He goes walking, and I take pictures (or try to)

Richard began exercising 2 years ago when we decided to lose weight. At first, he just walked a mile, but then he decided to increase that to 2 miles, and he even plotted out a 3-mile walk. Before I got hurt, I walked with him on the days I didn’t go to the aerobics class at the YMCA.
All walks begin at home. Here he is heading out on the 1.95-mile walk, carrying his water bottle and the little thingy he listens to music on. I will soon leap in the car in the background and drive to the half-way point.
The driveway has certain distractions. One never knows what one might see. A turtle. A rabbit. A snake. A couple of days ago we saw two fawns that still had their spots.
Stopping a minute to smell the flowers....
Ummmm... perhaps just looking is a better idea. These are a magnet for bees and butterflies.
This is the channel where the wet weather spring flows when it rains. After a hard rain it will overflow the driveway and create a river...
...that flows down the driveway and around the corner. And since water doesn't normally flow up hill, it cuts across the driveway, here to left, and then joins the other watersheds from this area that are part of the Eleven Point River system. A lot of water flows across our land after a hard rain.
And at the side of the driveway is a wild plum tree. This is the first time I have ever noticed fruit on it. I guess the seed got washed here once upon a time during a flood, and it took root.
One heads on up the driveway in the cool shade toward the road...

and then emerges onto the harsh reality of Willow Road. This is the street where we live. We are the only house on the street. The green lawn on the right belongs to the church. One of the town water towers, which is a beautiful shade of teal or maybe cerulean, looms in the distance. Something of a landmark when we give directions.
Richard walks the line. Our nearest neighbor used to be an old couple with a small farm. Where he is walking was probably their living room. Now, aside from the church, only other address on the road belongs to a tire shop at the corner with Highway 76.

And here is a perfect circle of green stuff in the road. Immediately after this road was completed, somebody came along and took core samples in various spots. Most of the round holes were patched, but not this one. It gradually filled with silt, and stuff started growing. It never gets very high, I guess because it gets run over periodically, but it flourishes nevertheless. It reminds me in a strange sort of way of a Chia Pet.
The journey continues across Highway 76 onto Bolerjack Road, where it passes a small farm that sits down in a hollow.
The man who owns it is the minister of the Church of Christ. He donated part of his land to build a new church, which was completed a couple of years ago. Here we make a right turn and walk the driveway of the church, which passes his pasture and makes a loop through the parking lot. We like walking by this place, because they have things to see. He is a horse trader, so a variety of horses, mules, and donkeys come and go.
He also has a few cattle. Some cows, a bull, a steer.
And calves.



I thought I was taking a picture of this calf, but instead I flicked the wrong switch on the camera and I took a video instead. (click on the link if you really want to see the baby cow but the embedded video doesn't appear in your browser). What I did not take a picture of is what we thought was a dead calf. It was on the ground. It did not look like it was breathing. It was not moving or twitching. We stood and watched it for a while. We were sure it was dead.

Which brings me to this sorry excuse for a picture (I am still trying to figure out how to use the camera). This will probably be the last picture of Richard that appears here for a while. He does not like to have his picture taken. Not at all. And he has been a good sport about it, but yesterday when I wanted to take yet another picture of him doing something, he told me, “You have enough pictures of me on your blog.” A wise woman knows when to back off. He thought it might be a good idea to walk down to the farmer’s house to tell them about the calf. The blurry dog next to him is Molly. When we walk by the house, she often will come charging up the hill, barking ferociously. And it does give one pause for thought when a ferociously barking German shepherd comes running up a hill as one passes by. However, I have seen enough of Dog Whisperer to know that she really doesn’t mean it, and indeed, she is a pussy cat. At any rate, the calf was not dead. It was just asleep.

I am looking forward to resuming walking with my sweetie. Maybe in a couple of weeks, Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

Angels of Mercy

The day after I got hurt, Lynn came to our house and offered the use of a wheelchair they no longer needed. It was such a blessing. It was custom designed to fit Judy, and thus it was narrow enough to fit through all the narrow doors in our house.

But now it is time to give the chair back, which we did after church on Sunday.

Judy has muscular dystrophy. When she was 20 years old, they told her she would be dead by 30. She proved them wrong, she will soon be 50 years old.

The disease has taken a slow, inexorable toll on her body. Now she can use one arm well, has partial use of the other arm, and can move her head and shoulders. She requires a permanent respirator to breathe, which is powered by a battery and sits on the back of her motorized wheelchair .

It is not a simple matter for them to just run out to the car when they want to someplace...

but they have equipped themselves...
and manage quite well.

Harvest Time

Twice a week, three or four of the local growers load up fruits and vegetables into the backs of their trucks and SUVs and assemble at the pavilion at the park, where they unload everything and make nice displays on the picnic tables, and hope that someone comes and buys. And people do come, and they do buy. In fact, you better get there early because someone just might buy all of what your mouth was watering for.


