Spring Is Just Around The Corner !

As they say "Spring is just around the corner!"  Question is where is that corner? The calendar says just 22 more days until the long awaited day.   Even in sunny Florida it is feeling like winter these mornings.  We had a frost a few mornings ago and saw a skim of ice on our birdbath.  Thankfully this week we've had just cool early mornings and nice sunny warmth by noontime.  Feeling so bad for all the folks in Boston with their huge piles of snow and more seems to come every day.

Been keeping busy here.  Learning a few new crafts and enjoying some company and cousin Natalie who is here until the first week in March.  Our grandson Shaun and Jessica were here for a few days last week as they traveled home from New Mexico.  We had a great time and were happy that they chose to come home via Gramp and Grammie's !  They sure enjoyed a kayak trip down the Weeki Wacchi River, getting great pictures of deer, turtles and manatee along the way.  Glad they made it home safely just before the latest blizzard and frigid weather set in.

Hoping this video will post here and open for you.  Great to watch a manatee being friendly!

Natalie and I have been out and about too, enjoying the annual Kumquat Festival in Dade City.  It seems to get bigger every year.  This is a pic of our little group as we enjoy the beautiful day and each other's company.  One of our fun "Ladies Days Out".

It is a lazy, rainy afternoon here and I am glad to have the time to write in my blog and share with you.

Plans for our annual Tea Party are coming along nicely.  "Spring Fling" is what we are calling the event this year. I have to be thinking about decorating a hat to wear worthy of the theme.  Guess I'll do just that while I listen to the rain patter on the roof.  No thunder storms as predicted which is just fine with me!  Even the wind has calmed down and it is just a gentle rain now.  So with that and a picture of the tiles I have learned to decorate I will leave you now.  Have a great day, and don't give up on the arrival of spring!  It always does come!  Right?  

A Scottish Proverb:

"Do not judge by appearances; 

A rich heart may be under a poor coat!"

The New Year Marches On

Well, guess my resolve to write more in my blog... dissolved ! OK  so I will try to correct that.  It has been a busy year around here.  Or I have been just goofing off,  enjoying a few swims in the pool (before the cooler weather set in), or enjoying the Christmas Season and then settling down to some house cleaning and planning for company.

We were really blessed by a nice visit from our Angel and our good friend and neighbor, Alison this past week. It is always SO good too have company from home.  These two are such fun to have around.  They arrived on a sprinkling afternoon in a very bright blue Mustang!  This flash of brightness after a few dreary days must have shocked the weather into brightening up.  We had some nice days while they were here with us.

The girls and their fancy wheels.

Very flashy but ...  that backseat ... Many laughs watching this Grammy crawl up and out of there!  Until Grampa came up with a great idea ...  why not just back out !!!  Now that really worked like a charm.  So for the rest of the time whenever we were out and about, I made a smooth and speedy exit.

We went to Tarpon Springs one day, the Greek community famous for it's harvesting of sponges and soap making.  A great day looking around this unique village, up and down the sponge docks checking out the little shops.  We had a wonderful lunch at Mykino's reported to be the very best place to get a great and authentic Greek meal.  Reports were correct!  Really great food!  After walking off all that lunch we had a little fortification for the trip home at a wonderfully decadent Greek bakery, Hellas.  The caramel cheesecake was perfect.

Now it is pretty quiet here again :(  and sad to have them leave.  But, we expect a visit from our grandson, Shaun in February as he and Jessica are on the way home from New Mexico where Shaun has been working this winter.  With gas prices so good they can make a swing into FL and a short visit with us before heading north up the coast.  

Meantime I am entertaining myself cooking up some new recipes, some nice healthy ones and some... well, not so healthy!  For healthy, I made a winter vegetable soup. We had been to the Famous Webster Flea Market on Monday and Angel made us a great and large casserole of roasted veggies and since we ate only half of it, I decided to put the rest into the blender and puree them,  add some ginger, a bit of garlic and some fresh carrot juice and top it off with  light cream.  It turned out SO good!  I froze a jar of it before adding the cream and will have that later.

Under the 'not so healthy' category,  there is the Chocolate/peanut butter Bark I made today while left to my own devices while hubby helped work on a neighbor's porch.   Here, I'll just offer you a piece!

