Happy Halloween, Sort of

Well today is Halloween though the kids around here went Trick or Treating last night.  That is the few kids who were allowed to go Trick or Treat any more.  We had 3 kids stop by our house,  that's all, so I gave them loads of candy.  It's sad that so few get to go out, though I can't blame the parents, I hardly let our daughter Trick or Treat when she was young, I generally threw her candy away and give her some I had bought.
How different all that is from when I was a child, oh those many years ago.  Our parents didn't go Trick or Treating  with us, no one bothered us out there in the dark, we stayed out for hours and then came home and gorged ourselves on the candy.  It was heaven.  The last time I went I was 13, getting a little old for it, but it was such fun you hated to give it up.
Now parents have to be by their child's side, all candy must be inspected and no home made treats will be accepted, how sad.
It's a strange world we live in and I'm sure each generation has thought that their growing up years were the best, but I know mine were a good time to be a child.  We went to the movies on Saturday without an adult.  We left our doors unlocked as well as our cars.  No one swore on our tv or took their clothes off.  Adults were the smart people not the kids.  We played outside until dark and our parents didn't worry about us.  We were children,  we didn't have to worry about Aids, Breast Cancer, Drugs, Child Molesters, etc--we'd never heard of these things.  But children as young as 3 and 4 are told about such things now, where's the chance to just be a child without worries?
I don't envy children of today, they're hardly allowed to be children at all.

A Witch By Any Other Name

Actual size of bloomer pattern

My witch is done, well mostly done, she doesn't have her cat and she doesn't have her bloomers, and quite frankly she may never get them.  I'm not a great sewer, but I'm competent, I can read directions, follow a pattern and sew a straight seam, so when I saw the pattern for my witch I ordered it thinking that would be so much easier than just making one free hand.  Boy was I wrong.  The pattern was terrible, clothes turned out way too big and didn't fit, I had to enlarge the body, directions were terrible, and not in good order.  They simply told me to cut a piece so big by so big for the skirt   and I was expected to free hand her bloomers from a tiny diagram, now I can do that, but I paid for a pattern and I expected to get a pattern for each piece.  But she's done and if I don't end up hating her I might make her cat, but she'll never get those bloomers!

Book Skeletons

In honor of Halloween this weekend: What reading skeletons do you have in you closet/  Books you'd be ashamed to let people know you love?  Addiction the the worst kind of (fill in cheesy genre here)?  Your old collection of Bobbsey Twin Mysteries lovingly stored behind you "grown-up" books?  You get the picture...come on, confess!

I took this from the Island of Voices Blog and it got me to thinking.  She mainly talked about books from her childhood, but my hidden skeletons are of a different sort.  In an earlier blog I talked about the genres of books I read and I said that I don't read romances, and  well,  that's not strictly true, one of my skeletons is Regency Romances, in particular Georgette Heyer's.  I discovered her when I was in my 20's and have read nearly all of her books, regency romances, historical novels, and mysteries.  I own quite a few of her books, mainly the regencies and the mysteries.  Though it would be  hard to say which of her books iis my favorite perhaps The Foundling comes very close, though Sprig Muslin, The Reluctant Widow and Cotillion also rank very highly on my list.  I know Regency Romances are fairy tales but I so enjoy their convuluted, though predictable  story lines.  Ms Heyer's in  particular are well written, often humorous and just darn fun.  Oh Lord, went to Amazon to look something up about one of her books and I ended up ordering 2!

And in the strictly romance department I'm addicted to Diana Galbaldon's Outlander series.  I know what I said about romance novels,  about Scotsmen, time travelers, et al. but I've been into this series since the beginning and I guess I'll be with Claire and Jamie to the end.  Along the way I've learned a bit about Scotish history (Culloden) and American history--the pre-revolutionary skirmishes, as well as enjoying a good love story.
So those are my skeletons, what are yours?

Monday Melange

Squirrel

Today was a running  around day, with Dr. visit, all is well, library books returned, and it's back to Amazon for me, a visit to the Post Office where I paid an arm, a leg and any future child I might have (LOL) to mail two packages, then off to a well deserved breakfast.
We went to a new, to us, restaurant a couple of miles from here, it's been here for several years and we kept telling ourselves we needed to eat there, so today we did.  It's primarily a breakfast place, though they're now serving lunch too.  And as breakfast is their speciality you'd expect them to do it well, and they did, eggs cooked just the way I like them, scrambled to death, enough ham to feed a small family, toast that wasn't dripping in butter and best of all, hash browns that tasted like they'd been julienned and cooked  on the spot and not dragged out of some freezer, and even better they weren't greasy.  Mac had corned beef and eggs and his was equally good.  It appears to be a family run place, not a chain and that's a big plus, so we'll be going back.
When we got home Mac saw waves in the pool and realized that something was in the pool and it  couldn't get out----we lost a much beloved cat that way, so he  rushed out and grabbed a net to quickly fish out a squirrel who barely had his nose above the water.  He, the squirrel,  lay on the deck exhausted barely breathing, Mac wondered what he should do, but  Lord knows you don't want to give a squirrel artificial respiration--who knows what that might lead to--but after a while he began to move around, drying himself off, but still appearing rather shaky.  Mac has put some bird seed and honey out for him and we're hopeful he'll be ok.  He's now sitting on the edge of the deck and looks almost normal.

