"What I did this summer"

Tomorrow is my last day of freedom before I return to ... jail. Well, not jail for me but I work there. I teach at our county juvenile detention center, aka, juvenile jail. We return to work a month earlier than "regular" teachers and we work the entire month of June whereas other schools get out the first or second week in June. So tomorrow is my last day of summer vacation.

If I were to have written an essay, entitled, "what did I do this summer". I would be hard pressed to come up with anything interesting. So let's see.

Things I did this summer:
1. Went to the pool with the kids, almost everyday.
2. Got up early and drove kids to and from various camps everyday all summer break.
3. Went to the movies and saw, Rattatouille and Over the Hedge.
4. Went to Talbots twice and bought $650 worth of clothes on huge clearance. (clothes for me and all three of my kids)
5. Went to the Smithsonian Institute Natural History Museum. Rode the Metro in to DC from Springfield. Yes, on the way out of town I stopped by the Talbots Outlet Store and bought some great buys there too!!
6. Knitted half of a sweater, crocheted 4 potholders, and a doily.
7. Made a scrapbook for my mother with all her old pictures.
8. Participated in the neighborhood 4th of July parade which ended at and involved a day at the pool.
9. Harvested copious amounts of squash, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. from our garden. Pulled weeds, planted and sprayed for pests.
10. Canned and cooked a lot!!
11. Did considerable amounts of laundry.

12. Installed a new vanity in our downstairs bathroom. (Well my husband installed it, I just stood there and looked pretty!)

13. Oh yeah, I read five books too!!

I can't think of anything else. My boss asked us to all bring pictures of what we did this summer when we return. I think I am just going to refer them to my blog.

Welcome My Friend and Country GAL

My friend and former co-worker, Sharon, has just started a blog here on Blogspot and I think we all should give her a big "Howdy!"

She is quite an entertainer with her bits of wisdom and stories about a city gal turn country wife and momma! Her stories at work used to make me laugh so hard I would cry and my sides would ache.

She has decided to share her stories and wisdom with us all on her blog.

So check her out and comment on her blog with a big "howdy"!!

http://whatsupwithus-vial.blogspot.com/

Any time you want to return to her blog I have it on my list of blogs on the sidebar.

Update on the "No TV" thing...

We DID survive the no TV day yesterday... well, my husband cheated. Once the kids went to bed he turned on the TV and we started watching Glen Beck. About 20 minutes into it I realized that I was feeling guilty about watching TV, plus my bowl of ice cream was finished. So I got up and checked my email and then announced that I was heading up stairs. Kenneth barely heard me. So I said to him, "See, this thing sucks your brains out too".

He came up right after me and we ended up turning on the TV again to watch the weather report.

The kids didn't mind so much about no TV day but they did ask a couple of times. Caroline wanted to watch a video she had borrowed from the library on bugs, Nicholas wanted to watch the new SpongeBob episode, and Alexandra wanted to watch a DVD "High School Musical" which she has seen a zillion times. Each time my answer was the same, "not today."

We will have another no TV day and I need to work on Kenneth about not watching after the kids go to bed.

A "NO TV" DAY...

Today is a "no TV" day in our house. The kids have recently gotten their brains sucked out by sitting in front of the TV for 3 and 4 hours at a time. I can't move them and when I ask them to do anything they literally don't move. They have become limp green beans.

So today I have declared it a "no TV" day in our house. In the three hours that my middle daughter has been awake she has asked me three times if she can watch TV. I tell her "N-O!". She isn't happy about it but hasn't whined yet either. Right now she is stringing beads on the back porch watching workmen take down part of a tree in our neighbors yard. Now isn't that better than getting your brain sucked out by SpongeBob Squarepants?

What a Beautiful Week!

This week couldn't be more perfect in any way. If I had my perfect climate, temperature, weather, this would be it. All this week it is sunny and in the low 80's for a high. The humidity is lower than normal and it doesn't really get hot until late afternoon like 3ish. There is a slight breeze blowing and these big cottonball clouds scattering the bright blue sky. If only it could be like this all summer...

