Show and Tell Thursday

Today is the brunch talk edition of my blog every day week. I have some fun or interesting notes and a couple scrapbook layout for show and tell today.

Baseball Tell

First off, not much baseball talk today because I feel “up” and that’s not because of yesterday’s baseball. My number one team in BOTH leagues was shut out yesterday. I know I have a fair share of Red Sox fans who follow The Chronicles, but there are only a few times that I’m not cheering for the Sox with you and well…

I was reminiscing yesterday about the intro/outro bits they had on the Tigers broadcasts for a while when I was a kid. It was the feisty cartoon Tiger growling at the beginning of the broadcast, ready for battle. At the end of the show you saw the tiger again biting a bat with the opposing teams logo when we won. He ripped it up, spraying splinters everywhere. I loved it when we played teams that could be otherwise represented too. For instance, when the Tiger grabbed the bat with the Orioles’ logo after a victory, you heard the growl and instead of splinters, orange feathers, very cool. When we lost, you’d see the sad tiger with a cold pack on his head and hear a whining meow, followed by a quieter “we’ll get ‘em next time” growl and a determined look. I loved those bumps! Yesterday, after an evening of fog and rain, my child brain saw that sad meowing tiger with the cold pack. I always took that “we’ll get 'em next time” to heart, still do. So, sorry Red Sox first fans, the man who shares the TV we watch it on included, today is OUR TURN! And arrrgh, mateys, the Pirates walk the plank too!

And that’s all I have to say about baseball today.



How about some show to go with all the tell? Here is a scrapbook layout I did. This page is an “ad” for the new album by The Feline Patch. David always refers to the shots of all three of our kids in the hall as their “rock band pose.” So, I ran with his idea and did one of the rockstar photos he took as an ad for their CD!

Credits: Cat in a Basket by Miss Edna and Suruha Freespirit

Featured Tracks:

What Part of “NO” Do You Understand?
Hiders From The Storm
Fun Mouse
Feline Groovy
War Kittens
Tuna The Page
House Cat Strut
When The Cats Go Marching In
Theme From Meow Mix
(remix, with more salmon)

It’s not our first collab piece. We’ve written a few sets of parody lyrics when waiting for trains too. David and I can come up with some fun stuff when we work together!


Oo! There’s another piece of way good news, to me anyway. I watch baseball and Degrassi on TV. Sometimes I watch some news, if there’s something I want to see instead of just read about, even though I’ll go back and read for better details later, but baseball and Degrassi are the only things I make an effort to watch on TV. There used to be another show and it’s been a number of years now since it’s show finale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Yeah, I have a strange thing about shows in high schools. Well, the network that carries Degrassi, Teen Nick, is going to debut Buffy on May 31! For the first week, it’ll be 2 shows a day, then it will be one a day in a regular time slot. That is just so cool!

Okay, maybe I’m too easy to please.

My Netrition order came in yesterday. Yay for having fat-free peanut butter in the house again! I also got a couple of meal replacement bars. I like those once in a while to replace the small meal of the day. A lunch bar and a large can of V8 is a full meal without feeling too stuffed if I’m not hungry. Promax lower sugar bars come in chocolate fudge and peanut butter chocolate and I bought one of each to try. The sample they threw in this time also happened to be a lower sugar Promax bar, the chocolate fudge. They are sweetened with Stevia and I think the Stevia tastes even less artificial than Splenda, and I love Splenda! I tried the chocolate fudge bar and instantly flew back to my childhood.

Mom used to buy “Food Sticks” as snack for us when my brother, Dave, and I were kids. We were astronaut nuts, all abuzz after the lunar landing and anything that the astronauts ate, you could get us to eat. We drank Tang and loved dehydrated ice cream, in fact, you can still get dehydrated ice cream at the Air Force Museum in Dayton and when I visit there, I always bring some home as souvenirs. Food Sticks were shaped like beef sticks, but instead of meat, they were vitamin fortified fudge. I don’t remember what flavors they were, but I do remember the chocolate and the peanut butter. The Promax lower sugar bars have the taste and texture of Food Sticks! YUM!!! I think in my next order I’m getting a whole box!

Okay, one more “show.”

This is the first page for our “wedding album.” I think I’m going to do our reception weekend and Patch 365 as a separate book in between the two 2009 books.

credits: Mr. and Mrs. – Red and Gold by Nibbles Skribbles

I’m a few folders behind on 2011, but keeping up well and I really need to get moving on the 2008 pages in my catch up, but this page fit well for a challenge at Ginger Scraps. It did put me in the mind that I really need to get some notes down for some of the folders that I don’t have a hand written notes for.

