Every Job has Its Perks

I work for the family construction company. I grew up around big equipment. My father used to deliver a dump truck load of sand for our sand box every Spring. He dug the hole for our pool when I was little. Little by little he cleared out the overgrown lot next door to us and turned it into a nice yard. So, this summer when I was looking at the overgrown back part of our property, I instantly thought of the hydro axe. My cousin came over to check things out and then dispatched not only the hydro axe but a Komatsu 200 shovel equipped with a bucket that has a thumb and one of our best operators to run them. In one day (ONE DAY!!!) he had managed to fill in the old pit of despair and clear out fences, saplings, weeds and vines and reveal the back portion of our property. In a few more hours yesterday morning, he weeded my red shed garden, took down the lunging ring and hydro-axed the stuff that had grown up inside it, and dug us a new, enormous pit of despair! Gotta love heavy equipment!!! I'm stoked and re-energized to spiff up the place!

In the "If I Knew What I Was Doing..." Department

Quite a while ago, we bought an Olympus Digital Camera. I let Little Man's Father use it for several years. Then I decided I wanted to photograph the bowling balls, so I started messing with it. At that time, it held 20 pictures on its memory card. Then I learned about memory cards and bought one with more capacity. Mind you, this was a smart media card, which was considered an antique when I bought it, since now everything works on a scandisk card. Anyhow, this new card gave me 153 pictures, which was quite an improvement. In my quest to photograph bowling balls and jewelry, I discovered the macro button (VERY COOL!) and other features, and have had a lovely old time snapping pictures.

Enter the card reader! For Christmas, my sister received a digital frame. (Speaking of VERY COOL!) We all thought that Little Man's Grandmother would enjoy a digital frame, so we bought it for her January birthday. At that time I learned about card readers. Since our Olympus camera takes forever to download pictures, being able to move them around with a card reader was a huge advancement. In May we decided that Little Man's Grandfather should also have a digital frame, so when I purchased it I bought myself a card reader. It even handled the smart media card. I love this thing!

Fast forward to yesterday. Little Man's Grandfather had a huge auction, and as his bookkeeper, I took pictures of each lot. Somehow, when I was moving the pictures from my camera to my computer, I deleted the formatting on the card. Yesterday I couldn't use the camera since I didn't know what was wrong with it. This AM, with some time to look at the instruction book (look at the instructions - what a concept!), I found out about the formatting. Also, the card must have had a fingerprint or something on it, because it wouldn't work until I wiped it off with a tissue.

Here's the whole point of this entry. Since the re-formatting, I now have the capacity for 257 pictures!!! No, I didn't change the resolution - it is the same as always. But for some reason, I can go longer before I have to dump the pictures. Like the title says, "If I knew what I was doing, I'd be dangerous!" (and also wouldn't have to work so hard!)

And in case you are wondering, Little Man's Father has a Kodak digital that holds about 4000 pictures. I could update, but even though my camera is older and doesn't have as much memory, I think the picture quality is wonderful, and since I'm still learning new things about it, I'll keep playing with it for the time being. Sometime soon, we might make the leap to an SLR camera that works with all the old lenses we had with our 35 MM camera. Reading the Pioneer Woman's blog makes me want to learn more about photography and photoshop. That should keep me off the streets for decades!

Tea Kettle Inn

Last weekend my mother and I went to a wedding in Harrisburg, PA. We stayed at the Tea Kettle Inn in Manheim, PA and had a lovely time there. Here are some pictures:

Fun With Fruit

We LOVE rhubarb. Here is a recipe we have been enjoying:

Rhubarb – Blueberry Crisp (adapted from Betty Crocker)

4 cups cut up rhubarb
3 cups blueberries (frozen are fine)
Salt (divided)
1 ¼ cup flour
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 ½ cup sugar
½ cup oatmeal
2/3 cup butter
2 tsp cinnamon

Place cut up rhubarb in a 9 x 13 ungreased pan. Sprinkle with ¼ tsp salt. Place 3 cups blueberries over the rhubarb.

