Thanks a lot, Hank Williams...

Hank Williams photo from Amazon


All it took was a co-worker mentioning a song she heard on the way to work.

I didn't even hear the darn thing.

But it is stuck...going round and round.

There's a tear in my beer
'cause I'm cryin' for you dear.
You are on my lonesome mind.

And those are pretty much the only words I know. Great. Carey couldn't think of other lyrics either, so I did a web search...twice. But the rest of it won't stay in my head. Just those three lines.

It has been DAYS!

So now my husband...who is a MOST patient man...is fed up. "Stop it," he says. "I can't," say I! But to humor him, and entertain myself, I have started making up lyrics.

Through the years, and the tears
I have always loved your ears.
You are such a cutie-pie.

And he's not only patient. He is a good audience. So he laughs. And laughs.

Every time that I rhyme,
I feel like a freakin' mime.
Why can't I just let it go-o?

(I know what a mime is. I didn't say I was making sense here.)

That's just a small sampling.

Even a patient man can reach a limit. And when he felt a new verse bubbling its way to the surface, he smacked his hand down on the coffee table in an effort to startle my mind away from this demon song. Unfortunately, it just made me laugh...really hard.

When you're angry at me
in my pants I just might pee.
Lord, I hate this stupid song.

Story time...

Don't you just love old books?

Maybe you can't judge them by their covers, but you can love the covers for their own sakes. The colors. The art. The well-loved, much-handled textures.

I have a lot of books, and I can't bear to part with them.

Some of them are from the bookshelves in my parents' house.

Some of them are from the bookshelves in my great aunt's house. I spent a lot of summer days with her, learning to embroider, and crochet, and tat. And I was intrigued by the treasures on her shelves. And she was eager to talk to me about them. Some are inscribed by family members from when they were Christmas gifts. At least one has notes written in the margins by my great-grandfather about the Nebraska farmland that was his stomping ground, brought to life for me by books written by a local author. The funny thing was that I was acquainted with the author...fell in love with her stories, drawn as if by a magnet...from my school library several states away. I was surprised to see her titles and name on my aunt's shelves. She was surprised that I was already acquainted with them. She sent them home with me to love into the future.

I gladly accept that responsibility.

Simply delicious iced coffee...

Emphasis on 'simply' as well as 'delicious.'

I have mentioned this before, and had a request for the 'recipe.' Took me awhile, but finally, here it is.

Ingredients:
water
ground coffee
milk
sugar or sweetener
ice

This is a 'cold brew' coffee. Which works for me, because I've never learned how to make coffee the conventional way...I don't drink hot coffee. I have read that cold brewing also cuts down on the acidity, so it has a smoother flavor.



First find a container to brew your coffee in. This is the one I like to use. I make as much as it will hold, but you can 'brew' as much or as little as you want. I place about 3 heaping Tablespoons of ground coffee in the bottom, and add about three cups of cold water. Stir gently, so that the grounds are wet through. Cover container, and place in the refrigerator overnight.



The next morning, place a coffee filter or cheese cloth over the top of another container pushing it down into the container, and hold in place with a rubber band. Pour the container of cold-brewed coffee through the filter into the second container. (I like to do this through a fine sieve to catch the majority of the grounds...it seems to go a little quicker.)



Once filtered, pour about a cup of the coffee into a tall glass.



Sweeten with sugar or artificial sweetener to your taste, and pour in milk...about an equal amount to the coffee in your glass or to your taste. (I use two envelopes Splenda sweetener and 1 cup fat-free milk.)



Stir well, and fill the glass with ice. Enjoy!

For the remaining filtered coffee, cover the container, and place it back in the refrigerator. It keeps well for a week or so, so for the next couple of mornings, you won't have to go through the brewing/filtering steps.

Sunday visit...

Bobby, 10


Diego, 8

Quality time spent with two of the boys today. I thought the balsa puzzle/sculptures would be challenging for them, but they breezed right through them. Of course, this is the kind of thing that's impossible to do when their little sisters are nearby.

I'm hoping we can borrow them again before too long. It gets harder every year with school and sports.

This land is your land...

This is one of my favorite spots in the world. Every day on my way home, I round a curve, and the road just opens up in front of me. I don't think the photo adequately captures the way the hills roll. We're over the fourth hilltop in the distance.

It always makes me think of the Woody Guthrie song, "This Land is Your Land."

"...As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me..."

My favorite subject...

Ooooohhh, I love it when somebody asks me a question, and Becky asked the best one EVER!

She wants to know what a Sonic Coke is.

So here's the answer, Becky: A Sonic Coke is a fountain drink of the Coke variety from my favorite fast food place of ALL time...SONIC drive-in restaurants. Not crazy about their food. But they have MAGIC ICE (crushed) that makes the drinks really special (according to me and lots of other Sonic aficionados). They also have carhops on roller skates...so nostalgic.

As soft drinks go, I can take them or leave them, and never keep them at home. But when I go to town, I HAVE to have a Sonic drink. Actually, when I'm working I usually go twice a day...for a Coke in the morning, and then for unsweet iced tea later in the day (they have a happy hour with half-price drinks in the afternoon).

I keep telling Carey that someday I want to renew our vows...at Sonic!

Guilty pleasures...

I went back to work today. And I came home to find that Carey had washed, dried, and folded all the towels. Believe me, there was a mountain of towels to be washed! And since they were all germy, I had wanted to get that done before he got home and had to be exposed to them. I wanted to...but I didn't. (Up until now he managed to miss the whole bombardment of contagions.)

Anyway, now I'm feeling the requisite guilt. I'm making up for it by watching baseball with him. But I'm thinking about guilty pleasures. And I have to say that coming home to completed laundry is right at the top of my list.

A few others are: Midnight bowls of cereal. Sonic cokes (probably nobody believes that I still have a little guilt about them, but I do). Days when I spend the whole day in bed reading. Law & Order marathons. Ghost Hunters. Procrastination.

Okay. Enough confessions. My soul says, 'good enough.'