Happy Thanksgiving

As we get ready for Thanksgiving I just want to take a few moments to think of the things I'm thankful for, and heading that list are  my husband and daughter.  They are my heart and soul!  Each day they bring me joy and I'm grateful to have them, I know how lucky I am.

I'm grateful for my sisters, I don't get to see them as often as I would like, but I'm thankful to have them.

I'm thankful for my friends both near and far, and for facebook that has allowed me stay in touch, and reconnect with old friends and family.

I'm thankful for my health and don't take it for granted.

I'm thankful for our furry baby Miss Kitty who adds so much to our life.
I'm thankful to live in the best country in the world, we've lived in other countries and traveled to many more, and though there are places that are special to us, home is best.

So I hope that all of you out there who celebrate Thanksgiving have a good one.

Oh the Joy and the Pain!

The Boat Anchor that's leaving

Our new tv is here!  We've been looking at new tvs for a while now, tired of the huge boat anchor that has been sitting in the familyroom all these years, the d**n things just don't wear out like they should.  Last fall we bought a 37" Vizio for upstairs and after much shopping around we ordered a 42" for upstairs, and we'd move the 37" downstairs.  We'd looked at Best Buy and Walmart because they were the cheapest and then I went online to Amazon who offered me everything I'd been looking for, 42", 120 hz, no tax, free delivery and about $100 less than anyone else was offering.  So last Monday I ordered it and this morning they delivered it, in a HUGE box, but luckily it wasn't that heavy and Mac and I wrestled it upstairs.  Then we went to look at the boat anchor, I mean tv in the familyroom.  Our guess was that it weighed somewhere between 300 and 400 lbs. There was no way we'd be able to carry it out or even lower it to the dolly we'd planned on moving it with.  We're giving it to a friend and he can't pick it up till after Thanksgiving so we had to come up with a plan.
Eying the blanket chest that we use for a coffee table I suggested to Mac that we could put it on a towel (oh the things I've learned watching HGTV, ease the tv onto it and push/slide it out of the room to where it could wait to be picked up.  It worked!

The 37" that has moved downstairs

So then we headed upstairs, disconnected the tv up there because it was moving downstairs and put the new tv up, connected cables and the satellite and waited for a big, bright picture to appear, it didn't, just a message saying searching for satellite, searching, searching, searching, nothing.  Looking through the paperwork that came with the tv I found a number for Vizio tech support, called, talked to a gentleman in South Dakota who said they were having freezing rain and he and Mac tried a number of things.  Then Mac decided that because the satellite box downstairs was the main one and that maybe it had to be on to get the one upstairs to work, smart man.  We now have two huge tvs, and the older and blinder I get they're much appreciated.

The new 42"

Please Remind Me

Please remind me why I bought a glass topped kitchen table.  Was it because of the attractive way the dust  glows in the sunshine?  Was it because of the way cat prints show up so well?  Was it because junk looks so much better sitting on glass?  Was it to highlight the dirty floor underneath it?  Was it because the glass is so thick that things falling on it break so much easier?  Was it because we really didn't need a kitchen table because we usually eat sitting on the couch?
I'm sure that if I think hard enough I'll remember why.

Good Bye Rugs

The work on the closets has begun, Mac started in yesterday working in his because it was the worse.  We have wire shelving units and about half of them had fallen in his closet and he hardly has any clothes hanging in his, I'm assuming that the builder didn't bother attaching the shelving to studs which means that eventually the drywall gives way and you end up with large holes in your wall.   So Mac  had to plaster and sandpaper before he could paint, and as he was painting the rest of the shelving fell down pulling down more drywall.  Well the plastering is done, the painting is done and the rug, that God-awful, nasty rug is gone, and after I took the picture he pulled the mat out too.  Now he's starting on the flooring, I sure hope mine isn't as big a pain to do , though the pain has been Macs I just listen to the sad sounds coming from the closet.
We're putting in a metal clothes rail and wooden shelves and storage in his closet,  no more wire shelving!

A Movie Review, Sort Of...

We watched Toy Story 3 last night, and not having seen the first two in the series we had only a vague idea of what to expect.  Well it was wonderful, smart, sweet, funny, everything you want in a movie, just goes to show you can make a wonderful "G" rated movie if you try. We laughed often and  my head was "leaking" at the end and for some reason my nose was running so I kept sniffing.
There were many touching moments in the film, but one that really hit me is when the Mom puts her arms around her son who is going off to college, and says she wishes she could go with him, you could tell that it has finally hit her that he's going away and things will never be the same.
I remember when our daughter left for college, we were living in Izmir, Turkey and she was going to be attending the University of Georgia.  We drove her to the airport in Izmir and had to leave her at the curb,  because of Turkish security no one was allowed in the terminal without a ticket.
Leaving the airport Mac and I both cried, it was probably the hardest thing we'd ever done. It was horrible, she was just 17, our baby, our only child and she was flying half-way around the world on her own.  But more than saying good-bye to her, we were saying good-bye to her childhood, she was an adult now and we knew that when she came home again it would be as a visitor and that is one of the saddest things a parent has to come to terms with.  To her I'm sure she saw it all as a wonderful adventure, the next step in her life, but to us it marked the end of her childhood, she wasn't our little girl any more, now she was an adult, and though I've often said I enjoyed every age our daughter was, but that adulthood was the best, I must confess there are times when I miss the little girl who played with horses, wrote pencil stories and thought her Dad could do anything.
So to finish my sort of review I'd say that Toy Story 3 was about childhood's end and I definitely connected with it, sad and beautiful.  I'd highly  recommend the movie.

