The Silver Ghost

My path to and from school takes me alongside a train track and requires a cross over the track.  Sometimes on the way to school there is a train passing by, sometimes there is one sitting on the track, blocking the crossing which causes me to have to detour.  Coming home recently I had already crossed over and was driving parallel to the track.  I was tired and ready to get home.  There are a few street lights along this road, but there were no other cars so it was somewhat dimly lit.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a glimmer of light and a reflection type of light.  When I glanced over I was excited to see an Amtrak train slipping by in the night.  All too quickly it had passed and for once, I was disappointed that I hadn't been caught by a train!  The sleek, silver body of the train slipped by quietly, car by car, like a ghost gliding through the night.

During those few seconds as the train and I passed each other I thought about travel on a train.  I had a vision of quiet elegance and gentle swaying of the cars.  I thought of the antique passenger cars that I've walked through in different locations.  They were always "old" smelling and faded but I always imagined them as they were in their grander days.  Some were beautiful private cars and others just plain and useful coach cars.  And the reality is that although they were beautiful and comfortable they did not have air conditioning or heating.  Steam locomotives were noisy and the soot from the coal covered everyone and everything.  Still the elegance of a by gone era charms me.

The train was gone quickly but I drove the rest of the way home wondering what it was like to travel on a train and thinking of how much our world has changed.  Train travel was the mode of transportation for so many years, now it is a novelty mode of transportation.

Last night was Gammy night.  Cameron dropped by for a while and the boys had a good time playing.

What happens at Gammy house stays at Gammy house! 
Yes, Cameron is sitting on a table, but that's ok only at Gammy house can he do that!

The Snaggle Tooth and The Artist



Jaydon lost both of his upper front teeth last weekend! 

He is officially a snaggle tooth kid!



Last Friday night he undertook an artistic effort on the driveway...a large stop sign!





 



Family Meals

Last post, spaghetti sauce.  This post, family meals.  Here's what I'm thinking:

Jaydon got a little put out with me on Sunday because I wasn't cooking on Sunday night.  Until recently on most Sunday evenings I cooked a meal and we all gathered to share it (the twins have caused a brief recess!).  He was annoyed that there was no meal on Sunday.  I asked him what he was hungry for, but he couldn't tell me.  So I don't think it was so much the food as it was that he missed our family gathering.

Now it has been said many times that it is good for a family to sit down and eat together.  My family did when I was growing up but those meals are more memorable to me for the food that my mother cooked than our family time.  I'm sure we talked at the table, but I don't remember that part.  When my children were growing up I came home from work and put a meal on the table almost every night.  There was usually some grumbling because it is impossible to please everyone, but the point was that a meal was served and we sat down together to eat.

Several months back our pastor made the comment that she has gone into many restaurants and seen families gathered around a table for a meal.  But sadly instead of talking with each other she had noted that they were all focused on the device in their hands! Were they communicating with each other, no I'm sure they weren't.  How sad.

So, back to Jaydon and his desire for a meal with his family.  At least I know that I've created a pleasant experience for him and he has good memories already of those family times together.  He values that time to sit down with those he loves and visit with one another while eating a meal.  There's something about sharing a meal that draws people together.  Just one of life's small, simple things!

Spaghetti's Cooking!

I have a pot of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove.  It smells heavenly!  I love the way spaghetti smells while it cooks just as much as I love the way it tastes.  I do not eat spaghetti in a restaurant, oh no.  I prefer homemade sauce, using my mother's recipe. 

My mother made the best sauce ever,  I loved to come home from school and smell the sauce (and many other things she cooked, too) simmering.  Mmmmm, so good.  She had gotten the recipe from the wife of one of my father's pilot training buddies.  We had met up with them again while we lived in California and I remember being invited to their home one evening for dinner and she served this wonderful spaghetti.  She shared the recipe with my mother and it became a family standard.

My mother made the sauce for special occasions as well as everyday.  I always asked for spaghetti on the days I had my braces tightened, as well as for birthdays.  When my mother would be out of town taking care of ailing parents she always left a pot of sauce in the refrigerator.  We would get several meals out of the pot, and it was during this time that I learned to use the sauce to make lasagna.

