PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/29/2008

I've missed a few days of posting because of the fact that I actually need a little sleep now and then! My day job is medical transcription... Did I say "day job?" Pardon me! What I really meant is my all-times-of-the-day-and-night job! The last two weeks have been my busiest ever with that, and then into that scenario we mix the fact that the vegetables in the garden are ready to be processed and frozen for the winter, Coral had a neurology appointment and ongoing med experimentation, and our elderly friend Warren has many problems to overcome as he rehabs from a broken leg.

Before I get some of the above-mentioned sleep, I am going to open a window on my day today and imagine you peeking in! I buzzed through the work from two doctors, and then went out to the garden to pick some corn.Here is L.C. (Lap Cat) checking out the remains after I shucked the corn.

In the sink, ready to be washed...

Bubbling on the stove, with the timer set for 4 minutes....

Dunking the cobs in cold water to stop the cooking process and cool them quickly for handling...

Letting the cobs dry so that there will be no water mixed with the kernels when I cut them off...

Cutting ALL that corn off of ALL those cobs...

Ready for the freezer!

I froze 10 bags in all today, and each bag had the kernels from 6 to 8 cobs in it.
(Some of the cobs were really young, so they made an extra-special tender bag!)

Like I said, I actually need a little sleep now and then... and I think it better be now!

To keep in touch...

If there could be snow in August, you would see a pile of it with me underneath... I have been so "snowed under" that I have not been able to post, and today is another day just like that. More transcription work than I can do + the garden + trying to help with an elderly friend + the usual care for Coral and other home stuff. I'm hoping things calm down in the next day or two. In the meantime, this is just a note to keep in touch until I can post properly again...

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/23/2008

My pot of ratatouille!
(not to be confused with Ratatouille, the movie!)

This was on my stove this afternoon, simmering and filling the house with delightful fresh garden scents! I know that ratatouille is usually just vegetables, but I also know that my husband loves his meat, so I started some ground beef browning with my favorite seasonings. Then I chopped up zucchini, eggplant, peppers, and onions to add, freshly picked from the garden. Our tomatoes are not ripe yet, so I settled for canned ones and let it bubble a bit longer until it looked like this.... Mmmmm, absolutely the best served over rice!

So now I have ratatouille in the freezer, and on some snowy day in winter I will start the rice cooker going and pull out one or two of those containers, and we will have us a scrumptious meal!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/22/2008

Cute Kitten!

One day a couple of years ago, this coat was on the floor, and the kitten found out how warm and cozy it was and just enjoyed a blissful sleep!

It used to be that every year -- sometimes more than once a year -- we had a bunch of kittens romping around in our house. What great fun it is to watch kittens scamper about, tussling with each other and swatting at imaginary playthings! The kitten thing lost a bit of its glow, though, when they clawed their way to the top of the drapes and shredded the edges of books on the shelf. And the whole scenario got real clouded and tarnished when I had to walk in the kitchen by scraping my feet along the floor so that I would not step on one of the furballs! Too much of a good thing, that's what it was.

So now all the cats have had their shave-shave, cut-cut, snip-snip, and stitch-stitch procedures and are settling into old age peacefully without any pesky kittens to keep them young.

But sometimes I miss those kittens, especially when I come across pictures like this one!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/21/2008

On my Memories Shelf sits this beautiful wooden container.It was specially made by my father on his lathe. I'm not sure if that lathe could also be used with metal, but I think so, because from somewhere in the back of my mind comes the memory that he also was able to make parts on that lathe for the engines when they broke.

I love this container because it shows off the beautiful hard red wood found in Liberia and also because my father spent so much time making it perfect.
It is not just a solid piece of wood...
It has two separate parts to the lid so that I can drop things in it through the little opening, or I can open up the whole top... if I could think of something worthy of storing in it! Right now, it is beautiful all by itself!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/20/2008

Trent, Barry, and I were hiking in Eldorado Canyon on July 4th when I noticed this little cactus flower by the side of the road, a little bright spot of yellow almost hidden by the dry brown around it.

I'm sure you know by now how much I love to be surprised by beauty in unexpected places!

