Gratitude

For Thanksgiving I plan to practice being thankful.  My family of origin used to go around the table and "let" each person say something they were grateful for.  Some were grateful for the food, for each other, and there was a certain amount of foot dragging and groaning from the teens at the table accompanied by "I'm grateful my sister is not sitting next to me," and the like.  Sometimes you heard surprisingly wonderful things.

I'm grateful because it is not, for us at least, a shopping holiday. We get to visit, talk, catch up.  Sometimes some of us go for walks, play games, or take some kids to a movie.  And we eat many tasty things though now there are more salads and green veggies than there used to be and more diabetics at the table.  I bring a green bean casserole made of green beans of course, almonds, grilled mushrooms, and bacon.  No sauce.  And I am the bringer of deviled eggs.  With 30 people at the table I have borrowed every Pampered Chef or Rubbermaid egg carrier I could.  It's like Easter at my house the day before with all the eggs boiling away. Last year I added a plate of eggs with avocado in them.  Some people said "eww!" and some loved them, they were all eaten up.

I'm grateful we are not Black Friday participants.  We hang out and bother each other all weekend without help from malls or shopping.  I'm grateful we are not a family who battles on holidays.  I am grateful that both my sons will be with us.

I plan on keeping all my gift buying local.  We are lucky that we have many small shops in our little downtown area. We still have several small bookstores here.  For the teens in the family I get some small thing and a card with money, the gift card that's good everywhere. Sometimes the temptation to buy from the big A and have it wrapped as well as mailed is too much for me to resist and I don't.  I have already ordered something I couldn't get here.  I will get out and shop the many artists in and about town to. Many artists, poets, and authors live here.  Art is for sale here in all the coffee shops, wine shops, and two of the book stores.  I remember trying to make a living selling my art, never could get beyond needing a part time job.  I'm grateful for all the arts people here and much of their work is marvelous.  Saturday begins an event called a "Pop-up" art sale.  Pop-up because the local arts organization rents a room or hall for only three days (sadly we have many empty store fronts) and sells the art of local artists.  Shopping and a chance to see a galley of local artists combined.

Photo Nancy Fox

Here's my barley-chicken soup recipe.  I like my soup thicker than the picture above but it looks similar to mine.  It makes about 8 servings.  Good for using up left over Turkey too.

In your favorite soup pot:

This is approximate as I am kind of a fling-it-in cook when it comes to soups and stews.
2+ cups chopped chicken (I use a roasted chicken from the grocery)
The amount of chicken can vary depending on how meat I want at the time.
2 cups chopped onions
2 cups chopped carrots (I slice them in slivers)
6 cloves of garlic (you can of course use more or less, I'm a big fan of garlic)
4 tsp olive oil, add more while cooking as needed.
5+ cups of chicken broth as needed (I use low salt broth)
1/4-1/2 tsp garam masala depending on your taste, I love this stuff, use it a lot.
  (or combo of cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg & mace)
1 tsp dried basil
1 cup barley
Salt as you wish.

Heat the oil and saute the carrots, garlic, and onion in the pot.
Add the chicken, barley, herbs, and half the broth.  Bring to a boil.
Turn to simmer, adding more broth as needed and cooking until vegetables and barley are tender.
Adjust seasoning to taste.  I don't usually use salt and I add more pepper or tasbaco sometimes.
The time to cook the barley varies depending on how dry it was.  Eat it up yum!

Jack Frost's Icy Fingers

Is this what they mean by "ice wine?"  The rumored freezing rain came sometime last night. Thankfully we don't have anything like the weather in the Midwest or on the east coast but I think our little town has two buckets of sand, one shovel and a part-time employee for ice and snow removal.  The schools including the colleges are all closed.  Les Schwab I hear, has customers lined up in the street.  We humans can be slow learners, every year this happens.  I am enjoying the blessings of being retired, sitting at home in my jammies for now.

My daughter-in-law is home with all 8 of her children, including two toddlers. I hope she has some wine in the house.  The two highways out of here, SR12 east and west and SR125 into Oregon are completely closed in many places. I'm happy both sons work here in town, one walks to work, his office is opening two hours late today.  I think the road plan in town is to keep everyone home until it melts, around noon perhaps.  I'm sure someone in Montana or New York is sneering at us by now.

Think I will vacuum, make some chicken barley soup, and start one of the armful of books I brought home from the library yesterday to celebrate the "big ice."  Sending prayers and good thoughts to all you who have some really bad weather right now.

