EARLY GARDENING

We did just a little bit of gardening today. Early hardy pansies and a couple of heather bushes against the new deck leading to the addition to the house. My mother in law had three ceramic gnomes made for me oh about 20 years ago. We use to put them in the front landscape mound but a couple of them escaped. My husband says they go out drinking at night and over the years only one has made it back safely. Every morning we find at least one or two fallen over. We only have one left and it is so faded you can't even tell what color his shirt is. I think I may have to buy some ceramic paint and get to work getting him back to his original colors.

It is such a nice day today. I actually wore sandals to work this week.

I had to just laugh to myself this week.

It's St. Patrick's day and I have a corn (corned) beef cooking int he crock pot. I didn't get a chance to pick one up until late morning today so we may have to wait until tomorrow to eat it. I love the smell, we have it simmering in two bottles of beer.

CARS

Today the daughter's car had to go in for service, regular maintenance, but they found a very small leak in the transmission. They said it didn't need to be fixed immediately. She has an extended warrant that is good for another 10,000 miles so she hopes to be able to get it fixed right before the warranty runs out and she doesn't want to do it right now because there is a $100 deductible. Fortunately for her they gave her a loaner.
My husband's old jeep is in for service too, apparently it needs hubs, whatever that means.
My husband saw an orthopaedic doctor today (why do they spell orthopaedic that way). He had to have cortisone shots put in each knee. I hope that helps with the pain. The doctor said he is bone on bone in his knees but not bad enough for knee replacements. Thank God. That would be one hell of an ordeal.
My daughter is into couponing. I had the experience of shopping with her today. Holy Cow! It takes forever. She has a binder with clear plastic inserts that would normally hold baseball cards, but in this case hold coupons and she has a section for each product line.......GEEZ! It took us for ever to get through the market. She usually does this shopping thing with her best friend on Sunday nights but was not able to go this past Sunday so I got stuck doing it with her on her day off.
I just baked three banana breads. I try to look for ripe bananas at the market every week and if they have some I try to bake a bread or two. I will probably bring one to work tomorrow.

60 DEGREES

It got to almost 60 degrees today but it felt a lot warmer. The sky was clear all day and so blue not a cloud in the sky.
We washed all the windows in the back room today. The room faces due south so you can really see how dirty they are at this time of the year when the sun is so bright. We took the screens off the windows and washed them with soapy water and a brush and even hooked the hose up. I can't believe it is only March 11th.
The wandering jew plant hanging in the windows in the back room really had a rough winter. Not that it was too cold because that room was a lot warmer than we thought it would be we we completed the additional last year. I think that room is probably better insulated then the rest of the house. The plant just didn't get water consistently enough and I think it just got too big. There were no leaves on the top and I think it was just to heavy to support itself. I gave it a good haircut and maybe it will come back but in the meantime I went to HD to get just a small hanging ivy. That will do until the weather gets warmer and there are more house plants in the garden centers, because there was not much to pick from in HD.

TREADCLIMBER UPDATE: We got the new treadclimber on Friday March 2. I got on it on Friday night and could not eve do one minute. On Saturday I tried again and again not one minute but that was with trying to work the timer. I forced myself to do two minutes on Sunday with a lot of huffing and puffing. I did two minutes every night this week and today I got on and was able to do three minutes with a 50% reduction in the huffing and puffing. I am a little more encouraged by this progress. I will do three minutes all week and see what happens on Sunday next week.

Daffodils

The weather here has been awesome. Very warm for this time of the year. Today will be a bit nippy, only around 30. The house across the street from us has Daffodils coming up already. I have never been able to plant any kind of Spring flower in my front gardens. My house faces due north. The sun never gets around far enough to hit the front of the house until right at June 21st and then it is time for it to start going back to it's winter position. I think the farthest right side of my house in the fron tnever sees the sun. I don't complain in the summer though when it is always shady on the front porch.


