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This is about all I could manage today. It wasn't a funfilled day as previously planned.
Stand back from your monitor!! I have yet another ailment for gosh sakes!
The beat just keeps on going....the ailment du jour is strep throat...we think. My throat started hurting last night and today there were white things on the back of my throat and it really hurt. So, my doc was off today...the Wednesdays when I usually get sick. So I called the rheumatologist's office...thank goodness. They told me to go to one of the Doc in the Box places again, and...this is so freaking important...not to take the rheumatology meds for the time I'm taking the antibiotics and for a week afterwards. I had no idea that was the way it should be done. No wonder he got kind of silent and in my opinion a little snippy when I told him about the sinus infection I'd taken meds for about a month ago....and I didn't call them to find out what to do. *gak* Just think two weeks without a crummy two Tuesdays!
Anyway, I now have a good reason to have some ice cream or popsicles to ease the pain. Also, I get to have the tv remote and I ge"t to watch all the dancing shows I can find. Tonight was a good night. Some had been tivoed like Dancing with the Stars", and "So You Think You Can Dance". Also, my new favorite show is "Glee". I just really like it a lot. The time for the musical is back and I love it. The kids in the show are truly very talented. I'll probably dig around and find some Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers...if I'm lucky. I really get to rest for a couple of days for real.
Stay healthy and happy. I'm off to bed with a good book and a large glass of water. Actually the Internets said to stay away from citrus juice. It would make it hurt. Learn something new everyday.
Maybe I'll do some more research about cowboy hats. There is a real interesting story about them. I think some was started, but we'll see what we can find that is interesting.
I don't want to be mean or anything along those lines at all, but it is starting to get to me about the Susan G. Komen Foundation's fundraisers for breast cancer research. So much money is donated to that one cause. When I was working one of the women at work had breast cancer and has been in remission for a long time now. It is a worthwile cause for sure; however, the number one killer of women is heart disease. I wish more focus could or would be put on that. I made a trip to Catherine's clothing store the other day and they have taken the disease of diabetes as their cause. I was happy about that. So far as I can tell, the only attention Heart Disease gets is the Wear Red On Friday, and that would go with your jeans for casual Friday, which I hope is easier to figure out than Country Club casual.
Have a good one. Tonight is my knitting group and I'm still working on the same dishcloth I've been working on for a month at least. Just thought my tiny little soap box need dragging out again. *putting it away now*
Oh yes...one last thing...Oprah was in Dallas today for our the Texas State Fair. Yep, it is that time of year again....when they drag out Big Tex, who got new clothes last year. You can go here and there is a button to hear Big Tex http://www.bigtex.com/ Every year they fry something weird, but this year it is fried butter....can't you just hear Paula Dean starting her car and heading for Texas. :o)
Pedro did come to trim the shrubs yesterday. He did a fine job on most of them, but he does not understand how to keep nandinas looking pretty all the time. It was my fault for not going out and "talking with him" about the process. Nandinas are one plant that I dearly love. They will live through the worst droughts, flooding, and almost any weather Texas has thrown at them. Nandinas fell from favor a good while ago. People said they get all "leggy" and look like they have knobby knees. The trick to keeping them lovely and keeping the berries for the birds in the winter is to prune them from the bottom. Take out one third of the tallest canes in the spring and the height will be maintained and so will enough of the berries. I've kept ours looking very nice using for many years using that pruning method. The bottom canes will fill in so they quickly regain their fullness. The height is maintained because only 1/3 of the tallest canes are cut, and the berries are great for the birds in the winter. I will have to show him next spring how to care for my nandinas.
Lantana, lavender, a yellow mum that came back this spring from last year and a purple sage just barely in the picture on the right.
These are nandinas behind the yellow butterfly bush in our herb garden next to the driveway. The berries had begun to turn from orange to red on the nandinas, but they were beheaded to my dismay, but we will all get over it by next year.....nandinas are tough plants. :o) In the spring they have masses of small white flowers that turn to green berries, then to orange and eventually to the bright red berries the birds love.
Pineapple sage, orange mums, basil, some lantana, some sweet potato vine, and lanvender grow
in a small garden by the driveway. It is nice to have fresh basil just outside our backdoor. All of these plants came back this past spring after being out all winter. Even hubby's tropical hibiscus came back. I don't believe that has ever happened before. The basil didn't come back. I grew it from seed in the greenhouse. It is everywhere! Basil is a very easy plant to grow and maybe even inside.
Pineapple Sage
The pineapple sage is blooming again and I just love it! Very pretty bright red flowers on the pineapple sage. This is the second year for the plant and it bloomed in the spring for a short while. The leaves start getting a sort of yellow glow and then the flowers pop out. I had never grown them until last year and boy oh boy I think they will always have a place in my garden.
