I love back to school time! I have ever since I started first grade without benefit of kindergarten. I was way ready. I was going to learn to read! In fact, the oral tradition in my family holds that I returned home after that first day of first grade and swore I was never going back. I’d been there 6 whole hours and no one had taught me to read yet!
Caution…Grammy is learning new things!
On Monday and Tuesday I wrote recipes. I’m about done with the bone broth recipes and have moved on to lots of yummy things to do with that freezer full of broth once you’ve got it. The possibilities are nearly endless!
Wednesday brought a bit of a calendar melt-down, followed by a video meeting with Dr. Scott Mills, the Chief Evolutionary Officer from Planet SARK. If I were to tell the truth, I’d admit that the whole video meeting thing still weirds me out some but I’m getting better. (I seem to have early childhood camera traumas that still need some work!)
Simple Pleasures…
As a part of my Lent II, 2016 retreat, I’m trying to pay attention to things that feed me, body, mind, and soul. It also helps with the writing! Let’s Boil Bones…Grammy’s guide to bone broth and other yummy things! is rapidly becoming reality and should be out this fall.
I’ve worked for years to perfect a recipe for roast chicken. Roast chicken makes me happy! It also makes great broth. It’s both homey and elegant in its simplicity. It’s juicy and full of flavor. And, perhaps best of all, it’s easy. In fact, with a little planning and prep time, it could even be a weekday dinner. Or a new tradition for Fridays or Sundays.
A Purple Sort of Mood
We have some fairly unusual traditions in our family. One of those traditions, which others tend to find perplexing, is our habit of moving holidays around to days that are more convenient for us. I think it started a couple of years after we got married. We spent the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving helping a mom and her four children find safety in a shelter for battered women, several counties away. It was 2:00 in the morning by the time we got home. Bill and I looked at each other and said, in unison, “Thanksgiving on Friday!” and fell into bed.
Made for This
It’s been a challenging week in my corner of the world. A lot of the challenges fit into the category of annoying or inconvenient. Things to breathe through and, hopefully, chuckle about later.
Some of them were much bigger! The kind of reality shocks that require a tremendous amount of pondering and contemplating. The kind that cause me, at least, to stop and really consider what I believe. And for me, that takes a bit of shoring up.
Newfies Are Good At Helping!
Hi! It’s me, Sarah!!!
Mom’s doing that thing she calls writing again. It must be fun because she sure does a lot of it.
Sometimes I kind of wish she’d do a little less. She doesn’t really want to play football with me when she’s writing and she says, “Wait, please,” a lot. I know those words!
Right now she’s writing about soup. She says that’s why the house smells so good. I like soup. Sometimes she makes me some of my very own. It has things I’m not allergic to in it. (Whatever that means!) And it’s supposed to help my back and hips feel better. Mom said she’d even put the recipe for my soup in her book. Maybe I’ll be famous!
All I’ve Got…
I would imagine you’ve noticed that it’s been a crazy week in the world. Well, many weeks and months, I guess. Years, even…
There are all the routine attention grabbing things in life. New ways of eating. A lot more shopping. Sarah, our Newfie, got stung by a bee, right in the corner of her eye. She’s fine now. (Really!) Things to write. Things to edit. Things to plan. Things to read. Things to wash and water and fix. A new mailbox to install. (The door fell off the old one.) And a different door that suddenly doesn’t close right. Soup to make. Appointments to keep. Travel schedules. Well, you get the point.
Then there are the big things for so many of us. The truck bombing in Nice. The racial issues we face as a nation of human beings. The political chaos that is running rampant in America. Hunger. Violence. Homelessness. Bigotry of all kinds. Climate change. This morning, Baton Rouge, again. And on and on and on.