SAND AND  STONE 

A good friend, Mickey,  sent this to me today so I thought I'd pass it along in case you haven't seen it yet.

Mickey and me in Sedona, AZ

 

 TWO  FRIENDS WERE WALKING 
THROUGH  THE DESERT . 
DURING  SOME POINT OF THE
JOURNEY, THEY HAD AN
ARGUMENT; AND  ONE FRIEND
SLAPPED THE OTHER ONE
IN THE  FACE

THE  ONE WHO GOT SLAPPED
WAS  HURT, BUT WITHOUT
SAYING ANYTHING,
WROTE IN THE  SAND , 

TODAY  MY BEST FRIEND 
SLAPPED  ME IN THE FACE . 

THEY  KEPT ON WALKING,
UNTIL THEY FOUND AN OASIS,
WHERE THEY  DECIDED
TO TAKE A BATH 

THE  ONE WHO HAD BEEN
SLAPPED GOT STUCK IN THE
MIRE AND  STARTED DROWNING,
BUT THE FRIEND SAVED  HIM. 
AFTER  HE RECOVERED FROM
THE NEAR DROWNING,
HE WROTE ON A  STONE: 

'TODAY  MY BEST FRIEND
SAVED MY LIFE' 

THE  FRIEND WHO HAD SLAPPED
AND SAVED HIS BEST FRIEND
ASKED  HIM, 'AFTER I HURT YOU,
YOU WROTE IN THE SAND AND  NOW,
YOU WRITE ON A STONE, WHY?'

THE FRIEND  REPLIED
'WHEN SOMEONE HURTS US
WE SHOULD WRITE IT  DOWN
IN SAND, WHERE WINDS OF
FORGIVENESS CAN ERASE IT  AWAY.

BUT,  WHEN SOMEONE DOES  SOMETHING GOOD FOR US,
WE MUST ENGRAVE  IT IN STONE
WHERE NO WIND
CAN EVER ERASE  IT'

LEARN TO WRITE
YOUR HURTS IN
THE SAND  AND TO
CARVE YOUR
BENEFITS IN STONE.

Be  kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

 

 Thanks, Mickey

Pat

Low Key Day

It seems we've been so busy lately that I welcomed a fairly low key day today.  By 10am  I was headed to Amy's to take care of the two little grandsons while she took the two girls to the dentist.  She brought lunch home for us and then I took her three oldest kids over to Sara's to play with their cousins.  It's nice having these families of 4 grandkids each living so close...within 4 or 5 blocks of each other and me.  Nicer still that each of Amy's kids corresponds in age to each of Sara's - all ranging from 1 yr to 8 yrs.

Amy's kids

Sara and her kids

Each year Quincey (Sara's husband) plants new flowers, trees, shrubbery, etc. in their garden so I had to take pictures of some of this year's additions. 

 ...a pretty creamy yellow rose

...a romantic pink rose

A very interesting shrub/tree?

...a lovely hydrangea

...a mosaic stepping stone with Quinn's picture

...and a water bubbling rock, which Charlie decided tasted yucky.

I finally got some pictures of Quinn, who just turned one year old a couple of weeks ago, walking.  Her short chubby little legs can move very fast. 

I also got a picture of their cat Mickey.  She's such a good cat.  Not five minutes before I arrived there she caught a mouse, killed it, and gave it to baby Quinn.  Quinn in turned clutched the little critter in her fist and took it in to show her Mom.  Sara freaked out and the babysitter took it away from Quinn and disposed of it.  Mickey lives to hunt and she's so very good at it.  But she has to learn that she's not to bring her treasures into the house and especially not to drop them in front of Quinn.

Mickey and mouse - 2010

Mickey - today - looking for another one

And finally, before I made my way home again, I stopped in at the local Auxiliary Hospital to visit with an old friend who is confined there now with Parkinson's.  Ann was one of my roommates back when we were single and working at the University.  I stayed with her for over an hour and we had a lovely time sitting on her cool balcony catching up on family and friends - gossiping, in other words. It's nice to see her in such good spirits. 

And that's a day in my life.

Pat

Not to Belabor the Point, but....

It was a success!

Yes, it was raining, but thanks to our enclosed patio Lloyd was able to cook on his new self-built (with navigational help from his patient wife) barbeque last night.

No explosions.

No fires.

No self-inflicted burns.

Just delicious grilled salmon served with baked potatoes, fresh green beans and a salad.  With fresh-picked raspberry shortcake for dessert.  (the raspberries were fresh-picked, not the shortcake!).  Yum!

And yes, Mike, we did think of waiting a couple weeks until you came to visit with your uncanny assembly skills, but there comes a time when parents need to become independent of their children and learn to do things for themselves. 

And we succeeded wonderfully.

Scary!!

Do you want to see something really scary?

Really, really scary?

Something that almost brought me to tears?

Something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy?

It even scared my big, brave husband!

I hope you haven't been too traumatized!  It's a barbeque in 80 pieces, including 685 screws, pins, washers and bolts.  And the instruction booklet.  Can't forget the instruction booklet with it's hard-to-follow instructions and even harder to understand diagrams...a nightmare of gigantic proportions.

If there's one thing Lloyd has a mental block about it's reading instructions.  He'll try putting things together on his own first and only refer to instructions as a last resort.  So it fell to me to interpret the instruction book and navigate our way through the construction of a small barbeque.  We only had to take it apart 3 or 4 times before it was completed - 5 hours and one mental health break later!  What a way to kill a perfectly lovely summer afternoon. 

