Busy!

After driving back from Atlanta yesterday, my daughter and I went to Parkway Place Mall. It was crowded, busy and fun to walk around in. I love Christmas season. In some ways, it can be a pain, although I enjoy most of it, especially the music and decorations. I have to stop myself from buying glittering holiday clothes since they are usually only worn for a month or so, and go for something more practical. I did buy glitter lotion. I was sparkling yesterday.

Christmas can not come too soon or last too long for me.

Thanksgiving in Atlanta

It was wonderful. We went to Atlanta. I love Atlanta -- well except for the traffic. We got stuck in it going out, although we sailed home on Saturday morning. My sister roasted a 22-lb. turkey with all the usual side dishes. The best part was visiting with her and her husband (a minister) and 4 of their 5 children (the oldest is doing church work in California as a missionary). We had a great time. The photo blog has many camera phone pictures. My camera phone is generally poor quality, but it works when there's no computer access.

My husband was came down with a cold just as we arrived, but he did the best he could. It's a good thing my sister keeps a pharmacy in her home. With 5 children, they come down with every cold out there - and plenty of other things.

While we had good leftovers, my two favorite Atlanta restaurants are Joe's Crab Shack - a seafood chain that has not reached my hometown yet and Sweet Tomatoes - a wonderful soup, salad and pasta buffet. Salads and soups are their specialities. They make several unique ones. The chicken won-ton salad is my favorite. Their chicken noodle soup is a cut above the rest, using thick homemade noodles like grandma used to make.

This time, along with their regular potato bar, they offered a sweet potato bar with toppings such as maple cream, cinnamon sugar, butter and honey butter - so good!

While there, I got to read the first return of Opus. Breathed's artwork is much improved.

Is Michael Jackson a Child Molester?

Our local news is taking a poll. Several possibilities are offered, but the results are overwhelming in one direction. Have an opinion? Post here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Writing in advance to wish all of you who celebrate it, a very happy and satisfying Thanksgiving. My sister and her family are with me. We are cooking (well, she is doing most of the cooking), eating, shopping, going to movies, enjoying each other's company and probably staying up half the night talking. By the way, I finally bought Sister Schubert's Yeast Rolls. I've been meaning to get these for years but they always sell out at Thanksgiving. I forget how many grocery stores I visited in desperation to find them - all without success. I learned my lesson this time, shopped early and stored them in the freezer.

I don't know if I will be too busy to write in this blog for a few days or not, but the photo blog will be going strong. Hope everyone will be safe. My daughter thinks accidents coming into the hospital might increase. Drive carefully.

Eating with Turkeys

I got a chuckle from this article. A group of vegetarians in Maryland are going to sit down and eat with turkeys. I remember when I went to the San Diego Zoo. Peacocks were wandering the eating area while we had lunch. Fortunately, they did not make lunch of our toes.

Americans are "Highly Tech Savvy"

A study found 31 percent of Americans are geeks. The high percentage was a surprise to the study's authors. "Despite being plugged in to the Internet and other sources of data more often, only 13 percent of the tech-savvy crowd feels overwhelmed by information. By contrast, a sense of information overload plagues 25 percent of the rest of the population."

I remember when most folks had barely heard of e-mail. In my early days of doing genealogy online, I had to explain how to download a file - what the word "download" meant. Very few folks visited a website. Instead, we went to a community bulletin board like one sponsored by our local computer club. Only in person could be on the site at a time and we could post on a message board. I joined CompuServe and Q-Link early. We stayed within the system. It was a different world then.

First Big Frost

Last night it got down to about 24 degrees and produced the first big frost. I took a few photos and posted them on the Photo Blog. My husband planted garlic a couple of weeks ago and it is doing well. The kind of frost we get here does not kill garlic and he expects to harvest it in February. This is a photo of the garlic plant leaves with frost on them.

When I was walking today, I saw frostweed by Aldridge Creek. It's a plant that develops a delicate layer of frost when the ground freezes hard enough -- an interesting site. Here's a photo of it in the winter after a frost. The white is a thick, delicate frost coating -> Frostweed or view Frostweed in the summer. Sometimes the effect is spectacular with a larger but delicate frost coating on the plant. (Not so this year, although I did see the effect.) Sometimes, winter comes so mildly that the plant does not frost up like this way. The frost comes too late in the year. It takes a sudden deep early enough frost to do it.

Mythbusters

We were channel surfing and found a show called, Mythbusters. The episode I watched involved an exploding toilet. Stories about exploding toilets have been around for years and this episode was trying to recreate such a scenario. They put all kinds of chemical combinations together without success. They even filled the toilet with gasoline and dropped in a match. The liquid put out the match! When they torched it, though, the gasoline caught fire. Still, it did not explode.

Finally, they filled the toiled with gunpowder and set it off. Okay, that did the trick. (You should have seen the mannequin they put on the toilet!) After we were done laughing, they concluded that the exploding toilet story was just a myth, an urban legend.

This show explores other myths. It was fascinating and funny.

It reminds me of a quote in the most recent Cal Thomas newspaper column, not so funny - but true. He was requoting someone else when he said words to the effect of, "The danger of no longer believing in God is not that people will believe in nothing, but that people will believe in anything."

Foot Massage Heaven

My husband buffed and massaged my feet, rubbing in citrus body butter lotion. I think I died and went to heaven.

This was after he brushed our cats. He's the best husband in the world. The whole idea of doing the foot massage was his - a gift given gladly. I hope every husband is this nice to his wife.

Continued on the NEXT PAGE -->

<--  Previous Page | Topic List for this Page | Back to Top | Next Page -->