Chocolate/Peanut Butter Bark

Last night we enjoyed a great Spaghetti dinner at Sunrise Hall.  Great cooks here!  A good turn out.  Friends came over after to have a few card games.  (Girls won, yea!)  

We are having another cool spell so it was nippy for them walking home later.  Needed the quilt last night too.  We hear that a blizzard is being warned for Vt this week.  Really glad cousin Natalie and her Jerry got out on Friday and are now in Georgia visiting relatives and will be at their place here in Sunshine tomorrow.  Always fun when Natalie gets here to pal around with!   

Once again it is planning time for the Great Tea Party!  I'm rounding up a committee to help with the planning and executing of this great event.  It is scheduled for March 3rd. so we have some time to come up with some unique ideas to make it as nice as last year.

Little Gr Granddaughter, Selena pours tea for her friends.  Wish she could come to and enliven

our Great Tea Party!!

It is around 6 PM now and the sun is getting ready to set over west of us.  There may be a beautiful sunset again tonight so guess I will stop rambling and check it out!   I truly have missed doing the blog and it is a good feeling to have written here again!  Hope y'all didn't give up on me entirely!

A quote for today, from Martin Luther

"I have had many things in my  hands

And have lost them all;

But whatever I have placed in God's hands,

That I still possess"

Blessings to you all!

The Absolute Best Gift !

It is Christmas Eve.  May you all be Blessed as you gather or as you don't to contemplate the greatest Gift ever given to mankind...  the gift of our loving God of his only Son, Jesus.

Reading the local paper today, I make a point to read the column written by Cal Thomas of the Tribune Media Services which our paper includes in it's publication.  Today Cal writes about the Christmas story and the ultimate gift of Jesus to the world.  He suggests reading this story again, Luke chapter 2 in God's Holy Word.  I will quote some of Cal's column.

"This is truly the ultimate gift and it has your (and my) name on it!  It fits all who try it on and has the additional benefit of having been paid for by someone else.  This gift never wears out.  Once accepted, it so satisfies that people rarely return it.  For WHAT could it be exchanged ??
Can anyone name a better gift that has produced more positive and welcome results around the world for more than 2,000 years ?"

So today won't you accept this gift?  Unwrap it... make it a treasure... and let this Gift of God fill your lives and make you whole.  Then you will find this a Gift you will want to share !

I wish you all a Blessed and Merry Christmas!   May your New Year be Happy and Healthy.

Love,  Dottie and Dennis

Thanksgiving Reflections

It is Thanksgiving once again!  Shouldn't every day be a day of Thanksgiving?  The bonus is that when  our minds are busy being thankful, we have not as much time for worrying or complaining! And most people I know can think of lots to be thankful for.  Being able to be thankful even in hard times is such a lifter-upper to others!!

We are enjoying a cooler day today here in central Florida after several days of humidity accompanied by LOTS of rain and all day thunder storms.

After "Coffee Hour" today, I helped others set up Sunrise Hall for our community/family dinner which will be at 1 PM tomorrow.  A new seating plan will help move things along a bit faster.   The tables are set up in a circular fashion around the hall.  The table at the front will be where the Turkey, Ham, Mashed potatoes, Gravy, and Stuffing will be served and this table is in the circle.  Folks also bring their favorite Thanksgiving dish to share.  This dish will be set in front of their place at the table they choose to sit at.  Time to eat, all will rise and those sitting on the inside of the circle of tables will take their plate and go around the INSIDE of the circled tables, reaching past the empty chair to serve themselves from the favorite selections down the center of each table. Those sitting on the outside will move around the circle of tables on the OUTSIDE. Moving around they will be served from the meat table and continue around, back to their places.  Also on the tables will be baskets of various breads.  Desserts will be on another long table and when ready, one goes to the dessert table and helps themselves, IF you have any room for dessert at this point!  We have some awesome cooks around here.  We have 60 folks signed up to be at our dinner.

