We had a little road trip Wednesday

I wasn't really wanting to go anywhere, but Cliff wanted to go to Ridgeway, Missouri, to look at an old tractor like the first one he ever had, one he bought from my parents for $50.  That was back in 1967 when we had just bought a 20 acre place with a four room house, and we had very little money for anything.  I think we gave my folks $5 weekly until we had it paid off.  

A cousin of mine lives in Bethany that we hadn't seen in years, and Bethany is just a hop, skip, and jump from Ridgeway, so I called to make sure she'd be home.  

I made sandwiches and grabbed some potato chips and some tomatoes from the garden; yes, we still have tomatoes in the garden!  We each had a bottle of pop and took some store-bought cookies along for dessert.

I gave Gabe his breakfast, let him out for his morning business, and put him in his cage.  I shut the two cats in the porch and left them food and water.  I was a little worried about Gabe, because he had a tummy problem and I had taken him outside twice overnight, but he did fine through the day.  We were gone from 9 to 4.  The dogs and cats were happy to have their freedom when we returned.

We enjoyed the time with my cousin Kathleen, too.  She's ten years older than I am (doesn't look it) but is still the same jolly person I remembered. 

When Cliff started that Minneapolis Moline tractor and rode it, I was almost sure he was going to buy it.  It ran like a dream for a 1939 tractor, and the price was right.  It had been restored several years ago but still looks good.  Honestly though, unless he just wanted something to use in tractor shows and parades, it would sit around here in the barn.  And we don't do too many shows and parades these days.

 That's all, folks.

I'm enjoying the outdoors

Two weeks or more ago, I was wishing to walk in the timber.  Leaves were changing, and the dry leaves of the trees have a wonderful smell in autumn.  I have had to stop walking at various times over the years because of my knees, but once in a while I'll try again.  For some reason, it worked this time.  I don't know why old age pains sometimes get better for a while, but it happens.  Even from day to day, the pain can be more or less.  I've learned to do what I can when I can, knowing the changes aren't permanent.

I intended that first walk to be about ten minutes that day, which would get me to the nearest part of our timber.  When I got there I noticed that my knees weren't hurting yet, so I walked on about ten or twelve minutes more before I turned and came back.  Now mind you, I was walking slowly... but I was walking.

I've continued walking, probably five days weekly.  I'm going much farther now, still walking slowly without real pain, although when I wake up next day, sometimes my knees do hurt; usually it's the replacement knee, on the left leg.  On those days I don't do my walk in the pasture.

Walking like this won't last, it never does.  But I'm making the best of it right now, and it is truly a gift.  Gabe is glad to be back to walking with me, too.  I told him to sit for a portrait, which he did; but I don't think he wanted to.

It's National Cat Day!

Honestly, for my first five days with these cats (Butch and Unique), I was very busy watching them, hoping they didn't forget where their litter box is in the back porch:  There were three warm days when they first came that I could leave the door open for them, so it was easier;  cooler weather came, and the porch door had to be shut because the porch room is not heated.  However, so far they have gone to that door and meowed, and I let one or both of them in the porch.

That does present a problem though; I'm also feeding them in there.  So they may or may not want to use the litter box, or they might just be hungry.  But so far there's only been one accident, and it was my fault.  I've been keeping the bedroom doors shut until I get totally acquainted with these characters.  However, I forgot to shut the door to my bedroom once and saw Butch had followed me.  I picked him up, carried him out, and shut the door.  Perhaps twenty minutes later I realized Unique was missing.  Of course, she had sneaked into my bedroom with Butch, unseen.  Not only that, she pooped in Gabe's sleeping cage.  Oh, the smell!  However, I am glad that's where she did her business because I simply took the pad out of the cage, flushed the poop, and tossed the pad in the washer.  She might have done it in my bed instead of Gabe's!

Up until yesterday I had just about decided I couldn't handle two cats.  I've found out two cats use a lot more litter than I had expected, and that stuff isn't cheap.  Then there are the vet bills coming up.  And good grief, Butch thinks he needs to eat every fifteen minutes, so he is in there at the door meowing at the top of his lungs, but I have to keep food shut off in the porch because the dog will eat it.  

