Memorial Day 2014 In My Little Town

HHBL and I are learning the rhythms of our little town. What happens when and where.

Yesterday was Memorial Day. Can I just say that I couldn’t love it more that we could exit Chez Knit and make a 7 minute walk and get a place to stand and watch the parade. No leaving the house 90 minutes before the parade in order to get a parking spot and a good spot to watch the people go by. Nope, out the garage door, put the garage down, walk out the development, take a left, walk down the hill, cross the street and bang, we were done.

Fabulosity.

Lets see what we saw, shall we, in my little town.

Bake sale! We did not partake…but I thought about it.

Lots of people brought their dogs. That is a thought next year, to bring Max the Magnificent. There was a lot of courtesy sniffing going on!

Oh THANK YOU  sir for positioning your video equipment RIGHT in my line of photography. Thank you so, so much.

Lots of standing and cheering as the flags went by.

And then it was on to the annual throwing of the candy into the street JUST out of the range of the children so that they need to run and get it.

Often this was reminiscent of a congregation of alligators going for that last piece of unsuspecting tourist.

Why is it called a congregation of alligators? Is there a pastor alligator? A board of elder alligators? An alligator choir singing hymns, perhaps?

But I digress.

The high school mascot. Now THAT is a job that is coveted on a hot and sultry day.

I love a good marching band. Maybe it is because I played in one during Jr. Hi and High School. And for some reason I am always fascinated by the footwear as they go by.

We won’t dwell on that too much.

“He gave me a WED bawoon! Wed is my favewetist cowwer!”

Egads! Young man why are you doing that in the middle of the street? And where, for the love of all that is holy and padded, are your safety mats! And could you just hold that mid flip so that I can get my camera ready?

Look Ma! No breaks. No, literally. That bike has no breaks. He would pedal for a bit and then drag his feet along the pavement to stop. Maybe we should just call this the Fred Flintstone Flyer.

It is always good for dad to wear cargo pants with extra pockets. This guy kept telling his little girls that there was no more room for candy. And there wasn’t…..in these pockets. They just started filling up other places.

And speaking of his little girls…….

Parade? What parade? I just want to take pictures of all the kids. So stinkin’ cute.

See what I mean! So stinkin’ cute!

And after it was all done and we walked the 7 minutes home and spent a bit of time doing this and that we got to go and participate in the joyous wedding of these two crazy kids!

All in all it was a very good day.

An Enduring and Unexplainable Love

45 years ago today, May 25, 1969, I attended an event that marked the start of a love that endures to this day and is totally unexplainable to some.

I went to my first Indianapolis 500.

I was 9 years old....and a girl....and I would most likely rather have been reading a book. In fact, I did have a book with me, although I have no idea what it might have been. We were living in the Indianapolis area and Papa was a serving in the US Medical Corp. I was more likely concerned on a daily basis with getting on the bus whithout Pilot Man splashing (deliberately I might add) mud on my tights. Or perhaps playing with my next door neighbor. We were an odd couple who might be found on a nice afternoon cutting tunnels in the grass with scissors so that we could make paths for our dolls.

And then there were the endless hours of singing showtunes in her basement.

But I digress.

I know that we sat in the infield on this particular day. That I do remember. And there were A LOT of people...but not nearly as many people as attend now. At least I do not think so but then younger kids never really have a sense of how many people are in attendance at a big event. I think we drove into the infield parking area in a van but I do not remember whose vehicle that we went in. I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting on a folding chair and looking around at all these people and wondering what the heck was going on.

The pace car came past with 33 cars in it's wake. So loud! So much excitement! Once around. Twice around.