Just inside the back gate is a small garden where plants that have just been potted or I just want to look at a lot are placed. Sweet potato vine is a wonderful plant, too. There is some in the far left corner of this picture and growing out of the pot on the left. Center is a beautiful light green coleous with a blush. I think it is very beautiful and there is some traditional coleous planted in that pot as well. Marigolds are a good plant for fall color along with mums. In the back is a grey/white plant called Dusty Miller. It will overwinter outside if it isn't too cold.
Keeping plants in pots is something I like to do. I can move them if the sun is too strong, or if it seems they will grow better in a slightly different place. If it seems like it might hail, we bring them up under the patio cover. Hubby really adores me on those occasions.
Oh my gosh! Yesterday was so HOT we could barely stand it. Hot and Humid in October is pushing the limits of my patience a bit, but it rained and rained last night. There is significant flooding in some areas this morning, and today it is 50 degrees and falling. It has the old arthritis kicked into high gear today! Today may be that sofa and movies day after all. I never really got to that after the reunion.
What a surprise that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was surprised, too. I think most everyone was surprised. Especially those who have been working their rears off to win it. However, on the up side he has tried to make some sort of understanding with the Muslim world. Didn't do much good since we had that guy was trying to blow up Dallas and all.
Pedro came yesterday to mow the grass and he told me, in Spanish, he would be back to trim the shrubs today. I told him it was going to storm and rain, but he didn't really believe me. Men! We will see if he shows up today. After his encounter with me and my very poor Spanish, then last week my husband talked with him. Pedro told my husband that I speak pretty good Spanish. I guess it is relative. He was most impressed with my daughter's Spanish, but she lives in Galveston and it is a hassle to get her to interpret. He did say something about pulling the "weeds" and I told him I didn't have weeds. My daughter told me to keep a sharp eye on him when he goes "weeding". Her yard guys pulled up a large thyme and her rosemary when they "weeded ". I don't have any rosemary.....remember...I can't grow it. Every schoolchild at the school behind my house can grow it just fine, and I am envious every time I go to vote.
Pedro and I will have a meeting of the minds and if necessary I'll get the computer and spanishdict.com out to show him precisely what I'm talking about! I found a button on my toolbar that will translate words. I don't know how it knows I needed Spanish and not German or some other language. It seems to work very well when I mouse over a word on a web page.
I'm out now to enjoy this nice cloudy day and to tidy up around here some. Hope you have a great day.
Oh yes...Skeeter...we got over 2.5" of rain last night. We are up on the rain this year...thank goodness. I saw where you all were really getting hammered last night. Hope there were no tornadoes up in OK for ya'll to deal with.
I just had to put this on for you guys...it totally cracked me up. Buda is down by Austin where my youngest daughter is moving. They are somewhat different down in Central Texas. Must be the air or something.
Thank goodness all the festivities are over and all the friends and family met and had pictures taken...even "Elvis" showed up to sing, but my cousin's wife said she had never heard any of his songs. Her daddy said Elvis was most probably the Anti-Christ personified. I told her not so much, I thought. Who knows, maybe I'm unkowingly leading her down the path to destruction. My cousins are fraternal twins. It had been an extremely long time since I'd seen the one of who lives in Oklahoma and several months since I'd seen the one who lives near Ft. Worth. There is another brother who lives in Colorado, and it would be good to get to know him, too. *thinking snow*
The other musical entertainment was really a great country music band called Three Fools on Three Stools and they played lots and lots of songs that were popular while we were in school and later on while we were busy making our families and/or professions. Lots of people later in the evening were dancing while the Three sang. Some were very good dancers and go out dancing at least once a week. I wish I was that "young"! They did the push and if there had been enough of them they could have done the stroll. We were debating if they were doing the Charleston to one song, but I thought not. It looked like how we danced a club called Jack's. We were all underage when we went there. I learned from another group of ladies that when the neon donkey on the sign was kicking the TABC was coming that night and to stay away. I learn the most astonishing things from very straight laced ladies. They must have gone to Jack's way more than I did. Actually I think the lady who told me about that was her best friend's dad, who worked for the TABC, Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission.
I'm happy to report nobody showed up in sweats and/or a ballgown. My clothes were just fine and thank goodness I'd done a lot of googling and stressing about it all. Coldwater Creek rocks for nifty clothes for country club casual. I wore a beautiful jacket with a dark brown sleevless sweater, and a dark brown skirt with lovely embroidery on it. I didn't take off the jacket to show off my arms, a la Michelle Obama mine aren't quite that good looking yet. I tried to copy/paste the pics from the Coldwater Creek website, but no dice. We really did have a fun couple of days with good friends....some old friends and some new friends...and one married couple went to high school with my husband and I worked with his wife. As we get older it seems Fort Worth gets smaller. They asked who came the farthest to celebrate the 50th reunion and it was a guy who lives in Israel. He won...hands down. At the 30th reunion there was a fellow who came all the way from Hawaii. He won that time. There was one guy who has a home in New Hampshire and an apartment in New York City. I heard from someone he is involved with some plays on Broadway. Don't know if that is true or not, but wouldn't that be something if he was.