That’s it for Show and Tell day! Need more coffee!

Photoblog Wednesday

A Blast From The Past

Basking in the afterglow of another Reds victory, today’s photo is AT a baseball game. This is Rina and Tori at Oldsmobile Park in Lansing, Michigan in 2000. Baseball, Dippin Dots and Cotton Candy was always a sure way to get a smile from both of them!

Happy Tuesday!

Okay, I’m hoping you all don’t leave comments saying, “please don’t,” but this week I’m going to try to blog every day. I don’t usually do that, although sometimes I have in the past. There are a few blogs that I read every day that have a new entry every day and I really enjoy them. Sometimes it’s a short note about what’s going on in the day, other times it’s big news and sometimes it’s just a couple lines to say, “hello,” and give a link to a scrapbook freebie. I can’t promise I will blog every day from now on, but I’m planning on every day this week. I’m also hoping to get a few Mug Shots done this week so on weeks where time is taxed, or I’m just not feeling mug-inspired, I still have a feature for Monday. Here’s hoping that plan works!

This afternoon I’ll be cracking open the XML text again to start my catching up work. I have three chapters and the final exam to complete and turn in, but I’m going to go back a few chapters and redo the reading and work to get up to speed first. The worst of my stress and mental anxiety over the medical stuff is over, so I should be able to catch up the work and actually “get” it.

We’re still on “arc alert.” The rain hasn’t been hard today, but there still has already been some rain and it’s just dark out. These are the days that make me want coffee. I have this problem with coffee. Caffeine is a natural diuretic, which means that it dehydrates you if you over do it. Yeah, there’s the “ZZZZT!” factor too when it starts making you jumpy. Two cups won’t do that to me, but if I’m going to drink more than a cup, it’s more economical to make a pot than use the Keurig maker. So I make a pot which is 12 cups or about 5 mugs. On Sundays when we’re home and do hot breakfast I make a pot, one mug for David with a second cup if he wants one and two for me. I’ll usually heat up the rest of the pot for Monday breakfast. The carafe keeps it warm but not hot by Monday morning. The problem with dreary days that put me in the mood for coffee is that if I make a pot, I’ll drink it all by the evening. Too much caffeine and quite dehydrated by then! Since I’ve scaled back to one cup of regular coffee most days, that really has become TOO MUCH caffeine! I think I need a bag of decaf on hand for days like this! I’ll add that to my list.


One last thought on this gloomy Tuesday is shoes. Our 1950s era house was built before residential architects were run over by the clue bus with the words “MUD ROOM” written in large letters on a chipboard in the grill. We buck the norm in the area of footwear. David has WAY more shoes than I do. He has work/dress shoes, casual slip-ons, tennis shoes and two different kinds of boots. (I think one is for mud and the other is for MUD.) I have tennis shoes. There is a pair of white dress shoes and a pair of black in the closet upstairs and some flip flops/sandals. But in the main living area, where shoes that are currently worn a lot are, I have one pair to his five. With no mud room, shoes go on the mat near the door that just happens to be between the kitchen bathroom and outside door. I stumble over his shoes all the time. I’ve thought about putting little shoe-shelves just inside the bathroom, because there is just no room in the little hall for them. The only trouble is if I put little ledges in there, the bathroom door wouldn’t close. I’ll have to keep pondering a solution for this.

You know, if it would quit raining, shoes wouldn’t have to be taken off at the door.


Okay, to the books for me! May the solutions to all life’s troubles be the sunshine in all our worlds today!

-Nani

Wrapping up Monday

A little taste to kick off the week!

The first bit of business I need to address to start this week is a “fix” from last week. I got several points wrong in my early rant about how Sally, the mother goose from our post office, died. I didn’t correct the mistakes or take down my original post because I don’t want to delete the comments and my demeanor hasn’t changed. It’s settled now after a few days, but the anger about it is a little fueled. The stupid mistakes were made by people who should know better, WAY better. The people who moved the family were from a center for the “rescue” and rehabilitation of wildlife. When they moved the goose family, with three goslings and two un hatched eggs, to a “better” place across the street, they were caught by surprise that geese are territorial and the incumbent geese in that area would threaten the new geese and try to drive them out.