Yesterday I baked Banana Nut Bread and Boston Brown Bread. I can say that the Boston Brown Bread certainly comes out better baked int he coffee can like my mother use to do it. However we have gone from coffee cans to coffee sold in bags to single serve pods, no coffee cans found in this house. I don't think there even any left in my husbands shed, especially since most of the jun in the old garage was demolished and put in a dumpster with the falling down garage. Now the new shed doesn't have any junk in it


So anyway my four best friends are getting together for the birthday of one of them. She specifically asked for no gifts, I hate it when people do that. I got some beautiful gifts from them when it was my birthday. I know her and her husband enjoy my homemade breads so I baked the banana and brown bread for her.


I never ever dream about my parents, who have both passed. My dream last night included both of them. The dream itself was very vague, all I know is that they were both in it. A little upsetting for me, what are they trying to tell me


W got a B0flex Treadclimber. A very small piece of workout equipment. It is self propelled, not electric. Two seperate treadmills, one for each foot and as you are walking the individual treadmills go up and down to mimic stair climbing. It was very difficult for me to at first. My brain could not wrap itself around the motion. I finally got it after a couple of days of just practicing. Yesterday I did an entire two minutes. The directions said to start out at 5 minutes, I am that much more behind the curve. I will try to do three today, if not I will stick to two minutes for a couple of days.


Today I am going to try to be better about my sugar/carb intake.


A bowl of oatmeal with a few raisins for breakfast.

SNOW

It finally snowed!!!! The bad thing is that it snowed, the good thing is that it is March and this pile of snow is not going to stick around very long. The bird feeder has so much snow on the roof that the shepard's hook is bending.
I had two invites today to go out. One with my daughter and one with a good friend that I consider my second daughter. I don't know who will want to venture out in the snow first.
I got called from my old job yesterday. They call occassionally to ask me to fill in for a sick person or to help out with my old job. I worked from 1-4:30.
The snow is fally in large flakes right now, really beautiful. It is also sticking nicely to the trees and bushes. I guess it is nice to have things looking white instead of the ugly brown for a while.

SNOW?????

I had dinner last night with my good friend/my daughter's godmother. We don't see each other as much as we did when our children were little. Her daughter just got married so she shared some pictures. We didn't attend it was a very small wedding in Virginia. Her daughter's second marriage...........the first was a disaster, with him leaving her for another women early into their marriage. Devastating........I don't know how my friend did it...........her daugher lived hundreds of miles away from her at the time. I would have been besides myself with worry and pain for my daughter. Her daughter had a good job and good friends where she lived so she got through it fairly well.
It's going to snow today..........so they say.......another threat, same as all winter, we will see about this one.

LAZY CATS

These are my two lazy good for nothing cats basking in the sun. Buddy on the left and Bella on the right. Or Belly and Budda.

A beautiful sunny day today but a bit cool. They are calling for snow tomorrow into Thursday but I will believe it when I see it.

I think I need to get a job. I never though I would be saying those words. The entire time from age 15 until age 55 I have been saying I can't wait to retire. Now I am retired.

Teenage years..........I don't want to work I want to be able to hang with my friends.

Twenty's........I don't want to work I want to stay out late and sleep late.

Thirty's........I don't want to work I want to be a stay at home mom.

Forty's.........I don't want to work I want to be home when my child gets home from school.

Fifty's.........I don't have time to work I am taking care of a family and two sick parents and emptying the home I grew up in after my mother died........emptying out my father's smaller apartment when he died and then emptying out my brother's apartment and taking care of his estate after he died.

I didn't have time to work all those years but I did and I don't know how I did it. Now I have time to work and I am retired...........there is something wrong with this picture. Now I am not a teenager, a young adult, a mother to an infant, a mother to a teenager, a care giver to sick parents and a brother. I am a person with a lot of time on my hands. I want a job where I can get up early and get to work by 7......work for about four hours and be home by noon. I reason to get up and dressed in the morning, Where does one find a job like that.

