• Chicago, January 11…

    January 11, 2020 / 2 Comments

    It’s 31 degrees outside with a drizzling cold rain.  Snow showers are expected.  Tiger and I are inside where the old-fashioned radiators keep everything warm.  In fact, I have a window raised slightly.  Tiger is asleep, curled into a ball on top of the leather sofa, one of his favorite places here in our Chicago condo.

    Doug flew to Texas a few days ago to join a group of men from our church in Iowa on a mission trip.  They are building a church in Mexico in the midst of an extremely poor village.  A couple of the wives went along and prepared a hot dog lunch for about 150 of the villagers yesterday and gave out small gifts for the children.  This is Doug’s first mission trip and, in spite of the hard work, he’s enjoying it.  In the short video clips he has sent, you can hear the wind howling.  They are staying in Southern Texas but cross the border into Mexico each day.

     

     

     

    Thankfully, his flight arrives back in Chicago tomorrow night – weather permitting.  I’m praying there are no obstacles to his arriving back to O’Hare safely!  We are supposed to return to our Iowa home on Monday – again weather permitting!  I have my pre-op physical on Wednesday for my ear surgery on the 23rd of January.  I’m ready to get it over with!

    I’ve loved my time with our family here these past few weeks.  All of us celebrated Doug’s 73rd birthday before he left for Mexico.  It was soup night.  We made big pots of homemade vegetable beef soup,  homemade chicken noodle soup and a bowl of fresh fruit salad.  Of course, you must have hot cornbread to accompany homemade soup.  I am Southern after all.  My only concession to this Midwest way of life is a little bit of sugar in the cornbread.  When we go home to the South, I get it my way – no sugar!

    Last night I enjoyed pizza and a movie with my youngest and his family,  My six and eight year old granddaughters chose the movie Abominable (about a baby Abominable snowman trying to get home to Mt. Everest and his parents!) and it’s adorable.  Amazing how far animation has come!

    I had plans to get so much done while Doug was gone but, to tell the truth, I’ve been a bit lazy!  I’ve enjoyed reading, watching a few British mysteries and I’ve kept up with the basic necessities here.  I did get to walk down to the school to get the girls a couple of days and that’s always fun.  I should have also walked down to get a haircut from my favorite Chicago hairdresser yesterday!  Instead, I did the unspeakable and took the scissors to my hair – never a good thing!  I’ll go get it straightened out when we get back to Iowa.  😉

  • 2020…

    January 4, 2020 / No Comments

    I love new beginnings.  Like the first day of school with brand new No.2 pencils and a clean, fresh notebook with empty blue lines on bright white paper.  Lines waiting to be filled with everything I’d learn that year.  At this point in my life, it’s a stack of fine heirloom fabrics, coordinated in the wonderful homestead colors I love…just waiting to become quilts.  Quilts for my loved ones.

     

     

    At this point in my life, it’s also continuing to work on a family history that has come so far but still is not complete.  I’m the youngest of four daughters and, unfortunately, not the one with the most memories of the early days.  That would be my oldest sister Dorothy but she’s in Heaven now.  We worked together on it for many years.  There are also boxes of photographs that chronicle 60+ years of my life and the lives of my children. I need to focus on scanning and having photos printed to compile albums for each of my three children.  They’re busy raising families now and may not think photo albums of their childhood are that important.  In time, I think they will cherish the albums and memories.

    2020 will also be a time to focus on traveling as much as we can!  We belong to a couple of travel companies that make planning trips a little easier.  There are so many places to go and new things to see before we get any older!

    Since I celebrated my seventy-fourth birthday on the first day of December, I’m wise enough to know there may not be too many more decades left to complete everything, so I’ll take advantage of the beginning of a new year and a new decade to, once again, tackle these important projects.  Beginnings, in contrast to endings, are about hope and second chances.  I’d say hope and second chances are good for each of us.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Tiger…

    November 12, 2019 / No Comments

    It has been a busy and cold day to be out and about here.  Started out with having my Cat Scan done this morning for the ear surgery in January.  The procedure took at the most 10 minutes.  Check-in about half and hour!  After that, we went for lunch at a deli here.  Since we were in that part of town, Doug agreed to reading his Kindle which he had with him, while I got a haircut.  He’s such a sweetheart!  A haircut always makes you feel better.  I usually have it cut in Chicago but this young lady did an excellent job for about half the price, so I may stick with her.  I just enjoy visiting with my Mexican hairstylist in Chicago.  He’s from Puerta Vallarta where we like to vacation.  The more we talk, however, the shorter my hair gets!

    Afterwards, we stopped by Kohl’s for a little Christmas shopping.  I feel like the process has now begun.  Then it was a stop by Scooter’s deli for the equivalent of a Starbucks Caramel Macchiato.  Remember I said yesterday that the cortisone shot in my knee would keep me awake?  It did.  So the coffee perked me up for a while.  That was our last stop and we came home to Tiger who was happy to see us.