She's Looking a Little Deconstructed

Then after out walk I went upstairs to work on my witch.  Every time I think I going to make lots of progress on her I really get bogged down.  Today it was her legs, I'd painted them last week and had planned on quickly sewing them together, stuffing them and attaching them to the body.  Well they're stuffed and sewn together but they're not attached to anything.  Stuffing them was a bugger even though you do it in stages.  Finally I put them aside, painted her face, sewed the bodice and skirt together and called it a day.  Hopefully I'll get her apron and hat done tomorrow, that is if stuffing her arms doesn't take forever!

Pea, Peas, Peas, Peas, Eating Goober Peas....

A little post about peanuts an important crop in Georgia.  When the Atlanta Braves were playing the San Francisco Giants in the baseball playoffs this month I bet Mac's cousin (who lives in California) that the Atlanta Braves would win,  If  Atlanta won  he would send me a bag of California pistachios, if San Francisco won I would send him a bag of Georgia peanuts.  Well of course Atlanta lost and I've been on the track of some Georgia peanuts  and I haven't  been able to find  any from Georgia any where.
 What I have learned is that there are 4 types of peanuts grown here in the South: runner, Spanish,  Valencia and Virginia.  Ninety-nine per of the peanuts grown in Georgia are runners and those are used primarily for making peanut butter.  Before the 70's they mainly grew Spanish peanuts  here and now it's runner peanuts.  The most popular peanut for just eating is the Virginia peanut and its grown in North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina, and that's the only kind of peanut I could find for sale in any of the stores.
It should also be said that peanuts aren't actually nuts at all, they're members of the legume family, so they're more a pea than a nut.
 As for the title of my Blog, well that's an old Civil War song and the goober peas they're singing about are boiled peanuts and they were an important part of the Confederate soldier's diet.  I've never eaten a boiled peanut, seen them, decided they were not for me, peanuts, even if they're really a pea, should not bend.
So cousin you'll be getting North Carolina peanuts, not Georgia peanuts unless you want a jar of peanut butter.

Birthday Lunch

Mezes

As I said yesterday I took Mac out for lunch for his birthday, which is today, and we went to Troy, a Mediterranean restaurant over in Savannah.  It was very good, the service was excellent and the food was very authentic.

Gyro Plate

We started with a plate of Mezes that included Hummus, Stuffed Grape Leaves,  Baba Ganush, and that's spelled correctly regardless of what Blogger thinks, and Pita bread.  It was all good, particularly the Baba  Ganush which is pureed egg plant.  As you can see from the picture we had half eaten it before I remember to take a picture of it.
For entree I had a Gyro plate that came with a salad and a fish soup, I gave that to Mac although it was quite tasty. It had rice with it and an interesting veggie dish, carrots, squash and celery julienned and steamed, very tasty.  Unfortunately I was stuffed by the time my entree got there and I brought most of it home.
Mac had the Lamb Shank he'd been craving and he said it was delicious.  It came with the same veggies and garlic potatoes.  But again, way too much food, and most of it got taken home.
We really enjoyed the food and we'll be going back again.  About the only negative thing I would say about it is that it sits in a strip mall and the view is of passing traffic, they should just pull the curtains.

Lamb Shank

Beautiful October Day

It's a beautiful October day, the sky is so blue it looks phony. So just a few random items before we take off for the day.  Tomorrow is Mac's birthday and he's been craving lamb shank so we're going to try out a new, to us anyway, Mediterranean restaurant  over in Savannah.  I'm looking forward to the Mezes and tons of pita bread.  Their menu online looks like they have a mixture of Greek and Turkish food and as we lived in Turkey for a couple of years we really like Turkish food, so fingers crossed.  
Mac's getting a green house for his birthday, I had him pick it out because I wanted him to get one he really wanted, but I have a few surprises planned for him too.
Before lunch we're off to order wood flooring to put in our closets, FINALLY!   We've had yucky carpeting in there forever, I do not want to think about what the people who owned our house before us did to them, but bad dog thoughts run through my mind.  When we pulled up the carpet in our bedroom and put in wood floors and pulled the carpet out of the bathroom and replaced it with tile we said that next we'd do the closets next.   But with one thing and another we haven't gotten around to them till now.  We will order the wood today and it will be done before Thanksgiving, YEAH!
And before  shopping  we're going to do early voting, and boy howdy, if ever there was a year when I thought all the candidates stunk this is it.  I've moved back and forth between the two parties, I guess that makes me an Independent,  and I'm fed up with both of them.  Does this make me a Tea Party fan, no, I'm frustrated with the direction of our country and how high taxes are, but I think most of the Tea Party candidates are just too weird for words.  So I guess I'll just hold my nose and vote.
But as I said, it's a beautiful day.

