Nana Knows

If you are playing outside early in the morning and your feelings get hurt,

 your Nana knows how to fix it and make you smile again in no time flat!

Strawberry Bisque

We spent last week in the Caribbean on a cruise ship.  Every night we had a delicious fancy dinner.  One of my favorite appetizers was strawberry bisque.  I missed it so much that I googled a recipe for it and found the Carnival Cruise Strawberry Bisque.  We are on the second batch!

Ingredients
2 cups frozen strawberries
1 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream (whipping cream)
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons sugar
fresh mint for garnish

Directions
1. Puree strawberries, milk, cream and sour cream in blender or food processor until smooth.
2. Sir in sugar
3. Chill 8 hours or overnight in refrigerator before serving.

I garnish mine with whipped cream.  The second time I made the recipe I reduced the amount of sour cream and added some extra sugar.

Lunch Interrupted!

While eating our lunch today we heard some odd noises.  I thought it was the fridge making popping noise.  When we realized that it was coming from the laundry area just across the hall from the kitchen table, Peanut went to investigate. 

That's my clothes dryer on the right. I had used it several times this morning.  There is an air conditioning filter against it and you can see a plastic dishpan thingy on the left.  If you look closely you can see that a snake has his body through the handle of the dishpan thingy and the white thing is a glue trap when the snake's head and tail are stuck!  This snake had gotten itself into a very serious  sticky situation.  When he saw that the snake could not bite,  Peanut removed it to the yard. I did not freak out with screaming or running but I did not carry or touch this varmint.

It was determined that this was not a poisonous snake and that it would be impossible to remove the glue trap, so it didn't end well for this intruder.  Steps are being taken to try and prevent the entrance of any of this unlucky fellow's friends or relatives.  Some days life on the Ponderosa is just downright dangerous!

Daffodils

"And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils."

from The Daffodils by William Wordsworth

 

Planting Time

It was beginning to look a lot like spring around here with all these blooms

 Rhododendrons

 Tulips

 Hyacinths

 Daffodils

 Bradford Pears

 And Maple trees--this one is just a mess waiting to happen!

 And then a farmer came along
(you all know the rest of the story from the commercial So God Made a Farmer)

And the farmer and his borrowed tractor made this...

I just love dirt!

 Then we added one farm cart loaded with fertilizer

 Ten pounds of potatoes and some sweet corn

And put them into straight rows and that confirms that spring has arrived on the Ponderosa!

Easter Fun 2013

Easter Sunday is really quiet on the Ponderosa, but yesterday was a different story!  Friends and family gathered for our annual Easter picnic and egg hunt.  With an early Easter it was jacket weather but there was no snow or rain so all was good.  Around 50 people gathered for lunch and then the kids enjoyed an egg hunt. It's always a great time to stop for a while from our busy times and visit with friends!

Easter Blessings to all!

31 Days

This writing challenge began as a way to pressure myself into blogging more frequently.  My blog was intended to be a record of our family adventures, recorded mostly for the grand kids to read someday.  I had a small audience of family and friends who read what ever I posted, but I never set out to create an audience or to be an example of scholarly wisdom!  My Aunt Linda, who has always been my cheerleader, enjoyed a month of pictures I posted in February and she wanted to know what I was doing for March. I began looking around for something and being a frequent visitor to the website Two Writing Teachers I was familiar with but had never participated in their Slice of Life Challenge which requested that participants write something everyday in March.
I work best under pressure and sometimes that is exactly what it was.  I typed a couple of posts with heavy eyelids at the last minute, because I am just like that.  If I make a commitment I keep it.  One of my favorite quotes is from Horton Hatches an Egg, a Dr. Seuss story where Horton the Elephant says, “I said what I meant and I meant what I said, an elephant's faithful 100 percent.”
I’ve made it to the last day.  It may have become a habit.  I surprised myself some days, when I opened my word processor and wrote about something completely different than the post I had created in my mind.  I can be distracted easily like that!   Or some days I had to wait and something just happened in my ordinary day that sparked an idea. 
Thanks to new friends who commented along the way, and thanks to family who encouraged me along the way! I still have much to say and you know that my camera is never very far away so when I have writer’s block or a busy day a picture may let you know what is going on at the Ponderosa!