And then the checkered flag and life changed for me. A nine year old girl who really, even today, could care less about how a car works just so long as it works. But by the end of that day in 1969 I was hooked. I couldn't yet tell you which engine was in which car just by the sound of the engine. Nor did I understand yet why the car was shapped as it is and what all of the different parts did, why adjustments of a fraction of an inch can make the difference between first and second place. I did not know that there is a fully functioning hospital in the infield, staffed with the best physicians and nurses that can be found, with the sincere hope that they will NEVER be needed. I had no idea at that time that the drivers all start with the same amount of fuel and tires and there is no borrowing either. I did not know at that time what the rules were whether under the green or the yellow or, heaven forbid, the red flag. I knew nothing other than that I loved this thing called Indycar racing with a passion that made no sense. That passion has endured through 45 years.

I have had the privilege of attending "The 500" 5 times in total and ever time has been an truely unique and special occasion. And on the years that I have not attended I have watched. It has been many years since I have been to an Indy, since college years I believe. HHBL would tell you that in very large and highly packed crowds.....

I do not do all that well.

People in my personal space make me as jumpy as a Democrat in a room full of Tea Party members. But if anyone EVER offers me the chance to again attend an Indy 500 I will get over that phobia and right quickly I can promise you that.

Race well gentlemen and woman (there is one competing). Race safely.

My heart is already beating faster than usual and there is still at least 20 minutes before the classic "Gentlemen, start your engines!"

Indiy 500 I will love you forever.

Posted with Blogsy

7 Quick Takes (Vol 260)

Here we are again, Memorial Day on the horizon, the gateway to Summer! If you have a chance, saw thank you to a veteran this weekend!

You know your marching orders. When you are done fulfilling your blathery duties here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, certainly at a faster pace than my blogging this past week, over to Conversion Diary.

Attention! Blather is now in the house.

1.
Oh poor little blog. I must again apologize for my sad neglect of you. I did not mean to take an entire week off. I actually have several blog posts in various stages of writing.

And yet…..

None of them are here at the moment.

I hang my head in shame and apologize to all 7.5 of you who come to visit.

2.
I don’t fear too many things, cooking wise. But my nemesis has always been…..

Cooking dry beans.

I know! I know! Other people accomplish this smallest of kitchen tasks without any issues at all. But cooking dry beans has always been a bugaboo for me. Really it is not that I am frightened of the process, it is more the fact that I always feel like I am teetering on the edge of bean cooking disaster, never knowing if they will turn out or not.

Last week was a good bean week. I made a small batch of kidney beans which I then marinated in a vinegar/sugar dressing along with celery, red pepper and green onions. Oh my stars and garters it was good. I actually had some of it for breakfast….and lunch…..and snack.

It was a windy few days.

I felt confident after that. I felt I had conquered beans. And then yesterday happened. I love baked beans. Warm or straight out of the fridge. For breakfast or dinner. I love them with a fiery, windy passion. But I don’t like all the salt and unpronounceable ingredients that come with a can of baked beans. I had found what looked to be an interesting recipe that you did in a skillet in the oven. It did involve the usual soaking of beans etc.

Let’s just say……it was not a success.

The beans, despite soaking for hours and the addition of a lake of water and homemade chicken stock, never would get anywhere NEAR soft. Crunchy baked beans are not where it’s at in my book.

And there was bacon in them too, which makes their failure extra sad. Plus I sort of resent having used three cups of my homemade chicken stock in something that I ultimately pitched into the garbage.

But I will NOT be downtrodden and deterred. I WILL conquer baked beans. If the pioneers in the wilds of Maine can do it with only a bean pot, some salt pork and a wood burning oven then I can do it too.

When I have it perfected I will give you the details and photos to go with it.

3.
Sunday was my 29th anniversary of being married to this guy…….

Life is a daily adventure with my HHBL.

We went out to breakfast at a place called The Blue Door. If you live anywhere in the Cuyahoga Falls or Akron or Cleveland or Frozen Northeast Ohio area you need to go and have breakfast at The Blue Door. I even gave you TWO links to it just in case.

