7 Quick Takes (Vol 247)

February. The month when you start to see the light at the end of the winter tunnel….and you hope it is not a train. You know what you need to do. When you are done basking in the blather warmth here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of melting snow in Sochi, Russia, over to Conversion Diary.

Oh, and incase you follow me with an RSS feed and wonder why you got this blog post twice…it is because I was a bit “quick” on pulling the post trigger and realized that I hadn’t written the introduction. Let’s try this again shall we?

Blather that even Vladimir Putin envies.

1.
I love the Olympics but I feel like I am watching entirely too much TV. I am not normally a daytime TV watcher. In fact, unless there is some huge news event that I am monitoring I rarely turn the TV on during the day.

But for these two weeks it is Olympics on the TV almost all day long.

And may I say, the “color commentator” that they have for the Cross Country skiing events, I am afraid that he is going to have a stroke by the end of every competition. I had no idea that anyone could get that worked up about a cross country skiing event.

I am exhausted just listening to him.

And one more thing….

Bob Costas PLEASE get better. Matt Laure is a poor substitute.

2.
It was a whopping 32F yesterday. I felt like I should break out the shorts and t-shirts it seemed so warm out there. And the weather person is saying that it will be in the 50s next week.

Heck we might even, eventually, get as warm as Sochi, Russia….where it has been in the 60’s. Which is what you would expect for a port that is able to sustain palm trees year round. But NOT what you should have for the Olympics.

Just saying.

3.

I treated myself to a trip to Half Price Books yesterday. I love that place. I have loved Half Price Books since I discovered their flagship store in Dallas during my nursing school days. It was a place of wonder and discovery, much less well “organized” than my current local HPB and therefore all the more fun. I could get lost for hours.

Why I am telling you this after showing you a picture of a woman standing on a step stool looking at books on the top shelf? Well it is because of what this woman is doing. Something that I dislike.

She and her companion (who smelled so strongly of smoke that I couldn’t share an aisle with him) were diligently going book by book, scanning them with their little hand held scanners, looking for books that they could buy cheap and resell at higher price. You cannot see it in this picture but that cart is full of kids books.

OK, I know that they have to make a living but I hate when these people do this. They act like they are doing something wrong, scanscanscan look around to see if anyone is watching scanscanscan. I am sure that the staff of HBP know they are there and that they are fine with what is happening but I just dislike it. I hate even more, I mean REALLY hate it, when I encounter these same kinds of people at our local library book sales. They are usually first in line and when admitted start grabbing books and making a huge pile in a corner of all their books. Now they might not buy all of these books, they haven’t scanned them yet, but the books are not available for someone else during this time. Then they scan the books, buy the ones that they can sell at higher price and leave the “discards” in an unruly pile in a corner.

It makes my blood boil. And I will admit, that for one brief moment when she was in the bathroom, I thought about taking some of those books and reshelving them just to be ornery.

Stepping off soapbox now.

4.
I have become a lazy blogger and therefore an inconsistent blogger. I am not sure at what point in the last several years I drifted into writing my blog post in the afternoon. It may have been a gradual things, a slippery slope that just kept me sliding down into bloggilaziness.

I am not really an afternoon sort of person. I don’t get as much done after around 1p as I do in-between say 6a and 1p. That is my “golden time”. So, when I am blogging in the afternoon what often seems to happen these days is that I will think, “Oh, I need to go and write a blog post.” But then I look at the clock and realize that it is 4p (or sometimes later) and I just don’t get downstairs to do it.

So, I am going to try changing things up a bit and blogging in the morning if I can. We will see how I do. Also, I am not really tied always to blogging using my computer. Now that I have a QWERTY keyboard for the iPad I can very effectively blog from there as well (which I did yesterday).

Of course no one may actually care when or if I blog……..

5.
In rooting around in my freezer this week, a place that is still a bit disorganized from the move SIX MONTHS AGO, I made a discovery…..

Three more packages of my homemade fruit leather. I had completely forgotten about these, not having been over impressed with my efforts at the time. I am surprised that I didn’t just throw them out when I moved the freezer contents from OCK to Chez Knit. But there they were.

I decided to try one again…..

Guys I LOVE THEM!! Tart yet sweet. Packing a fruit punch. I wondered why I hadn’t liked them all that much at the time and then I remembered what the problem had been. They had seemed just too brittle and dry. I have solved that problem though. When I want some I just take them out of the frig and put them on the counter for 5 minutes or so. They warm up a bit and soften up and are fabulous. I can see that I am going to have to make some more as soon as fruit season comes around. Actually, I have a boat load of apples in the frig from my apple picking extravaganza last fall so I may experiment with apple fruit leather.

6.
It is just about this time every year when I start to think about flowers.

Flowers that I am going to put in planters and pots.

February is the month when we all need to start thinking about color and sunshine and flowers.

This year it will be a bit different for me as I now have landscape beds that are taken care of by someone else. No more do I have a huge back garden to indulge myself in. But after watching what happens with the landscape crew I can see that there are some things that I will be doing. Once the snow recedes from the land (I sound like a northern version of Noah) I am going to start spraying the Hydrangea bushes with deer repellent. They have decimated the planting and this must stop. The landscape crew isn’t going to do this, not their job and frankly I doubt if they know or care. It is me or the four footed marauders deer…and I am going to win. I am not going to plant flowers in the landscape beds but I am going to extensively use pots etc. My brain is spinning with ideas.

Now if it would just get warm.

I may actually have to go out and buy a plant that has flowers on it just to get myself through.

7.
We all need a bit of laughter during the dark doldrums of winter.

Here you go.

You can thank me later.