Forever Friends

This is my friend Ruth.  People ask us how long we’ve been friends, and we have to say we don’t remember when we were not friends. I am exactly one month older than her.  We grew up in the same church, and were in the same classes all though our school years.  We graduated second and third in our high school class.  After college she moved to a town about two hours away.  I still live in our hometown.  We are both teachers, she is still at it, and I have retired. She is my BFF, no matter how old we get.  It doesn’t matter how far away we are from each other I know she is there for me.  It doesn’t matter how long its been since we talked, we can spend hours and never run out of anything to say. 
She visited me today, drove for two hours just to join in the fun of our annual Easter picnic and egg hunt. We make our picture together every year at this time. We think we are aging gracefully!  The two of us also know how blessed we are because not many people have a friendship like ours. 

The Visitor House

Here’s my spring project.  We recently purchased it because it connects to our property.  It’s more than 100 years old, which means that it has a lot of character(aka some no so level spots)  The left side is added on and fairly new. There are two bedrooms, a loft bedroom, kitchen, living room, two bathrooms, utility room and a terrific screened in porch. The owners were collectors.  It’s full of interesting stuff.  Just look:

We bought it all.  Right now we aren’t sure what we are going to do with all this stuff, we just know that much of it has to go. After a little cleaning and scrubbing it can be a guest house for our children or other family and friends who need a place to stay overnight or even to get away!  My grandson has named it The Visitor House.  Anyone want to have a tea party on my porch?  I have plenty of dishes that we can use!

Recovering

This post is coming from the couch.  I’m down for the count, but with only four posts to go, I must finish this writing challenge.  It’s important that I get better, there’s a bunch of people coming to my house for an Easter picnic, plus I can’t disappoint some little people who want to hunt eggs!  So my doctor gave me some antibiotics and assured me that I would be fever free tomorrow and would not be contagious.  But right now, I think curling up in a ball will be the best medicine. Thanks Alexander Fleming for discovering penicillin, you saved Easter for me!

Be smart

Until recently I had resisted owning a smart phone.  I didn’t have a need for being constantly connected.  An upgrade offering an iphone for a small charge tempted me into giving it a try.  Admittedly my phone is usually smarter than me, but I am learning.  Today I used it to send the husband a picture of a bag of charcoal, because he said get the orange bag and I was not sure.  It looked red to me.  When I needed to use my reward card at the drugstore, there is was on my phone with just one touch.  No searching through the wallet.  One message ding brought me a photo of my grands eating popcorn and watching Sesame Street.
One thing I try to be careful with is talking and driving.  There is a law against texting and driving in Tennessee, but no law against talking and driving.  If I must take a call when driving alone, I put the speaker on so that I can talk hands free.  Other citizens on the road in Tennessee were talking today.   Several times a car suddenly slowed in front of me and when I moved left and passed, guess what I saw. Phone conservations in the car take your attention away from where it should be.  Even if you believe that you are good at multi-tasking, the road in not the place to practice it. 
Be safe and keep focused.  Call back when you stop.  Until Tennessee makes it illegal to drive and hold your cell phone, I’m going to be watching out for the other guy--the driver with one hand on the wheel and the other at their ear! Be smart with your smart phone.

Too much stuff

My day was spent spring cleaning.  Usually during spring cleaning you would raise the windows and let the house “air out” but today there was snow falling outside as I cleaned.  I have dusted and scrubbed and rearranged the clutter.  I say rearrange because if you do not throw items out or take them out of the house in some way you are just moving things from one place to another. Because we have limited storage space we have a catch-all shelf at the back door. It had run over into the floor.  Don’t judge, you have one too!  I tackled it today and when I started finding things I did not remember we had I realized that it was time.  It’s time to lose some weight. The load must be lightened. It’s time to give it to Goodwill!