Let's look a bit closer...Breathtaking beauty surrounded by thorns and prickles!

That is life, too...

(Pictures by Trent)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/19/2008

Last week we had the strangest weather. In fact, we set some records. It was so cold here that we had to turn on our furnace one night! In the middle of August! The high for the day was below 50 degrees.

On Saturday, even though it was still rainy and overcast, Trent went hiking with his friend Mike and took this picture.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/18/2008

Uncle Wiggily Game

Look what I found! While Barry and I were browsing in an antique store a few days ago, I spotted this game and pounced on it with delight! Did the box for our old game look just like this? I can't really remember what it looked like. Maybe it was so beat up that it does not stay in my mind! The copyright on the box is 1949, so it has to be real close.

Here are the rules...

the cards and playing pieces....

...and here is the game board!

I'm just going to have to play this for old times' sake!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/17/2008

Castor Oil & Toilet Paper

My childhood illnesses were not normal flu and ear infections and sniffles like those I helped my children through. We had things like jigger bites and mosquito bites, malaria, and dysentery. We took a very bitter little pill every night to help us keep from getting malaria, but occasionally we got it anyway. We knew people with huge tropical ulcers and tuberculosis. One of the ladies who lived nearby had lost most of her fingers and toes because of leprosy. When I was about 7, I caught hepatitis A (we called it "infectious hepatitis") from someone else who had it, and I was very very sick for about a month. Thinking back on it now from a mom's perspective, I can imagine how difficult that must have been for my mother, because at times she was not sure I would ever get better.

We did not know anything about Tylenol or decongestants or any of the other drugs we can get so easily now, but there was one thing we knew ALL about, and that was Castor Oil! My father was absolutely positive that, no matter what invisible bug was attacking his body, it could be flushed out once and for all with a good dose of Castor Oil!

And we children also learned first hand of its germ-flushing capabilities! How we hated the taste of that stuff, but Daddy had come up with a solution for how to get it down in one big gulp. He took a clear glass custard dish and filled it about 1/4 full with water in which he dissolved some baking soda (already sounds yummy, doesn't it!) Then he opened the Castor Oil and poured in a big dollop, right in the middle of that soda water. You could see the oily patch floating on the surface. ("That baking soda will cut the oil," he would assure us as we tried to put off that awful moment!) We knew just what to do, because we had watched him do it so many times. He would stand with the custard dish in one hand, poised for swallowing, and his left hand on his hip. Then back his head would go and he would gulp it down. No matter how much that soda water "cut the oil," there was no disguising that awful horrible taste! Then he would stand looking at us, and the first burp would come, and the taste with it....AGGGHHH! I can almost taste it now! "U-buh-buh-buh-buh!" he would shiver with that burp!
At the first sign of illness, we all took Castor Oil!

This wonderful treatment did not end with actually getting that oil down (and keeping it down)! About an hour later, we did not dare leave the house because of the extreme....ahem!...VERY extreme laxative effects of this wonder drug! It would be impossible to describe how very, very flushed those germs were...along with every other blessed thing that could possibly have been retained in our little intestines! We were clean as a whistle when this whole procedure was over!
Thus, you now know why the bottle of Castor Oil would indeed be only half the picture if "the roll" were not beside it!

(Now if you click on that picture and read the label on the bottle carefully, you will see that the manufacturers make the preposterous claim that this product is "Tasteless & Odorless!" The very fact that they felt it necessary to put that on the label tells you something! How many things do we buy that assure us, right on the label, that they are "tasteless and odorless?" 'Nuff said!)
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PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/15/2008

The iron

When I was a kid, this was the kind of iron we used. The bottom part is solid iron, so it is very heavy, and for that reason this one does not sit on my Memory Shelf but is on the floor beside it. Pull up on that little round knob, and the handle comes off. This is a very important feature of the iron.
A big round metal plate sat over the wood fire, and on it were 3 or 4 of these heavy metal irons (without the handle). They got blistering hot; in fact, they were downright dangerous, now that I consider it! When it was time to iron, the handle was pushed down onto the top of one of the irons to fasten it on, and that iron was used until it was too cold to do the job. Back to the wood fire we went and traded the cold iron for a fresh hot one while the first one heated back up. It was a good system that worked very well, but there was no such thing as a quick press or touch up to a wrinkly dress. Clothes had to be ironed on "ironing day" when the fire was lit and the irons had time to heat up.