Sunny and cold

Jenny Pastel Rhinestone Round Sunglasses

Found myself looking up fun sunglasses yesterday. My eye is healing and we have amazing sunlight to go with our 15 degree weather. I have a great pair of prescription sunglasses that are an old and mild enough to accommodate both my new and old eyes for now.  It was fun to see what's out there just the same.

The first day I came home and crawled into bed to sleep off the sedative I'd been given.  I woke up about an hour later to find my left eye could see nothing but plain gray, no shapes, no shadows, no nothing.  Eek!  Five minutes of panic.  Back to the doctor.  Apparently the problem was 1) a thick coating of jell from the surgery combined with 2) glaucoma-like pressure in my left eye.  I don't have glaucoma.  So they flushed the eye of the jell and spent half an hour applying and reapplying glaucoma drops to bring the pressure down.  It worked.  My doc set me up to come in early Saturday for a re-check.  Still good, but I didn't so well on the eye test, apparently my eye is healing more slowly than expected.  I go back in tomorrow. Each day, almost each hour it has gotten a little better.  It's much better than my unimproved right eye.  No more double images.  My left eye can read without glasses and I can drive.  There is still a little blur in there.

I am telling you all this because my friends, and sister, all had instantaneous good vision in their eyes right after surgery.  Most people seem to but not all.  So if and when you have cataract surgery and if the world is still blurry don't freak out like I did.  Just get yourself back into the MD.  The same friends and sister had the other eye done right away.  Mine was scheduled for next Friday and I am rescheduling to after Thanksgiving.  I can't manage two mending eyes at the same time and the doctor will be gone all Thanksgiving week.  It will just be better for my peace of mind.

Tomorrow

No, I'm not expecting great sunshine, in fact it's supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow.  It's still only 21°.  It could be sunny after that.  I've dug out my darkest sunglasses for post-cataract surgery tomorrow.  Normally I avoid any surgery but this fall's eye exam, it became clear that nothing is clear, and new glasses won't cut it.  I'm looking forward to getting this done.  The left eye is this week and next week the right.  I decided to pony up the extra $$ and get corrective lens that will get rid of my astigmatism and far-sightedness.  I may still need reading glasses but the eye guy says probably just those over the counter readers will do it.

I grilled my sister and my friends who have had this done, and all of them were happy with the results.  Some of them were really seeing colors again for the first time in years as well as being able to drive at night again.  The ones who got the corrective lenses were very happy with the results.  They are expensive, an extra $900 each in our part of the world.  Still, I love to read, I sketch, am signed up for another watercolor class, and I used to make jewelry and take photos until I couldn't see what I was doing.  I can't drive on the highway at night, at dusk or in many kinds of weather.  I love driving almost anywhere.  The better lenses will mean a better life for me, I'm thankful I can manage it.

My sweet daughter-in-law is providing transport, it's supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow but it's flat as a pancake here in town and the hospital close by.  And Saturday I'm going out fishing with my son.  Me and my eye patch ;-)

Horse Heaven

When I was 10-11 years old our constantly moving family stopped in one place for about 4 years.  I still remember it as the perfect place for a kid to live.  The house Dad rented was two stories with the second story unfinished. Up there all our toys and wooden fish crates used for doll houses, trains, and two-seater cars.  Pop was sea-going fisheries researcher and got the crates from fish canneries to move our stuff.  Then those crates were free, now you see them for sale as antiques on eBay.  The upstairs was a child's castle keep, big windows, big space, lots of light and Mom busy downstairs with our one-year old sister.  Up and downstairs the windows had beautiful country views. Downstairs the bedroom my sister and I shared looked out at Mt. Hood over a corn field that was framed with fir woods on both sides.  In the center of the back of the house was a screened porch that shared that view and Dad put up army surplus cots for us in the summer and we sleep out there in sight of the mountain, the stars, and listening to the night critters.

Now when school is out in June my brain is filled with memories of my summer self walking down the unpaved road in my bare feet, the thick dust drifting over my toes like talcum powder and warm from the sun.  The road went past the home of two of our school friends and dead ended at a gate to a wooded pasture, full of foxglove, daisies, blue cornflowers, and about a dozen horses.  Horses that hadn't been ridden in a very long time that had been turned out there by their elderly owner. This is the age that horse crazy strikes a lot of girls.  We carried notebooks where we carefully recorded every name of every horse we came across anywhere.  I sketched them as well.  So, over, under, and through the gate we'd go.

