Jerry Loggins

My wife has been mulling over whether to buy new eyeglasses, opt for laser surgery, or try the latest contact lenses.  One thing is for sure, she needs a new prescription – her vision is deteriorating fast!  Unfortunately eye surgery is not covered by our insurance, and the cost is more than our budget can bear.  So I’m all for checking out the new contact lens technology and see if she can go the contact lens route.  We just aren’t sure if she can take advantage of the new contact lens technology because one of her vision problems is a condition that requires a lot of prism put in the lens.  I guess that is something we will have to ask about when she goes to the eye doctor next time!

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I always liked to watch Grandma work with the vegetables we harvested. She would take her canning jars, wash them out, and put them in pots of boiling water for a while to sterilize them. She would chop the ends off the cucumbers and split each one into four long slices. After the cans came off the stove, she would stuff the cucumber slices into the jars as much as she could and pour in the mixture of vinegar she had prepared. She would screw the seal on with a lid and sit it aside to go on to finish the rest of the cans. I remember asking her what the popping noise was in the jars. She would always tell me it was the canning jars sealing themselves.

Grandma would do the same thing with tomatoes when she canned tomatoes and tomato juice. The only difference is that she would leave the peals on the cucumbers but remove all the tomato skin and some of the cores before she canned them. I don’t recall her ever preserving any melons though. I know she would cut squash up and freeze it, as she would also can green beans, freeze corn on the cob, and the potatoes would be stored down in the basement in huge open wire crates. The floors down there were dirt and cool, therefore, it preserved the potatoes. We had potatoes all the way up until planting time in the spring.

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Last night my sister and niece came over for a short visit.  My goodness, my niece is growing up fast!  It seems like overnight she turned into a young woman!  They had just been shopping for some new beauty tools for my niece to be trying out.  She’s started to take an interest in healthy beauty products. 

I’m sure that she wants to make sure that whatever she uses will be something that has not been tested on animals.  She was mortified when she learned how makeup is often tested on rabbits.  I won’t go into details here because I don’t want to upset anyone, but believe me, testing makeup on animals is cruel.  So anyway, she wants to buy the beauty essentials necessary to obtain a clean and fresh and natural look.  That always confuses me – why wear makeup if the goal is to look like you aren’t wearing makeup?

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I will never forget those hot summer days of working in the garden. Grandpa would plant lots of cucumbers, rows upon rows of potatoes, long rows of green beans, melons, corn, and quite a few tomato plants. There were other vegetable plants I may not remember but I do know I didn’t like gardening all that well. It was too hot and laborious.

Grandpa would always make Grandma drive the tractor, as he would follow along with the hand plow creating the rows. Grandma would cut the potatoes he had bought so there were potato eyes showing on each piece she would cut. We would haul the buckets of potatoes across the field to where the garden was and grandpa would drop the potatoes in the rows, step on them once with his shoe, and then use the hoe to pull the plowed dirt over on them. It only took them about fourteen days to pop up through the soil and start growing.

The only real part of gardening I didn’t like was pulling out the weeds. It seemed back in those days the weeds would outnumber every plant we sowed in the garden. Once a week we would go out and pull weeds while my grandparents would tend the vegetable plants. Toting the water in five gallon buckets out to the garden was no easy task either. I would spill half of it before I got there with it. Grandpa always expected more of us than we could actually physically do. I think it was his way of actually making us stronger as people.

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Whenever I have some free time I like to go online and read up on what’s new in the world of cars, trucks, and motorcycles.  These are things that I have had a keen interest in ever since I was a young boy.  As a teenager I spent many hours under the hood, of a car – either my own car, my father’s ford mustang, or a friend’s jeep.  I was always so excited whenever my father let me help him change the oil on his mustang – afterwards he’d take me for a spin in it down to the local ice cream parlor for a sweet treat.

I’ve been thinking about the  chevy avalanche specs I was reading – I’m hoping to buy a new pick-up in the near future, and my heart has always belonged to Chevy or GMC trucks.  If I were in the market for a car, though, I’d want to give the honda crosstour a test drive.  I’ve heard that it handles well and gets good mileage, too.  There are so many great sounding cars out there it’s hard to make a decision!

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When I was growing up I can remember that our grandfather would clean out the barn with the tractor, pushing all the manure out into the front lot. When it would rain, it would create a large recessed mud and clay pool at the front of the barn. We would go out there barefoot and actually wade through the recessed pool of manure and mud just to have fun. Of course we would get fussed at for going out there in the lot where the cows were but we didn’t care. It was a lot of fun and something to do to pass the time.

When we got back to the house we would have to wash the dry mud off our legs before going in but to us, this was fun. Whether it was wading through manure piles, chasing chickens around the yard, creating problems for our grandfather all the time, or trekking through the woods setting out on a new adventure, there was nothing like growing up on the farm.

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I think it is so funny to observe the females of our species.  I’m referring specifically to my daughter.  She will spend hours sitting at her bedroom vanity staring into the mirror, fussing with her hair and her make-up until she looks so perfect that you can’t tell she’s wearing any make-up at all and her hair looks perfectly tousled.  I have a hard time suppressing a smile because I think she is beautiful no matter what.

Tonight she recruited my wife to help her go through her closet to look for the cropped denim jacket and the Jessica Simpson Clancey Boots that she wants to wear on her big date with Trevor.  This big date is actually several weeks away – it is for a Valentine’s dance at school.  But she wants to pick out the perfect outfit and make sure everything fits and “goes” together and is clean and not missing any buttons and seams are all properly sewn.  Or maybe properly ripped – it is hard to tell in this day and age when the kids walk around wearing what they wear!  Some of the things they wear look like the old clothes my wife threw out into the rag bag years ago!

Yes, it is truly amusing to watch the women fuss so much over their appearance.  Makes me glad I’m a man!

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My heart goes out to the victims of the big earthquake in Haiti!  So many people killed – the capital completely demolished!  It is hard to imagine such pain and sorrow.  It is heartening, however to see how many countries are getting involved in sending rescue and relief.  Kudos to the International community for their humanitarian efforts.  Haiti has had a lot of troubles, that is for sure!

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My sister is very excited about her up and coming appointment at Sono Bello next week. She has been wanted to have some Laser Liposuction done for some time now. For Christmas her husband gave her a gift certificate to have the work done for her, so now she has no excuse for putting it off. The look on her face when she opened the card up Christmas afternoon was priceless. She didn’t know if she should be upset or happy, you could see her little brain working up a storm, we could even smell a bit of smoke going on in there!  LOL

She has always had a bit of a weight issue and since giving birth to two kids, she has been struggling, big time, so we are all hoping that this liposuction will do the trip and make her a happy camper with her body once and for all. Sono Bello has a great reputation and we all feel comfortable in having them do the procedure. Sono Bello does hundreds of laser assisted body contouringprocedures every month and all of their physicians are board certified. They advertise that they can permanently reshape your body in just one session. So we will see what they can do for her and hope for the best all the way around.

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We are getting a Panda Express at our local mall sometime in the next few weeks. I really like their food and I am pleased that I will no longer have to make a long drive to the next town over to order from their menu. Their Orange Chicken is great, I haven’t been able to find any other place that makes Orange Chicken quite the way that they do. Their prices are affordable as well, so it’s all good!

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