Don’t tell me it’s another repair bill?

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Daily life brings a lot of joy, but it also hands you crap occasionally.  Today was one of those days.  This morning we discovered the fridge had quit.  Lucky for us, we have another fridge in the garage.  We called a repairman and then moved everything to the other fridge and freezer.

The technician called us back and said he couldn’t come until Monday because he was too busy.  What?  Monday!  This will never do and was quickly becoming a frustrating situation.  He gave us the name of another repairman he knew, so we called him.

As it turned out the second guy never showed up, claiming he tried to call us, but our phone never rang.  We were here all day waiting for him too, so Tootie missed her vet appointment to get her eye checked today.  This is a whole other story about what has been going on here for the last month or so.  I’ll fill you in on the next post.

We are giving the repairman the benefit of a doubt, thinking maybe he wrote down the wrong number, but this is quite typical behavior for where I live.  We’ve had to wait on people all day only to have them not show up or bother to call us.  I won’t miss this when we move.

Now Tootie won’t make her vet appointment tomorrow either because we’ll be waiting for this man again.  We have no time as to when he’ll be here.  I probably won’t take her in now until next week.  I think her eye is on the mend anyway.  It would just be nice to have the vet confirm it.

I hope that this will be a simple fix and we won’t need a new fridge.

May Pole

On another note, today is my mother’s birthday, Mayday.  Everyone’s going out for Mexican food.  That’s no surprise.  Mexican is the one thing they can all agree on to eat.  I wish I were there too, but maybe next year.  I hope one of my sisters will take pictures to send to me, and to my little sister in New York.

 My mother

Raven’s now six months old and getting to be quite a handsome boy.  We had company today, our Aussie friends, and he was all over them, purring and playing and being a social butterfly.  This is my handsome little man.

 Raven - six-months-old

The resident lizard is still making herself at home in the fireplace.  She must have been out on the town last night because she wasn’t in there.  Hee-hee.  I don’t know if she had a hot date or not.  I determined this was a female lizard because she doesn’t have the colorful underbelly the males do.  The cats enjoy watching her through the screen.

 Lizard in the fireplace

 Lizard in the fireplace

It’s windy here in the desert again today.  This makes day number three of wind gusts up to 40 mph.  Big earth movers are stirring up the dust preparing the ground for the new house going in two lots down from us.  I kept the windows closed, which I hate to do, being there are so few days in the year we can open them.  The building crew is keeping long hours over there having run into the underground stream we told them was there.  They’ve had to change their plans so the house doesn’t start to sink and crack later.  A guy has owned that lot for twenty years and finally decided to move down here and build a house on it.  I guess we’ll hear the noise from all the construction soon.  The cats love all the action that’s taking place.

 A to Z survivor's badge

Congrats to all who entered and finished the A to Z challenge this year.  It was fun.  I enjoyed hopping over to read others blogs.  Thank you to the ones who read my posts and to my new followers.

Until next time...

Z is for Zoo and Zealous

Okay, our family fits both of these.  The house was always a zoo with so many people in it.  We also were over zealous about everything growing up.

 Happy Little Sisters courtesy of David Castillo Dominici 

All of us would become so enthusiastic playing games that we hurt ourselves at times because we were laughing and cheering each other on and not paying attention.  This resulted in a few mishaps that caused nothing more serous than bruises or scratches.

Thinking back on my childhood, we were a bunch of crazy kids.  Something was always going on and we would get crazy over mundane everyday happenings.  Maybe we spent too much time on the farm, or maybe we were just a bunch of happy kids.  That had to be it because we had very little, except each other.

 Countryside courtesy of Dan

We don’t have those times today.  I almost feel sorry that things have changed so much and the kids growing up now will never experience the pure joy of all the simple things we had before technology took over.  We had to use our brains back then to think of things to do to occupy ourselves.  We never heard of computers, ipads, or cell phones.  We didn’t even have a TV until I was six.  It was black and white and had rabbit ears.  We didn’t have Dish or cable in those days.

I don’t remember when we got a telephone.  I think I was a teenager and we were on a party line then.  The phone was a big black one with a rotary dial.  I don’t think they make them anymore.

Today I’m a big computer user and cell phone user.  I wonder how we managed without those things growing up, but we did fine and probably were healthier for it because we played outdoors all the time and learned to make due with what we had.

I want to thank all of you for stopping by to read my crazy childhood tales during the past month.  It was fun reminiscing about all those times.  I’ll still post some more tales later, but will go back to my regular stories of my daily life and my cats.

Y is for Yard

We always had dirt and weeds growing in the yard when I was a kid.  Any grass sprouted up by accident.  Once we moved to town when I was about fifteen, we had a regular house with grass in the yard, but the grass would be knee-high before anyone bothered to mow it.

I probably mentioned that Rosenberg Mamaw had a big garden, as well as the peach tree; fig trees, paper-shell pecan trees, a black walnut tree and a mulberry tree, but we always bought 50-pound bags of potatoes and onions and bushels of peaches at the fruit stands.  Everything was in big quantities and very cheap at those stands.