Also, I have always been employed in a job that was "a good choice"; a job with good benefits, a job where I could work only when my daughter was in school; a job in a nursing home where my father was a resident. Now I want a job that I love and have fun at. Since money is not an issue this should be easy......right?

SLIPCOVERS

Not so warm today but the sun is shinning really bright which makes it seem warm especialy when the sun streams in the windows.
I finally took the garland off the mantle in the lving room. Now I have to go find the garland I had up last Spring and Summer. When I find it and put it up I will take a picture.
I took the festive chair covers off the dinning room chairs that I had on for the holidays and washed them and put them away and I put the Spring/Summer/Fall coves back on. I really would like to get these. They are on sale for $40.00 each I don't know if I want to spend the money. They would look great against the walls in the dinning room which are painted about the same color as the yellow in the clip cover.

UPDATE: Bought the slipcovers. They are really pretty and I am glad I did. I will wait until around Easter to put them on the chairs and then maybe I will go and get some dried flowers in the same color combination for a vase on the table. Spring is coming!!!

ICE TEA

Last summer we were hooked on Arizona Ice Team half and half. It was half tea and half lemonade. I don't remember if it had any sugar in it. We would buy a two gallon jugs for $5.00 when it was on sale. When the summer ended I still felt like drinking ice tea instead of soda. So I decided to try again making ice tea from scratch. Every time I have done it in the past I never liked it. I have finally got the recipe down pat. Six decaffeinated tea bags in a two quart heat resistant glass pitcher. Pour boiling water on them and cover with plastic. I use to a this point put the pitcher in the refrigerator but I discovered that letting it steep on the counter was much more effective. I let it sit until it was room temperate then I put in in an air tight container. When ready to serve pour into a glass full of ice. I make sure I always have sliced lemons in he frig. Perfect tall glass of ice tea.
It's only Feb 24 and the wind is blowing like it is the beginning of Mar. MARCH COMES IN LIKE A LION AND GOES OUT LIKE A LAMB. We will be seeing tulips soon.

Bow Flex

The leaves on my rhododendron bush outside my dinning room window are all turned in this morning. But the sun is shing so brightly you would think it was summeer. It is still below freezing but it's going to be close to 40 today. The sky is as blue as if you were at the ocean.
Tomorrow the Bow Flex Tread Climber arrives. Let's see how this plays out.

COMPLELLED

I just felt compelled to write today. I have not in a while. The reason I feel compelled is that the weather has been damn near perfect for this time of the year. The sun is out today and it is close to 45 degrees. I don't think I have worn what I would consider a winter coat all season. I even heard a bird chirping this morning. I don't think it was a bird that you hear chirping when it is really springtime, like a robin or something. I think it was just one of the birds that spend the winter here in the great northeast and it was very happy to be warm. There is a cardinal sitting in the weeping cherry tree outside my dinning room window. The only reason I know it is a male because I read somewhere that male cardinals are bright red and female is brown. Now with that written I can look back from February 19, 2013 and refresh my memory about the weather on this date. Because chances are next year on this date we will be looking at a pile of snow under that cherry tree and the male cardinal's red color will stick out even more against the white snow. I have an awesome rhododendron outside my dinning room window also. The leaves are all perky and flat out. Usually at this time of the year the leaves are all curled into themselves trying to keep warm. The maple trees are being tapped in our area for maple syrup, that usually doesn't happen until late March or early April. I wonder if the farmers are going to be able to plant to crops this year.

CHRISTMAS TREE

Overcast... High 54


I can't belive this weather........I don't think we have had a hard freeze yet. It snowed a couple of inches way back in Oct but has been warm ever since.


I don't think we are going to put up a tree this year. Not that I don't feel in the spirit and really this is going to be the best Christmas in a long time. My daughter has a significant other and they are doing really good. Being so sick last year put a damper on that Christmas put a damper on that and the year before that I was still mourning the sudden loss of my brother. After I lost both my parents too, Christmas has not been the same as it was when my daughter was little and I had my parents and brother.