One thing about that porch, the cats love it there.  They sleep there all night.  Our old cat tree is there, and they climb to the top and look out the window.  They do a lot of wrestling in there, too.  That's where they stay when Gabe and I take a walk, because I don't want Cliff to have to watch them while I'm gone.

My husband would rather not have cats in the house, but he's trying to adjust.  It's the only way I can have a cat and be sure it won't get killed.  I should have settled for one cat, and if I could do it again, I would.  But I have them now, so there we are.

Greetings, from the Zoo

News from the animal kingdom around here.

 First of all, the goat ladies have dog collars on their necks.  I intend to be able to put a leash on them and take them out to the woods sometimes so they can eat leaves and weeds.  I can't let them loose anywhere besides the pen where they live because the grandson's two dogs would chase them and, if they caught them, they might kill them.  However, the dogs will listen to me if I have them with me on a leash; one loud "NO!" and they'd stop.  

The cats eat in that little house on the old cat tree, which I moved to the porch.  I can't keep their food anywhere else, because my dog Gabe eats it.  They usually sleep all night on the very top shelf, side by side.  Right now, though, Butch is in the living room in Gabe's bed, while Unique is in the back porch napping.

Oops!  Butch has moved to my lap with Gabe.  By the way, Butch is the vocal one, meowing at the top of his lungs.  He can also be heard across the room when he's purring.

I'm sure learning about cat litter-boxes:  Both Butch and Unique know what to do with it, but they toss a lot of the litter all over the back porch floor, too.  I suppose I'll have to get a cover for it.  Also, Unique likes to just lay in the box, even though she knows what it's real purpose is and uses it for that also.  Right now, though, she is sleeping atop the old, cat tree that we had for Blue, which I've put in the back porch.  They like it so well, they sleep in it all night long.  

I suppose things are going on OK, all things considered.

So, how's your day going?

SCORE

We're out here in the country, one and one-half miles from the town of Wellington.  There are farm cats everywhere, and some friendly unwanted strays in town, too.  I had a feeling if I went to the Wellington page on Facebook, I would find my cat... or cats.  There were several folks offering kittens, but some were a little older than I wanted.  My daughter in Wellington has some feral kittens she's feeding, but they aren't tame.  One person put a picture of two beautiful little calicos, but somebody else took them both before I could answer.

Finally, though, a lady about fifteen miles from our house said she had kittens, and they were tame, thanks to her children playing with them.  Two were beautiful calicos, but she wanted to keep them.  That left two orange boys and one not so striking calico... Cliff said she was ugly.  I decided I wouldn't judge her by her color and brought them home in a cat carrier.

I put the carrier with the kittens in it in our small back porch with a cat litter box full of fresh litter, a dish of food, and some water.  I wanted them to get used to this place on their own terms, so I opened the carrier, left the porch room, and watched through the window on the house-side of the porch.  It took them awhile, but one, and then the other, came out slowly and carefully.  It was obvious from the beginning that the boy is going to be leader of the pack.  They found the food, and he tried his best to crowd her out!  Brotherly love... ha!  I have to get some cat dishes for them.  

They both toured every inch of that room, then settled down.  That's when I opened the door to the rest of the house, and at first they were scared to see that there was more to this place.  But the boy, now known as Butch, leads the way in every scary situation; then his sister follows.  I didn't really bother them, I just watched.

Gabe hadn't met them yet because he was at the groomers', so it didn't take much time for cats to get friendly with us.  I hated the fact that I had moved Blue's cat tree to the garage for him to use, because it was so dirty.  But I brought it in and vacuumed it the best I could, and when they finally realized how high they could climb, it was a regular circus, and that's where they spent most of their time!

When we got home with Gabe, I took him on his leash to see the kittens so he wouldn't scare them, but that was a joke.  The cats stood their ground and let him know they could kill him if he came any closer.  He took the hint.  He likes cats, although he is jealous if he thinks they're getting too much attention. 

