Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Life's simple pleasures (and occasional aggravations)

A few days ago Cliff and I were talking about one thing and another, and somehow the subject of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches came up.  
"I miss peanut butter and jelly sandwiches," I said.  "Remember the old days when, if we wanted something like that, we'd just go right ahead and have it?" 
One of our rules these days is to not eat impulsively.  Oh, we'll eat a tomato or some fruit between meals any time we want, and if we are out and about we'll occasionally have a McDonald's ice cream cone.  But to have a sandwich when it isn't mealtime is out of the question.  A sandwich is a whole meal-full of calories.  
Then it came to me:  Make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich serve as a meal!  And that's exactly what we did this morning.  Cliff chose strawberry jam, I'm having home-made peach.  It all comes to 450 calories, which is more than we usually splurge on breakfast, but I'll even things out at lunchtime.  
The thing is, the PBJ sandwich isn't nearly as good as I thought it would be, much too sweet.  So I won't be worrying about that any more.  I've gotten it out of my system.  

Cliff had his annual blood work and checkup Friday, in order to get his prescriptions renewed.  Yesterday the nurse called from the doctor's office saying he is a little anemic, and they need more blood, so this morning we'll go do that.  (Cliff says no wonder he's anemic, they keep taking his blood.)  
As we sat at the picnic table in front of the shop talking about this, I said, "You know, Phil (his older brother) started all this mess of everything going wrong.  HE'S the first one who had heart surgery.  HE'S the one who had bad PSA results first (their younger brother has recently had a blood test that revealed high PSA's).  If Phil hadn't started this ball rolling, you and Donald would probably be in perfect health!  I ought to call him and tell him off."  
The words had hardly left my mouth when the phone rang.  It was Phil.  
Maybe you just had to be there, but we found it hilarious. 


Just before Phil called, one of those wonderful, amazing things happened.  As I said, we were eating watermelon in front of Cliff's shop.  Out of nowhere, I suddenly heard a loud, loud roaring noise very close by, coming out of the south.  I hardly had time to look for the source when a Warthog airplane appeared over the top of our garage.  It was breathtaking, flying so low overhead it felt like we could have reached up and touched it.  It was one of those little gifts that will sometimes drop unexpectedly into a day; it could have so easily been missed if we had been inside, if we hadn't decided to have some watermelon at that particular time.  

7 comments:

  1. A-10 Warthog Trivia

    The plane is built around it's gun. The engineers had this massive gatling gun that fired depleted uranium slugs and they said "We want to put this in the air. Build a plane to carry it."

    The cockpit is surrounded by an armored "bathtub" designed to protect the pilot from ground fire.

    It is also called the "tank buster" because with it's gatling gun firing depleted uranium slugs at 3,900 rounds per minute it can slice through a tank like a hot knife going through butter.

    Because it was designed for close air support, it is one of the slowest flying planes in the U.S. arsenal. The pilots joke that the manufacturer is going to replace the airspeed indicator with a calendar.

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  2. Have not had the pleasure of seeing one. We get the low-flying cargo, troop carriers flying over us at times. Usually 2-3 of them at a time

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  3. That is actually my favorite air force plane ever. Those saved us a lot of dirty work in desert storm, and they would "wave" at us both flying past us to go rain some hell, and back the other way when they emptied.

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  4. HOW exciting to see the plane. Around here we see hot air balloons.

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  5. As a rule I only have jelly on my toast when we have our big breakfast on Sundays. I eat peanut butter on an apple a couple times a week.
    Chokecherry Jelly is my absolute favorite, but hard to find.

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  7. Every once in a while, a serious airplane will fly by here (south central Missouri), but not often. When I was in Los Angeles a couple of years ago for a wedding, a blimp floated by and we all went racing outside taking pictures of it like crazy. I ended up with a lot of dumb pictures of the blimp and not so many of family members. Oh well.

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