So tonight the sauce is simmering and I can hardly wait for it to be done.  I can't think of anything more peaceful that spending time in my sewing room, listening to classical music while enjoying the smell of spaghetti sauce simmering.  So as I leave here I'm headed to the sewing room to experience peace on earth.

Oh, and yesterday would have been my mother's 78th birthday.  So Happy Birthday, Mama and thank you for the legacy of your spaghetti sauce!

Ahhhhh, it's all okay now!

Ah, yes!  There is a football game on tv tonight! Yes, I know, it is only pre-season.  But dog-gone it, it sure sounds good.  I really haven't watched the game, been working on a knitting project, but just the sound of a football game is so soothing!  And it is good to glance up and see a game on the tv.  Now, I'm getting ready for fall!  The only bad thing is that the pre-season always seems to just take forever to be over.  Come on September I say!

Picture of the Week

I'm almost embarrassed to post this since the market was down so much today and there seems to be doom and gloom hanging out there but, in a way this was good for the economy.  Carole and Joe came over for the weekend and Stephanie and Jaydon joined us for a marathon shopping trip.  It's been a while since we did this, and the best part was coming home and piling the packages in the floor!  And there were a few more that didn't make it into the picture.  We shopped carefully and got good deals!  A little fun is good for the soul!

Is it pumpkin time yet?

August, ugh!  A few days ago, I was musing on the thought that August is just a blah month.  There is just nothing in the month of August except extreme heat. Now, yes, we have a few family birthdays but none are immediate family.  And there are no holidays or other events to celebrate.  School usually starts in August so that is it.  So what good is August?  All I think of in August is hot, hot, hot.  Everything is dry and dusty.

So, as I was musing I couldn't help but think about fall.  Usually I can't wait to get out those pumpkins and fall decorations and about this time I start getting the bug to get that stuff out.  In my mind Labor Day is the time to decorate for fall but I usually make myself wait until the first of October.  I don't know if it is the heat or what but right now I'm not getting excited about fall.  I think August just needs to be done and over with and then I'll be ready for those pumpkins.  Is it September yet?

Writing

July is over, now it is August and so I tell myself that my blogging sabbatical is over.  I just wish that August and this heat was over, but we still have a month to go.  Maybe we will get some relief, maybe not!

I've been thinking a lot about writing lately.  My current class is Old Testament (since this is a Christian u. I have to take 12 hours of religion) and I'm really enjoying it, more on the class later.  Homework is heavy duty, but very interesting.  Week before last in addition to all the homework I was supposed to write a 2 page paper on Proverbs 31.  I had finished everything else, but just ran out of time and wasn't really sure what to write about anyway.  The assignment assumed that I knew more than I did, so I was tempted just to skip the paper.  But being the over achiever that I am, I knew I had to write the paper.  So, on the day of class, just before the lunch hour I decided to start writing.  I thought I would try to just blah, blah, blah and get a page typed.  Before I knew it I was at the bottom of the second page and realized that I needed to end the paper.  I don't know what it was but the words just came to me.

I had a flash back to the first time I went to college and I remembered doing the same thing.  I would sit down to write a paper and the words would just come.  Only then, I was handwriting papers and then going to the typing lab and typing up the paper (complete with manual footnotes and formatting).  It seems that once I start writing the words just fly from my brain to my fingers and onto the page. 

And now I have this post to put my words onto.  So, I'm motivated to do some writing now that my sabbatical is over.  But first, I did a presentation for class last night and had the inspiration to use some of my pictures with the scriptures I was covering.  So, I offer the following picture with scripture:



"Do you not know?  Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth."  Isaiah 40:28



In the News...part 2

Several posts back I wrote about the so called experts that want to take away obese children from their parents and among other things do away with advertising "unhealthy" foods to children.  Today's news has prompted me to continue this topic.

