Saturday Afternoon Tea

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Reading on the front porch

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

Last night I was sitting out on the porch, reading The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, enjoying the warmer weather. I looked out at our front yard and yes, our old maple tree is missing, but it doesn’t feel as weird as it did the first few days after it was gone.

One night this week the wind was whipping outside, and I got that familiar clench in my gut that I always get when the wind blows and I worried about that big tree out there and what might happen if part of it fell. Then I remembered that there was no tree, and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Relief flowed over me.

We had two nicer days this week, but yesterday was even warmer and nicer. On Thursday, I couldn’t take sitting outside to read because the wind was just too cold. Yesterday, though, it was love and warm, despite the wind.

Little Miss drew with sidewalk chalk while I read. This was after we’d traveled the thirty minutes up and thirty minutes back to retrieve a grocery pick up from Aldi and spent a couple hours at my parents while The Boy helped his grandfather rearrange tools in the garage.

Little Miss wanted to take a ride on my dad’s golf cart, so we did that while we waited.

Today Little Miss, The Husband, and The Boy went to an Easter egg hunt.

We will spend the rest of the day hanging out and maybe watching a family movie. We’ll also be getting ready for Easter tomorrow.

We don’t usually attend an in-person church but will be trying to do so tomorrow so we can find more friends for Little Miss. After that there will be a small Easter egg hunt in our backyard and then lunch at my parents.

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It feels weird to be home alone. The house was so quiet. It’s usually me and at least one of the kids. Shortly after they left, I looked for a movie to watch and settled on one from 1934 that I’d never heard of. It’s called She Had To Choose.

I had to choose it because the man on the preview was quite handsome

I might also have time for a Murder She Wrote. I watched a couple episodes from Season 12 and they were well done. Better than some from the earlier seasons. The Husband says the writers probably got better, one, and two, it was the final season so they went all out for it. I would say they did. So far there are at least three episodes filmed overseas, or at least the story takes place overseas.

Earlier this week The Husband took Little Miss to a meeting of the chamber of commerce in the town he works on to show her how small organizations work. It was a good educational experience, but Little Miss said she was bored and “zoned out” toward the beginning. She will still be asked to write a paragraph to share in her homeschool portfolio.

Before the meeting they visited the library in that town and The Husband picked me up a book of short stories by Louis L’Amour and his biography. I am looking forward to reading both. That’s if I ever finish The Two Towers and my James Herriot book. Both seem very long and dense. I am going to finish The Two Towers this week and am savoring the Herriot book, reading a chapter here and there before bed.

After the library visit and meeting, The Husband took Little Miss to an ice cream stand which also has a playground.

They had a good time.

I was at home enjoying the weather, even though it was chillier that day.

We have finally fixed The Husband’s old truck and that means Little Miss and I will have a car during the week. Where we will go with said car, I am not sure, but I do know I will be headed to my parents once or twice a week to help clean and maybe cook them some meals. They are definitely slowing down these days and could use the help.

I can hardly believe there is only about a month and a half left of the school year.

Little Miss and I will be focused on art the final month of the year, like we did last year. We will be reading about artists, watching documentaries on them and doing art most days with some math lessons and literature thrown in. Little Miss isn’t excited that I’ll be having her do a couple math lessons a week during the summer to help her not forget what she’s learned for next school year.

The Boy graduates at the end of May and will be looking for a job shortly afterward. Yes that fact has my mind racing but I am trying to reel my emotions in a little bit when everyone is around and  having a good cry when they aren’t.

On Wednesday I visited my parents and dug into some old history, finding some extra letters from my great-great grandfather that I had wanted to find before so that I can write a final post to my series about my ancestors who fought in the Civil War. In the final post I want to follow up with how the brothers continued their lives after finding out Charles had died in Libby Prison.

If you haven’t read those posts, you can find them here:

Voices from the past: Letters written during the Civil War by my family members. Part 1

Voices from the past: The Fate of a Brother

How was your week last week? Did you do anything exciting? Is the weather warming up where you are? Let me know in the comments so we can catch up.

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A book sale, a trip to a garden center, and what’s up with the turkey vultures in our area?