    So I have finally done Tiger’s blog page which will “live” on the right sidebar.  Lots of cute photos of him.  There are a lot more of him I’ll have to post at a future time.  I finally figured out how to get my photos off of my old phone thankfully.  

     

    One of my favorite pics of Tiger!

     

     

     

     

     

    This is the window of the bedroom in the Chicago apartment

    we rented for two years prior to purchasing our condo. 

    Tiger liked to sit on the wide windowsill and watch the birds and squirrels. 

    This was the only time I have ever heard him “chatter”!

     

    Be sure to check out Tiger’s PAGE here!

     

  • Eleven degrees and snow on the ground…

    November 11, 2019 / No Comments

    We got all of four inches of snow last night.  Just enough to be pretty and start the snowball rolling.  The wind has been blowing like crazy all day out of the North-Northwest.  The large flags in town were blowing straight out just like they’d been starched.  Earlier today, I think it was about eighteen degrees.  At the moment, it’s down to eleven.  It is so cold and I’m not ready for winter.  Since my two favorite seasons are Spring and Fall, I guess that’s a clue I don’t like hot and/or cold!  We definitely needed warm caps and a heavy coat today.

    About this time a year ago, I took an ungraceful fall on the sidewalk right in front of one of my favorite shops in Lincoln Square in Chicago.  The sidewalk was uneven and, apparently, I’m clumsy.  I think I saw on Facebook that if one falls and everyone laughs, you’re young.  If one falls and everyone comes running, you’re old. Needless to say, it was embarrassing when everyone came running.  I ended up with a torn meniscus and knee surgery on Valentines Day 2019.  Today, I saw my orthopedic surgeon for a shot of cortisone in my knee.  It will help for several months.  However, it probably means I won’t sleep much tonight and tomorrow I will have bright red circles on my cheeks.  Just a couple of temporary side effects.  It should help the residual pain and, hopefully, give me a boost of energy for a bit.

    Tomorrow I have a CAT scan on my right inner ear in preparation for my ear surgery in January.  I’m not thinking about it or dreading it yet.  It has to be done.

    After the injection in my knee, we stopped at Olive Garden for lupper…late lunch, early supper.  Tiger met us at the back door when we came home.  Obviously, we had been gone much too long to suit him.  I don’t know why he was complaining though.  He’s in a nice warm house all curled up in his cozy spot.

     

    What you see behind the last windbreak of shrubs is a harvested corn field

    belonging to the farmer who owns the land behind our property.

  • Snow poles?!

    November 9, 2019 / 2 Comments

    Not too long ago, the house looked like this.  Spring and Summer here were wonderful.  The second year for perennials is always a beautiful show and we weren’t disappointed.  We enjoyed the front porch with rocking chairs and an indoor/outdoor rug.  Granted, there were lots of days when the temperature and humidity were too high to even think about sitting on the front porch but it was nice on cooler days.

     

     

    All the plants on the front porch are gone after the freeze but the pumpkins made it.  Inside, it is definitely Autumn…at least until the weekend after Thanksgiving when the Autumn decorations are put away and the Christmas decorations come out.  Autumn is my favorite season.  Everything about it – from the colors to the clothes to the food!

    Doug was working in the garage one day this week and the next thing I see outside are these poles lining the driveway.  For my friends and family in the deep South, just in case you haven’t seen these down there, these snow poles mark the depth of snow.  When the snow is a foot deep, it helps to know where your drive and walkway are.   When I asked him about them, he mentioned that the ground is soft enough right now to get the poles in the ground.  So in they went.

    I’m a very happy camper with the first snow.  I get downright excited.  Watching the snowflakes fall with a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows is the perfect way to spend an afternoon.  I even get excited for the second and third and fourth snow.  Eventually, however, there are piles of snow eight feet high left by the snowplows everywhere.  The roads and parking lots turn into a black, dirty mess.  Snow boots track in sand and dirt.  This goes on for weeks sometimes.  I haven’t even mentioned the well below freezing temperatures and the windchill.

    There is something to be said, however, for living in Iowa where there are four distinct seasons.  You can count on it:  the green of Summer, the beauty of Fall, pristine white snowfalls in Winter and the new birth of Spring.  One after the other.  The circle of life.  I’ll take it.

     

     

  • Autumn apple crisp…

    November 8, 2019 / 6 Comments

    I had big plans for today:  clean the house from top to bottom.  Granted, this house is three floors including the finished basement totaling about 3,000 square feet.  There’s no way #1 I’d get it done in one day or #2 do it all by myself.  Doug has offered to get help in for me, but did you ever see the I Love Lucy episode where she is having a professional maid come to help her?  She wears herself out cleaning the house and getting it ready for her professional helper!  That would be me.  I think I’ll move our “top to bottom cleaning goal’ to tomorrow!

    In the meantime, I just took an Autumn Apple Crisp out of the oven.  It smells delicious!  My daughter has an apple orchard with about 60 apple trees on their six acres.  We still have a small bucket of apples Doug picked before the freeze recently.  I’ve been working on using them lately.  We’ve made jars of apple butter and today an apple crisp.  Can’t let them go to waste!