Ten Things of Thankful

One might wonder how there can be such a variety of things for which to be thankful. Considering the various backgrounds of those who engage in this weekly activity it really is quite understandable and entertaining to my way of thinking. Kristi of Thankful Me is the host of Ten Things of Thankful and gets things rolling each weekend. If you are feeling grateful, write a post and link up.

1. Tractor with shovel

This week I had the sad discovery of finding a dead fawn on the ground behind some rhododendrons. Fortunately our little tractor has a shovel on the front, so my husband was able to quickly dig a hole in which to bury the fawn. The fawn appeared to have died from dysentery. I had actually noticed a doe edging slowing toward the area where I found the fawn. She had stood there for quite a while appearing to be looking down at something and then seemed to nestle down on the ground behind the rhodies. After I found the fawn later, I thought her behavior was probably that of a doe in mourning. 

2. Photo of fawns kissing

I was just clicking the camera as fast as I could to try to capture the playful antics of the fawns, and captured this!

Fawns kissing?

3. Bathroom apps

Apparently many people are having trouble finding available restrooms now during the COVID-19 pandemic when they are away from home. This week I learned that the following apps may prove helpful Bathroom Scout, Flush and Sit or Squat. In the meantime, we most likely will just continue staying close to home.

4. Hummingbirds

5. Berry cobbler using a combination of marionberries and blueberries

There were a couple of boxes of marionberries and a bag of blueberries in the local produce box I bought this week, so I combined the berries and made a berry cobbler using my favorite cobbler recipe.

Marionberry/blueberry cobbler

Cobbler Topping

2 C  sugar

1 t salt

2 C flour

2 t baking powder

1-1/2 C milk

Grease a 9” x 13” pan. Line the bottom of the pan with your favorite berries. Mix the topping ingredients and pour over the top of the berries. Bake at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes.

(If you prefer to use a jar of canned peaches or apple slices, be sure to thicken the juice with cornstarch before putting into the pan. This will probably take about an hour to bake.)

6. Blasts to the past. . .in the kitchen

Do you ever think about something you ate as a child, or perhaps when your kids where young? We hadn’t had tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches in what seemed like forever, so this week we did. The taste wasn’t quite what I remembered  since this time I didn’t use white balloon bread and the soft processed cheese that came in big rectangular blocks. That was what fit the budget back in the day. 

7. One more day

It is possible to pick blueberries that are almost ripe and let them set in a bowl on the table to finish ripening. This method of picking the berries works perfectly if you know you are not going to be able to pick the next day.

Most of these blueberries will be fully ripe in 24 hours. 

8. The element of surprise

While doing some work outside one day this week, I noticed what I thought was a ground squirrel hole in the ground where I was weeding. All of a sudden a tiny little shrew poked his head out of the hole much too large for his tiny frame. I don’t know who was more surprised, me seeing the shrew or the shrew seeing me. He quickly retreated. I grabbed my camera in case he decided to take a look at the outside world again, but I guess that was too much to ask.

9. Finding the exact folder I needed, without having to search more than a few seconds

When trying to unravel some family history questions this week, I was impressed by how quickly I was able to find the exact folder that contained at least part of the answers. Thanks to my Mom's collections of letters and emails to relatives over the years and how she had them organized the task was much easier.

10. Vic and our family

Vic and I were able to make considerable progress outside this week in tackling some things that needed to be done. We make quite a team and are still able to laugh through some of the challenges.

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Six Sentence Stories - Fabric

It is that time again for a short little story. This is being linked to Six Sentence Stories - Fabric hosted by Denise of Girlie on the Edge's Blog. 

Families once connected to their distant loved ones by lines penned on thin airline stationery sometimes spritzed with the perfume worn on the inner wrist of the woman writing the letter.

Ancestors' letters written about everyday life reveal pieces of the past as well as some of the personality similarities with their descendants.

Blankets, crocheted, knitted, and quilted have wrapped and brought comfort for newborns, the sick, and the enfeebled.

Reservoirs of strength combined as first one person and then another and still another conjoined to give aid and comfort when needed.

Instilling of traits, whether partly through DNA, example, training, or the school of hard knocks have shaped the people within the family.

Connections with the family, whether they be distant or near are like the strands of thread within finely woven fabric where each thread is needed and plays an important part.

Ten Things of Thankful

There are still things for which to be thankful, even though there are concerns shared by many as we are still seeing a rise in the number of cases of COVID-19 in our nation and in the state in which I live this July 4 weekend. My wish is that each of you are safe wherever you are and that you are still able to recognize some of the blessings in your lives. I am linking up my list of 10 to the Ten Things of Thankful blog hop hosted by Kristi of Thankful Me.