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

Today for our chat I am pulling out some tea, cocoa, lemonade, and even iced tea. What are you in the mood for?

This week’s weather isn’t really calling for lemonade since it will still be fairly cold, but I think lemonade can be good on any day.

I’m going to be having some peppermint tea with local, raw honey in it as we chat. My husband made it and oh wow. It’s so good.

*sniff* I needed this. (She said dramatically like she’s making a silly YouTube video.)

It’s gloomy and raining outside, but I don’t mind too much because I have my tea, my blanket, and a good book.

We did have some nice, warmer days this past week — nice enough that we spent a couple of afternoons and evenings outside playing and simply enjoying the warmth.

The Husband had three days off this past week so were able to spend time as a family relaxing on Thursday and then traveling to another town on Friday for a used book sale and a trip to a park.

On Thursday while we were sitting outside there was a huge flock of turkey buzzards or vultures circling the woods behind our house and then our house itself. It was really stressing me out, especially as their numbers started growing and they started lowering themselves. As far as I knew there were no dead animals around us but there were three living ones — my two cats and our dog — in the backyard.

At one point, Zooma the Wonder Dog ran into the yard and jumped up toward the birds. One of them began to lower itself and I yelled at it to go away. I then yelled at all of them.

“You get out of here! Go on! Go! You’re not taking my dog today!”

The Husband said I sounded like Fran Drescher from The Nanny while I was yelling. I didn’t take the remark as a compliment.

Either way, the birds started to move away. At one point there were close to 30 of them swarming the sky over my house. I searched online and learned that circling vultures doesn’t always mean they are looking for carrion, or dead animals, to eat.

Sometimes, if it is in the evening hours, they have probably arrived in the area that day and are preparing to roost for the night. I hope that was what has happening but later my neighbor told me the birds were circling when her dogs were out too.

Online is says buzzards/vultures can not physically lift a dog and also don’t take live dogs, but….I don’t know. This isn’t the first time this has happened when we’ve been outside.

Also, locally we call these birds “turkey buzzards”, but they are actually turkey vultures, according to information online. In the UK, buzzards are some other types of birds. Either way, these are pretty ugly and creepy birds and whatever they were doing, I didn’t like it.

Yesterday, The Husband, The Boy, and Little Miss and I traveled to a town about 45 minutes east of us to visit the library there for their bi-annual book sale. We also picked up some lunch at the local supermarket, visited a park to have a picnic, picked up our groceries (through pick up), and visited a garden store before stopping at a playground on the way home.

The most exciting find for me at the book sale was a box of The Hardy Boys Mystery books from the early 1940s. These books were actually published in the 1990s, but they are reprints of the originals, which were written in the 1930s or 40s.

The books were 50 cents each because they were in the children’s section. I double checked with the library ladies, but they insisted they were only 50 cents, so I picked up 19 of the some 28 books they had, including a book with three books in one.

They had three Nancy Drew Mystery books, but I already own those, so I didn’t get them.

Little Miss also picked out four cozy mysteries for me. She really enjoys doing that and has grabbed some great ones for me in the past. I was really excited that she grabbed another Amish Inn Mysteries for me to add to my growing collection of that series.

The Husband found The Count of Nine by Erle Stanley Gardner and said he has it on Kindle, but I said to grab the paperback. I never know when something might happen to one of our accounts, causing us to lose all of our books so I prefer to have paperbacks or hardcovers of books I know we will enjoy on our shelves. Our shelves are getting overrun, though. We are going to have to do something – like knock out a wall, build on, and create an entire room to be our library. I’m not sure the husband or our bank account will go for that but it would be very cool.

Anyhow, after the library sale we grabbed some lunch from the local supermarket and headed to a park. The kids played by the creek for a bit and then we headed to a small garden store that also sells . . . well, a lot of different stuff. It is a very relaxing place, and they carry some natural soda that I can actually drink. I can’t drink sodas anymore because of my corn allergy so it’s a treat to have some natural soda once in a while. This is also one of the local places where I can pick up some raw honey.