New Blog and Corn Salad Recipe

I have decided to begin a new blog specifically for cooking, baking, and canning. I really enjoy them and have had several people ask for recipes or comment on my cooking. I thought it might be fun to have a blog specifically geared for that. So I am sending you to my other blog for the recipe, but first here is a little 'teaser' picture of the corn salad.

http://www.whitneyscooking.blogspot.com/

Come visit me there!!

Don't worry, I will still be writing on this site too. I have so much more to share than just cooking!

OH My!!!

We went to dinner tonight over at my mother's house. We had tacos and fajitas. Mom made a corn salad that was to die for. It had corn (shaved off the cob), green pepper, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and Italian salad dressing and a bit of sugar. She said she got it off www.allrecipes.com. I will get the recipe and post it.

Update on Laundry and other random thoughts today

I have diminished my pile of laundry. I did 10 loads on Wednesday evening and a bunch of loads on Thursday. The problem with us is that if we don't take the clean clothes out of the dryer and fold them immediately then they stay wherever they are put. I can't put them back in a laundry basket; I can't put them on the couch to fold later. I can't put them on the bed to fold later. If I put them anywhere other than folded and in a drawer then they are forever in their spot. The kids are good about takin the clothes up to their rooms and putting them away when I ask, and my husband is great about shlepping towels and our clothes up the steps. When the family works together then things get done. Otherwise the pile will stay on top of the dryer or in a basket or on the couch FOREVER!

Oh, we had a momentous event today too. We finally installed a new vanity and sink in our downstairs bathroom. We have had the vanity and sink for over a year now and it has been sitting in the laundry room waiting to be installed. Kenneth finally did it and he did a GREAT job! It looks awesome and gives us so much storage in the bathroom now. Yippee!!!

Tomorrow we are off to Frederick, Maryland to pick up a piece of equipment that my husband bought for his business. It is a leaf vacuum.

Recently I have been thinking about trying my hand at thread crochet. I have found a few sites on the internet that have patterns for vintage doilies. These patterns are the original patterns from the 1940's through 1960's. They are pretty cool and I want to start out just making a doily that I can use on the wingback chairs in my living room. I want to put them on the arms which are gettin a little threadbare. Does anyone know of a good pattern that would be fun to start with?

Procrastination...

My kids are gone this afternoon roller skating with grandparents and I had hoped to get some laundry done.


That is the heap that has gotten down to the laundry room. Yes, that is a 55 gallon trashcan full of laundry too. There are overflowing baskets in each of the kids' rooms and a big heaping mound in my bathroom that has yet to come down. We got lucky about a year ago and got a second dryer which helps tremendously with the speed of doing the laundry. But to just make myself start... A friend of mine once asked me if we were the cleanest family or the dirtiest family. Right now, we are the dirtiest!

So what do I do as soon as the kids leave? I start canning! Good girls can when the kids are away!! Or, at least I want to think. So the laundry sits but look what I made...



Squash relish! YUM!! This is the same recipe that 2 Lambs Farm posted about a week ago. She didn't chop up her squash and she made hers with yellow squash. I made mine the same way as she did with her recipe, except I substituted zucchini squash for the yellow squash and I chopped mine up in the food processor just before putting them in the jars. WOW! It tastes soooo good. Just like pickle relish and the veggies are crunchy. Her recipe made 5 1/2 jars!

Canning

Okay, so I wonder why they call it canning when you put the food in jars.


I made enough spaghetti sauce to fill one large jar and I put the rest in the fridge. There was only enough left to fill a third of another large jar. So we will have that for dinner one night this week.



This is how much patty pan squash we picked just yesterday.



This is the squash and the zucchini cut up in bags to go in the freezer. The patty pan in front is what I still have to cut up left from yesterdays harvest.



This is what I still have in the fridge that I have yet to do something with. This is harvest from this past week. My vegetable drawers are 10 inches deep.

I have cut some much zucchini and patty pan squash that my fingers are permanently covered with squash juice. It made sort of a layer of stuff on my fingers that I can't get off with regular washing. Weird.

Putting Up Day

Today we are putting up tomatoes, zucchini, and patty pan squash. I am freezing the squash and zucchini and I am right now stewing the tomatoes for spaghettin sauce. I usually freeze the sauce but today I think I am going to can it. I think it will work better that way and won't take up any room in my freezer that way.

