2 eggs

2 t. vanilla

Cream together the above.
--------------------


Mix the following in separate bowl and then add to first batter


1 1/2 c. flour

1 t. baking powder

1 t. cinnamon

1 t. salt

Mix with low speed thoroughlly. Add

3 c. quick oatmeal

1 1/2 c. raisins

1 1/2 c. toasted pecans, chopped

Stir together. Drop by teaspoon on silpat or lightly greased tin. Bake 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove from tin and cool.... Hide the batch between binges!

zip I caught a bumblebee....

and zip, I let him go again.. That was a saying of my dad's when something came and left in a big hurry. So goes the tale of the three little kittens. My mom had my cousin put them and the mama cat in a safe place, the old playhouse, AKA old smokehouse, AKA future studio I dream of.... Well, the next morning I went out to let the Mama out and zero kitties at all were in there. We don't really know what happened. Maybe she moved them one at a time, or maybe she didn't... She shows up sometimes for a bit and eats in her usual spot, but she was not having our "relocation" plan... Sooooo, no pics of kitties today...

We'll have to settle for some great homemade Oatmeal cookies... Yum!

Welcome, kitties!

They're here!!! We have kittens! Mom's cat decided to curl up behind the flowerpot beside my door and have her kittens. That is all well and good today in the sunshine, but hey? Did she not remember it rains here? These kittens will be out in the rain when that happens. Plus we have a mean old country tomcat who just this week brought me out the front door and Mom out the back in the middle of the night as he prowled around and caused quite a catfight stir. I fear for the babies. I do. I am sleeping with the screen open so I can charge out there and shoo him off if I hear him... But so far, the only sound is the tinkling of the wind chimes on the porch and a few cute little "mews" from the new guys... I will get a shot today, but decided Mom's cat wasn't in the mood for the paparazzi last night.

* update: Heard that old tomcat and the mama cat fighting at 4:30, so I raced out there yelling. I rigged up a flashlight that beamed on the kittens and mama. He seems to hate the light. (Metaphorical? Dunno.) I don't think this looks good for their little futures. We may move the whole family, but we don't know where.

A nation bereaved. . .

Can you imagine picking up a newspaper or turning on the television and learning that your president, your chief of staff of army, navy, and air command, your national heroine, and nearly a hundred of your nation's best leaders had died in a crash? A crash that could have been prevented if the pilot had followed instructions not to land in a fog? A crash of a plane bound to a small territorial plot commemorating a massacre of your nation's finest that took place 70 years before? How very sad. My heart goes out to the Polish nation, to the fathers and mothers, to the children who will forever remember where they were when they learned of this... It will survive, Poland... but what a heart-staggering blow, no matter what a person's political belief. May God comfort them all.

My favorite actor... Quotes to live by....

“After the awards, I didn't win, my father called me up and told me that the man from Johnstown had put all kinds of signs in the theatre saying, 'This year's Academy Award winner... ' because my father had said I was going to win. And I didn't. But this guy asked if it would be alright if he took the Oscar and put it in the lobby and put a sign saying, 'This is what it would look like if he had won'.”

Check out Words to Live by on A Cottage Industry.

Last Easter Nook...

Good Morning! It is finally Saturday... 99.9 teachers agree it was a Loooooong week.
Just thought you'd like one last little look at the landing above my room... I finally replaced some things that were there with this table my son bought for my mom and my own dear Tiffany lamp. It makes the loveliest glow as I motor upstairs to get a drink or make a little trip to the ladies loo!!!
We were going to a little woodland theme here to go with the picture...
Which you can see is a puzzle. The puzzle/picture was a gift from some dear, dear friends of mine. Their mother had put it together, and they wanted me to have it. I was really touched and pleased with it... so magical and whimsical. Does anyone know anything about the print??? I tried to look it up, but no luck. The figures on it seem to be from fairy tales, but none that seem familiar...

Have a great Saturday!