Last year because I was sick we joined my extended family for Christmas and Thanksgiving. My cousin and her daughter's and their families. They were nice enouogh to realize that we were going to be just the three of us for the hollidays

A QUICK UPDATE

Today was a lazy day, the only thing we did was go to the pet store to get cat food and liter. All of a sudden the cats are not eating the canned food that we have been giving the for years. So every week we try something different.
So we spent most of the day sitting on the front porch. Sometimes I wish this space was my entire world. It is quiet and comfortable and we can eat, sleep, blog, read, play games etc and ever have to leave the porch.
My girlfriend brought me the most delicious home grown tomato so I made grilled cheese and tomato sandwhiches for the three of us. Our patio tomatoes went to crap, I will never do that again. My grandfather would be so disappointed in me. He use to grow the most wonderful tomatoes, why can't I.
Still no plans for the upcoming wedding between my daughter and her fiance. They just don't know what they want to do. She has tried on some wedding dresses. I am not going to call them wedding gowns because they are by no means a gown. One of them we found in a boutique. She wants something very sinple.

BACK AGAIN

Abundant sunshine. High 88. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.





I am back after a long absence. I don't know what comes over me but if I miss a couple of days it just seems too overwhelming to try to catch up and then it just gets worse and worse. What I should do is not worry about try to write about what has happened weeks ago but just concentrate on the current events.





This morning the carpet cleaner came and cleaned the carpet in the living room. I also had him shampoo a chair and the couch. I had taken the cushion covers off of the couch cushions and wahed them so he only had to shampoo the rest of the sofa.





Last night my husband and my cousin and I celebrated our best friend's birthday. I have never cooked a port roast before. I was always afraid that it would never come out as good as my mother's but when my friend requested it as her birthday dinner I could not refuse. It came out delicious. I rubbed the roast with salt and pepper and put small slivers through the meat on top and stuffed garlic down inside the roast. Cooked it on 400 degrees for 10 minutes then a slow 250 degree oven until the meat thermometer reached the pork setting. I served roasted sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, buttered carrots, applesauce and a tossed salad. Everyone said everything was delicious. The birthday cake was a white layer cake with strawberries and cream between the layers and on top. We hung out on the porch until almost 9. We had a lovely night.

A LAZY HOT SUNDAY AND GUESTS FOR DINNER ON SATURDAY

We got up early this morning and had a nice cup of coffee and a light breakfast on the fornt porch. My favorite thing to do. We decided to go to the outlet stores over in the next state to ours. My daughter took a store managers job in one of the stores there. It was a nice ride and I got to go to the Jones of NY store and buy an outfit and my husband got some new Eddie Bauer polo shirts, his favorite.

We were going to stop for lunch but it was so hot and we new we had a nice cool porch to sit on waiting for us and leftovers from the night before.

On Saturday night we enterained my daughter's future in laws. I made a dinner of roasted cherry tomatoes in a balsamic vinegar and olive oil and garlic, served over angel hair pasta. My husband grilled chicken breasts and we had fresh Italian bread. For an appetizer I made hot crab dip with crackers and a pitcher of my famouos white wine sangria. They brought Italian pasteries for dessert for a local Italian bakery. Everything was delicious. My daugher even stopped by after work.

CLEAN OUT THE GARAGE

We started in early this morning cleaning out the garage. Today they will drop off an excavator and tomorrow the excavator driver will be here to excavate the garage. We managed to get everything out that we wanted to keep and the rest will be dumped with the garage. On Monday of next week we will have delivered a new shed from a company that makes them in Amish Country.
The daughter and her boyfriend came over to help with the clean out.
Saw the eye doc this morning and the cataract surgery went very well in both eyes. Just two more weeks of drops in each eye and then I will see him again.

