In Sorrow, Peace

Bittersweet. That’s the word I’d use to describe today. Bittersweet. I was awakened before six o’clock by my phone ringing. I knew what the call was by the time. At 5:44 AM, it had to be the hospice nurse and it was. “I’m sorry to tell you, your Grandma has passed.”

She had been hanging on, almost miraculously, by a thread for a few days. Our prayers had become ones for peace as recovery was finally past reasonable possibilities. Yesterday she was restless and fighting pain. Pain killers and stress relievers were administered to give her comfort. Then this morning, final comfort.

I’m not really up to writing about it right now. Soon, I will share the story of this truly wonderful woman, but for now, I’ll be attending to other responsibilities and absent from blogging for a few days. Knowing it’s coming doesn’t make it easy, but it does make it more bearable. Your positive thoughts and prayers for my family for strength and closure are appreciated beyond measure at this time.

Thank you.

Another Fish Story

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of HealthyTuna.com. All opinions are 100% mine.

The big one that got away, That giant fish we’re trying to catch, pregnant women shouldn’t eat tuna, all myths! That last one is the worst of all of them! Tuna is one of the most versatile and tasty fish you can eat. It’s low in calories, high in good fatty acids, mild flavored and not fishy tasting and is wonderful in recipes hot, cold, mild or spicy.

When you or someone close to you is pregnant, she should stay away from fish that are high in mercury, like swordfish, mackerel or shark to name a few, but tuna is not in that list! In fact, according to recent studies I’ve read about at Healthy Tuna, eating fish during pregnancy can reduce the chances of depression for Mom during and after pregnancy and increases Baby’s brain and behavior development. In the article I was reading, Dr. Ashley Roman, OB/GYN, suggests eating at least two to three fish meals a week during pregnancy

Okay, no, not pregnant here, but I did have tuna for lunch!

My healthy tuna lunch today was a real simple tuna salad on medium-well done, warm toast served up with some yummy crunchy celery. Yes, I’ve been told that I’m one of very few people that ever uses the term “yummy celery,” but I’m among many who say that about the tuna!

My Dad uses tuna in the summer a lot in salads. Back before he retired, when he was in construction and out in the heat all day in the summer, a salad done with tuna, chunk cheese, olives, cucumbers and fresh tomatoes with his homemade vinaigrette was hearty but not so filling to made him uncomfortable after a hard-working day. I remember he used oil-packed tuna when I was much younger, but he switched to healthier water-packed later.

Mom used to make a tuna casserole when we were little that was great! That was another of her fantastic ways to stretch a dollar, but it was so good! I’m going to have to leaf through some recipes and see if I can reconstruct Mom’s recipe for that one. It was done with a soup for the creamy base, or maybe it was milk, but done with tuna and shell noodles with crunched up potato chips on top. I feel all full and warm inside just describing it!

As for me, I do a basic tuna salad that's on Davlicious Recipes, but it’s tuna, sweet relish and Miracle Whip. The salad I did today was smaller in proportion than the one on my recipe site because I used the 80-calorie, single serving envelope from Star-Kist. But I’ve also tried tuna steaks at home and tuna a couple different ways at good seafood restaurants.

Hey look, that’s three different ways to prepare tuna, all of them tasty and all of them satisfying! If there are any expecting Moms reading this, hit print! Everyone should checkout the Healthy Tuna site for more recipe ideas and articles about tuna. As something that’s good for everyone, tuna is the real deal, not just another fish story!

Monday Mug Shot

Hartwick Pines State Park

I got this mug at the visitors center at Hartwick Pines when my Mom and I visited. Hartwick Pines is an interesting study in contrast! They have a little chapel in the woods and alogging museum and the oldest untouched pines in Michigan.

Hartwick Pines State Park is just out of Grayling, Michigan. Mom and I went f0or a small trip, a couple of hours when we were visiting Grandma. “Chasing around,” is what she called it. Hale is a wonderful home base for many touristy things in Michigan and we often went out to do some of those things when we visited. Sometimes Grandma went with us, sometimes she waited for us to get back. This trip was just us.

As usual when Mom and I went someplace together, there was much chatting. There was also the usual looking for hawks and deer in the Michigan woods just off the side roads. There is just a wonderful feeling in the upper and upper lower peninsulas of Michigan. It always brings back memories from childhood and camping.

On this day, the mission was simple. The oldest and biggest pine trees in Michigan are at Hartwick Pines. Sort of the Redwood Forest of Michigan. We got into the park and got out on the walking trail to the old pines.

It was a very scenic walk and one of those great walks where you can hear the small animals on the forest floor, lots of birds and the breeze in the trees. It was summer, but even so, there weren’t a lot of people in the park. It’s one of those things where the park is so big and just enough out of the way that you can feel free and still private.

When we got to the place where the oldest pines were, I was amazed. The truly ancient pines were just huge! Imagine a pine tree that you can’t join hand and surround completely with two people. Just wow.

I smile when I think about it. It’s a great memory with my Mom, but it’s also the opportunity to really appreciate what we have in my own country, in the state in which I was born. We have industry and history, but we still have more area of wilderness than we do cities and farms. We have an incredible wealth of man-made and natural wonders. I’ve been truly lucky to experience so many of them from the small to the large. That little hour-long walk in the woods definitely shows that you don’t have to take a two-week vacation to find a little peace and see something magnificent.