What I'm Reading

Let it be said I'm a reader, always have been.  As a kid I read cereal books, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, any thing I could get my hands on.  The first thing I did when we moved to a new place was get a library card.  Since I've retired I read even more, I read any where from 3-5 books a week.  And I'm pretty eclectic in what I read everything from fantasy, science fiction, history, spy stories, convuluted suspense novels, whodoneits, mysteries, a few biographies, to  a  little non-fiction.  So obviously I'm not real choosy, but even I have standards.

For the past 10 years or so Amazon has been my "library" of choice.  They make it easy to buy, they keep track of what I read and offer new suggestions, I can get free shipping with them and when buying used books I can pay as little as a penny a book plus postage.  But in a fit of economy a few months ago I decided to start using our local library again, and unfortunately this hasn't worked out.  Our library is small and though they try to keep up to date with books the selection is not good.  If you like "cutesy" mysteries solved by chefs, knitters, quilters, book sellers or antique dealers, they've probably got a book for you.  If you want a romance (and notice that's about the only genre I didn't mention reading) about a Highlander, pirate,  frontiersman, aristocrat, time traveler, vampire, again, they've probably have a book for you. If you want science fiction or fantasy from 20 years ago they might have it.  If you want the "trashier" books off the New York Times best seller list you can get in line for one of those.  But if you enjoy older authors, books from the 30's, 40's or 50's they don't have any. If you want books to make you think, to take you outside of yourself, then you're in for a disappointment.   Each week I've brought a stack of books home, tried to read them, at times made myself finish them and hauled them back to the library in hopes that the next  visit would be more successful.

I get the feeling I'm not the only person feeling a bit let down by the choices available for as I turned my books in last time a lady eagerly asked if any of my books was any good and I sadly had to tell her no, not a one of them.

So Amazon I'm coming home.

Sunday in the Park

Yesterday's walk was at Ft. McAllister again.  The weather has just been gorgeous so walking is even better than usual.  We do a 2 mile walk every day and now that the weather has cooled down we  try to do an even longer one on Sunday.  So the walk through McAllister, with the Magnolia Trail thrown in, was about 4 1/2 - 5 miles, yes feet I can hear you, but it feels good to get out and walk somewhere different.  The sand on the trail was so fine we could see a raccoon's footprints, in addition to bike tracks.
Then yesterday afternoon and evening was football, football, football.  My team lost, again, they're so bad I may have to start wearing a bag on my head on Sundays!  But the Sunday night game was good.
Today I worked on Christmas presents, can't say too much because most of them are for my daughter.  They're going well, but as they say, the devil is in the details,  and the details are making me blind!
I always have trouble with allergies in the Fall and this year is no exception.  I'm sneezing my head off and my eyes are really bothering me.  So having to look very carefully at what I'm sewing can be aggravating.
But the weather is so nice I will not complain.  I didn't get outside today, dirty house trumped lovely garden unfortunately.  Mac worked on the putting green though and he says we're getting closer to our Fall Invitational.

Tee Time

About 5 years ago Mac made us a small putting green in the backyard.  Now neither of us is a golfer, though we'll watch a bit of it on tv, but we thought it might be fun to play a little pitch and putt.  And that's what we do, in the spring and fall, in the summer it's too hot to do much of anything in our yard.  So the weeds take over the rock edging he put around the green.  About twice a year I'll go out and pull all the weeds and you're  to see the green again.
 This year it really got overgrown and I could barely make out the shape of it.  But I sat out there this morning and started pulling the weeds out of the rocks before the sun drove me in.  They predicted that it would only be in the 70's today, and windy, because there was a cold front passing through, HA!, but it's much closer to 80 than 70 and I felt like I was frying my brain.
Plus the ground was as hard as a rock!  We haven't had any rain since the end of September and they're saying we don't have any coming in the next 8-10 days, so Mac has set the sprinkler up to see if he can soften the ground for me.  Anyway, I took a picture, see if you can spot the putting green.

Time Well Spent

I woke up stiff, sore and as I call it "gruntled", not disgruntled.  Mac says it's the change in seasons and he's probably right, as usual.  But an hour or so in the garden and I feel much better.  I have finally beat back the summer weeds, planted about 60 bulbs, Crocus, and just enjoyed the wonderful weather we're having.

There is nothing like having your hands in the soil to make you feel better.  You'd think I'd be stiffer after being on my knees, but I'm not.  They say that gardening is the slowest of the fine arts and I find that's a speed that fits me well.