Not pretty but servicable

When I was in high school, girls took home economics. We learned basic cooking skills, how to read a recipe and measure ingredients. One of the things we made, Goldenrod Eggs, is something I still like and will be having it tomorrow for breakfast.

We learned how to knit. I wasn’t very good at that. The teacher had a few remarks to make when she saw my first efforts. The slippers I made would have been suitable for Big Foot.

We learned how to use a sewing machine, how to cut out a pattern, and sew it. We made a gym bag to carry our gym clothes.

My mom was good seamstress (she made my prom dress)

and I learned from her too. She had hopes for me. They gave me a very old Singer sewing machine in a cabinet when I graduated from college.

I made some of my own clothes back in the day, and I made a caftan for Richard after we moved here.

I was never really very good at it, however.  And 50+ years later, I am still not that good.

We had BLTs the other day. The toaster is one kitchen gadget that we almost ever use. We probably had not used it in at least a year, and it was very dusty. I had to open the bottom and use canned air to blow it all out.

Richard thought we needed a cover for the toaster because it was so very dusty. He had a bolt of black cloth that was very cheap which he uses to cover equipment in his office and shelves in the garage where the little red bins of nails, nuts, washers, etc live to keep the wrens from throwing the nails all over the floor when they decide to build a nest in there.

So I used that to make the toaster cover. I saw some really cute toaster covers on the internet, but I didn’t have a proper pattern. I just measured the dimensions of the toaster and then cut the pieces out of the material and sewed them together. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell the right side from the wrong side, and after I finished, I realized one of the seams was on the outside. 

Oh well. I decided not to dismantle it. It will keep the dust out even if it isn’t quite right and is probably the ugliest toaster cover ever.

Following the directions

On our last trip to Springfield in the Fall (before anyone had heard of COVID-19), we stopped at the Asian market. Richard spent too much time in the noodle section and came home with 6 or 7 different kinds of noodle. Including Beijing Noodles. 

They are a long, flat noodle, sort of like linguini. 

“It is non-fried and no preservatives. The quality is healthy and satisfying. You can set your mind at ease because we can guarantee your expenditure.”

He wanted me to cook them for dinner. So I read the instructions… not the ones in Chinese, obviously, but the ones that had been translated into English.

1. Add Noodles (100 g) per person to boiling water and stir occasionally to separate noodles. Wait 3 minutes. 

Okay. We have a kitchen scale. Weigh out 100 grams and into the boiling water they go. Set the kitchen timer. So far so good. 

2. Turn to small flame. Add a half cup of water. Turn off the flame while boiling again.

What? Huh? I guess they meant bring it to a boil again on low heat and then turn the heat off. I didn’t know.

I decided the noodles would be mush if I did that, so I improvised. I added the half cup of water, turned the burner off and let them sit in the hottish water for another 3 minutes. They turned out fine

Just another case of the meaning getting lost in translation.

"Honey, have you seen the...?"

So, how much time do you spend every day searching for things are not actually lost, just “temporarily misplaced?” Because this is such a problem for us, and seems to get worse day-by-day, some time ago, Richard made a sign

 and put several of them around the house to remind us to put things back.

Do we put things back? Sometimes, but more frequently, we do not.

One morning last week, he put an altered sign on my desk.

 "This is my reality," he says.

I had a good laugh, but I wasn’t laughing later that afternoon when I was preparing dinner and needed the lid for my 1-quart casserole.

I opened the cabinet where it is supposed to live. It was not there. Richard was in the kitchen, so I asked him if he knew where it was. He also opened the cabinet and looked, and he agreed that it wasn’t there. We looked in the dish drainer, on the counter next to the microwave, on top of microwave. No lid.

I was very exasperated by the time I did find it. My big cast iron skillet mostly sits on the back burner of the stove. The last time I had used the casserole, I had put the lid in the cast iron skillet, and then later had put the lid for my 6-quart soup pot on top of it.

Richard needed the big clippers to trim some small branches hanging over the driveway. He couldn’t find them anywhere, and wanted to know if I had seen them. I hadn’t, but decided to help look for them. I searched all the likely places. Then I thought to look in the back of the truck, just for the heck of it, and there they were.

He had driven the truck down the driveway several days earlier with the tools (including the clippers) he needed to clear a brush dam that had caused the wet weather spring, which has been flowing for quite a while, to run like a river down our driveway instead of flowing through the culvert. He had left everything in the back of the truck when he finished but had forgotten that’s where they were.

Richard often takes the small cutting board into his office when he wants to chop vegetables for our salad or slice apples or orange because his back hurts if he stands too long at the kitchen counter.

Yesterday I heard him rummaging around in the kitchen. “Leilani Lee (uh oh! Mom and dad never used our middle names unless they were really annoyed with us), what did you do with the blue cutting board?”

“I didn’t do anything with it,” I fired back. The cutting board is one thing I always put in the dish drainer to dry when it has been washed or hang on the nail when it is dry. “You probably took it into your office to use. That’s probably where it is.” Sure enough, it was in his office, probably right where he had left it.

And of course that brings up the other problem of not being able to see something that is almost right in front you but perhaps not quite where you were expecting to see it.

If we could just put everything back where it belongs the problem would be solved, but I don’t think that is going to happen. So we will likely keep on muddling along.

The Other Mother

If course I am remembering my precious mother today. What a blessing to have had her love, wisdom, kindness, and care for so many years. She taught me so much. She died in 2009, and I miss her very much.

But there was another mother who had an incredible impact on my life. Her name was Minnie.

After her fourth child was born, Minnie probably thought she was done raising kids, but then 7 years later, Richard arrived. I worked with Minnie at the library the summer after I graduated from high school. Richard had just been discharged from the Army and was living with them until his college classes started in the Fall. He came into the library to see her and asked her to introduce us. She did. She was gentle and kind, sweet. She loved to talk, and she had a great sense of humor. Some mothers resent the woman their son marries. But when we got married 4 years later, I believe she was very happy for us. We didn’t see her much after that because she and Richard’s dad moved to Texas and lived with a son there.

Some problem developed and she came back to California for a while and stayed with her daughter, who lived in Huntington Beach, and she spent a weekend with us, which was when this picture was taken in 1977.

She died in Texas in 1982.