I am thinking of Thanksgivings Past these days.  The first couple of years we were married, we went to either my family gathering or Dennis'.  I remember the wonderful HUGE hams Den's mom would prepare.  The best ham I have ever had!  Sometimes it was turkey at Thanksgiving and the ham for Christmas dinner.  I still make Mom's Raisin Sauce when we have ham, as my daughter, Angel does now too!  The family raised their own pigs as well as having a huge garden every year.  If we were at my family's Thanksgiving dinner it was usually Turkey.  Or maybe Turkey and Chicken and Dumplings, Aunt Ethel's specialty.  Uncle Herb was especially fond of the Chicken and Dumplings. She always made a big batch of biscuits too just in case you would rather have your chicken and gravy over biscuits.  And those wonderful creamed onions!  Yum!

I think it was five or six years after we were married that I first attempted to roast a turkey.  I remember pouring over recipes and pushing for the perfect menu.  We ate in the early evening that year  as opposed to the usual noontime repast. Going through some old slides awhile back I found a photo of that first Turkey dinner. I have a scanner, given to me by my sister in-law, Lea that has a special gadget that a slide fits into and makes it able to scan the slide to the computer.  This is one of the slides I scanned.   Our guests were my Grammie Della and my Daddy.  Dennis was the photographer.

That's little Matt peeking into the picture on the right!

Chip is on my left, Grammie, Daddy, Matt and 

Angel-baby in the high chair.

I used our very best dishes which were my Grandmother Amsden's best china. (These are Angel's now) The ruby- red tumblers were so pretty and were collected when I was a little girl, by Grammie Della.  They came with oleo in them!  That is back when oleo started being sold already yellow like butter!  Before that, it was sold in a plastic bag, white like lard, with a color/dye button in the bag that once you began kneading the bag, broke and the more you kneaded the more the nice yellow color distributed through the oleo.  The center piece here was real fruit.  A memorable time!

So I hope you have time to think back and remember good times with family and friends on Thanksgiving days long ago.  Remember the special people who have walked through our lives and made special memories for us to hold onto.  Another thing to be thankful for at this season!

HAPPPY THANKSGIVING!

I leave you with this from Psalm 100: 4-5 from God's Holy Word.

"Enter into His gates with thanksgiving,

And into His courts with praise.

Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.

For the Lord is good;

His mercy is everlasting,

And His truth endures to all generations"

Wow!  I hope not everyone gave up on me!  This summer was a busy one and I am ashamed to admit that I just didn't carve out some time to keep up my blog.  I also had about with sciatica and thanks to a wonderful therapist, Cindy, and many visits to her healing hands, I am finally back to pretty much normal. ( OK, I looked that one up in my dictionary and it defines 'Normal' as...average, regular, orderly and SANE)!  Don't know if I ever met all of these definitions of normal anyway!  But is sure good to feel better.)

What a beautiful fall we had in Vermont this year.  When I saw the leaves start turning in Sept. I thought it would be all over way before Columbus Day, but not so. After the rain took down some of the early turned leaves, another batch, even more brilliant presented themselves and were the most lovely I ever remember seeing. We left for FL on the 18th of Oct. and it was still very colorful and all this time with no hard frost in our area!

I am on a committee that is raising money to restore to use the old 1879 brick schoolhouse in the Village. At town meeting last March the voters chose to save it from the wrecking ball, for which I am really thankful.  Folks are coming forward with their skills and donations of time, talents and money to make this possible.  Groups and organizations are offering their help and we held a very successful yard sale in early Oct. raising $1116.00 !  An Historic Grant has been applied for, money for a new bathroom donated, a work crew has volunteered to fix a floor etc. etc.  Soon, we hope, the local Food Shelf will be able to move in.

This is a cake!  Made for the 100th year celebration of the 1879 brick schoolhouse

by my friend Dotty Rhodes in 1979.  (only picture of the schoolhouse

I have with me here.)

We also managed to go on a couple of relatively easy hikes in Oct.  The first one was on a just perfect day for a hike. We went to view the caves where the Weathersfield Panther was caught in the 1800's.
This beast had been feasting on local livestock and was tracked to a cave up on Pine Hill.  With the help of a dog who entered the cave and was chased out by the Panther, the local men shot it .  Someone had it stuffed and it remains to this day in Weathersfield at the local Historical Society.

