SATURDAY — “Back away from the food, . . .

. . . put your hands up, turn around slowly . . .”

We ended the blog last week with Friday, so will start this on Saturday, January 01, 2011 with a low temperature at the airport of -1.  It’s interesting when you abbreviate the date as 1-1-11.  We have cooked, cleaned a little, fed the horses, dog and cat, but mostly done emails all day.  I manage to write a few letters to people who don’t have a computer, and to pay a few start-of-the-new-year bills.  John is making a big pot of his famous salt-free Chili for dinner and the rest of the week as needed for lunches or dinners.  Also there is a big container of rice steaming.  Yesterday we made some long distance calls but didn’t do any today.  It never got above 16 here, but was colder at the airport about 5 miles south of us.   We had lots of deer and birds hanging around today looking for handouts.

Sunday – The Taize’ music program has been cancelled until next week.  Suits me.  I will be happy to stay home all day and work on projects.  We have no other pressing plans.  By the time I drive to town and back and spend a couple hours in town, it is a time sink, not to mention the gasoline expense.  My car gets worse gas mileage in the very cold.  I spent two hours sorting and cleaning stacks of receipts off the counter between the den and kitchen.  It has accumulated amazingly over the past year plus.

Monday – I went in for a blood draw and then to the SAIL (Stay Active & Independent for Life) exercise class at the Adult Activity Center.  They have a new policy to help pay the bills and are charging a yearly fee for all AAC activities of $20.00.  I don’t mind paying that at all for the whole year.  My class is only $3.00 /quarter, so a lot less expensive than going to Physical Therapy and paying an insurance co-pay of $25 for 45 minutes.  The SAIL class meets MWF for an hour.  Turns out the yearly fee will cover those quarterly costs and allow us to participate in other activities, such as the first Friday of each month’s potluck with “something-main dish” provided by the center.  This week it will be baked potatoes with all the toppings.

I’m pretty worn out from all the exercise today.  We plan to make cookies tomorrow – chocolate chip & pecans; known by some as Toll House* cookies.

*While the  NESTLÉ® company still brands their chocolate chip related products as TOLL HOUSE®, the “toll house” legal “trademark” seems to have been lost in 1983.  The name does relate to an original stage line toll house built in 1709, near Whitman, Massachusetts.  Story here:

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/CookieHistory.htm

and here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_House_Inn

Once each year we take cookies and repay favors owed, including always to the people at Complete Computer Services when we pay our connection (email) bill for the year for the old account we have had since 1995, ( nancy@ellensburg.com ).  They only charge us $5.00/month and that includes the occasional silly computer-tech question that John doesn’t solve on his own.  They set up this “blog” for John to provide “Nancy updates” and (for a reasonable fee) they also fix our serious computer problems.  They are a nice bunch (3) who love our homemade cookies.

It was cold today and tonight.  I couldn’t get my feet warm even with down booties and heavy cotton socks.  So, I found my garage sale wool socks from Eddie Bauer to put on inside my garage sale down booties from Eddie Bauer, and my feet are finally warm.   Only problem is the wool socks have dangling green balls on the laces, and the cat thinks they are meant for him to bat around.

Tuesday is John’s birthday.  We’ve nothing special planned, other than sorting receipts, except I have to call my doctor in Yakima for a report on the blood tests from yesterday.  It beats driving all the way there to hear them.  Turns out I wrote an email to his nurse and she got back to me that all the tests went well, and sent me the report, with my “number” and range expected.

Yesterday, I got a $40 savings from a pharmaceutical company on my $62 monthly prescription (Micardis).  It doesn’t apply to people with state or federal help with drugs, such as Medicare D, which I do not have, but is allowed for those with insurance co-pays.
Today starts the winter quarter at CWU.  Thankfully, I do not have to worry about being there and ready to go with 3 new classes.  Phew.  Retirement has its benefits.
We just had lunch: the foundation was a Marie Callender’s plastic dinner of rice, sweet & sour chicken – with added carrots, a couple of costly panko shrimp (flaky bread crumbs)  and several Idaho fries.  It wasn’t low in salt  but “reduced” by the carrots and the fact that we split it.  John fixed his own birthday lunch and breakfast and fed the horses, and entertained the cat.  We emptied the dishwasher and I am loading it, so we can clean a large Pyrex bowl to mix cookie dough in.  We double (perhaps quadruple) the recipe.  Turns out we multiplied all the items 6 times one year when we finally figured out how many we had to make to give away and still have a few left.   I always forget that until I open the cook book and find those notes from years ago.

Night was spent on the phone with various people who called; one, the longest, was from John’s sister Peggy wishing him a happy birthday.  Then after dinner we both spent a lot of time on the computer.  The kitty spent his time running back and forth between us.