McDonald's (every child's favorite place and home of the Happy Meal) announced that they are going to begin serving apple slices with every Happy Meal.  Isn't that exciting!  They will replace half of the fries in the Happy Meal with apple slices.  Every child is thrilled.  Thank goodness they will offer the option of all apple slices or all fries.  But let's see them get that order right...Jaydon and I have learned to check his sack before leaving the drive thru window to make sure that he has a toy for a boy (Barbie didn't do much for him one night) and the ordered barbecue sauce to dip the McNuggets in (the sauce I have in the fridge doesn't do the trick on the McNuggets).

Recently I had picked up a child's meal at Subway for Jaydon.  Typically those come with a small sandwich, a choice of apple slices or yogurt, and either milk or a juice box.  And they pack it in a cute little re-usable tote bag (no toy but the bag is usually ok, too).  Jaydon ate the sandwich but not the chosen yogurt or milk, so I put  both in the fridge to save.  I took them to work a day or two later as part of my lunch.  First surprise was the milk.  It was 1% milk...just to note here that I buy 2% but really, 1% for children?  Yuk, watered down and tasteless liquid.  Then I started on the yogurt.  It tasted funny so I read the label...non fat yogurt.  Yuk, again.  So, I wonder now what is the deal here?  Do they want today's children to look anorexic?  They will surely starve if all they have is apple slices and non fat food.

My Mind (AKA The Salad Spinner)

I've decided that my mind is like a salad spinner (you know, one of those little bowls you put wet lettuce in and it spins the water out).  What, you say, a salad spinner?  That's right, a salad spinner.  I have all these thoughts in my head that are always spinning around; I think a lot and my mind travels down many roads.  I realized that lately I've been having a thought overload.  I just have too many things to think about and I feel that I'm going to short circuit.  I've even found that I can't think more than a day or two in advance to make up to-do lists and shopping lists.  Five minutes into the future is about all I can deal with. 

Then I realized that my brain is like the basket of my salad spinner.  It is full of thoughts and is just spinning around.  So now when I find myself thinking about something fairly useless I've started telling myself to stop the spinner (my salad spinner has a little black button that you push to stop it) so I push the button so to speak on my mind and tell myself to take that thought out of the basket and get rid of it.  Sometimes the thought is something stupid that I have no reason to even be thinking, sometimes it is about something that happened in the past (good grief, no use thinking about that, it is over) or sometimes it is worrying about something in the future. 

When the spinner is going too fast or is too full that is the time to push the button and stop the spinning.  It is like cleaning house in my brain.

Leonardo Da Vinci

I had to write a paper for my last class and the instructor was pretty picky about what he wanted. In flipping through the text book for the class I saw a picture of Leonardo Da Vinci's painting The Last Supper.  So I wrote a paper on the making of the painting.  I enjoyed the research, so much so that I've added Leonardo to my reading list of things I want to read about someday.

I knew that he was a very talented artist but had no idea what a genius he was.  He not only painted but he designed "war machines" and dissected dead bodies among other things.  What I thought was interesting was that very often he never finished a project.  He had different reasons for not finishing, usually because the project wasn't turning out like he wanted but often he just seemed to get distracted with another project.  Another interesting fact was that he carried notebooks around with him all the time.  He would either sketch ideas or write down thoughts.  In one case his grocery list was scribbled in the book!

I don't profess to be anywhere near his intellect but I did relate to not finishing projects.  I love to start something but have a hard time finishing unless I'm under a deadline and have to get something done.  I also have quite a few notebooks laying around and even have a small one in my purse.  And I find myself interested in many things.  So I decided that I could relate to the genius who painted The Last Supper.

Speaking of the painting, I should note that within a few years after he finished it that it had been reduced to just blobs of paint.  The surface had been prepared correctly but instead of painting on wet plaster Da Vinci choose to paint on dry plaster using a mix of oils and tempera.  The result was that the paint began to flake off in a very short time. Ever the experimenter, his idea did not work.  What we see today represents careful restoration and only about 20% of the painting is actually original work. 

And, the final note I should add is that he was probably a homosexual. All in all I enjoyed writing the paper and found his life very interesting.