The cats are now well acquainted with us; we will see what this day brings.  Oh yes, when Cliff called the little girl cat Ugly, I said, "Oh no she isn't; she's Unique, like me!"  So that's her name, although I will likely just call her Neek, or Neekie.  Yes, it's a silly name, but I like it.

Unique may not be the brightest kitten.  She thought the litter box was a bed when she first came.

Wish us luck.  I will be making an appointment with the vet today to get them started right.

It happened at the hairdresser's

Since my Blue-cat died a horrible death, I have pushed the whole part of his dying out of my mind.  Our faithful old 14-year-old Mama Kitty, the outside cat, doesn't hunt anymore: She eats, drinks, and naps.  She has my respect and love for the wonderful mother she was before she was spayed, and also for the way she hunted in her younger years, and went on walks in the pasture with us.  

However, she can't take the place of Blue:  In the first place, our little Cora brought him to me when we were her babysitters.  She chose him for me especially, because I wanted a grey cat.  He almost could fit into one hand, he was so tiny.  He was an inside/outside cat, and didn't need a litter box because he'd go to the door and meow when he needed to go.  

We have never had a cat that was totally a house cat, and I've been scared to get another one and let it live outside even part-time because my heart was so broken when Blue died.  

Saturday Cliff and I went to Style Corner in Buckner because we both needed haircuts.  That lady is about as close from our home as any other hair-cutter, and we like her.  But this was the first time I had met her cat.

Coal-black he was, not a spot of white on his body.  I reached down to pet him, and he decided to be my friend.  I was stroking his back, and I found myself saying, "Oh, I miss my cat."

I was almost ready to cry, but I didn't want to cry in front of my hairdresser, so I held back.  Cliff wasn't paying attention to me:  Since he has Cochlear Implants, he tunes his ears to hear only what's on his phone so he can laugh at comical stuff, and he is literally deaf to everything else.  So yesterday, (Sunday) I was telling him how that black cat had affected me, and I did cry a bit in telling the story.  And he said, "Well then, get a cat.  At this point, I don't care if we have a cat in the house all the time."

And he sounded like he really meant it.  

He enjoyed Blue's kitten days as much as I did.  It was the first time he had even paid attention to a kitten.  And let's face it, the whole world is full of cute kittens at any given time.

So the search is on.  I think I may already have found the one I want, but if not, I know there's one somewhere.      

 

Some things aren't fun

My husband sees various doctors at different times: There's the urologist who came with the territory when he had his cancer adventure; a cardiologist, because he had a four-way bypass in 2006; and the regular doctor that we see every year to find out if we can remember three words for ten minutes after drawing a picture of a clock.  Actually, we never see an actual doctor there, because we deal with a very nice nurse practitioner.

However, two weeks ago Cliff had a problem with a UTI, and he's still dealing with the problems related to that.  We have had two very early morning visits to an emergency room ($$$) and one visit to our regular provider.  Oh, and a visit to the urologist office, although we only saw one of his nurses.  We have an appointment with him November 5, so we hopefully can get this whole mess done with.

Meanwhile, we each have a cataract to be fixed.  We had an appointment three weeks ago to go to our first visit with the ophthalmologist.  Unfortunately, we both had covid on that date, so I called and got another appointment.  Wednesday we went, and today we are going back to be prepared for our coming procedures.  We are doing it on the same day, and Cliff's sister will take us and bring us home.

So, if you've wondered why I'm taking so long between blog entries, now you know.    

At least the ophthalmologist is near Costco, so I went in and bought one of their five-dollar rotisserie chickens to have for our noontime meal, and dinner was served. The chicken was still warm, I cooked a big sweet potato from the garden in the microwave, heated up some broccoli, and dinner was ready about thirty minutes after we got home. Yesterday I made a chicken Rice-a-roni casserole with the rest of the bird, and there's enough for two more meals. I might put two servings of it in the freezer until next week so we don't get tired of it.

Speaking of chickens, I saw this in the news yesterday: Thousands of chickens to be culled after Minnesota poultry company faces financial problems,  What a shame all those chickens will die for nothing.  

Peace!