From there we made a stop at Walmart and Aldi (Aldi was just a  pick up thankfully) and then on to another park that has a zipline, slides, and access to a creek. Little Miss usually loves to explore the creek but this time she and her brother played on the zipline instead.

I’m not sure if I have ever explained this or not but when I write the word “local” that often means something different for people in my area. Local for us can be anything from 5 minutes to an hour away. When you live in a rural area, it can take a long time to get to “civilization.” For us, it is about 30 minutes one way to pick up groceries at an Aldi and in that town, there are a couple supermarkets and smaller stores but nothing larger like a Walmart. Forty-five minutes southeast, where we went yesterday, there is an Aldi, a Walmart, and a larger supermarket that carries more natural items. About an hour south, there are larger stores like Walmart, Target, Gamestop, Barnes and Noble, etc. About 90 minutes north we can find those stores as well.

Local, in other words, clearly means different things depending on where you live – a rural or urban area. If that wasn’t obvious already.

This upcoming week we don’t have a ton going on. The last night of the church program Little Miss goes to was last week. We might attend a library event in the town where The Husband works but other than that there is nothing on the agenda until the weekend when The Husband is taking Little Miss to an Easter egg hunt he is taking photos at for the newspaper.

How about you? How was your week last week and what do you have coming up for this week?

Saturday Afternoon Chat: It was more than just a tree

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 23 Comments

This week the absolutely mammoth maple tree in front of our house was cut down and it knocked me for a bit of an emotional loop.

The tree has not only been here since we moved in, but it’s also been on this street, right in that spot for over 100 years.

Since we’ve moved here, though, my neighbor and I have looked at that tree, especially the top of it, and watched the branches blow in the wind and wondered what would happen if the top of it snapped off.

For the most part I was comfortable in knowing I wouldn’t have to make a decision on the tree because we didn’t have the money to have it cut down. I liked the shade from it in the summer and watching the colors change on it during the autumn.

Sure, I worried some if the winds were high, but it was a sturdy tree. It’d been there for 100 years. The base was actually huge. It wasn’t going anywhere. Not the whole tree anyhow. Ahem. Hopefully. Insert cautiously optimistic worried grimace here.

This winter, though, a couple larger limbs fell off into our yard and I wondered what would happen if an even larger one broke off and hit either our house or the neighbors.

Then we had more than one wind advisory over the winter. I found myself looking up at the top of the tree (as far as I could look anyhow) several times over the last few months, hoping I wouldn’t hear a crack at some point. One day a limb did come down and that’s when the fear started to become more of a reality.

I knew we still didn’t have the money to have it taken down. Two years ago we were quoted a very high amount of money to have it removed. Our neighbors offered to go in halfway with us, but I still didn’t know where we would find the money to do it.

To make a long story short, the neighbors ended up talking to a tree cutting company who offered them a great deal to bring the tree down so they took the deal after they consulted us.

We couldn’t turn the opportunity down.

I no longer had my excuse of not having the money because the neighbors offered to pay for it. I had to face the fact that the tree would really have to come down and though I knew it was necessary, I didn’t want it to happen – well, in some ways. In other ways I did want it to happen.

I am someone who hates change and this would be a very big change. That tree had sheltered us from the sun, winds, snow for the five years we’ve lived here, but it has also sheltered other families for 100 years.

Imagine all it has seen over the years. The invention of cars, or at least better ones, men marching off to war, new houses going up, the street in front of it being paved. A couple of years before we moved here it even survived a tornado that ripped up many trees around it and tore part of the steeple off the church the tree overlooked.

As a Christian I don’t believe trees are alive, but I do believe God created them. As far as I know this tree was planted by either the town or the residents on the street since there was  row of them perfectly aligned up the side of the street. God created trees and from them came saplings to be planted though.

View of the street about 1920.
Not sure the date of this one but you can see the maple trees are bigger here.

This tree brought beauty and personality to the view out our front window these past five years. Shielding us from the sun was one of the most helpful features it offered because our house has stayed very cool even without air conditioning because of the shade of the tree. Installing air conditioners is not easy in this house because we have roll out windows. We  have to use portable air conditioners.