Football Fans Raised in Detroit

The most watched show on TV is Set!

The Detroit Lions raise some very strange football fans. The first rule of being a football fan in Detroit is learn how to have hope and realize that being a Lions fan builds character. Being a Lions fan also messes your head up for going into the adult world!

Smart Lions fans grow up, get married to someone from another state and adopt their team! But that has a whole new set of complications!

Take my brother and me. Dave and I grew up in metro Detroit, raised as good little homers, cheering for the Lions as long as the Red Wings or Tigers weren’t playing. Mom was a baseball fan and Dad is hockey first, other sports next! Dad scored tickets to a Lions game when we were about 11 and 12 and the four of us went. They were 50-yard line tickets at the Pontiac Silverdome, 3 rows away from the dome! They played the Dolphins and I recall the blue ants and blue and orange ants fighting over a chocolate chip. I remember the guy on the shuttle bus from parking to the arena, decked out in Lions gear and cheering loudly, “Rah rah ree, kick ‘em in the knee, rah rah rass, kick ‘em in the other knee!” He was cheering looking at us with a fun smile, glancing up at our Mom and Dad who had mildly concerned looks. I don’t remember who won, but dollars to donuts, it was probably Miami.

So now, a year after the team we grew up with was the first team in NFL history to finish the season 16-0, we have both married into new teams. I’m a Patriots fan by marriage and Dave is a married Colts fan.

Both teams were in the playoffs this year. Just a couple years ago, the Pats were on the verge of a better kind of history, they almost had a perfect all the way season, missing that with a Super Bowl loss, but what a ride that was. The Colts are going to be IN the Super Bowl this year. We’ve made significant gains with our football marriage bonuses!

Ah, but there are new rules to learn that we haven’t managed to get past. I was talking to Dave tonight and he told me he still wishes the Lions could manage a winning season. Well, actually, me too. I think it would be totally cool to see Detroit’s Hawaii blue jerseys on the field in the biggest American TV event of the year.

But the rules that are hard are not marrying into a new team forsaking all others. The Colts and Patriots are rivals! Like a couple of Lions kids understand football rivals, no one wants to make a big deal about playing the Lions! NFL rivalries are something new! Here’s where the problem is with the rivalry. I am happy that the Saints made it and I’ll be cheering for them on Super Bowl Sunday. You see, I’m an alumna of Siena Heights University, we’re the Saints too! My school is a small private college and while we have a great basketball and soccer teams, we don’t have a football team. I like the idea of being able to cheer “Go Saints” at a football game. But if the Saints had not won tonight, I’d be cheering for the Colts. I have family in Indy now, ya know? Besides, I’m a big-time Brett Favre NOT fan!

Dave is also a University of Michigan football fan. So, he finds himself with a natural leaning to support the Patriots because our QB, Tom Brady is a UofM grad. EEKS! If Laura would tolerate that, I’m sure his new son, Robert, would have something to say about it!

David says he’s okay with the fact that I’d support the Colts if the Saints hadn’t won because he understands the Favre thing, but that's easy to say now because he won’t be seeing his wife sheering for the Patriots’ arch rivals in the Super Bowl this year!

Now I just have to figure out how to crash a certain Super Bowl party if I should find myself in Indianapolis in two weeks…

GO SAINTS!!

Backup Glasses for Safety!

Who would have thought that an extra pair of eyeglasses could be a safety measure too? No kidding here, I have a couple of bruises on my face, including a really ugly one below my left eye. And I’m grateful to my dearly departed backup glasses that it wasn’t much worse! I’d turned in early and as a result woke up before the sun did Friday. Rather than waking my husband up, I got my backup glasses out of the office. Good thing I have an extra pair! Well, I just kept the extra pair on. Several hours later, I was in the bedroom to get a sweater. I twisted wrong and fell, face first, into the bed frame! My glasses took a lot of the impact. My broken glasses are probably why my damage was bruises and not a broken nose!

I learned two things that day. First, people with bad knees need to twist slower when they are looking for something and it’s really an essential thing to have at least one pair of backup eyeglasses! I’ve blogged about Zenni Optical before and I’ve also read the great review in examiner.com, part of New York’s Info 101, telling how it IS possible to get low cost, high quality eyeglasses. Now I’m about to make that call and get the necessary prescription information to become a customer too!

Zenni Optical has a selection of simple, fun frames that are only $8.00 with the lenses! They also have a large collection of frames in different designs, including rimless ones that are just like the ones I usually wear, glasses that look like my over $250 glasses for under $30. So tomorrow will be a call to the eye doc to get my prescription and pupillary distance. I’ll need that information to order my new backups. I picked a very pretty pair of half-rim glasses, adding the anti-reflective coating that my vanity has to have - $20.91! Even with my insurance, I can’t replace the broken glasses for anywhere near that inexpensive!

I’ve heard great testimonials from friends who swear by Zenni Optical for their backups. Of course, you aren’t replacing the care you get from your eye doctor. You still need the prescription information from an optometrist, but what you are replacing is the big bills for multiple pairs of glasses, which, believe me, are a good thing to have! Of course, if your reserve glasses look as good as your primary glasses, if anything does happen to them, you’ll still look good!

Whether it’s a backup pair or a couple in different colors to match your wardrobe, Zenni Optical keeps you looking and seeing your best for a LOT less!