By the time I was in my mid to late teens, we had a small generator that provided a bit of light for a few hours in the evenings. We also had a small electric travel iron that did not draw too much current. Even so, we could see the lights dip each time the iron came on. I'm afraid we were getting quite spoiled by then, because I remember times when we would run to our father and ask him to turn the generator on so we could use the iron for a few minutes! And he did it!

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I'm back!

Thanks for all the good wishes for my away time. We lazed around in the mornings and ate a very late breakfast, then went out to browse in secondhand stores and an antique store or two whenever we felt like it. By evening, we were hungry and ate out before coming back to the little cottage nestled at the foot of Pike's Peak in the Colorado Rockies. What a gorgeous place! We were quiet and undisturbed, and the few days passed far too quickly.

Now I'm beating up my computer keyboard again trying to catch up...it seems to be the story of my life!

TAKING A BREAK!

I'm taking a break. Barry and I are off on our second honeymoon... or maybe it's our third...or fourth...or fifth... I've lost track! See you on Thursday!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/10/2008

Aluminum Juicer

What I wouldn't give now for an orange or grapefruit or lime, totally ripe, picked off the tree outside the back door! We didn't know how good we had it when we were kids!
This juice squeezer is just like the one we had. Ours was used to make orange and lime juice. We hardly ever made grapefruit juice, and I think it must have been because the grapefruits were so huge they would never have fit in this squeezer! We cut the fruit in half and put one half into the open squeezer......lowered the handle and pressed until all the juice was squeezed out of the fruit and drained down into the bottom through those little slits. Then we poured the juice out the spout into a glass and went on squeezing fruit until we had as much as we wanted. And it was SO sweet!

The whole thing came apart for easy cleaning!

We drank the orange juice or limeade out of aluminum glasses like these...(That sounds like more than enough aluminum than we should have been having, if you ask me!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/09/2008

Reading was my most favorite past-time from the time I was about 5 or 6. However, we were far from any bookstores, and there was no library anywhere. From here and there over the years we somehow acquired a few choice bits of reading material, and then I proceeded to read them over and over and over and over...

We had several copies of Uncle Wiggily books like this. They were the size of a magazine and had (as you can see from the cover) numerous short stories in each copy. I'm still on the lookout for more of these, as the first sheet in this one is missing, so I don't have the publication date.
Here is an inside shot.
We also had an Uncle Wiggily board game that we played over and over with our friends. I haven't found one of those yet, either.
(Of course, I know I could go internet searching, but since it is so much fun to browse antique stores, I'd rather do it that way for right now!)

ADDENDUM: I just looked at the front cover again, and I see that it says the copyright date is 1943.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/08/2008

4711

Just one whiff of this, and I am transported back in time to my childhood!

My parents worked with an interdenominational international mission organization, and that meant that on our little mission compound we had Canadians (our family), Americans who taught school, and Swiss and German nurses who operated the clinic. We called all our parents' coworkers "aunties" and "uncles."

On hot days when the rest of us were just plain sweaty, the German and Swiss aunties smelled cool and wonderful, sort of spicy and sweet! We admired the cherished bottle of body spray from a distance and just loved to be near them!
One day I found a bottle of 4711 in a store near here and was immediately cooled and refreshed just by my memory! So of course I bought it, and here it sits on my Memories Shelf. And some days, like today, I spritz a little on just because!

Here's the description of 4711 that I found at the website of a store that sells it now:
"Launched by the design house of Muelhens in 1772, 4711 is classified as a refined, fruity fragrance. This unisex scent possesses a blend of citrus oils lemon and orange, light floral rose, and sandalwood oil. Recommended for daytime wear."