This change is something we will have to simply adapt to this summer. Sitting on the front porch to read a book might not be as nice because the shade of the tree is now gone.

But . . .  again  . . . the tree was extremely tall and if some of the limbs had broken off from higher up it could have taken out a front porch or one of our cars at least, if not more. Someone could have been very hurt or even killed.

As an aside, I don’t remember ever seeing such a tall maple in my life. If some of those higher limbs broke off and came crashing down? Yikes! I hesitate to think of the damage it would have caused.

So, Wednesday night the neighbors let us know that the tree cutting service would be there the next day to take the tree down. It was a very fast turn around from when they suggested the plan to when it was implemented. I barely had time to adjust which might have been good since I probably would have ruminated and stressed over it all for much too long.

The company arrived at 7:30 a.m. and started cutting at 7:40 a.m.

I watched the process for the entire day – fascinated with how it was taken down chunk by chunk. I wasn’t terribly sad when I watched it come down because the process was mesmerizing. The sadness came later in the day and I did let myself cry some — even though my family seemed to think I was being silly.

There was a team of about six people but the owner of the company did all the cutting. He worked almost consistently all day with only a small lunch break. His arms had to be killing him at the end of the day.

We were told at the end of the day the center of the tree where it branched off was rotting and there were ants living inside. There was also water running through the base. It was a necessary removal for sure.

Now our house is much brighter (almost too bright for me) and we have a totally different view of the town. The leaves haven’t come back on our trees yet so it’s a little sad and brown outside our window at the moment but we are seeing some buds pop out on the branches. I’m trying not to remember how the buds were coming out on our maple too and how it would have been blooming soon, it’s canopy spreading over our house, our street, and our parking space across the road.

The view of the tree cutter from his bucket.

(The view of our small town from the bucket)

I try not to think about the animals or birds who might have made the tree their home.

I try not to remember how I could see that tree from the  main highway as we came back from our parents or how I often took it for granted and didn’t take the time to look up at it’s towering branches.

For me the tree was more than a tree. It was a symbol of normalcy, of comfort, of the expected.

I don’t like unexpected things. I don’t like change. I don’t like remembering that much more than losing a tree is changing in our lives these days.

My parents are getting older, my health is sometimes wonky, my son is about to graduate high school, my daughter needs to make new friends and I feel like I need to find them, and the world is absolutely crazy.

With the tree gone I feel like my normal world is no longer normal in some ways. I feel like a piece of me has been taken away, as odd as that sounds.

The day after the tree was removed I looked out in our backyard at another towering maple and whispered to it, “Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone take you.”

And I won’t. I’m going to be very protective of the trees in our backyard now.

Yes, I know the tree had to be taken down before it came down without our permission, and I am so grateful to great neighbors who were so generous to help us all out, but still . . . I miss our tree, I miss my normal routine of looking out at it while I sipped my tea in the morning, and I miss the feeling of normalcy having it there gave me.

I’ll adjust. I’ll be okay. I’ve (almost) already accepted it.

I won’t, however, feel guilty for taking a little bit longer to mourn it.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Remembering the times I had to drive in the snow and hated it

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 21 Comments

This week we were surprised by snow and unfortunately it wasn’t a pleasant surprise since I was driving in it at the time. I thought it was merely going to be flurries, but oh no…it started sticking. Driving with snow on the road? No. that’s not something I do. Like ever anymore.

But there I was driving to my parents to return their car to them, thinking the entire seven minute drive that it really wasn’t as slippery as it probably was. You ever ask yourself, “Why are people out in this?” when the weather is bad?

I am normally one of those people who ask that, not one who is driving in it but I just kept thinking the snow would stop and the road would clear up.

I made it to my parents with white knuckles. The plan was for my husband to pick me up on his way home from work but Dad decided he’d better drive me home so my husband didn’t get our car, which doesn’t have great tires, stuck on my parents’ dirt road.

Honestly, I think Dad was excited to be needed and get out in that snow. He loves driving in the snow. That’s crazy to me. On the way back to my house he said, “If there isn’t six inches on the road it doesn’t bother me.”