This is the closest thing I could find on the net to resemble my grandmother's house

When I think about her pretty yard all kinds of things come to mind from my childhood.  We would climb the mulberry tree when we got the chance and sit up there and eat the berries.  They were wonderful, long, purple, and sweet.  We never got away with this though because we always came down with purple hands and stains around our lips and on our clothes.

This is what berry juice does to your hands

The paper shell pecans, on the opposite side of the house from the garden, were enormous and wonderful shade trees.  The lower branches dipped down and touched the ground in places.  It was all molten leaves under there because it was too shady for grass to grow.  We would also find many pecans that fell off the trees.  We gathered these pecans, as well as picking some.  Daddy would take us down to the park by the Brazos River, so we could sell them by the coffee can full to cars that would stop.  There were more pecan trees down there at the river.  It was always tempting to eat them as we went because they were very easy to crack.

Pecan Tree

Several pink crepe myrtle trees grew in a line along the fence on that same side of the house.  The trees were loaded with lacy blossoms that looked pretty during spring and summer.

Rosenberg Mamaw loved figs.  She had about four or five fig trees on the highway side of the house.  She would use them to cook with and to eat.  She probably also canned them.

 Fig tree from Wikipedia

Sometimes I would get a crazy hair and mix up concoctions for my siblings to eat or drink.  I put figs in chocolate milk one time.  My sister, Thea, said after that she couldn’t stand figs anymore.

In the front corner next to the fence was a black walnut tree.  Those nuts were very hard to crack, so we generally left them alone.  Mamaw was happy about that because she used them in her baking.

Now that I’m grown, I try to keep a nice yard filled with flowers in the summer time.  Trying to grow grass is a constant battle with the heat.  Living in the desert takes its toll on everything that needs a lot of water; so many people leave their yards in a natural desert landscape except for right around their houses.  Actually, the desert landscape is very pretty in areas.  I took this pic behind my house.

Taken on the trail behind my house

X is for Xamined by Dr. Mamaw

That’s right.  My Daddy’s mother thought she had the perfect remedy for everything that came along.  She would mix up concoctions for us to drink or rub on all of our “ouchies.”  This didn’t seem to hurt any of us.  Whether it cured us of what ailed us, I can’t say.  We always got better, but it may have been a case of the ailment running its course.

She would mix up lemon juice with honey and a shot of whiskey for sore throats.  Maybe or was the whiskey that made us forget about our sore throat.  We’d go to bed and be much better in the morning.

The only pic I have of Daddy's mother

We used Vicks a lot.  We rubbed it on our chest when we had a cold and we’d even put a dab on our tongue and swallow it.  I don’t think people do things like that today.  In fact, I’m sure there must be a warning on the label not to ingest it.

When we had a bellyache, they instructed us to lie on the floor with our butt against the wall and our legs extended up the wall.  We had to lie there for about twenty minutes.  It usually fixed us right up.

We rarely went to the doctor for anything because we didn’t have the money.  They fixed most things on the farm with old-fashioned remedies.  The only time I can remember any of us having to go to the hospital for incidents was with one of my sisters.  Bonni was always getting into a mishap.  She had to have her stomach pumped once for eating some old medicine out of the garbage and another time when she cracked her head open.  Mama tried to stop the bleeding with vinegar and water, but that didn’t work because the gash was a big one, so they took her to get it sewed up.  However, it did stop by the time the doctor was ready to work on it.  I guess my sister remembered her first trip to the emergency room and her sheer fright stopped it.

Did you have any childhood mishaps or have to suffer through childhood remedies?

W is for Watermelon

It was a lazy summer afternoon.  The Texas heat was almost unbearable with the humidity sitting at 98% and the thermometer matching it.  Of course, we wouldn't really realize the full impact of the heat and humidity until we were grown and had traveled to other dryer places in the country.  To us, as kids, this was just summer and it was hot.  We thought it was like this everywhere.

We loved the three-month summer vacation except for working in the fields.  Any kind of work was miserable in those conditions.  Sometimes even play could be miserable so most of the time we just sweat, drank tons of ice tea from mason jars and tried to ignore it.

Looking back on this, I’m not sure what was so great about summer vacation because we were stuck on the farm, but I guess we preferred it to being stuck in the classroom.  Most of the time we all enjoyed each other’s company and would entertain ourselves in many ways.

“Oh look at that one!” my sister, Scherri, exclaimed.  “It looks just like a face.  See the nose and the chin is right there.”

“Yeah, yeah I see it and there’s a giraffe,” I chimed in. “His head is above those trees over there, to the right of the face.  See the long neck over to the left?”

“Duh, yeah,” she said.

“Oh look, there’s a rabbit forming over there,” my sister, Bonni, sounded excited as she joined the conversation, “see the ears coming up?”

We were lying on the grass in the backyard watching the clouds form shapes as they rolled by.  Most days the sky was a brilliant blue and there were many big, cumulous clouds to be seen everywhere.

We were sticky from the heat and itchy from the grass, but this was one of our favorite pastimes and a good way to take a break from all the childhood games we invented.