Sunday Stealing

1. What do you hope your last words will be?  I have no idea.

2. What do you spend the most time thinking about?  food

3. What is something you can never seem to finish?  washing dishes

4. What mistake do you keep making again and again?  I think I've always kept making all my mistakes over and over again until finally I learned.

5. What’s the best thing you got from your parents?  My natural curly hair from my mother, and all my mother's stories.  I got a lot of my dad's orneriness.

6. What’s the best and worst thing about getting older?  The best thing is that when you're older you have more time to do what you want.  The worst thing is that you can't do a lot of the things you would like to do any more.

7. What do you wish your brain was better at doing?  At this time, I just wish my brain could work at capacity like it should.

8. If your childhood had a smell, what would it be?  Fried chicken, cookies, and coffee

9. What have you created that you are most proud of?  the songs and poems I've written

10. What were some of the turning points in your life?  When I got married, when we first moved to the country, and when I had my children   

11. What song or artist do you like but rarely admit to liking?  I don't have any song or artist I'm ashamed of

12. What small impact from a stranger made a big impact on you?  When Cliff and I went to Georgia to visit our son and we went to Plains, Georgia, on Easter to sit in on his Sunday School lesson.  When it was over, we had our picture taken outside with him and his wife.  We were both fat then, but I still love having this picture.

 

13. As you get older, what are you becoming more and more afraid of?  I am going to try my best to trust God to take care of me.  He has given me a good life thus far, and I expect him to take care of me no matter what.

14. What are some of the events in your life that made you who you are?  I don't know as events had anything to do with who I am.  I just walked through life assuming everything would pan out.  Fortunately, it has.

15. What could you do with $2 million to impact the most amount of people?  I would give it to my favorite charity:  Kansas City Union Mission.   Because there but for the grace of God go I. 

Health issues

Once you get to a certain age, you expect to have various aches, pains, and other problems.  My husband has something going on, and we've had a hard time finding what is causing the problem simply because the specialist doctor we need can't get to him until November 5.  And I'm not much help to him, because I have dementia and get addled in certain situations.  Our daughter, who is working overtime because this is the time of year that her job is the busiest, came over and helped us get what we needed to know yesterday, and she will accompany Cliff to the doctor next week to see that his needs are met between now and November 5.  

I have been losing simple words since 2020; of course that happens to most old folks.  But so many names, places, and simple words just don't come to mind when I need them.  I can tell you that my closest family members have seen how I can hardly say one sentence without someone helping me figure out the word I need to say, and they know.  In my last blog entry I couldn't remember the word "microwave" and had to go to Google and ask the question, "How can I warm up leftovers?" in order to use the word in my entry.  Thank God for Google, or this blog would already be closed.

I have told my nurse-practitioner (or whatever they call them nowadays) every year since 2020 that I have dementia, and she just says, Oh, just keep reading and doing things.  

I really don't care about being diagnosed anyhow.  Everybody thinks there are pills that help, but the help anyone gets from those pills is insignificant, from what I've seen.  In July I talked to a nurse who is married to one of Cliff's nephews, and she suggested I could get some help from pills, but agreed with me that anything a pill for dementia does is very little, and doesn't last for long.

What I am doing now is taking life as it comes, trying to enjoy life now, and just praying my family isn't too bothered by what I become.  As for myself, I still FEEL like myself; I've even been able to take very slow walks in the pasture again with my dog without my knees aching too badly.

So, if you notice misspelled words in my stories, you will know why.  But as long as I can, I will keep blogging.

 As always, I'm just keeping things real.

I've always loved gravy

Milk gravy, that is.  Oh, I like the kind of gravy that comes with a beef roast too, but not as much as milk gravy.  I'll bet that's one of the first things my mother fed me; that's just a guess, but she did love to feed people, and I do love to eat.

Mother often told me the story about how worried she was that I didn't eat enough vegetables when I was a baby, so she asked my doctor what to do.  He told her, "We don't care what she eats, just so she eats!"