We made it back to my house fine and Dad made it back to his house as well. Another inch or so fell that night and The Boy didn’t have to go to school the next morning.

While I don’t usually drive in snow at all, there was two other times I had to do it — both while working for newspapers.

The first time I was working at the local daily newspaper and when I left work the roads were covered. I was nervous but started inching my way the 15 miles to  home. There was one hill I was very worried about and I did well going up it but was nervous going down. There was a line of cars behind me but only one of them seemed annoyed by me going slow. Everyone else was also going slow since there was maybe three inches of white slush covering the roads. Well, almost everyone. One driver of a pickup truck decided he needed to get by us so he passed a couple of cars.

I might have muttered something like, “You idiot,” as he went by.

Several feet in front of me he fishtailed but was able to gain control again.

“See!” I shouted at my windshield. “There’s a reason we’re all going slow!”

He ended up having to drive slowly all the way to the area called The Valley where we lived.

The other time I was stuck in snow was, again, coming home from a newspaper job. This time I was working in New York State, about 50-minutes from our apartment at the time.

I kept asking to go home but the editor wanted me to finish a couple of things. He finally allowed me and by then the main highway was covered in snow and ice. There are two lanes going east and two going west on this highway and I was going east to get home. I was not going very fast and no one was passing me because it was that snow with a layer of ice on top.

At one point I hit some of that ice and my car started to spin until I was all the way around facing the oncoming cars. Thank God I didn’t go into panic mode, causing my brain to freeze up. Instead, I ripped the car into reverse and backed it into the median and waited for the other cars to pass me before trying again.

A 50-minute drive took probably 90-minutes that day, but I was so glad to be home.

All this being said, I am really looking forward to some temps in the 40s this upcoming week where we live. Even a couple days of sun would be so nice.

Other than my driving adventure, we didn’t do too much else this week. I did take Little Miss to Kid’s Club at a local church on Wednesday and it was nice to get out of the house a little bit.

I’m not sure if I shared this photograph of a bald eagle eating a rabbit that The Husband took a couple of weeks ago on here or not. I’m going with not.

He took this shot with his iPhone. The eagle was close to the edge of the road, and I am so excited that Little Miss was able to get a look at it because she often misses the wildlife we see.

How was your week last week?

Do anything fun or interesting? What teas are you drinking this day if you are a tea drinker? Let me know in the comments.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Small town newspapers and small town vets

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 10 Comments

Tuesday morning, I watched my neighbor drive by my house and less than two minutes later drive back again.

He and his wife run our little county newspaper and Tuesdays are their publication day.

In a few minutes, he came back again with his white newspaper van (which we jokingly call the kidnapper van). I’m not sure if he forgot it was the day to pick up and distribute the newspapers or what, but it was somewhat funny to watch.

Their little newspaper, by the way, is not who my husband works for. Their paper is more like a community announcement paper, with little to no hard-hitting news and not even names on most of the stories. It is a beloved staple in the community because of its simple presentation and has been around for probably 100 years. My neighbor’s dad and mom owned the paper before him.  His dad, Tom “Doc” Shoemaker was also the local vet and a wonderful man, as far as I know. I based a side character in my latest book on him.

In the book I share how the vet checks over Gladwynn and Lucinda’s cat and I drew on an actual experience we had with Doc Shoemaker when I was a child. My dad and I had taken one of our cats to see Doc Shoemaker because we had noticed blood in the snow when he went to the bathroom (I think that was the incident anyhow) and Doc wasn’t exactly rough, but he wasn’t exactly soothing either. He did speak to our cat — Zorro — in a fairly soothing tone but then he abruptly and quickly yanked Zorro’s tail up and inserted an old-fashioned thermometer right where the sun don’t shine.

Another time we took our pet dog to him, and he had to pull needles from a porcupine out of her snout. Poor, pup.

I have book here that Doc’s family self published and I really want to sit down and read it this spring. I think it will be a nice follow up the James Herriot book I am currently reading.

Poor cat. It was necessary though because it helped to determine that he had a UTI and needed antibiotics. Poor Zorro had bladder problems for the rest of his life, but lived until he was around 20-years-old. Longevity must be something which occurs with black cats because The Husband and I also had a black cat and she lived until she was 19.