And here he is coming to buy, walking with purpose and doing his part to be green by bringing canvas bags to carry home the produce.

Indeed, he is walking so fast that I can't keep up.

This is Marguerite. Her husband was an amazing gardener. He was instrumental in organizing and starting the Farmers Market in our town. After he passed, she continued his legacy.

Were I one of those creative women in the household arts, I would have bought a few of these wonderful warty-looking gourds and made a lovely table arrangement. Alas, I am not, and I did not.

Now, the woman at the table next to her went to the trouble of making attractive strings of those little hot red peppers. I did not buy any of them either. Just one more thing to hang from a nail and collect dust.

Farmers work hard for their money, and I especially like the idea of buying directly from these local growers. I have to buy from them because we no longer have garden.

I used to make a garden. I used to worked very hard to get things to grow. We made raised beds. I hauled manure and composted it. I worked on the soil — we have very poor land here — and the work paid off. We did grow and enjoy. But, Richard has never met a tree he doesn’t like. Gradually trees sprang up and there was no more garden spot.

So aside from the tomatoes he grows in containers, during the summer months we depend on others for the fresh squash, eggplant, cucumbers, apples, pears, turnips, peppers....

Smoke Gets In Your...

A soft summer breeze wafts by the window (which is open because we don't have air conditioning), bringing with it the....

acrid smell of smoke...

smoke....

and more smoke...

Clouds of white smoke.

Our neighbor to the south has decided to repair what is left of the fence that divides our land and is in the process of clearing the trees and brush on his side.

And he is burning the brush piles.

My mind keeps wanting to jog down memory lane to when they expanded the highway and cleared the land in front of our place and torched huge piles of trees and brush, which burned for days and days.

R had already decided not to hang the clothes out on the line because the humidity has climbed too high and they won't dry well before evening. But I would have stopped him because of the consequences of hanging clothes on a line when there is smoke in the air.

We’re Eating... What?

Our usual conversation about this topic started off normally enough:

R: What's for dinner tonight?

But then something unexpected happened.

Me: Kuckey tacciatore

There was a moment of silence as we both contemplated what I had just said.

R: Huh? What was that?

Me: Aha ha ha ha

R: Would you like to try that again?

Me: Uh.... wait a minute.... let me get my mouth organized.... turkey cacciatore....

Yes indeed. Just another delectable dinner served up in my efficient well-organized country kitchen.

Actually, turkey cacciatore is very good. It's just a variation of your basic chicken cacciatore recipe; in fact, just about everything I make is a variation of the way the recipe is supposed to be made. For example: Is there a very good reason why vegetables that are going to boiled until tender in soup must be first fried in oil? Well, I never fry vegetables first; why add the extra calories?

At any rate, you chop up some onion and bell pepper and throw that in skillet that has a lid (I have a teeny tiny little crockpot that works particularly well for this) along with a can of diced tomatoes and their juice, or add some tomato sauce if it seems too thick.

If I was CD's Wife or Pioneer Woman, at this point I would have a nice picture of all the ingredients, and then show step-by-step the process. But I'm neither of them. And I would have to spend too much time cleaning up after myself after each step. I do nothing without spilling, dropping, or otherwise slopping it on the counter.

Add some Italian type spices (oregano, basil, whatever seems good). Cover and cook until the onions are tender, then add a can of mushrooms and the cooked turkey and warm it up. Then you dust on some Parmesan and serve it with whatever carb you happen to want. I'm a potatoholic, but pasta or rice are both good.

Funny, funny

From my sister:

I just read your blog for today-with Allie and MICAH (not Noah - you did it again ha ha ha ha.... I always get mixed up and call the kid Caleb - these fancy names!) and the old geezer ahhhh. He's so cute...

Well, I fixed the mistake in the post earlier, so it now says Micah.

Brother.

Posting First and Asking Questions Later.... and... and.... Geezerhood!!

I could have e-mailed Poops and gotten the correct information about the little girls in the Eyes Have It, such as how they are related and what their names are.

But did I?

No. Of course not. That would be too easy.

I got some of it right, but I guess I will correct the mistakes. Poops says: You are pretty close with the family connection. Adrie and Little Hunny are first cousins to the little girls' Mama, Nicole. And yes, they are Tony's grandchildren.

So, here is another picture of the cute little girls. This one was taken at Little Hunny's 18th birthday and high school graduation party -- the one I was supposed to go to in June



In this picture, Victoria, the one with the differently shaped eyes, is in the middle, and the younger sister on the left is Aviana. Now, the little girl on the right is no relation at all, but her family has been connected with our family since, oh maybe the mid-1950s.

Her name is Allison – Allie for short – and her grandpa was Gene Rogers, and he was the pastor of the church our family went to for about 25 years.