We spent hours just standing in that pasture watching.  We brought apples trying coax some kind of food based affection for ourselves from them, trying to get closer and closer.  Eventually they ate from our hands and would tolerate a small amount of stroking and petting from us. Mostly they ignored us. Horse heaven for young girls.

That was summer, now fall is nearly gone and what I remember about late fall back then is being stuffed into coat and raincoat for the long walk to school and back.  It was Oregon and raining by then.  On the way home sometimes several of us would detour through the apple orchards and have a protracted, running battle scooping up rotten apples and throwing them at each other.  Then we'd hose off in our yard.  Funny I don't remember Mom saying about word about that.

Autumn

Everywhere the sounds of leaf blowers and scraping of rakes accompany the annual weeks of leaf collection.  If you pile them at the curb the city comes with road equipment and lifts them away into a big truck.  Halloween has been put away.  The local stores have skipped right over Thanksgiving and gone straight away to Christmas.  Eek!

Pioneer Park

Last year at this time I had moved into an apartment I thought good enough and came to hate almost immediately. By March I was in my own home again, a condo with a yard service to gather up the leaves.  Nothing like a little bad to point out the good.

I have a cruddy cold and I've been having a lot of cold related vivid dreams.  Visiting places I lived before, longing to still be there, even those places that really no longer exist.  Spending dream time with people I used to know, some of them dead and gone, like my parents and my first high school boy friend. It feels like searching for some new form or shape in my life.  It's made me call people I haven't contacted for awhile.  That's been good.  And it's also made me think about forgiveness.

There are some people I have forgiven but will never connect with again.  Our time together was toxic.  Some things can't be resolved just accepted, there's a pragmatic side to me that is okay with that.  There are some I just need to be very centered to be around.  Then there are my own mistakes. The ones I have a hard time forgiving myself for, and I poke at old wounds again in my half sleep. When I'm awake I know the "why" and made my amends.  Why is it so hard to forgive oneself?  Always the same old stuff, often around my children, wish I did this, didn't do that.  A job I never should have left but wanted to venture out.  These things ambush me when I'm half asleep or moping around in the night with a bad cold and feeling vulnerable.  I will be so glad to feel rested again.

VOTE

I deposited my ballot in the handy drop box here in Walla Walla Saturday.  Hope you will vote also wherever you are.

Halloween on a Friday night.  A combination Halloween party and adoption party for Ella at my youngest son's house.  My eldest son Chris and I went, in costume.  Mine was minimalist, black clothes, kitty ears, and a cat face out of makeup for nose and whiskers.  I parked in front of Chris' apartment and waited for him to come out.  Eek, a stranger rapping on my window in the dark. A policeman. He looked as surprised as I did, I forgot I'd drawn all over my face.  He wanted to know if I was one of the people who'd been in a wreck? No, but then a fellow ran up to say the wreck-ees were all parked a couple of spaces behind me.  Turned out the man behind me at the stop sign was t-boned in the intersection when he drove through. No injuries, crunched metal.  I'm glad no one was hurt, and I'm glad it wasn't me.

I live close to downtown and we drove very slowly through jillions of little trick or treaters headed for the shops, the Y, or the churches, all downtown and within blocks of my condo.  Duh, I should have figured the residences on our side of town would be walking in to enjoy the goodies and entertainment.  I think its a great idea especially for the younger kidlets.  So very carefully we extracted ourselves from the neighborhood only to get stuck behind someone going 15 in a 30 zone, no trick or treaters in sight anywhere.  Then a young woman in a hurry pulled up behind me and honked endlessly.  I pulled over so she and the turtle car could deal with one another.  She continued to honk until she turned left in about a block.

After that we arrived and enjoyed one of the best Halloween parties I've attended.  People from 72 (me) to 15 months.  Most in costume.  Tons of tweens and teens.  Parents, grandparents, grade schoolers.  Two more cat costumes, three Minnie Mouses, two blue men, lots of high school glamour pusses, and my three year old grandson in his Spiderman costume leaping off the sofas and flexing his padded muscle with a huge smile on his face.  And goodies, oh yes.  Midway in the evening someone handed Spiderman an oreo and his eyes went tilt and he handed it to me.  Even Spiderman had enough.

Great food, bread witches' fingers, devilled spider eggs, powdered sugar cookie balls dressed as eyeballs, and a delicious if ugly chocolate "baked brain" cake.

Lots of pictures were taken but not by me, forgot my phone.  Hopefully some will share with me.