She was so old that when we took her in at 17 the vet (not Doc Shoemaker because we were living an hour from where he had once practiced and because he was retired) asked if we had named another cat Squeek.

 Squeek was my husband’s cat and I said, ‘no’ that this was the cat he’d brought in some 15 years before after rescuing her on the street. The vet tech was shocked. Even more shocked, I’m sure, when we had to bring her in two years later to have her put to sleep after she had a stroke and could no longer walk.

As I write this I have a cat and a dog staring at me from my bed.

They are not staring at me because they want me to go to bed. They are staring at me because they want me to give them a sample of coconut oil. I don’t know why but they both love coconut oil. The only coconut oil brand they seem to like though is Better Body Foods.

One time I picked up some organic coconut oil from Aldi and they wouldn’t even look at it. They literally walked away. This makes me wonder what the difference between the two coconut oils is.

So yesterday we went grocery shopping in the store for the first time in probably a year. We did this because I had tried to place an order with Instacart to Aldi for pick up but was told I could not have my order at the time I had chosen. Instead, I could have it at some point but they had no idea when. That didn’t work for me since I had other things I wanted to accomplish today and didn’t want to simply wait at home for them to tell me when I could come get my order. I have to drive 30-minutes to get to an Aldi, or any large store, so I needed an actual time.

This was all even more irritating because something similar happened last week when we were supposed to pick up our groceries at 5 on Friday, but two hours before they sent me an email and said my pickup time had been moved to the next day.

That wasn’t convenient for us at all but there was no way to contact anyone and even Instacart didn’t help because when I did a chat with them via text on their app, they said they would move the time and did. It was changed right back, however, by the staff at our local Aldi (I guess) so we had to get it on Saturday.

The reason we do pickup is because I have a couple of weird health issues where some days I feel well and other days I deal with a lightheaded and weak feeling when I do something like shop at a grocery store. No idea what it is, other than being overweight, having hypothyroidism, and getting a bit old. A friend would like me to be checked for POTS, as I do have some symptoms of that, but I have not yet asked a doctor about it. Hopefully in March.

Plus, pick up keeps us from buying extra things we don’t need and it is simply faster. I did find today, though, that there seemed to be more options available in the store than on the Instacart app.

I am not sure what we will do about pickup next week now that we’ve had two weeks of Instacart issues.

The nice thing about yesterday, though, was that The Boy, my 18-year-old son, offered to do the shopping for me. In addition to my weird health issue, I’ve also been dealing with a very sore knee (or muscle by the knee really). Luckily it is so much better but a lot of walking isn’t yet in the cards. In The Boy and Little Miss did the shopping and I helped some by walking around the store some, but not all the way around.

Little Miss has always loved helping to shop and has been very disappointed that we haven’t been able to do it lately.  She even likes riding with me to get the pickup. It’s our mother-daughter time and we listen to audiobooks on the way. The Husband or my dad have been picking up our orders lately because we are currently down to one vehicle. I’m grateful we’ve been able to do the pickup as long as we have and hope that we can continue to do so.

Today we are supposed to get a freezing rain/snow mix, so we don’t have plans to go anywhere. I am sipping a cup of peppermint tea with honey and hope to spend most of the day reading.

Tomorrow we will be visiting my parents for a late Valentine’s Day lunch.

The upcoming week is going to be very, very cold so we probably won’t be going out much but I would really love to get to the local library at least one day. I am hoping that maybe Dad will need to take a trip out here to our tiny town for something and can give us a ride. I would love to be able to walk downtown to the library but…the aforementioned knee issue and right now absolutely freezing cold.

How was your week this past week? Did you do anything exciting? Or did you simply have a nice, relaxing week?

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Staying warm in the winter in the 80s and an unusual cure for my knee pain

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

Good Saturday afternoon! As I write this I am actually sipping grape juice instead of my regular morning tea, but I am going to go grab some tea in a moment. I have not tried any new tea flavors. I know. So boring. How about you? Any new tea flavors?