Created in 1772 and still being sold today at a reasonable price!
(And that is the story of the interesting-looking bottle on my shelf!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/07/2008

My Bear Bowl
(And here is an extra-special bonus! Najee took a nap on this cloth and left some of her fur behind, just as a treat for you!)

I don't remember where this bowl came from or why it was considered mine, but it was my special porridge bowl. No one else ever got to use it, that I can remember.

We did not have oatmeal or cream of wheat except on very special occasions. Our porridge was homemade! My father had a hand grinder that was used to grind rice into little pieces, and we had that every morning for breakfast. It cooked up just like any other porridge and could be lumpy or smooth depending on the skill of the person making it.

My Bear Bowl helped me through many dreary breakfasts of porridge!





Here is another view of my special Bear Bowl!

And here is the bottom. I have not been able to find out anything about the company that made my bowl.



(If you were to look really closely, you would see that my bowl has not survived all its travels in one piece, and the head has been carefully reattached!

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PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/06/2008

Cookbook and Calumet

When I was growing up, I thought "fast food" meant sandwiches for Sunday lunch! Cooking from scratch was the only thing I knew, and my mother wanted to be sure I knew how to do it properly -- complete with an apron! ("Good cooks always wear aprons, dear!") Saturday was baking day, and Carol-Ann and I took turns making the bread. We started the dough rising right after breakfast on Saturday, and the beautiful golden brown loaves were cooling by early afternoon. Sunday lunch was special because we got to have sandwiches made with that bread. It seemed like fast food on Sunday, but it took all Saturday morning to make the bread!

While the bread was baking, I usually tried out a recipe from my mother's big falling-apart cookbook. I started a collection of those in my own "Recipes" book. I opened it up today and saw that there are grease and flour spots on many of the pages. Here is Lemon Sponge Pudding, one of my very favorites!
The Calumet can is one I saw in an antique store and couldn't pass by, because the very sight of it brought back the days of clumpy baking powder, weevil-filled flour, and ants in the sugar. I remembered smoky wet wood smoldering in the stove, and beautiful cakes that fell when the heavy cast-iron oven door clanked shut. Best of all, though, I remembered how much our youth group loved the cookies I made! This can looks just like the ones we used to have. I know that brand is still around, and the can has not changed much, so when I saw that can in the antique store, I thought, "Is this really an antique?" I turned the can over and decided it was! See for yourself...
And here is one more picture, especially for Carol-Ann!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/05/2008

Pebbles and palm kernels

On my shelf I have this little jar of rocks. That might seem odd until I tell you that they were scooped up outside my childhood home in Liberia. As I dumped them out and held them tonight, I was surprised to realize that they are bumpy and rough, but there are no sharp edges on those reddish pebbles, almost as if they have been rubbed together until all the sharp points have worn away. Once in awhile I ran in bare feet on those little pebbles, and I could have sworn they were covered with sharp points all over!

In my jar of pebbles are two dried nuts with some husk still clinging to them. They are palm kernels, the center of the palm fruit. That shape, that color, that size, that texture... it is one of those familiar things forever in my mind. We used the palm fruit for lots of things...a dish to serve with rice, cooking oil, oil for making soap. We called the palm fruit "palm nuts," and as I write I can taste palm nuts fried in a pan with a little salt added...

This jar holds some of my very first memories.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/04/2008

My shelf of memories

The memory shelf is getting crowded now. I think I need to make it into two shelves because everything doesn't fit on here anymore.
One of my favorite things to do is to browse through secondhand and antique stores looking for things I remember from my childhood -- household items, my mother's knickknacks, books I read, the razor strap (!) -- little things that can immediately bring back times long ago.

Today I have a picture of the whole shelf, but over the next little while I will take things off this shelf for "show and tell." There are a few extra things, too, that aren't in this picture that may just have to be included!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/03/2008

What is this?

Barry and Trent went hiking in the mountains yesterday and came back with this picture. Tell me what you think it is!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 08/02/2008

Barry and Coral
Coral was about 5 years old.

(I wish I could remember what made them laugh that day! Actually, I think Coral is laughing, and Barry is enjoying watching her!)