Yanno, I just don’t get how you can work for a wildlife center in an area where there are a lot of geese and not know that. They said it was a “no win” situation because Sally was nesting in an area where there was so much traffic. How about carefully move the family to somewhere that there aren’t geese already living? I mean, if you’re moving the geese and have already invaded them, why not put them someplace safer than where they already are? Sure, a busy parking lot by a busy road is not ideal, but it’s not like no one knew they were there. Putting them in an area where not only is there the human factor but also territorial other geese sounds like a “maybe lose” or “lose big” choice and they chose lose big.

You can read the story on the Toledo Blade’s website here: Blade article



I SO don’t want to be all doom and gloom n a cloudy Monday, here in northwestern Ohio. We’re still on the lookout for that arc! ^The rain was hard and nasty Friday night into Saturday morning. The tulips took quite a beating! In the front half of our side bed, there is a lot of petal litter! That’s from the blooms that just exploded from the driving down rain on them. I’m glad I got my photos when they were strong and healthy! There are more exploded tulip blooms in the front section than the back, so there are still flowers, just not as many. The smaller tulips seemed to fare better than the taller ones, but they weren’t as open. David reported this morning that the absolute las6t of the crocuses, a couple of the stripey ones that bloomed later and stayed a little longer, had finished for the year now. That ups my resolve to get some bulbs in the ground for summer and fall. Now if we can just get a day that doesn’t rain. Our forecast for the beginning of this week: today was “cloudy with a shower or two,” we got three or four, then “mainly cloudy, showers around,” and on Wednesday,“ warmer with showers.” Hey, at least it’ll be warmer! Just give me one weekend day that’s cloudy, but no rain, so David can help me, and I’m good!


There are things that make me happy. The Reds swept the Cardinals out of town over the weekend and hold first place again and they beat up the Cubs in the sixth inning tonight for another win. I like this kind of roll!

David and I got out to the grocery store yesterday and left with many bags of groceries and a lighter pocketbook for the effort, but we saved BIG TIME with coupons, careful sale shopping ahead of time and a good buy ten and get $5 off deal at Kroger. I also got my almond milk supply refilled and Dannon Greek Yogurt comes in peach now! This morning I made a cup of warm cocoa with almond milk and a scoop of Splenda-ized dark chocolate. MMM!!!! I let David try a sip and he was impressed too!

Okay, it was a little bit of a mundane Monday, but it wasn’t a bad Monday. I still really do like Mondays, even if the telling of them is really just wrapping up the weekend. It’s a fresh start to a new week.

Now if we can just get it stop raining or get passage booked on that arc…

A Grim End To The Tale

This is so sad! Remember the Canada Goose family that was the subject of the April 13 Photoblog Wednesday? They had a sort of fan club visiting but keeping a safe distance, leaving food for the geese and basically being the “Gosling Watch.”

Then this past Monday the goslings started to hatch, not even all of the eggs had hatched, but they started to. Some idiot, and I use the term idiot with every bit of vinegar, spite and blame it can conjure, thought it was a good idea to move the mother goose and goslings/eggs to the other side of the road. When the mother goose was approached and her babies threatened, she went nuts and in the frenzy ran in front of a car and was killed. What was something beautiful to the post office patrons was destroyed, murdered, by human ignorance.

You don’t ever touch a baby animal. The smell of a human on them can make a mother abandon it. If you approach a baby, a mother will react. In this instance, that reaction cost the mother goose her life and probably the lives of the babies. I haven’t heard that the father goose was involved at all, which means he probably wasn’t there at the time. That means he wasn’t able to be there to save any of the goslings. A young gosling must be warmed by a parent about every 15 minutes and these were newborn and still unhatched geese. Geese mate for life and are absolutely as attached as humans are. Scratch that, most humans can’t comprehend that kind of a bond in this day and age. The gander would have returned to find his family massacred.

In thinking about the goose’s reaction to a strange human with plans to move her, touch her hatching eggs, I completely understand the reaction. If I was holding my newborn baby and someone who didn’t speak my language said nothing but grabbed the baby, I’d go nuts too. That’s a natural reaction

As simple humans who have many generations ago abandoned the use of our instincts for conscious thinking, and usually under-thinking to the point of touching a nest when the eggs are in the middle of hatching, my only hope is that we learn. I hope that everyone who was touched by the potential simple miracle of nature’s new life in the spring, can learn from the sad feelings that range from disappointment to anger, and get a better understanding and respect for the animals that come to live in the city when we’ve grown our cities in so many of the places they live.

Life renewing itself in animals of any species is an everyday miracle, the art of life itself. Treat those miracles like art in a museum. Look, but don’t touch and when security tells you you’re too close, respect.