MOVING IN

When I was ready to move out of my parent's house it was because I was married. Now that I look back on it I didn't care what our first apartment looked like. It could have had shelves supported by cinder blocks in the living room. I didn't care I was moving out of a bedroom that held my entire life into a three bedroom flat with a living room, dinning room, kitchen and a bath and my own washer and dryer. I was going out in the world to start my life with the guy loved and a long future ahead of us. It is very different with my daughter. She owns her own condo and her fiance owns his own house and they both have bought and decorated in their own personal style. My daughter is planning on moving into his house and her decorating style is clashing with his or vice verse. I am having trouble helping them balance this but I never had this problem. Granted most of the things that were in my husband's and my first apartment was his stuff because he had an apartment when we met I still had to merge my stuff into his, but like I said it didn't matter to me. I guess it's different with my daughter she had to earn the money and painstakingly picked out the furniture and paid for it her self so I guess in a sense she is right that she doesn't feel like she wasts to give it up and he had to do the same and he probably feels the same way. The only way I could help them is tell them that they each had a style when they met and now that have to make it an "our style". I am sure it will work out but it may be painful.

RAIN RAIN RAIN

One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep track of the things that happen every year like the daily weather, planting flowers and shrubs and when we accomplished things on the outside of the house each Spring.

Unfortunately I have failed at keeping this blog up to date this Spring so it is basically useless to me in the areas mentioned above.

The only thing I can say that it seems to have been raining a very long time.

I will try to sum things up for the last few weeks.

I have had cataract surgery in both eyes. The right eye was a breeze and two weeks later the second eye seemed to give me a bit more trouble. There was pain in the left eye that didn't exists in the right eye and a blood vessel or somethng was broken during surgery on the left or second eye that caused my eye to look disgusting but did not effect the results of the surgery. The doctor said it looks great.

The mud/laudnry room is complete. The just have to finish the trim around the outside of the additon.

The pictures show some of the room. The cabinet with the lamp on it was in my brother's apartment. It was unfinished so I painted it to match the seat covers on the chairs.

Don't look beyond the windows, just look at the table and chairs. The car isn't usualy parked on the lawn and this is my husband old jeep that he uses to go back and forth to his construction sights with. The chair covers are new. This is a very old ice cream palor table and chairs that was in the store that my husband's grandparents had. They had a gas station and one part of the store was devoted to an ice cream parlor.

The washer dryer area and to the left of the washer dryer is the stainless steel shelves that we bought for storage of my small appliances, blender, crockpot, toaster, kitchen aid mixer, waffle maker, etc. The bi fold doors close and it doesn't even look like a laundry area.

BOOKSTORE

My daughter had the day off yesterday so we had the opportunity to go to the bookstore together to pick up a WEDDING PLANNER. Yes there has been some excitement since I last wrote here, an engagement.




On April 30th it was a nice enough day so we thought we would get the screens out from under the porch and put them up on the porch. So that's what we were doing when my daughter's boyfriend drove up without her. I figured she had asked him to come and help us with the screens. He did help and then when my husband and he were done they sat in the back yard with a cold drink and he said. "the reason I am here is because I want to ask you something, I would like to take Liz and my relationship to the next level, I would like to ask her to marry me, with your permission, of course." My husband, of course said yes. He had the ring with him and I actually got to see it before she did.

The ring is a halo setting.

He asked her to marry him that night and presented the ring on one knee. He is really a sweetheart.

AN ENGAGEMENT

OMG!! Where do I begin! My daughter is engaged!! I never thought I would say those words. She and her boyfriend had Saturday off from work. She texted me and said that she was going to get her nails done and he was going to run some errands. I spotted him on Facebook chat so I asked him what he was doing. He said he was going to pick up a special package and then stopping by our house to show it to us. He got here about 2:30 and helped my husband with a few things outside he was working on. We were putting up the screens on the front porch. After a while that sat on the back patio to take a short break and he said, "the reason I am here is that I have to ask you a question...........I would like to take your daughter and my relationship to the next level...........I would like to ask her to marry me.