Here we are already Wednesday, and we are back from town and still making cookies.  We didn’t start till this morning and made enough to take a couple of dozen by where we had planned.  John did that and went to get my meds reduction, buy some groceries, and then come back and pick me up from my exercise class.  It went a little better today than Monday, but I’m still sore after the long “lay-off”.  We stopped by our neighbors on the way home to pick up a nice chocolate frosted cake she made for John’s birthday.  Also stopped by the hospital for a blood draw (INR) to check on my dosage of Coumadin.  We missed doing it Monday this week, and it was due.  I’m only on a monthly check now, after it has been stabilized.  So that’s nice.   While baking the last couple of batches of cookies (we still have half the big bowl left), we are making spaghetti sauce with some ground beef John bought this afternoon.  That will last us a couple of meals.  John gave me the choice of a hamburger with cheese, and I declined, asking for this instead.  He is so accommodating, and finally happy that I’m again eating what he fixes.

Sunny kitty is now eating on top of a dog crate on the end of the table in the den.  It’s a great place for him with room to eat and lie down from his perch on high to watch the dogs below him.  He is “king of the mountain”, and now John was able to move his food from out of the window in the computer room, next to the filing cabinet.  Yesterday, he pulled his little bowl down into the cabinet, but thankfully, John had put a newspaper below so it didn’t all fall down into the file drawer.  He now has a bigger square bowl that is more stable.  He will come down the hall from his room, even in the middle of the night, to get his food when he’s hungry.  His water bowl and litter box are still in the back computer (bedroom), where he usually sleeps in the chair or under the bunk beds.

We got some more sad news of people we know losing dogs.  We’ve had dogs, cats, and horses and the average life time is in that order, about 10, 20, 30.  Folks we know got a baby African Grey parrot (now 19) and they average about 55 years.  I wonder if anyone knows why life spans vary like this?

Our kitty is cavorting and mingling with the dogs now.  He’ll get on “their” couch and walk among them on the floor.   He’s also growing and climbing up on more things.  He was eyeing the kitchen counters today and I told him no.   Wonder how long that will last.   He gets a little braver each day.  Still very playful with everything that moves, or moves when batted.  If it makes noise, all the better.  One of his toys is a medicine container with hard dog food it in to make it rattle.  Another is tied to a long shoe lace and hangs from the table.  He will play for many minutes batting it around.  We’ve heard companies are going to market toilet paper without the cardboard centers, but those are another favorite toy.  We need to start a web-campaign to prevent the demise of cardboard tubes.

Thursday was a trip to town for me to play music and John to go shopping and buy stamps at the P.O.  We had a nice afternoon.  Rained on us going in, but nothing serious, and there was sun in town.  We had some fog out here, but had had early morning sun.  John is working on the KVTR newsletter (Trail riding club), and I’m doing emails and need to transpose some music when he wants to take a break from the computer.

John took a break to come fix dinner.  What a guy!  So, I transposed the last two pages I wanted to do.  Then we ate, and now John’s back at the computer again to work on his newsletter.  It has to be finished, printed, and sent out Saturday afternoon for early delivery next week.  It has to be in the pickup box in EBRG by 4 PM Saturday or it doesn’t go until Monday evening. Mail we send to local folks bypasses EBRG and goes to a processing facility in Yakima, then returned to EBRG from whence it came, and hopefully delivered in a timely manner.   So if we wait until Monday it likely won’t be delivered locally until Wednesday and the meeting is Thursday.

Friday was a food fare day.  I had two potlucks to attend:  one at 11:30 and another in the evening with my music group.  John will be making a baked ham for the latter, and I’m taking cookies to the one mid-day.   Then I have my SAIL exercise class after.  I also played the violin and sang old songs at noon with an accordionist and the group there for the potluck.  They have words to the songs to sing along.

Friday we had an early morning call from a charity fund raiser in Manila, Philippines for the Spirit Lake South Dakota Native American tribe elders and children for help with heating costs.  I am always skeptical of those kinds of calls and ask lots of questions.  I got on the web to check their website and will write someone there about the authenticity of the call I received.  They started with wanting a $100 donation.  I asked where they got my number and address and they said it was from a list of charities we had given to.  I didn’t pursue that.  I know I just should have hung up at the start.  We had had a call last week from an organization saying they were calling for funds only in the state of WA for Viet Nam vets.  We checked that out and found it is a real scam and that the “charity” organizer pockets most of the funds.  I assume that is also the case with the recent call.  When I asked, however, how much of the money would go to the reservation, the caller claimed if I wrote RESTRICTED on my check, that 100% would have to go there and they could keep nothing for administration.  So, who sees to that?  And I wonder if the Spirit Lake Dakotas don’t have telephones?  I’ll take up a collection to get them some.  Send money, please.  Unmarked one-hundred dollar bills will do.

Great potluck tonight and good jam session following too.  John’s ham was appreciated, and there was chili and potatoes and salad, deviled eggs, bran muffins, and brownies, cookies, and angel food cake, and we took John’s chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake our neighbor made for him.  There was plenty of food and we all ate a lot.

Today, I take off for a play date at Briarwood at 2:00 p.m. and they serve us a meal afterward.  It will be vegetarian chili.  I debated about taking some leftover ham to throw into the mix, but I won’t.  It’s probably already got more salt in it than I need on my “low salt” diet.

We wish you a good week, and we will chat with you next week.

Nancy and John