Friday night was the cocktail party and registration...I had a diet coke...living on the wild side again you know. After the meet and greet we hung out for a bit, but decided to try the free trolley they have downtown. We caught the thing and it was uncrowded...that in itself should have been a heads up for me, but nooooo, we just had to try this trolley out. There was an Indian couple with their two small children and another couple from the reunion. When we got on it was so cold in there it was miserable. It is usually warm here, but the driver had the a/c turned to snow blower. Then we were off to the races. She drove so fast and turned corners like on two wheels practically. We got off as soon as we got back to where we could walk to pick up our car from the valet parking. That was a ride to remember. And I woke at 2AM with my back hurting a lot from being slung around so much. The Indian couple with the children were still on the thing when we got off. They live here and had just come downtown to see the sights. Hope they didn't get whiplash from the thing.
Downtown Fort Worth is a happening place these days especially at night. There are many restaurants and clubs that looked interesting, and several of the large buildings have been turned into really nice lofts. I don't drink anymore because of the arthitis meds, but sometimes (actually a lot of the time) I eat. Anyway, we finally got our car back from the valet parking and on the way home we checked out some of the more interesting places just driving around at night like we did a long time ago. One repurposed highlight is Montgomery Plaza. It used to be a Montgomery Ward store where you could call in an order from the catalog and then drive down and park in a space for pickups. There was a phone directly to the pickup desk and you would call to tell them you were there to pick up merchandise. They would run it right out to you while you stayed in the car with three kids and a dog or something like that. The Montgomery Ward store is a landmark for Fort Worth. In 1949 Fort Worth had a major flood. Here is a quote from another website :
"Long-time Fort Worth residents have always measured the severity of the flood with the same yardstick, the Montgomery Ward department store on West Seventh Street. The large Ward’s building saw the water level reach the second story, although each enthusiastic retelling of the story seems to elevate the water a floor or two." After that we built a new levee in the '60s and or 70s have not had much flooding since.
The Country Club turned out to not be quite as scary as I'd feared. When we attended his 30th reunion the guest of honor was a coach who had terrified generations of kids. It turned out he was just a little old man...but I swear when they introduced him there was a gasp from the crowd. This time it was the stately Colonial Country Club. I'm sure we were a hoot to the staff with our carrying on. I even got to get my picture made with my Jr. High class, now known as Middle School class. I wasn't in their class and asked if it would be ok...they all said you went there, so get in this picture. They took a class photo of all the ones who graduated from his high school in 1959, too. There were a lot of them. The photographer even had a riser for them to stand on....like when we were little kids and had class photos made.
The food was very good, but the club chef must have gotten a really great deal on Haricot Vert - French Green Beans, because I had a plate full of them. Some in a salad and some as a side dish. Good thing I like them.
I found out today that my very best real life friend had her 50th reunion this past weekend. I guess I was so scope locked on getting the right clothes I missed her telling me...or maybe she was so busy she just thought she had told me. Lord knows we all about have Alzheimer's after this weekend just from information overload.
Pretty much I'm looking forward to a day on the sofa with some movies. It is raining and cloudy. Good movie weather and good nap weather. Plus my knees hurt today, and her "highness, the big cheese", has gone shopping this afternoon for some new clothes befitting her altered status in the grand scheme of things. Hope she finds some really classy stuff.
All in the interest of keeping it real....which is the prime object of blogs...right.
I'm "much younger" than my husband, by 4 years. *grin* They just get so ticked off when I say that.
Today is going to be a busy day. As I've mentioned my husband's high school reunion is this weekend. I've an appointment to get my hair styled today and also it is the day of my friends' get together for lunch day.
The craziness continues with the in laws. My husband was checking their bank statements and found that someone had scammed them last July. There were 7 "checks" on one day for varying amounts. We called the bank and they said someone had gotten the account code, made checks and deposited them into an account, but the trail went cold at that point. If you are reading this, never ever give your bank account number to anyone. I don't understand how the scam works, but think they call and tell the elderly person they will do them the favor of handling all the work for them. The whole thing is just weird. Now my husband is going to have to close that account and talk to everyone who deposits into the account. I was ready to drop the in laws off at a fire station or hospital yesterday....like young women do if they find they cannot care for their child.
The upside to yesterday was our daughter called and she got the job!! She is a "big cheese" now.