The good news is, Lloyd and I are still together and even still like each other.  And we now have a barbeque so Lloyd can do some summer cooking.  So I guess it wasn't a total waste of time.

Hopefully it won't blow up in our faces the first time we try to use it.

Pat

I Love Pie

I used to bake pies.

Good pies.

Fruit pies and cream pies.

All kinds of pies.

With light flakey crust made from

Betty Crocker's recipe and Crisco shortening.

They were good, too.

I was famous in my family for my pies.

People would travel over the mountains for a piece

when they knew I'd be baking them.

Well, one nephew, once.

But he said it was worth it.

I only made them at Thanksgiving,

but I made a lot.

With a family of nine to feed

I thought I needed nine pies!

Foolish woman.

Always a lemon meringue pie for me,

a coconut cream one for Lloyd,

All made from scratch of course.

No mixes for us.

Then for good luck I'd make

Apple, blueberry, rhubarb, strawberry/rhubarb,

chocolate cream for Mike, and of course,

pumpkin.

Gradually the daughters took over the pie baking.

Emily became the go-to pie baker

and I had a rest.

Until this week.  In the past two days

I've made two pies, just for Lloyd and me,

and for Emily and Allan when they came

for dinner yesterday.

The first, which Lloyd wouldn't let me share with anyone,

was a raspberry/blueberry pie made from berries from our back yard.

And the second one was Icebox Lemon Pie from 

Holly's  blog post a couple weeks ago.

Thank you Holly, it was delicious.

I garnished it with Raspberries rather than strawberries though.

Hope you don't mind.

And that's the extent of my pie baking for this year,

Maybe!

Pat

On Line Dating and Cats

It seems that a lot of my bloggy friends are dog people.  I like dogs, but in my book they come second to cats.  Please don't be offended.  I love cats - we always had one when we were growing up.  I tried to have one since I've been married (40 years) but there was always someone in the house who was allergic. Now that there's just two of us at home now, I realize that our lifestyle is not conducive to cat ownership.  We're just on the road too much.  Maybe someday....but not yet.

That's not what I wanted to talk about.

My youngest daughter and her husband are celebrating their third anniversary this month.  They're a sweet couple, very happy together and Allan is a welcome addition to our family.  They met on-line...not to unusual these days.  They had mutual friends but their first communication was on-line.

So what does that have to do with cats, you ask?  Besides the fact that they have a beautiful one named Hero.

We had them over for dinner tonight and Allan sat with my iPad and pulled up YouTube videos for us to watch.  They were quite hilarious.   I'm going to share one with you here.  I hope you enjoy it, and find the connection between the two disparate topics I started rambling on about.

These videos won't imbed but you can see them by clicking on the link.  The first one is the actual on-line dating video.  The second is the video after it was songified.  Very funny.


On-Line Dating video


Songified 


Pat

Wending Our Way Home

 We had a lovely drive home from Lethbridge today.  It took us 6 hours instead of the usual 5 because we stopped to take pictures along the way - it was a beautiful summer day in Alberta.

The last couple of times we've made the trip, we've gone off the highway to check out some of the little villages along the way.  Today we explored the beautiful little village of Arrowwood, located near Gleichen.  I had to check it out on the internet when we got home to see what it's history is.

It was incorporated in 1926 and with its three grain elevators was a distribution point for wheat from the local ranches which was sent throughout Canada.  The current population is 247 people.  Their pride in their village is evident everywhere.  The community has entered in the Communities in Bloom competitions every year and were winners in 2002, 2003, 2004, 20005 and 2006.  They competed nationally in 2007and won special mention for the residential component of the competition.  Here are a few pictures I took of the village.

We only saw a few stop signs but each of them was growing out of a flower barrel.

The water tower is just used as a landmark now since they've got a new water system.

The remains of an old wagon with it's bed filled with flowers decorates the new shopping center consisting of six businesses across from an RV park housing 4 RVs.

This little honeysuckle cottage is currently for sale.  Any takers?

This looks like a renovated church.  It's located at the corner of 1st Ave. and 1st St.  I don't think there were more than 4 streets and avenues in the whole village.

This is the United Church with a cute stubby steeple.

The restaurant - the only one in the village - was nicely decorated with vines painted on the walls.  It even has a dining patio attached.

Along the sidewalk beside the restaurant is a fence with the brands of the local ranches carved into it. The picture is of the smallest of three sections of fence.

This house was for sale too.  You might want to enlarge it to read the sign at the left.  I don't know what they do for law enforcement in the village - maybe they just post signs to shame the offenders!

Five kms. down the road, around a bend and down a hill from Arrowwood there's this quaint blue one-lane bridge across the Bow River.  When approaching it, you need to watch for approaching traffic and just one of you can cross at a time.

 

And at the side of the road across the bridge there is a patch of wildflowers, or weeds, whatever your perspective is.  Thistles are too beautiful to be called weeds, as long as they're not in my garden.

Farther along the road I've seen this old homestead so many times but couldn't stop on the bridge to take a picture.  Lloyd found a lay-by and I ran across the highway to get this picture.  I've always wondered why that particular spot was chosen for the home and why it was abandoned.

Here's a zoomed in close-up of the homestead.

And this is the last picture I took.  An oil well in a field of Canola.

So we're home safely now.

Pat.