Mother Mary and all the Saints in Heaven! I had the best bacon and eggs that I have ever had in my life…..and I eat a lot of eggs. The bacon was…..was…..was…..heavenly. Locally sourced, thick cut, smoky, crispy. The eggs were buttery and delicious. 

I am drooling.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the freshly baked English Muffin that was approximately the size of a small Baltic country. It had the same texture as the muffins that I have been producing, more dense, less holes, more bread like. It renewed my desire to perfect (along with cooking beans) my English Muffin skills.

We had a lovely, leisurely breakfast.

A excellent way to celebrate the beginning of our 30th year as an old married couple.

4.
The latest in my “Do It Without a Macro Lens” series. This is just so much fun that it should be outlawed. In fact, maybe I should just call this series “Macro Porn”……

Or not.

The Beauty of Impatiens

I could spend a lifetime just taking macro photos of the things that I find around my house!

5.
So, I started knitting on a sweater this week.

Yup, the weather is finally heating up and I decide that I want to spend hours manipulating Aran weight wool. Call me crazy. You wouldn’t be the first.

This particular pile of yarn is something that I picked up last year at an Estate sale. I don’t think I ever told you about that sale. It was actually “found” on Craig’s List by one of my Knit Sibs. She went and was blown totally to pieces by the rooms full, you read that correctly, ROOMS full of yarn, and toys, and collectible dolls, and housewares and….stuff. Now most of the yarn was acrylic but there was some good stuff. We activated the knitting telephone tree and I managed to get up to Cleveland Heights within about 2 hours. For an obscenely small amount of money I bought a bunch of yarn (good stuff), some books (including one that I had been wanting FOREVER) AND a yarn swift in perfect condition.

As is my usual practice I put my yarn purchases in the freezer for a bit (to make sure it didn’t bring any critters into the stash) and then introduced it to the rest of the yarn family. It didn’t know what it wanted to be yet so I let it just sit.

Monday was the day. I had the pattern in mind that I wanted to do and so I rummaged around in the yarn cupboard and the cream colored Jaegar practically jumped me in it’s eagerness to be knit.

Well OK then!

The first ball got me most of the way through the raglan increases, the sweater is a top down Raglan cardigan….my favorite to knit. I add in the second ball and knit away for awhile. It was evening…..the light was a bit on the lower and softer side……and I didn’t really realize until Tuesday that the second ball of yarn wasn’t quite the same color.

Dang it!

Different dye lots? No, same dye lot. Believe me, I checked that right away. In fact I checked it before starting the sweater, but somehow missed the fact that the balls of yarn vary slightly. The balls were all in one bag and had come that way from the manufacturer, which also usually indicates that they are the same dye lot.

And then I took a REALLY close look at all of the balls of yarn……..and there are slight variations.

OK, I am just going to say it………Shit balls on toast!

I do not have enough of either hue of yarn to complete the sweater. Larissa, it wouldn’t even work if I swapped out the balls of Jaegar that you purchased from the same sale.

SO, I am going to continue with the sweater, alternating the offending skeins, and I may possibly just call the whole thing a design element.

Or I may over dye it in the end.

I will keep you posted.

6.
Last year, after Shoe Queen’s wedding to Slim Jim, I swore that I would NEVER work with or sew or even BUY another yard of burlap.

Burlap is evil.

And yet, because I love LaurenLeap and because she asked me…..

Yesterday found me sewing potato growing bags out of burlap.

You know, the design I have come up with is rather clever.

But I still think that burlap is evil.

7.
And as is my usual lazy way….here are some Instagram pictures from the past week.

7 Quick Takes (Vol 259)

April showers bring May showers bring June flooding bring muddy floors……

But I digress. You know your weekly job description. When you are done perusing my ever insightful blather you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of ever expanding and never quite done pile of ironing, over to Conversion Diary.

And now, on to the Blather Show!

1.
I have an app that I occasionally use to blog from my iPad. I don’t use it all that often but there are occasions when it comes in handy, such as when I am traveling and I want to blather on or when I am just basically too lazy to go downstairs and blog from my computer.