Combine the flour, sugar, brown sugar, oatmeal, cinnamon, ¼ tsp salt. Cut in the butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over the rhubarb and blueberries.

Bake at 350 for 50 minutes.


For your further use are the two original recipes that I combined to make the one above:

Rhubarb Crisp (Betty Crocker’s new & Revised Cookbook – 1978)

4 cups cut up rhubarb
½ tsp salt
1 1/3 to 2 cups sugar
¾ cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/3 cup butter

Arrange rhubarb in ungreased 8 x 8 backing dish. Sprinkle with salt.

Mix sugar, flour & cinnamon. Cut in butter until mixture is crumbly, sprinkle over rhubarb.

Bake at 350 for 40 to 50 minutes.


Blueberry Crisp (Betty Crocker’s New & Revised Cookbook – 1978)

3 cups blueberries or 1 package (16 oz) frozen (I used 3 cups frozen)
2 tbsp lemon juice
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
½ cup flour
½ cup oatmeal
1/3 cup butter – softened
¾ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp salt

Arrange blueberries in an ungreased 8 x 8 baking dish. Sprinkle with lemon juice.

Mix brown sugar, flour, oats, butter, cinnamon & salt. Sprinkle on top.

Bake at 375 for 30 minutes.

Binky

Black cats are VERY hard to photograph. Couple that with the fact that usually when I get the camera out, Binky stops doing whatever cute thing he was up to and comes over to get petted and lick the camera! Today he actually slept through this photo op, so here's a current picture of the big brother, resting up up Daddy's feet, plus a couple from a few days ago. He's an in & out cat (not my first choice) which fascinates the other two, who are not allowed out.

Birthdays

The darlings arrived in July of 2009 and the vet thought they were each around 10 weeks old, which makes their birthdays sometime around now. Last night we went out with the couple that brought us Raquel, so we made it a birthday party. Since the guest of honor couldn't make it, we printed out this picture of her and took it to the restaurant in a frame! The waitress was a cat-lover, so when she brought me dessert, she had written "Happy Birthday Raquel" in chocolate syrup around the rim of the plate! Nice to know we're not alone in our feline goofiness.

Re-Living My Childhood - part 3

Spoiler Alert! I might give away too much, so if you haven't read Smoky the Cow Horse by Will James and you want to, be warned!

I remember my father getting this book for me from the library. It is memorable because Dad was not much of a fiction reader. However, he had read this book as a boy and brought it home for me to read. I read it several times as a girl, along with everything else Will James wrote. I loved the illustrations, which were by the author, and I loved the casual way he spoke directly to the reader, as if he were telling a story around a campfire.

This time, I listened to Smoky as a book on tape. It was produced in 1981 and wasn't the greatest audio book I have ever listened to. The audio book industry has come a long way in 29 years. I thought the reader was kind of ordinary. I would love to hear this book read by someone that sounded more like a cowboy - like Clint Eastwood. The recording was 5 tapes long and I almost stopped after the 3rd tape because I remembered the last half of the book being sad. My memory was correct and it made me heartsick to listen to the description of Smoky being abused, but I carried on because I also remembered that there was a happy ending.

It was interesting to read reviews of this book. Some people loved the whole book. Some people liked the second half because there was more "story" happening. Some people were offended by the racism. Some people hated the bad grammar and cowboy slang. I was just interested to observe how much our outlook has changed since this book was written (1927) and took it as a glimpse into a slice of the American West that has slipped into history.

If you google Smoky The Cowhorse, you will find an Australian site that has the entire book on line, including the illustrations. Also, there is major spoiler information on the wikipedia site about this book. www.willjames.com will take you to a site that sells Will Jame's artwork. www.willjames.org will take you to the Will James Society. I was interested to learn "Lone Cowboy" by Will James, which was sub-titled "an autobiography" was actually completely fiction up to his mid-teens and a mixture of fact and fiction after that. (The things you learn from the internet!)