1. Being in the right place at the right time

2. Knowing when to stop

3. Being able to see colors

4. Playful antics of six little fawns that appeared together near our home one evening this week

5. Impressions that come into my mind to pray for someone right then, even though I don”t know the reason why

6. Saved research notes received from other family historians

7. Having bodies that have joints so we can bend

8. The sound of a flute

9. The Declaration of Independence

10. Vic and our extended family

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Ten Things of Thankful

Wild Himalayan Blackberry blossoms reflecting
their different stages

After a few years of participating in the Ten Things of Thankful blog hop hosted by Kristi of Thankful Me, I have come to appreciate the various stages of understanding, experience and talent of those who take time to consider the things for which they are thankful. Be sure to take a minute to see what others are saying this week. Just click on images at the bottom of the page.

1. Being able to discover the source of a leak when it was still daylight and sending an email to the necessary company so they could come the next day and take care of the matter

2. Rocket has playmates although the twin fawns born this week are not nearly has fast as he is!

3. Sweet and sour red cabbage and pickled beets were two dishes I prepared using some of the veggies that were in the produce box I bought this week. I think I'd only eaten sweet and sour red cabbage once at a favorite German restaurant years ago. After making it I found out that it tastes just as good cold as it does hot. When I was growing up pickled beets were a favorite. It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned that the cans of  pickled beets one buys in the stores are sweetened. I prefer the unsweetened ones which are made by cooking the whole beets in boiling water for about 30 minutes, slipping off the skins under cold water, slicing the beets into a bowl and soaking them with equal parts vinegar and cold water for a couple of hours.  

Sweet and sour red cabbage

4. Being able to make a little progress in tackling the weeds in the shrub bed has been a visually rewarding task this week. There is still much more to do, but I have been playing it smart by putting time constraints on my body and sticking to it.

5. We still have a couple of lizards (that we have seen) even though one young one was killed by a trap we had put out with the intention of narrowing the ground squirrel population. I suspect the lizard below eats mostly ants, flies, and spiders.

Fence lizard

6. A YouTube video showing how to divide my leggy kalanchoe houseplants was helpful. I was impressed that no water is required initially to get them to take root. 

Divisions of my kalanchoe plants

7. Discovering that pollen pine cones are little and they are purple! How these pine trees grew so large and I only noticed the large seed cones and never noticed these tiny purple cones, I will never know.

Little purple Ponderosa pine pollen cones

8. I recently got a short free Audible book that isn’t my usual genre, but the title was intriguing. Click the link Nut Jobs Cracking the Case With Marc Fennell to see a very short YouTube video of an interview with Marc Fennell giving you just an hint of what this is about. So interesting.

9.  Faith and prayers and the comfort afforded by them

10. Vic and our family

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Six Sentence Stories - Thumb

This is a "little" post for the blog hop Six Sentence Stories - Thumb. Thanks to our host, Denise of Girlie on the Edges Blog I did a little ruminating before finally figuring out where I wanted to go with this prompt. I did enjoy the journey though, so it was worth the extra time involved.

He was quite a character, legendary to be exact, an extraordinary feat considering his size.

If it hadn’t been for Merlin, well who knows, if he would have even existed. 

Infertility seemed to have been the parents’ cross to bear but Merlin was known throughout the land for his magical powers, and Old Thomas  thought it was worth a try for his  wife  to schedule a consultation.

When Merlin learned of their desire for a son, even if he was no bigger than a thumb, he knew this would be unlike any of his other magical endeavors.

The baby, aptly named as Tom, after his father, and surname, Thumb, well because of the obvious, had many adventures and became a favorite in the court of King Arthur.

The Queen  became jealous of all the attention given to Tom, and  one thing led to another until he died from the poisonous bite of an arachnid.

Ten Things of Thankful

In was interesting to me how a couple of items on my Ten Things of Thankful post this week brought back some memories about my Dad, especially since Sunday is Father’s Day. Kristi of Thankful Me provides the link to the Ten Things of Thankful blog hop.

My parents and me

1. Rat traps are good for more than just rats.

One of my early memories of rats and rat traps is a time I was asked to go to the barn to get some potatoes out of what we called the dungeon. It was a brick-lined room which we think may have been the location of a furnace in the barn which originally had been a prune dryer. When I opened the door to the room I saw a single large rat atop the pile potatoes. I quickly shut the door and went back to the house empty handed. Thanks to my Dad quickly setting a rat trap in the room, I didn’t have to fear my future errands to the dungeon.