Yesterday we picked 10 lbs of zucchini, about 12 lbs of potatoes, and about 15 lbs of patty pan squash. We picked a mess of roma tomatoes but only really enough to make one big batch of spaghetti sauce. It will feed us three times.

I will take pictures of the harvest when I get it canned.

What my 5 year old thinks I should talk about today...

So I sit here thinking about updating my blog and at the moment can't think of a topic. I ask my 5 year old daughter, "What should I talk about today?"

"Scissors.", she says.

"Scissors?", I ask.

"Yeah, scissors"

"What should I say about them?"

"Well, they cut. They can make hearts.", she says with confidence. And hearts mean love. That is exactly what she means. If only it was so easy. Scissors make hearts and hearts are love.

5 year olds have the best insight sometimes. They are so innocent and curious about the world they live in. I love to watch her in her activities. Just today, she was working so hard to catch a butterfly with her hands. He was just a bit too fast for her and she thought it wasn't fair that he wouldn't let her catch him.

The other day we were sitting on the front porch and we were watching a Robin pulling worms from the earth. He had gotten a couple and would carry each one off and then return for another. My 5 year old got angry because he was taking all her worms. She stood out in the front yard and yelled at him as he took to flight, "Go away bird! Stop taking our worms. I like worms and bugs! Leave ours alone!"

Then she came to where I was sitting and said that we needed to fill our bird feeder so the bird could eat the seeds and not take our worms.

I love 5 year olds.

An Old Friend

Just a quick note! An old friend emailed me this morning and shared her blog address with me. Her daughters are beautiful and it is a fun blog to read so I am sharing it with everyone. I have put a quick link on my sidebar but here it is:

http://stopperfamily.blogspot.com/

I am so glad to have found her again!!

It is Bunko Night tonight. I get together with 11 other friends once a month for Bunko. Honestly it is just an excuse to get together with friends and drink a bit. We have bunko every first Tuesday of the month. We rotate houses and the host makes heavy hors'douvers and stocks the bar. We play 2 rounds of Bunko and then we have coffee and dessert. I hate missing a month because I miss seeing all my friends who I don't get to see or spend time with that often. Tonight we are meeting at a home where she goes over the top with a theme. I think tonight is Tropical Night. I usually don't drink that much and don't stay out late because I usually have to work in the morning but tonight is different because I am on summer break. So I may want to sleep in tomorrow morning.

Our Fourth of July Float

For the last several years our neighborhood has had a Fourth of July parade. The kids decorate their bikes and moms decorate their strollers and we all parade around the neighborhood to the community pool. Last year some moms built floats. This year we had floats and old time cars and of course our decorated bikes. It is a lot of fun and the neighborhood comes out to watch the parade if they are not participating.

This year Kenneth drove our 1959 Farmall Tractor pulling a trailer with straw bales with the kids for an old-fashioned, all American hayride.

The neighborhood loved it and asked lots of questions about the tractor and practically rushed Kenneth as he parked the tractor at the pool at the end of the parade. This was great for Kenneth as he "stole the show" with the men of the community, but it left me to setting up the tables, chairs and canopy at the pool for our family alone.
Here is Kenneth entertaining his "fan club".

What do you do to celebrate the 4th?

What do you do to celebrate our nation's independence day? On July 4, 1776, our forefathers of our country, including, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin gathered together in the Philadelphia meeting room and with fear for their lives signed the Declaration of Independence. At one point just before Benjamin Franklin signed the document he made one of his many famous statements. "Gentlemen, we MUST hang together for assuredly we will all hang separately!" This meaning that if we don't win our independence we will all hang for treason.

As historians, many hold these people up on a pedestal as great men who were wise beyond their years, almost like they were gods. I, too, think they were great, brave people, willing to hang for what they stood for and willing to do what it takes to make things better for others. I often wonder if they were thinking, "what will the history books say about me?" No, I don't think they were. I also wonder how they got to that day. What made them come and sign, basically, their death sentence if we didn't win the war.