After breakfast, we had walked up the dirt road, past our grandparent’s house, to the highway to watch the cars go by.  One of our games was to pick a certain color of car for that day and we had to watch the road until that color went by.  Once it did, we could go home.

The chickens clucked and scattered as we walked by, pecking at some invisible seed in the dirt and gravel, like they did all day everyday.

About an hour later, an old red car passed by on its way to town.  That was today’s color, so we headed home and found our tin cans and pieces of window screen and spent the rest of the morning sifting dirt we had gathered from the ditch and the front yard.

The black dirt had such an earthy smell about it.  It started out as clods in different sizes, so we would sift for hours to get it real fine and then make our mud pies.  Sometimes we would mix some hay in to make it different and then lay them out in the sun to dry.

Beads of sweat clung to our upper lips and rolled down our cheeks as we sifted and sifted.  The air was so still.  Every now and then, a welcome little breeze came along which felt oh-so-good, in spite of the fact it carried with it the usual farm smells of the chicken coup and the cow pasture.

During the summer months, the clouds could darken quickly and a cool brisk breeze would start up.  We would all go outside on the porch to cool off.  The rain would pelt the place in gigantic drops.  These quick thunderstorms didn't last long, but were such a relief from the heat.  Then afterwards, when it was over, it was hotter than ever.  The ground would steam and it wasn't long and it was dry and dusty again with the cracks that formed on the top layer of that black dirt giving it the appearance that it hadn’t rained for months.

Now, as we older girls lay and watched the clouds roll by, we made chitchat and wondered when Daddy would be back from town.  He had gone with Papaw, after breakfast, to take care of some business.  When he came back, we were going to cut into a couple of big watermelons.  They were from the garden and chilling in the bottom of the icebox.

While still lying in the grass, we looked around and saw the old, wood picnic table and benches, which is where all nine of us would gather later, laughing, talking, and eating watermelon.  A big pecan tree, with its spreading branches, shaded part of the small back yard. Beyond that was the pasture with its fence posts and barbed wire to keep the cows in.

The back door to the house was open and it revealed a long hallway, which was part of the addition to the house when the bathroom and a bedroom were added.  We knew later on that there would be a line in that hallway as we waited to use the bathroom.  That was one thing about watermelon, but the inside bathroom was a definite improvement over the outhouse.

When we were younger, our parents allowed us to strip down to our underwear to eat that juicy watermelon.  The three of us had to laugh as we thought about stripping down to our undies.

The juice was sticky and sweet, dribbling everywhere.  Then you could hose yourself off.  It was so much easier.  Now this privilege was only for the younger kids.

“I wonder if we have time for a quick game of jump rope or hide and seek.”  Scherri wanted to know what we thought.

Before we could answer, we heard the old pink and white station wagon sputter to a stop in front of the house and we knew Daddy was home.

We got up and brushed ourselves off as we walked around the house, which stood up on cement blocks.  Some of the old, brown fake brick siding was peeling off in places.

Everyone was gathering by the green front door.  The funny thing about that is that it was one of the few things ever painted in that house.  As an adult, it makes you wonder about this, but as kids, we just accepted it and never thought to ask why the rest of the house was bare wood two by fours.

We just took joy in the simple things and our mouths were already watering at the thought of that watermelon.

We laughed, cried, and generally made the best of all situations, whether it was games, watching the clouds roll by, or eating watermelon and then standing in line waiting for the bathroom, making each other laugh to see who would wet their pants.

V is for Birds Flying in V-formation

We used to see this on the farm every spring and fall as the geese flew over our heads on their way either north or south depending on the season.  We would hear their quacking and run outside to see them flying over in large groups.  I’m sure most of you have seen this where you live.  I swear it seems like everything was an event on the farm because we sure too notice of nature and all that was around us.

From ibtimes.con

The birds fly in V-formation because birds are smarter than you realize.  They sync themselves together carefully positioning their wingtips so as to catch the updraft from the bird in front and to the side of them.  This practice saves energy.  If you think about this, it makes perfect sense.  They would be tuckered out by the time they reached their destination miles and miles away from where they started their flight.  There was a study done on this by scientists and printed in Nature magazine.

It’s estimated the birds use 20-30 percent less energy flying in V-formation.  They have to remain careful and aware of their neighbor at all times.  No one knows how they decide on the course and how the leader picks to appropriate place to start.  Birds seem to be smarter than you think.  Their survival depends on it.

U is for Underwear

I remember the first time I slept without any underwear.  This was when we visited Mamaw’s house (Daddy’s mother) in the summers.  We would go three or four times a year in pairs to spend the night.  She told us to take our underwear off so we could “breathe”.  Of course, we thought this was very odd, but did as she asked.  It felt strange to us until we got used to it and then we laid awake half the night wondering why we had to wear underwear at home.  Of course, we knew why.  We had cramped quarters at our house and many people around.

We would lie in bed and watch the lights from the highway run across the walls until we fell asleep, occasionally hearing the whistle of the freight train.  The railroad tracks were on the other side of the highway, so very close to my grandparent’s house.

Do you remember the first time you slept without underwear?