He was also one of my dad’s best friends and his fishing buddy. For many years they went on week-long fishing trips to Baja California, and they called themselves the Baja Pals. And here they are with some fish they caught on June 14, 1993.


Gene, he's the one on the right, passed a few years ago, when Allie was about 18 months old.

And now that I am on a roll, there is one more cute kid that I need to include.


This is my brother Andrew with their grandbaby, Micah.

But, moving right along. Today is a

big day

for my very own sweetie. Yes indeed. Today my honey officially becomes a geezer.

Happy birthday!!!

He has gotten very good at making lists to restore order to the chaos (see yesterday's post).


He has gotten very good at being a househusband. He is much better at being a househusband than I am at being a housewife. He does the dishes and puts them away.


He find food for dinner and gets it out of the freezer in plenty of time to thaw (it's on the counter there, on the right).


He makes his lunch. He cleans up after himself.

I have a problem in this area.

The kitchen after I have cooked and not cleaned up after myself.

Deep thoughts...

Him: Gosh! I’m going to be 65 tomorrow.

Me: Any profound thoughts you would like to share with the American public?

Him: Mmmmmmmm. No.

Silence for a minute or two...

Him: I sure don’t feel it.

Silence for another minute or two....

Him: Your father sure has enjoyed his retirement. What with his crossword puzzles and his routine. I don’t have a routine. I just have chaos.

The Eyes Have it

I don’t have young children of my own, or grandchildren for that matter, so I’m going to borrow somebody else’s children so I can have pictures of cute kids on my blog just like everybody else.

Here are some cute kids. The young women on the left are my sister’s girls; that would be Adrie on the far left and next to her is Little Hunny. I think the two other girls are also sisters. I don’t know their names, but their father and my sister’s girls are first cousins.

Jennifer, did I get that right? These are Tony’s grandchildren, right?

I think that makes them second cousins.

At any rate, the genes tell the story. We have always been fascinated by Adrie’s eyes. No eyes like that have ever appeared in our family. So those eyes came from their father, only he doesn’t have those eyes either. But someone in their father’s ancestors back there in Italy had to be responsible for those amazing, almost almond-shaped eyes. She's smiling so they are sort of squinched up but they are almond shaped.

And surprise, surprise. Here they are again in yet another generation. Take a look at the eyes of the girl on the far right.

Here... I'll help...

The eyes have it...

What have I gotten myself into?

Once upon a time (6 years ago, maybe), Pastor David was thinking about doing a study on Revelation and I loaned him a book -- a good one -- that my mom had sent me. I think he changed his mind about doing the study. Several months went by and I asked him about the book and he said, "I can't find it." He'd shake his head and look puzzled. "I don't know what happened to it, but it just isn't there..."

Whenever Pastor David's wife, Sheila, invited us to their house, I'd wander (sneak) off into his office to look for the book. He was right.

It wasn’t there. I couldn't find it.

They continued to look. They couldn't find it.

They hadn't thrown it away or taken it anywhere, but it just wasn't there anymore.

Not lost, just temporarily misplaced.

Time kept on slipping away into the future. David resigned the church and became the pastor at the church down the road from their house. We got a new pastor -- well, several actually -- but finally, a really good one, Ralph.

Sheila and I continued to be friends – something that often does not happen when people leave one church and go to another. Then about a year ago, Sheila e-mailed me with the news that she had found the book. She was fixing up the bedroom where a girl they had hosted as a foreign exchange student had slept so it would be convenient for a married daughter who was coming back for a visit with a new baby. The girl had taken the book to read, without telling anyone, and had left it under the bed when she went back to Japan. Sheila was a bit embarrassed to admit she had not done anything in the room for several years.

Now back home safe and sound, the book settled in on my bookshelf, where I promptly forgot about it. Until now. Several months ago I began a series of lessons on worry (which I desperately needed to teach myself).


Yes. This was the first thing I handed out to the class. Only I didn't learn the lessons all that well, and I started worrying about what I was going to teach next.

I suggested that Ralph continue on with a series of lessons on Revelation he had started on Wednesday nights three summers ago but never finished. He canceled that service because he had major surgery and we never started back up.

He threw down the gauntlet:

"Why don't you teach the class."

"Me?"

"Me? You've got to be kidding?"

He wasn't.

Well, silly person that I am, I got to thinking about it, and lost my mind for a moment, and I picked up the gauntlet and launched into it.

I thought the church was going to shut down because too few people were attending and that I would not actually have to finish what I started.

At the last church business meeting, we were supposed to vote to close the church because of dwindling attendance and I calculated that I would be able to quit about the time the Four Horseman showed up.

I was wrong. Everybody voted to continue having church. And here they are


Now I will have to finish, unless a Trumpet sounds sometime when we least expect it within the next couple of months.

And now on to the mystery of the 144,000.