July, 2018 ~ Dinnertime in the heat.....

UNCLE JIMMY wrote:Eggplant  breaded and fried. Tina bought the eggplants in a Hornings in Bethel, PA. They were almost seedless. Not bitter, and tasty.

Looks fantastic, too, Jimmy. Made my mouth water!

Looks really good, Jimmy

NormM wrote:The pressure washer we have only has two settings: On and Off.

NormM wrote:I mowed lawns and baby sat when I was in high school.

I still remember the first time I baby sat. An older lady in the neighborhood asked me if I babysat. I'd never done it before but promptly said yes!  The couple's three grandchildren were in town and they were about 7, 5 and 3. They put the fear of God in the kids before they left, too, and had put a blanket and a pillow on the sofa in case I wanted to snooze after the kids went to bed at their appointed hour of 7 p.m. I was so relieved as I was worried about falling asleep. Mrs. Richards never asked me what I charged but when they got home, her husband handed me a $10 bill!  I was over the moon, as that was a LOT of money back in 1965 (the Beatles tickets cost $5 each in fall of 1964 and my father fussed because the tickets were so expensive)! I sat many times for them when the kids were in town and even saw an infant make it into the group. It was funny, as my mom told me when I was a tad older that they'd seen them out the first night I'd baby sat for them, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (my father was trying to get sober at the time and Mrs. Richards told my mom that night that she had been sober for more than 10 years at the time).

Another funny coincidence happened years later. I went with Brian to his company's Christmas party; it was the first year he worked for this shipping company (he was a boarding agent at the time). He introduced me to the big boss and his wife and then he turned to introduce me to another bigwig who was standing there with his wife. Brian said, "Mr. Richards, I'd like you to meet...." and all of a sudden, Mr. Richard's wife and I were screaming and hugging!  It was that same couple who'd used me as a babysitter all those years before (we'd moved out of that neighborhood in 1967). Mr. Richards didn't recognize me but she and I were hugging and laughing before Brian could even tell them my name!  He and Brian were looking at one another with questions on their faces and shrugging their shoulders! We finally stopped and all at once, we were both explaining who we were and how we knew one another! Oh, what fun it was to see them again. But I took that opportunity to tell them how generous they'd been with me and how they'd given me my first of many babysitting jobs!  They in turn told me they had been impressed at how mature I was for my age. I laughed, as when you're tall for your age, people always thought you were older!!!  Plus I really tried my best to act grown up so they would be comfortable leaving me with those kids!  


I'm curious about how much kids make for babysitting now. The last time I did it, I was making $.50/hour. A woman with two terribly behaved sons asked me to sit with her kids and I told her for two kids, I had to charge $.75/hour (this was probably 1969). Thank God, she said I was "too expensive" and that she would find someone else!  Little did she know that that had been my plan all along. Because two girls I used to stay with when they got home from school so their mother wouldn't worry about them had warned me how terrible the kids were and how their mom had told this woman she needed to call me when she needed a sitter, I was forewarned. I'd almost told her $1/hour but figured it wouldn't be believable!

Do you remember, Norm, how much you charged for babysitting and mowing lawns?

bethk wrote:Looks really good, Jimmy

Thanks for answering all my questions, Beth! I hope things are going smoothly today for you two. I'll bet it's going to be strange when you leave that house this time, knowing it's for good. How many years were you and Dane there?

We bought the house in 1976 - Robin turned one a few months after we moved in. We had planned to live here for 5 years, fixing things and planning to make a good profit and move up. But for all our plans, we didn't anticipate job layoffs and job changes.....and here we are finally realizing our dream from 1981!

bethk wrote:We bought the house in 1976 - Robin turned one a few months after we moved in.  We had planned to live here for 5 years, fixing things and planning to make a good profit and move up. But for all our plans, we didn't anticipate job layoffs and job changes.....and here we are finally realizing our dream from 1981!

Life sure has a way of intervening! We originally planned to buy a double and rent out the other side. Then eventually we'd renovate the place and change it into a single. So glad we didn't do it, as I just KNOW we'd still be living in that double! And of course, we had NO plans to renovate it ourselves as we've always been smarter than that!

Brian just said again this morning how much he loves this house. He goes out every morning and sits out on the balcony, even if it's just for 10 or 15 minutes. It never gets old seeing those huge ships pass so close to our front door! And he still looks at me and smiles every single day when the Natchez paddle wheeler passes our house, as it honks its horn when it gets right in front every day. Most days we can hear its calliope playing when it's still docked. It's really quite a nice location and we just thanked God this morning that we were able to retire together as some people never get the chance!

Tonight we had Vietnamese steak with cucumber salad and zucchini pancakes.