Today, our politicians and government leaders seem to have many things in common. It is hard to find someone who isn't egocentric, a bit narcissistic, and thinking of their next political step. They also are looking for historic "prosperity". Or in other words, "what will the history books say about me?". What happened to those people who lead because they are good? What happened to those who make good decisions without thinking what will people 100 years from now think of me?

Are our leaders now trying to live up to the standards set by our forefathers? Is anyone able to live up to them? Will we have great leaders like them again? Will it take another all out war? It seems that our other great presidents were also in office during time of war. The Civil War with Lincoln, WWI with Truman, WWII with Roosevelt and Wilson. Eisenhower and Kennedy. Reagan with the Cold War ending.

I have been thinking recently of our presidential elections coming next year. Our candidates have already been campaigning and for most, by the election, they will have been campaigning for 20-22 months! Great Britain just had their election and now have a new Prime Minister. Tony Blair announced a few months ago that he would be calling a new election and would not be running, they have campaigned and had the election all in a few months time. It is over. We draw ours out. By the time the election comes around I feel browbeaten by the candidates. They have invaded every orifice of my being. They are in my mailbox. They are on my TV. They are in my newspapers, magazines, and radio. They are on street signs and billboards. They are everywhere. By election day, I just want it over with. And by that time we know everything about them and some things we didn't want to know. I am not sure this is how our forefathers had imagined it. Maybe some did. George Washington was elected without a political party, but by the time he left office 8 years later he warned us of political parties. Maybe he did know. Maybe we should take some lessons from out "greats".

Oh, we are spending our Independence Day as a family. We will be participating in our neighborhood parade with bikes and floats. Kenneth is driving our big 1959 Farmall 460 tractor with a trailer behind it filled with straw bales and kids waving the flag of our country (the red white and blue). Then we will be participating in the events at our neighborhood pool. Then ending the day with my parents, cooking out, eating watermelon, and roasting s'mores!

More Crab Racing

As I have been scanning in these slides the story becomes clearer. They call the crab races the National Hard Crab Derby. You buy a crab and they put a number on their shell and you name your crab. I was number 99! "Whitney". I don't know how well I did as my dad didn't take any photos of the standings. Oh well.

Back to the races. They then take your crab with your number on it and put them in these troughs with little dividers on it. Then when the race begins they dump the trough and out come the crabs and the first one over the finish line wins. I want to say they win a trophy and money.

By looking at the crowd it is quite a popular sport!! I believe they still do this in Crisfield today. I remember something on TV about it last year.

This is a picture of me with my mom.

Up and Running...

I am up and running on scanning in old slides. This one is from the Crisfield Crab Festival in 1971. It is a yearly festival in Crisfield, Maryland. We used to go most every year. Crabs are big in our family. From when I can remember summer meant being at the shore with my grandparents and crabs. Catching crabs in traps, moving the crabs to the live box, my grandmother getting in the water with a big basket and getting the crabs out of the livebox, and steaming and eating the crabs. Summer life revolved around crabs. We steamed them and ate them. My grandmother made "She Crab Soup" which was a vegetable soup with big pieces of crab in them. No not crab meat but chunked crabs. You ate the soup until you found a claw or a piece of crab, shell and all and pick it out and suck the crab meat out of the shells or pick the meat like you would steamed crabs. We had crab salad, like ham salad or chicken salad. We had crab cakes and fried soft crabs. And on and on. We all loved being at the shore. The house was on the water, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We would take the boat out and fish. We would fish off the dock. We would swim and swim and swim. We would jump off the dock and swim around to the shore or to the ladder and climb back. We would jump off the dock and swim down three more docks to my other grandparent's home. I was lucky because both my grandparents summer homes were just down from the other. My cousins would come and we would swim.

Back to Crisfield. At the festival there were many events including a crab cooking contest, pig catching contests, crab picking contests and the highlight-crab races! You would buy a crab (live of course) and they would paint a number on it and enter it in the races. Then they would race the crabs down a specially designed track. The fastest crab wins. All crabs get cooked at the end or you can take your crab home with you. We would take ours home and cook him there.

In 1971, as a child of only one year, my crab came in 99th!! My father's came in 83rd.

The crab picking contest was also fun to watch. The contestants were usually the women who picked crabs for a living right there in Crisfield. They worked in the factories and did this day in and day out. They can pick some crabs!