During our horrible cold snap last week, I was warming my rice pack and carrying it to bed with me each night, shoving it under the covers to warm the bottom of the bed up for my feet.

It reminded me of when I was a child, living in a drafty old 19th century home with a radiator that liked to conk out at the wrong times.

My parents would fill a plastic bottle with hot water, wrap it in a towel, and put it at the bottom of the bed to warm the sheets before I crawled into bed. I was also covered with several blankets, one of them a woolen one that we eventually figured out I was allergic to because I would itch terribly under it. Some nights I would be so cold I would wake up hugging the water bottle and seeing my breath in the air.

Luckily that wasn’t common — only on absolutely freezing nights and when that old radiator in my room really acted up. If it was too cold, we all slept downstairs in our living room, sheets hanging over the doorways to keep the heat in one room.

When I was in my room, I’d also pile all of my stuffed animals around me until I could barely be seen under them.

It was almost as cold as that old house in our old early 20th century home last week, but we are lucky to have both heat from our woodstove and heating oil downstairs. We have electric heat upstairs. Even with all three different types of heat we had a hard time chasing away the near zero temps.

A fellow blogger asked me last week why we have three sources of heat and my only answer is that this is how this house was built. For whatever reason.

The downstairs is heated by the furnace that runs on heating oil, but someone also installed a woodstove over the years. This allows for the thermostat to be turned down and save some of the heating oil throughout the winter. Heat from the woodstove can, and often does, travel up the stairwell and spread into the bedrooms, which means we don’t have to turn the electric heat up too much some nights.

The three sources of heat help us to spread out our costs over the winter months. Sometimes, though, like the week before last’s horrible arctic cold, the costs of all three increase.

We’ve had two firewood deliveries this year. Using a woodstove was something very new for me when we moved into the house five years ago. I’d never lit a woodstove in my life and figuring out how to burn the wood slowly and keep it going throughout the night was a challenge.

At first I wouldn’t even dare to attempt letting the fire burn all night. I was certain it would somehow catch the house on fire, which I now know is ridiculous with how the stove is set up. My dad was worried about the woodstove’s pipe, which he didn’t think was installed right. We found after he hired someone to fix it that he was right and we could have had a fire inside the wall if we hadn’t had it fixed.

I also made The Husband purchase carbon monoxide detectors to make sure we wouldn’t be gassed at night if there was ever a leak of some kind.

I didn’t even know how that all worked but I knew carbon monoxide detectors were important. We had them when we had natural gas at our old house too.

Even though we’ve learned a lot about how to conserve our wood during the coldest months of the  years, we still went through a lot this winter and still might need one more delivery to make it through the rest of the winter. We’ve been known to have snow storms in March here in Pennsylvania so we never exactly know when we will be lighting out last fire.

I find the last time we light the fire both exciting and sad. Exciting because I don’t have to clean the ash out in the mornings or work on lighting it or make sure it doesn’t die during the day and evening. Sad because I do love a cold winter night with a warm fire lit in the stove, a book open on my lap, a cat sprawled in front of the fire, another cat curled up on the ottoman and a sleeping dog on our broken recliner. Somehow the room seems much cozier and maybe even more alive with those flames flickering through the glass of the stove.

Switching gears a bit — Right after New Year’s I developed an issue with my knee and thought I might have to have an x-ray at one point. One night before bed I rubbed magnesium oil on it in addition to ibuprofen. My knee hurt the most when I lay on my side for some reason, so I figured it might be a muscle issue. I still had some pain overnight after using the magnesium oil spray, but in the morning, I used spray again and the rest of that day the knee felt much better. I was surprised by this development and decided to skip the ibuprofen or Tylenol I had been taking for weeks. The knee felt better for the next two days, and I was able to stop using a cane to get around the house.

I have had to use pain killers twice since then, but so far, so good. Apparently, the muscle around my knee simply needed to relax some and the magnesium helped facilitate that. I like to use natural remedies whenever I can but, in this case, I didn’t think a natural remedy would help. A CBD rub on stick was helping some as well, but the magnesium oil was the actual game changer.

Today I hope to go to my parents and help clean a little bit, visit with them, have some supper, and maybe play a game of intense Uno.