Fries 'Sketti' is the BEST, It was a lunch treat for my girls when they were little.

Yes, Michelle, you were smart to NOT do renos on your own. The final reno we did was to gut the downstairs, except the kitchen, which had been done years earlier, down to wall studs and floor joists. Dane even dug out the crawl space with a shovel! But we lived with the exposed wall studs and insulation for walls and plywood on the floors for almost 3 years. What a nightmare. Dane finally got tired enough and admitted he didn't want to finish it so we finally hired a carpenter friend to finish it for us. When it's your trade it goes much faster!

And the rest is history.....LOL

We went to my 50th high school class reunion last night. How can it be that so many old classmates still look familiar after half a century? There was only one guy, Mark, who we went to school all through grade school and high school with. He was always the happy heavy kid, someone you always thought of as "round". I didn't have a clue who he was until he spoke with me......I could still see HIM in his smile and facial expressions. He joked and said he had hired an actor to portray half of his former self.

There was a great turnout, more than I would have expected, coming from all around the country. We've kept up with a lot of friends through Facebook in recent years so it was good to have a chance to visit in person. This is the first reunion I wasn't involved in planning. I helped on 3 others and it was a lot of work. A lot of credit goes to those classmates who stepped up to the plate to create a fun evening for everyone.

NormM wrote:Tonight we had Vietnamese steak with cucumber salad and zucchini pancakes.

I'd call that a grand and beautiful success!  Meat looks delicious as do the zucchini pancakes. I'd pictured them thinner in my mind but after a re-read of the recipe, I see they were meant to be thicker than a pancake. They look even better than I thought they would, too. I hope they tasted half as good as they looked!

Thanks for posting pics, too!  

They were good. Crispy outside and creamy inside. The Yogurt topping was good too.

Bugster2 wrote:I fed Joe and Katie smoked salmon on a toasted bagel with cream cheese, red onion, capers and tomato.

Brian had an errand to run a couple mornings ago so he told me he was going to stop at this nearby coffee shop and get us a couple of almond croissants, which they were out of. He called and asked me what to get and I told him to get me lox and bagels with capers and onion but to ask them to please toast the bagels first. He brought them home (they were toasted so lightly that I didn't event think they'd bothered when I had my first bite; I like my bagels really TOASTED!) and it was the first time I'd ever seen lox and bagels with tomato slices on them! And now I see that's how you make them, too. I guess that's the way lots of people have them but I'd never seen that before. Next time I'll ask them to toast them twice as long and it still might not be as toasted as I like 'em!

Lox and bagels is one of my favorite breakfasts, along with Eggs Benedict, Huevos Rancheros and another Mexican breakfast that is served in poblano peppers -- can't remember what they call it! My favorite time to eat breakfast is about 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. when I'm on vacation. And in New Orleans, you usually have a drink with it, too, be it a Mimosa, Bloody Mary, Brandy Milk Punch or a Ramos Gin Fizz (another one of my favorites). It's funny as when we have company in town and go out for a nice breakfast, most of them (not all!) are surprised when the waiter or waitress suggests an eye opener with breakfast. We laugh, though, as they catch on quickly and it becomes a habit while they're in town!

bethk wrote:Yes, Michelle, you were smart to NOT do renos on your own.  The final reno we did was to gut the downstairs, except the kitchen, which had been done years earlier, down to wall studs and floor joists. Dane even dug out the crawl space with a shovel! But we lived with the exposed wall studs and insulation for walls and plywood on the floors for almost 3 years. What a nightmare. Dane finally got tired enough and admitted he didn't want to finish it so we finally hired a carpenter friend to finish it for us. When it's your trade it goes much faster!  

And the rest is history.....LOL

Brian and I don't do very well with a hammer and nails, Beth, so the Lord knows we'd have to be insane to even think of doing a renovation on our own. Plus it's an unbelievable amount of work to do when you're also holding down a full-time job for people like Dane who does know what he's doing. The other home we looked at that Brian wanted to get (I didn't as it wasn't "renovated" but was "updated" and not most of it, just the kitchen really -- I had to explain to him the difference even though it was very close in price to this one) had a fireplace standing in the room. It wasn't in the middle of the room mind you, but far to one side (it was a double that had at one time been converted to a single, and poorly converted and there was even a rabbit room that was obviously left over when they did a poor job of changing the floorplan). The owners had hung a big screen TV on the fireplace brick (this was 1998 so Brian fell in immediate love with that plasma TV) but if you put a sofa opposite the TV side of the fireplace, it would've been worse than sitting on the first row of a movie theatre, as it was about five feet away from the wall of the house!  When I said that fireplace made the entire room unworkable as to how you'd put your furniture, he said, "Oh, I can take that down if you want me to." Even the realtor burst out laughing with me when he said it!  I looked at him and said, "Yep, and I can just picture the roof imploding on us when you attempted that."

