Good afternoon!

I hope you are having a wonderful Saturday afternoon, or evening, whenever you are reading this.

Here in Pennsylvania it is a cold Saturday afternoon and as I write this I am planning to spend it watching the third Anne of Green Gables movie with my mom, and maybe Dad too since he got caught up in the first one with us.

Before I go there, however, I will take Little Miss to her gymnastics class.

Speaking of gymnastics, she attended her first competition last weekend. It was a home competition and for her age it was mainly to get her some experience in that realm.

She earned a fourth and sixth place trophy and got a special award for her cute pajamas since this competition was called Pajama Rama. The participants were asked to wear their pajamas to it. Of course, they took them off to complete their activities.

The rest of the week was mainly homeschooling and then Kids Club on Wednesday. Kids Club is what they are calling it now instead of Awana. On the way there, I picked up a little boy whose grandmother helps with the club but who was on vacation. The little boy lives in his great-grandfather’s house and it brought up a lot of memories for me since my family knew his great-grandfather, Karl, well. His great-grandfather was good friends with my grandfather and my dad. He worked with my dad for many years.

My parents would go to their house to play cards often when I was a young kid and I would be taken along because there was often no one at home to watch me. I have no idea where my brother would have been at that time, but he was eight years older than me so I guess he was doing teenage stuff. Maybe track practice since he did run track.

My mom does not like playing cards but she would go anyhow for something different to do. I’d sit in their living room with their fake fireplace and 70s-style lava lamp and for a while a real-life fluffy, sleeping, Siamese. Later that cat was replaced with a fake one after it died. That fake one was a little creepy, to say the least. No, I don’t believe they had the Siamese stuffed.

The entire house smelled like Karl’s pipe, which was a sweet and pleasant aroma. I’m glad he didn’t smoke cigars. The house was immaculate, and I was always worried I’d mess something up or spill the soda Karl’s wife, Blanche, would give me. Soda and chips were a treat for me because even though we were a Pepsi family through and through since my mom’s dad worked for them for 30 years or more, we didn’t have soda all the time at my house.

Blanche would set the glass of soda on a clear glass coaster so it didn’t stain their coffee table.

Sometimes I would watch a game show on TV while they played cards – usually wheel of fortune.

When I dropped the little boy off, Karl’s grandson and I chatted about my memories of the house. He laughed and said he understood about the pipe smell because he had those pipes and that tobacco in a canister in the enclosed front porch and in the summer the heat would heat the tobacco and make the whole porch smell like it.

To this day, I can’t smell pipe smoke or tobacco without thinking of Karl. My husband is the same with his grandfather, who also smoked a pipe for many years.

In many ways, Karl was like a grandfather to me since I had lost mine when I was only two and my other one when I was 9.  Karl could be grumpy at times and most people just let him go but one day when I was a teenager, I was over there and he was super grumpy about something. I don’t remember what had set him off but I let him know that whatever it was, it wasn’t that big of a deal. He was simply being a “grumpy old fart,” I told him.

As the words flew out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I’d said it. It wasn’t that Karl was a mean man, but people simply didn’t talk back to him very often. I stood motionless for a few seconds, afraid that he was going to blow up on me but instead he simply looked shocked for a few seconds and then burst into laughter, that pipe propped in the corner of his mouth.

“Well, you’re a sassy thing today, aren’t you?” he said.

After that, we joked hard with each other and it became the norm.

Losing him, and then years later his wife, was hard and I find myself often unable to look at his house where his grandson now lives without tearing up. The tears are happy tears, though, I tell Little Miss. They are tears filled with a lot of good memories I am glad to have.

This week should be fairly low key until the end of the week. On Friday, Little Miss is scheduled for oral surgery to remove several problematic teeth. She will be having it done under general anesthesia and to say I am nervous would be an understatement. I may have to be medicated that day (I’m only half-joking here) so please, if you wouldn’t mind, pray for that procedure and my already frayed nerves.

Does your tea need a warm up? I know mine does.

I’m going to be looking for some new teas here shortly. I was just telling a friend how I don’t like it when herbal teas have a bunch of other ingredients in them. I don’t want rose hips and lemongrass and some other herb. The only reason for that is that I had a reaction to a tea one time and it took me a while to figure out that might be the cause of my itching. In the end, I wasn’t sure which herb might have caused the issue. We’d also had a laundry detergent change that I was unaware of (since The Husband does a lot of our laundry and had used something new) around the same time, so it may have been that causing the itching all along.

Some teas with all those extra things in it (dandelion leaves, etc.) make my throat feel odd too. Plus, I can’t have caffeinated tea since I seem to be allergic to caffeine. Yes, I know, it’s completely bizarre.

So, for now I stick to the peppermint tea, but I’m really going to try to be brave and try something new soon.

Leave me a list of your favorite teas in the comments and let me know what you are drinking and doing today.

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