But, when I blog from my Blogsy iPad app, and I add pictures to that blog post, it dumps the pictures into my Flickr photo stream, where I often times do not want them to be. I try not to fill up my Flickr stream with a boat load of inane photos. So, I just delete those photos….

Which then necessitates me going to my computer, pulling up the blog post and re-editing it by inserting the photos again using my computer…..

Which screws up the original formatting of the blog post…..

Which then necessitates my doing more fiddling……

So as far as possible I am no longer going to do blog posts with the Blogsy app unless it is a post that has no pictures or pictures that I actually want in my Flickr feed.

Technology!

2.
It is now the 16th day of May.

And we have had rain for 11 of those 16 days.

Lovely….not.

But I really shouldn’t complain because Chez Knit sits up on a hill and isn’t prone to flooding. Last evening our Pre-Marital mentoring couple were over to the house for their next session. Nick was showing us pictures of his uncle’s house and the damage that was done by flooding. We are talking a total loss in the basement where there was 4 FEET of water pouring in at one point in time.

Ouch.

3.
This week we have run both the air conditioning AND the furnace. Monday the high was 86F. Today the high is projected to be 55F.

Weather schizophrenia.

We turned off the a/c yesterday as it surely wasn’t needed. However, I was clueless about what the temperature was supposed to be this morning….and so it was a tad chilly in here….the temperature being a whopping 42F when I arose from my prone position.

Of course, come August when it is sweltering, I will be complaining about the heat. But for now I am complaining about the cold. Obviously I am never satisfied. HHBL and I were contemplating going to the Indians game tonight as there will be fireworks AND it is Dollar Dog night. Who wouldn’t want to go to a baseball game where you can consume vast quantities of hotdogs that only cost you a dollar.

But we decided that it might be a bit chilly. I love baseball with a fierce passion, you know I do, but we have been to plenty of games where the temperature dips into the 40’s and it just isn’t all that much fun, even with coats and scarves and hats and mittens and perhaps a blanket.

4.
Sometimes it takes a bit of time to get everything just the way that you want it when you move into a new home. Case in point, my pantry

At OCK I had a rather gigantic pantry that held everything. You walked in, there were shelves up to the sky, all my cooking things that weren’t in heavy rotation were stored on the upper shelves and all my stocks of pantry items and canned items and baking stuff etc were all stored on the lower shelves. Everything in one place and hopefully organized.

However, here at Chez Knit there isn’t a big walk in pantry. I have two pantry type closets in the kitchen but definitely not the space that I had before. I am not complaining about this, I love my smaller (and more easily cleaned despite the WTF!) kitchen, I just needed to adjust where I put things and how I stored my pantry items. I have worked on a “pantry” system for at least 25 years. That means that I have certain staples in my kitchen that are always available to me. When I take something out of my pantry stockpile I put it on my weekly grocery list IMMEDIATELY so that I replace what I have used. That way I always know that I am going to have that can of water chestnuts that I need for my Oriental Beef Salad recipe (except this week when I found that I had NOT replaced the water chestnuts in the pantry when I used them last. FAIL!). So when we moved in last August I made the decision to keep most of my pantry staples like flour and sugar and baking supplies and all things in bottles (vinegar, ketchup etc.) on shelves in the basement along with all the things like laundry detergent and cleaning supplies.

This worked for a while. But I really just got tired of running up and down the stairs to go and get that new bottle of ketchup when we needed it or the package of flour when I was baking. So this week I rearranged everything and brought all of that stuff upstairs and put it in one of the pantry closets. All the cleaning supplies and bottles of detergent (I seem to have A LOT of those) and TP supplies etc are staying downstairs but all foodstuffs are upstairs.

So happy.

I lead an amazingly exciting life obviously.