She said that so many times, you'd have thought it came out of the mouth of Jesus.  From that time on, I was never forced to eat anything I didn't like.  It worked pretty well for me, though, because by the time I was in my teens, I liked almost any kind of food you could name.  

We had milk gravy often; all it needs is bacon grease, flour, and milk.  In those days every woman had a can of bacon grease sitting on her stove, and it was used for many things.  Mother made full meals, but if there was bread and gravy, that's all I wanted, and that was just fine with my parents.  

Another story Mother told me was that when I was a toddler, she went out to get clothes off the line after supper and took me out with her.  At some point she looked around to make sure I was still with her and saw me sitting on the ground with our dog, Cookie, helping her eat the leftover gravy my mom had put in her bowl.

Then there was the time my parents were the telephone operators in Villisca, Iowa.  I remember this very well.  I was probably four or five years old.  My parents and I got done eating our supper. I went outside when we were done eating, and the neighbor kids met me over at the door.  One of them said, "We had pork chops for supper!"

Thinking I'd go one better than that, I proudly said, "We had bread and gravy!"  My mom was listening and came running to the door to tell those kids every single thing that she had cooked for supper, afraid that the kids would tell their parents and they'd think ill of us for having such a pitiful supper.  She was a great cook, and proud of that fact, but I really doubt those little kids would have told their parents what I said.  

Cliff and I had gravy a couple days ago because we are still getting tomatoes from the garden.  My Arkansas friend Betty at Galla Creek mentioned putting gravy on tomatoes in her blog, and I just had to try it; turns out Cliff and I both liked it.  This morning there was still about half a cup of gravy in the refrigerator, so I sliced a smallish tomato, heated the gravy in the microwave, and poured it over that tomato.  I also had a small amount of sweet potatoes I'd cooked yesterday, and that was the rest of my breakfast.  

Sweet potatoes, gravy, and tomato.  Breakfast of champions! 

I often think how great it was that Mother told me stories, not only about myself when I was small, but also stories about how she lived when she was young.  I don't think most kids heard much about how people lived "in the olden days".

By the way, if you'd like to hear some of her stories, you'll find many of them HERE.

What it was, was football

I often think about the ridiculous amounts of money that NFL players receive. But this morning I'm thinking about all the people in Kansas City who woke up smiling and think, "Maybe it's worth it all, if they can make so many people happy. Especially realizing that at any time they can get seriously hurt doing their job."

When the political climate gets me down and wars are going on everywhere... when the garden has failed because it doesn't rain... when inflation is rampant and there seems to be no reason to smile... and let's

not forget the hurricanes...

OUR CHIEFS MAKE US SO HAPPY! And last night, the Royals also won, so Kansas City is twice as happy.

Of course we come back to the real world, but for a little while, we celebrate. It amazes me how our Chiefs just keep on winning; I know it won't last forever, but what a run they are having.

I'm sure most of you aren't interested in our football games. I used to dread football season. But the one gift that Covid gave me was that we couldn't do much of anything but watch TV or read, so I learned to love the Chiefs. I still don't understand all the rules and moves, but I know enough to enjoy the game.

I'll take that.

Covid is gone except for the cough

I haven't bothered with blogging lately, and as usual, nothing much is happening around here; there have been a few clouds on the horizon lately, but we won't worry about that.  Because today, we'll be eating turkey.  I bought a turkey after Thanksgiving last year and it has lived in the freezer all this time, with Cliff saying every once in awhile, "When are we gonna have that turkey?"

I kept putting him off, but finally the time has come for him to have his turkey:  It's in the oven.  I have the canned cranberry sauce, and the dressing... yes, it's the boxed stuff, but if you throw some things in it like sausage and onions and celery, nobody knows it wasn't made from scratch.  There's really no big reason to have that sort of dinner in October, but at least my husband can quit worrying about that turkey.  

It is handy to have leftovers, though.  There are so many things to make with cooked turkey.  I put the meat in the freezer in two- or three-cup portions and make things like Chicken spaghetti, substituting turkey for chicken.  Chicken pot pie and several casseroles can be done with turkey and you hardly know the difference. 

So with that said, let us give thanks.  

Peace!