He still thanks me for telling him I could NOT buy that house. I told him if he agreed to buy this one (brand new renovation, new plumbing, new wiring, new everything), and he wanted to move in 5 years, I would be happy to sell it and look for something else. He agreed and of course is the same man who tells me daily how much he adores this house. Just last week when I reminded him of the other place, which had less closet space than the apartment we rented for many years, he said, "What was I thinking? Thank God you wouldn't go for it!" He kept saying at the time, "But it has a two car garage!" I told him half of our clothes would have to be kept in the damn garage as the closets in both bedrooms wouldn't even hold my clothes alone! And the garage he was so enamored with wasn't connected to the house and was built of wood and was almost FALLING DOWN and the roof was visibly leaning a lot toward one side!  I kept telling him we'd have to repair the garage very soon as that house was also in Algiers Point, which is an historic district!  The windows even had plexiglass over them on the outside to obviously stop drafts from coming in; once the HDLC discovered that, you would be told to remove those and unless you had the money to repair the windows or replace them with wooden windows (probably custom unless you toured tons of places that sell used architectural details and find ones the exact size and the exact number of them you needed). He just didn't get it. But I knew if I talked long enough (and trust me, I did!), he'd let me buy the house that was not only better suited to us but in brand new condition!  


I think I told you that I have two beautiful bookshelves that my father built, the only things he ever built as he wasn't handy either. He was making them on top of my mom's dining room table, an antique she'd had refinished beautifully that was her mom's and maybe even her grandmom's. She put all kind of blankets on top of it for padding and he had all the boards on it to make it large. For 2-1/2 years at least one of those partially made and unstained wood bookshelves was on top of her dining room table, which was in the same big room as the living room so everyone who came over saw the mess. She finally told him he had two more weeks or she was putting them out in the trash!  He finished them and they were indeed gorgeous. I have one in our master bedroom (it's such a perfect fit that it looks like it was custom made for the space) and one in the guest bedroom. I still can't believe he made them. He had ever hand tool known to man and had them beautifully arranged on pegboard in the garage. He never used them. When my brother, who was handy, would remove a tool to use, my dad knew it because the pegboard was so dusty that the outline of the tool remained. He hated my brother using them even though he never used them. Strange but true...

NormM wrote:They were good. Crispy outside and creamy inside.  The Yogurt topping was good too.

Mmmmm! Sounds as good as the description with the recipe. Thanks so much for the recipes. I described them to Brian and he even said they sounded good! I might have to try those for sure. I'd love everything you made for that meal.

Glad you enjoyed your reunion, Beth. I'm still making up my mind if I'll go to my 50th -- I went to an all girls Catholic high school. I only went to my 10th reunion and that made me decide I had no desire to go to another; the school only "sanctions" the 10th, 25th and 50th so I know many got together and had one for the 15th year -- I still remembered how snotty some of the women were 5 years before so I had no desire to attend. The girls who were *itches were simply OLDER *itches. But two people I knew well (one I really liked) got into a loud snotty snit that I'm sorry I missed. They did some kind of a skit and one called out to the other on the stage. I remember they'd both dated the same guy for a while so I guess that old animosity reared its ugly head. I would've killed to see that as it sure didn't surprise me given how stuck up some of them still were at the 10 year reunion.

But I'm still good friends with one person from high school and see another occasionally so I just might go. The last time I saw both of them, we agreed if we still look halfway decent for our age, we'll probably go. It'll be in 2021 so I hope I'm still around for it, Brian, too, as I probably wouldn't go without him with me. His main remark at my 10th was that he thought my school had more than the normal share of "good looking women." I howled!

You and Dane went to school together, didn't you? I'd imagine it was more fun if you both knew those who came. Regardless of whether I got or not, I'd be less than honest if I said it was something I looked forward to attending. Very grateful for the education I got but didn't like the school at all...

I don't remember for sure how much I got for baby sitting and lawn mowing but $2.00 for mowing seems to stick in my mind.

Tonight I made boneless pork chops - AKA sliced pork loin, my least favorite cut. But Dane likes them so I figured I'd make him happy. Plus, they were on sale - LOL! I seasoned with s&p and did a light dredge in flour, browned in evoo and took them out of the skillet when browned. Then I sautéed some onion and shiitake mushrooms until the mushrooms were golden. I made some faux chicken stock from chicken soup base and water and added enough to make a good braising amount to put the chops back in to finish. When the pork was tender I took it out of the pan and made a slurry of flour and milk to thicken everything up. I had a baked potato and green beans to go with it.

Pictures of the ham dinner today....






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