"When I tell you something is dangerous, I mean it. And, I never forget the Victims"
T.J. Hooker
"Everyone can master a Grief but he who has it”
William Shakespeare
”I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth”
Kurt Vonnegut about his character, Kilgore Trout.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Thankful Thursday: Patio Plants, Salads, Feasts, Books

The shade patio plants are watered already! Yay!


Picture Source
Today I am grateful for being able to eat delicious salads all year long.   We are so spoiled in California, and I hope the drought will stop soon.  We'll see.  Mr. Z washed the car on Friday, and it rained  Monday.  In truth, it was not enough rain to do anything but get the car all dirty again, but it DID rain!

Also I can eat some of the ethnic foods we love, like falafel, even though I can't eat pita bread, or, indeed, any wheat breads.  Lord, I do miss them but am grateful beyond rejoicing and reveling, that ancient wheat still exists!  Though not plentiful, the flour is available, and I can still make tortillas.  Yay!

Tortilla making is on a list of things to accomplish PDQ, though I might cook them outside in the shade patio on a camp stove, doing that  in order to save the cool air in the house.  We cool the house down with the outside air, over night.  California air conditioning. Lol.

This brings us to Feasts:
I always remember that adage, "Enough is as good as a Feast."  It's now going up on the header.

Around the old Homestead:
Our Heater/ Air conditioner project is on hold at the moment due to a little snafu in paper work.  I'm still hoping to work everything out and have the first company do it.  I like them a lot!

Books:
I just finished reading Etched in Sand, by Regina Calcaterra.  She more or less had a childhood like mine.  And she came out of it in triumph!  You Go Girl!  And, she also pretty much had that good/bad experience of being a foster child.  This book made me wish that I had not gotten sick in my 50's so that I could have taken in the 18 year olds who are forced, or were as I have no idea if it's been changed or not, to leave foster care rather cruelly and abruptly, at age 18.

We did, unofficially, foster a couple of teens, who where our older daughter's friends, when they lost their homes at 18, though this was not because they were in the foster system.  Since I loved to cook, and feed people, it worked out quite well for the most part.  I remember them with fondness.  Anyway, this is a gritty book that shows just what a child who has good teachers and some good foster parents can do to survive whenever a bad, rotten parent, who doesn't deserve them, continually snatches them right back under some pretense or another.  I'm writing on the fly here, sorry.  Too many commas and not enough proof reading!

I'm presently reading Come to Grief by Dick Francis.  I think of it as a mystery, with horses in it.  To me, that is a very good read, indeed!  I just started it.  Dick Francis is one of my all time favorite authors.

There's another book waiting at the library, Operation PaperClip, which I didn't quite finish reading.  The footnotes and bibliography are two things worth delving into.  Ghastly but not at all out of line for a budding world power to play this "War" game instead of pursuing Peace by making sure people were punished for what they did during WWII.  What commenced was an odd way to make sure some other little monsters didn't just hitch up their bandoleros and do it all over again, which they have done, on a smaller scale, several times hence.



 I guess we can all be grateful that it hasn't turned out worse.  See, something to be grateful for!


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I’m going through some stuff but I will peek in now and then and will be back when it’s over..