Christmas Shopping

I guess people are getting serious about Christmas shopping now, Mac has sold another painting on etsy and we took it and the other one he'd sold to the post office this morning.
He's very busy painting a series of  Christmas pictures and they'll go to etsy this weekend.
Here are a couple of the Christmas ones he has on there now.  I'm not sure which is my favorite.

I finally finished one of the gifts I've been working on and have another one almost done, though it is now

so covered with cat fur I'll have to find some way to defur it before wrapping it.  It's very windy here today, a cold front is passing through and because the temperature is well up in the 70's it's a little spooky, it looks like tornado weather outside.  The leaves are finally starting to change color here and it actually looks like fall.  Well back to work again, oh my poor sore fingers!

Another Thing I've Lost to Old Age

I've come to terms with the face that my skin is sliding off my face and leaving me looking like the Saggy, Baggy Elephant.  And I've learned to live with receding gums that leave me with long walrus tusks, yes I'm now long in the tooth...can wisdom be for behind?  .  I don't even miss my eyebrows much.  But I want my bottom lip back.  I use to have a nice fat bottom lip, so fat my Mother would accuse me of pouting when I wasn't.  But now it's gone, there's just barely a streak of darker pink under my mouth.  I've taken to using darker lipstick on the bottom to make it look bigger, but it's not the same.  I refuse to have fat shot into it and chewing on it all day isn't helping either.  I miss it, no telling what will go next.

What Do You Think?

Keep Sarah Palin off Discovery

act.credoaction.com

Tell Discovery: Someone who vocally advocates for habitat-destroying oil drilling, denies global warming is a human-caused threat, and spearheaded a brutal wolf-slaughter program as governor of Alaska has no place in your eco-conscious lineup of shows.

act.credoaction.com
 A friend of mine posted this on her  Facebook page and I told her that I thought she, and whoever started this, were trying to restrict free speech on the Discovery Channel.  She disagreed, saying that Sarah Palin didn't match the environmental outlook of the Discovery Channel and they shouldn't run a program about her.
I asked if she knew what was on the Discovery Channel, think Swamp Loggers, The Big Catch, even Mythbusters where they're shooting up pig carcus's all the time.
I then discovered that the Sarah Palin's Alaska is actually going to be on TLC (part of the Discovery Channel family of stations)  the channel that brought us Jon and Kate Plus 8 which I told her was even worse than a program about Sarah Palin.
Now I'm no fan of Sarah Palin but writing into the Discovery Channel to keep her off is wrong, definitely a violation of free speech.  What do you think?

It's Friday, Where Did My Week Go?

Well the week has just flat  disappeared on me  and November isn't  far behind, I feel like throwing an anchor out.  I meant to Blog yesterday about Veteran's Day, a special day for us, for not only did Mac serve 21 years in the Army (he was drafted for the Vietnam War), but he was named after his Uncle Mac who died in the second World War shortly before my Mac  was born.  Mac's Uncle Phil also served,  as did 3 of my Uncles.  My Father didn't (bad eye sight) but he and my Mother met in the shipyard where they were building Liberty ships.  So we owe a lot to our Veterans!  If President Obama does nothing else while he's in office, and I hope he doesn't, he needs to bring our troops home!  We live near Ft.Stewart and some of the troops there have served 6 or 7 combat tours, enough is enough!
Most of this week I've been busy working on Christmas presents, putting them together, taking them apart, putting them back together, you know how it goes, and my fingers are sore, I can't sew with a thimble on.  I did get 2 Thanksgiving pillows done and they're sitting on chairs in the entryway.  And it felt like we kept having to run into town for one thing or another.    Though it's only 8 miles away sometimes it feels like we have to hitch up the horses load up the wagon and drive all day to get there.

We went in yesterday to pick up one of Mac's paintings, (The Great Escape) it was for sale in a store in town but it got sold on etsy, it's going to a new home in North Carolina,  and we needed to pick it up and drop off a replacement painting.  The lady at the store liked the replacement (Bass)  so much she asked him to bring more, how nice.
This morning I cleaned the top of my stove, oh Lord why don't they come up with burners that food won't stick to? and polished the floors in the living room.  I'm tired, my knees are sore and it's time to sew.
Have a great weekend.