5.
There has been frustration in the technology/iPhone front for me this week. I had thought to finally install the latest iPhone update (don’t go into those things quickly!) but it kept saying that I didn’t have enough room on my phone to accomplish this task.

What the!

OK, I will confess that I am not always checking exactly how much space there is that is available on Debbie’s iPhone (I really should give it a better name). So it was a REAL surprise to me when I actually looked and realized that there was ……not a whole heck of a lot of space available.

Ruh Roh.

What is using up all this space?? Go to Settings – General – Usage and it tells me that there is a boat load of space being taken up by Music. Well that doesn’t make any sense because I use iTunes Match for just about all my music except for one Playlist. As I scroll down through each and every album (there are 462 of them currently) I find that somehow I have downloaded a bunch of stuff onto the iPhone that shouldn’t be there. I take care of that….still not enough. Grrrr. But I do free up some space. However, I then didn’t have enough TIME to get the update done so I put it aside until this morning because I wanted to execute the update through iTunes. Some folks have had major issues when doing this update over WiFi, like wiping their phone clean kind of issues.

I plug in the iPhone to iTunes and……what the HECK is that big yellow blog of “Other” that is taking up almost 4G of data on my phone.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle
   as you install more apps, add more contacts, send more text messages, and generally just create more data and caches for your phone to store, the system section grows just like any other operating system.

See that underlined little section there, the thing about txt messages? Yeah, I send and receive a lot of those over the course of any given day. I might have not taken into account the fact that I never delete txt msgs after they have arrived or been replied to.

Guess what I did this morning before completing the update.

Now I have 3.4G of space that has been freed up on the old iPhone.

But let me tell you, Apple doesn’t make it all that easy to delete massive numbers of txt msgs without deleting the entire txt msg conversation.

6.
I was on a photo re-take job yesterday that took me into the area of East Cleveland, to the GE Lighting complex at Nela Park. Not a great area to driving around in but I arrived safe and sound.

On the way back to Chez Knit the trusty (or not so trusty) iPhone maps system took me on a little “tour” of East Cleveland before getting me back on the 90E.

Oh it was so sad. I wanted to stop my car and get out and take pictures of all of these homes that were once so lovely but are now almost falling down.

So sad.

7.
And here, to boggle your mind and the silly things that I put on Instagram……

WTF! And That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does.

We all know that I love my little Chez Knit. I say “little” but really, it is medium sized compared to OCK.

But I digress…and so early in the post!

I love everything about it…..

Except the white tile floor that is in the kitchen and laundry room. If the person who made the “let’s put white tile down in the kitchen just as if we lived in Florida” decision were standing in front of me right now….just before I dope slapped them….I would say….

FOR THE LOVE OF PETER, PAUL and Mary and ALL the SAINTS in HEAVEN, WHY? WHYWHYWHY?

Anyone who has ever had a white tile floor will understand my pain. Even Charlie Brown’s friend, Pig Pen, doesn’t collect as much dirt and dust as this floor does. You come in the garage, you step into the house and walk right onto the white tile floor, or as I have begun to call it in my own mind, WTF!, bringing the dust and grime and dirt of a thousand nations into my kitchen.

And then there is the dog and the dog hair and the muddy dog prints and the polydogethane that he lays down as he laboriously licks my floor. Max the Magnificent sneezes in the other room and the dog hair wafts gently through the air and lands on that WTF! And I can see each and every speck of that hair as well as all the bits of detritus that lands on the WTF!

Some day I hope to be able to kick the WTF! to the curb and put in something easily cleanable, maybe beaten earth, and NOT WHITE. But it occurs to me that this will not mean that my floor will be any cleaner. The dirt will still be tracked in by human and dog alike. The stink bugs will still crawl out and try to attack me. The soft boiled egg that slipped out of my hand and exploded on the WTF! will still have to be cleaned up from that seam between the floor and the base of the cabinet.

I just won’t be able to SEE how dirty my floor is.

I can live with that. Out of sight, out of mind.