I am thankful that we have never seen rats here on our property, but taking their place are ground squirrels which are quite problematic this time of year and are the bane of many a farmer or gardener and can leave a beautifully landscaped yard with patches of upturned soil and holes ready to twist the ankles of the unaware. My husband set a rat trap outside near one of the holes where we had seen some young ground squirrels exiting. We now have one less young ground squirrel. They are cute but destructive. There are many other ways of ridding one’s place of these critters, especially the adults.

2. Clean windows

Thanks to finally being able to use a gift certificate from our kids, the outside of our windows are clean and a gutter which was beyond time for cleaning is ready for those downpours which we are still getting even though the first day of summer is at hand. Because we are being very cautious about having anyone come into our home during this pandemic, the company was willing to substitute cleaning the windows on the inside for doing the gutter cleaning. 

3. New (to me) way to dry windows

I don’t know what tip you learned this week, but here is mine. How I missed learning this before all these years of living I do not know. My mother used to use vinegar and water to wash the outside of the windows and she dried the windows with crumpled newspapers. At the point in time in my married life when I tried cleaning the the windows using this technique, I ended up with streaks, so I didn’t use newspapers again. After that I either used paper towels or a rag to dry the windows, but streaks were still a problem. This week as I washed the inside of our windows, my results were very different, and I wondered why I didn’t know this tip years ago. The magic ingredient was using one of Mom’s old cotton tea towels, one I had used to dry dishes when I was a kid. It had long ago made it to her bin of rags she kept in her garage. When she passed, I kept the rag. I learned this week that cotton tea towels, which are so thin that when you dry dishes with them they quickly become quite wet, are actually ideal for drying windows and leave absolutely no streaks!

4. A window cleaning lesson I learned from my Dad

When I was growing up our barn had some very dirty six-paned windows, many of them covered with cobwebs, and some of which had a resident spider or two. Dad decided that they really needed to be cleaned and that I should be the one to wash them on the inside. What I learned from being given that task was sometimes we have to do things that need to be done even if we are a little afraid and don’t really want to do it.

One side of the barn

5. Flowers that remind me of certain people

The property where we lived needed to be partially cleared before our home could be built, which meant at some point we would have some landscaping to do. One of my neighbors introduced me to one of the old timers in the area, a woman who had moved here in a covered wagon. She had a lot of flowers that needed to be divided and so she dug up a clump of bellflowers so I could have flowers on our property.  Our clump eventually became quite crowded and we decided  get rid of them. Well this spring I was not able to do any kind of yard work for a month and with the weather such as it was everything grew like crazy. Now we are seeing flowers blooming that we haven’t see in years because somewhere there were seeds just waiting to germinate. This week I thought of that kind little widow, born in Hungary, who taught me the history of the area and shared some of her flowers with me.

Bellflowers

6. History and the various ways to access what has happened in the past and how becoming more educated about those things that have transpired gives one an opportunity to try to understand not only the past but the present

7. Ruby Bridges, the movie, the woman, and the author 

This week I watched the movie and also watched a video of Ruby speaking to children about her life and answering questions about her experiences.

8. Food 

Creamed chicken and wild rice  soup, but substituted 1% milk for cream

Steamed beet greens (A neighbor shared some of their bounty.)

Roasted cauliflower and broccoli 

9. Waking up and finding out the scary dream was just that

10. My husband, the father of our children and the influence he has had on their lives

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Six Sentence Story - Iron

The invitation has arrived to write a Six Sentence Story -Iron. Denise of Girlie on the Edge's Blog makes it easy by opening the link every Wednesday. Hope to see you there.

There were still some details to iron out as to when and where they would do it, but they had agreed that they would work on the project together. The teacher had obtained a specimen for them to use when they had the other materials ready to set up. Animal behavior interested both of them, and the girls’ parents were supportive as long as the experiment was only carried out at school.

The last day before Christmas break, the teacher told the girls that one of them would need to take the creature home for the holidays because someone would need to feed and care for him while the school was closed. If this detail had been explained to them earlier, they probably would have chosen to do to something that didn’t require a living organism, but as it turned out one agreed to transport the specimen inside a shoebox positioned on her lap as she rode the crowded school bus, which smelled a little more rank than usual that afternoon. 

When she freed her scared captive into an empty rabbit hutch and then fessed up to her dad, he grounded her for three months after his suspicions were confirmed that the white rat had escaped, no doubt heading towards bags of grain in the barn and to find a solid gray mate.