Later in Oct., just before leaving for our winter quarters, we went on another hike, this one longer and on a pretty chilly morning.  The mountain west of our village was named after a man named Hawks.  He made several trips from MA through VT and on to NY and Canada. Once as a captive of the French and Indians and a couple of times to ransom relatives taken to Canada.  We hiked to the Great Spring and a clearing on the side of the mountain where he camped on his way through.  The brook that comes down into the village is thus called Encampment Brook and flows through a little valley across the meadow from our house and on into the Black River. We ate our lunch in the clearing where Mr. Hawks and his men camped. Twenty people enjoyed this outing and the talk given by a man from the Crown Point Road Assn.

Our trip to FL was good with our second day stopover in NC a pleasant time with cousin Janice and Phil. Our little Miss Lizzie was a good girl and a model traveler this year!  Guess she knows by now that when the few days of strange places is over, she will be at a place to call home for a few months.
She loves the FL room and her scratching log, the other half of the one she loves so much on her VT porch.  Den got her a live oak log here but she would have nothing to do with that so last year we brought along the ash log and it is the first thing she heads for when we arrive.

We are pretty well settled in and I am enjoying the warm days and the pool.  Nights are cooler and good for sleeping. Snowbirds are arriving daily and it is good to see winter friends again. So thankful that we are blessed with friends and family, our health and all the good things God gives us each day.

Quote:
Ten thousand, thousand precious gifts
My daily thanks employ;
Nor is the least a cheerful heart
That tastes those gifts with joy.
                                                       Addison

A Lovely Country Wedding

It was a great day, last Sunday.  It started out with a shower and some cooler air which was very welcome.  Soon it cleared and the sun came out, insuring a great afternoon for an outdoor wedding!
All the preparations complete, or nearly so by noontime.  Grandson Patrick and his lovely bride, Lindsay, so happy and excited and guests arriving.  I will tell the story with some pictures.  It was a very nice time and everything went well.

Introducing Mr and Mrs Patrick Richardson

Lindsay, Patrick and Selena

The Cake  by Auntie Angel

A reading by Auntie Angel

Good Job,  by friends of the bride and groom !

Such a sweet couple and Selena thoroughly enjoyed the day!   The 'kids' are back now from a honeymoon trip to the beach.  They have many good memories to cherish of their special day with friends and family.

Still the summer stays busy!  Today was Family Reunion day... Den's family and it is always a special time as we gather in the hills at cousin Tim's for fun and food and catching up with each other as another year has passed.  How the time has flown!  Keeping the generations in order takes effort!  There are so many now.  I think the oldest attending the party was 95 years young!  The youngest this year was probably around 3.  We were blessed with a lovely day, nice, warm and sunny but not hot nor humid.

So it's been a busy day and now it's time to rest.  I hope you are all having a good summer with some fulfilling  good times and that you are making lots of good memories.  

This quote is from Frank Kafka

"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty in every age of life really never grows old."

 Here we are in mid July already!  Where is the summer going?  Such a busy one too!  Took our annual trip to the Northesat Kingdom the weekend of the 4th.  Had a wonderful time with our grandson and family and especially with the two little gr. granddaughters. They are growing so fast and amaze us with all they learn.

Then we spent a morning with my friend Jane and met her daughter whom I had not seen since she was a toddler. That was a super good time and they made us a lovely lunch.  Thanks, Jane and Sharon!
Then off to the top of the mountain to visit cousins, Mick and DonnaMae for the their birthday celebrations and some awesome fireworks displays, eight towns within a 180 degree range of view from their patio !,  Plus the great display put on there atop the mountain by the M. brothers! Thanks guys and also a big thank you to our hosts who put on a fabulous and yummy BBQ.
Then, next day we are off in the Gypsy Wagon for home.  Of course there is always time for lunch at Exit 17 at the Truck Stop!

The gardens are thriving really well, veggie and flowers alike.  We are preparing for a wedding on Sunday... Our grandson Patrick and his bride to be, Lindsay are planning an outdoor wedding.   The bridal shower was a couple of Sundays ago.  Everyone is all excited and we are hoping for the picture perfect day. Last session of therapy this morning for my ailing back.  Sure hope these have cured the sciatica problems!  Now for the final little wait for Pat and Lindsay's big day!  will write of the event and post some pictures later.   Enjoy the lovely sweet summer days The Lord has blessed us with.