The Great Escape 

Bass

Cranberries

Side-wheel Harvester

Hand Picker

You learn something new everyday if you pay attention and hate commercials.  We were watching football last night and because I refuse to watch commercials I went "grazing" through the channels and found Martha Stewart, my favorite felon,  doing a Thanksgiving special and she was going to harvest cranberries.
She went to a farm and was given an old fashioned cranberry picker that you swing through the plants, this is known as dry harvesting and even with a more modern push picker it's a very labor intensive way to pick and is only used for fresh cranberries--about 5-10 % of the national crop.
The rest of the cranberries are wet picked.  They're not grown in water as I thought, but rather their beds are flooded with 6-8 inches of water in Autumn when  the berries are ripe and a side wheel harvester is driven through them and it separates the berries from the plants, they are then corralled and picked up.
I knew that cranberries were grown in New England, but I learned that they grow as far south as Tennessee and that they are an evergreen.  Also watched Martha make a wreath out of cranberries.
My daughter and I love cranberries and she always makes us fresh cranberry sauce at Christmas, Mac on the other hand thinks cranberries are pretty awful.  They're one of those things you either love or hate, but isn't it nice to know that hating commercials can be educational.

Corraling the Cranberries

To The Mountains We Will Go ....

Haven't been blogging this week because we took a mini-vacation and went to the mountains in north Georgia.  Mac has been wanting to go trout fishing ever since we moved here and it's much too warm for trout here on the coast so I picked out a cabin near Blue Ridge, Georgia, appropriately named Rising Trout Lodge, it was supposed to be situated on Fighting Town Creek a good trout stream and made a reservation for the first few days of November.

The drive took about 6 hours, partly because we had to go through Atlanta, but we got  there in the early afternoon.
The cabin was beautiful, well decorated, well stocked and sitting in the woods.  But there were a few problems the first of which was the road in.  When we picked up the key-code at the rental office in town nothing was said about the condition of the road other than to say that the cabin was only 2 1/2 miles off the main road.  The directions were fine and then we got to the last stretch where you left the paved road and went onto a gravel road, in itself not a bad thing gravel roads give good traction in wet weather, but this road was in bad condition with large, sharp rocks sticking up, we scraped our bottom but finally made it to the cabin and let me tell you the last piece was STRAIGHT down, talk about pucker!  But we made it, deciding right then there'd be no night driving to this place and we'd eat our meals at the cabin.
So next we went to look at the creek which the lady at the rental agency had just told us was just across the field.  There were no fields, just a log and dirt set of steps going STRAIGHT DOWN the side of the hill.  Mac had to help me down and I all but crawled back up.  The creek was fresh and running and Mac looked forward to fishing in it, I knew I'd never go back down the steps to it again.
We had an early night and got up the next morning with the intention of heading into town and buying enough groceries to carry us through the trip, we'd picked up a few the day before thinking we'd eat out some--that was before seeing the road we had to drive.  Jumped in the car and part way up the first hill  a light for low tire pressure came on, we managed to  get to a flat place near the entrance to the gravel road and Mac looked at the tires and saw that one was flat, we'd cut the edge of it on on of the large rocks we'd driven over getting to the cabin.  Miatas don't have spares any more just a pump to pump your tire up and get you to a gas station.  Well there was no pumping this tire up and we were considering who to call,  AAA, a tow truck, God, when a man drove up from a cabin down a dirt road, said he had to go to the Post Office but would come back and take Mac and the tire to a tire shop.  Mac went looking for the jack, which looked like a toy and managed to get the tire off, and bless him, the man, whose name was Dick, returned and took Mac and the tire off.
Meanwhile I walked back to the cabin, about a 1/2 mile, not a bad walk till the end where it was STRAIGHT down to the cabin, I all but sat on my bottom and scooted down, it was bad, bad, bad.
Anyway, Mac got a new tire, we went into town and bought food, returned and parked the car at a different cabin, one not to be occupied until the weekend and most importantly not down the road our cabin was on.  We carried the groceries down to the cabin on foot.
We decided then and there that though we'd leave the car at the other cabin overnight, we really didn't have much choice, that we'd pack up in the morning and come home a day early.  So Mac spent the rest of the day fishing--altogether on the 2 days he caught 8 fish, none of which were trout, for as we found out, there are no trout in Fighting Town Creek.
Yesterday morning we got up and began ferrying our suitcases and stuff the 1/2 mile or so to the car, and except for the horrible stretch right in front of the cabin it wasn't too bad, though truth be told Mac did all the heavy carrying, I'd done the packing up and carried the lighter stuff.
So now we're home, safe and sound and not very happy with the North Georgia Mountain Cabin Rentals LLC.  The pictures and descriptions of the cabin we rented were deceptive.  They said our cabin would be a trout fisherman's paradise because it had 500 feet on a good trout stream.  Nowhere did it say you'd have to go straight down the mountain to get to the water or that you  needed a special vehicle to even get to the cabin.  We had exchanged e-mails with this company and talked to them in person Monday when we picked up our key-code.  If we had not been in reasonably good shape we would have never have made it up and down the road.  If we'd had young children I would have been terrified to let them out of the cabin.  If there had been an emergency it would have been difficult for help to have gotten to us and impossible for us to have gotten out in a hurry.
Lovely as the cabin was I would never recommend it to any one.  And I noticed that most of the pages in the guest book where you leave comments had been torn out, I'm not surprised.