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!
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.
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?
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.
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!