Tomorrow, we might visit them again.

The upcoming week is empty of any appointments or events, so far, other than Little Miss’s children’s club at a local church.

How was your week last week? Do anything exciting? How does this week look for you?

Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about what I’ve been reading and watching, etc. with my Sunday Bookends post.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Cold weather, evil, spell-casting cats, and family history

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

This past week our area was plunged into an arctic cold that had me wishing I could wrap myself in a cacoon of blankets and only crawl out to use the potty and get snacks.

I spent much of the beginning of the week acting like anyone who stepped outside our door into the arctic cold would immediately turn into ice and shatter.

“Don’t go out there!” I’d cry. “It’s so cold and you could get hypothermia! Frost bite!”

“Mom,” The Boy would say. “I’m just going to get some wood from the woodpile. Chill.”

Our animals stared forlornly out the windows at the snow that fell right before the temps dropped into single digits. Sometimes the cats would stare sadly at the back door and I would let them out. Sometimes less than ten minutes later they were looking in the window in our kitchen from the outside, their little faces panicked, as if I didn’t just tell them it was deathly cold outside.

Our cats have been curling up in front of the woodstove on most days and nights. They are much more cuddly than in warmer weather, as I have mentioned before. The youngest, Scout has even started curling up with me in the mornings before I am out of bed and it is during one of these cuddle sessions this morning that I was reminded how evil cats are. I am convinced they are sorcerers or sorceresses.

What Scout does is climb on my chest already purring. Then she bumps her nose against my nose and licks my chin. Her eyelids are all heavy and she sniffs the pillow next to me, bumping her head against my cheeks and chin and then finally curling up against my arm, next to my neck and shoulder. She snuggles as close to my face as she cans and begins to purr more in earnest, all while watching me with half-open eyes, drawing me into  her spell.

Sometimes she stretches her legs and paws out across my chest and purrs more, urging me into a deep sleep after I have already said I need to get out of bed and get the fire started.

“No,” she seems to say. “You will lay here. You will fall into a deep, all-consuming slumber. You will be delayed in starting your day. Why? Because I, your cat overlord, demand it. You are losing willpower. You are growing warm, cozy, and, most importantly, sleep. There you go. That’s right. Don’t fight it. Ignore the dog. She can pee later. What you need is me, your warm cat overload, your warm blanket, and the dreams of walking in a peaceful forest that I am now planting in your head. That’s right…you’re getting sleepy….”

Sometimes I wake up and she’s snoozing next to me – like she got some of her magic sleep dust on herself. Other times I wake up and she’s gone, and I wonder if she cast her spell so she can get up to some mischief elsewhere in the house.

This morning I fought her hard and finally managed to crawl out of bed and find some sunlight coming into our living room, which is welcome, but misleading since it is still only 25F (-3C), which is much better than 8F (-13).

It was so cold last week that not even our furnace, woodstove, and electric heat upstairs could seem to drive the cold out of our rooms.

I spent most of the week locked inside, watching Edwardian Farm, All Creatures Great and Small, and old movies.

I also read quite a bit.

On Thursday I was finally able to break free (“ I want to break free…I want to break free….” Sorry. I always end up humming songs with lyrics that matched what I just said. I know. I’m weird.) and go visit my parents while The Husband stayed at home and suffered through the cold the kids had had earlier in the week. I hadn’t seen my Mom since January 8 and had only briefly seen my dad during that time. Either it was too cold or I had sick children and was worried I’d be next and pass whatever virus we had on to them.

Somehow, I either managed to avoid the illness or had such minor symptoms that it did not hit me as hard.

At my parents I looked through a bunch of old photo albums and found some interesting photographs. One of those photographs I will share in a future blog post to tie up my posts about letters written between my great-great grandfather and his brothers during the Civil War.

Other photographs are photos I have seen many times over the years. They are from a photo album that my grandmother said belonged to Ivy, her aunt. I don’t know if Ivy took all of the photographs, but Grandma said she believed that she took some and collected the others. There are photographs of her sisters and my grandmother and her sister when they were babies. My grandmother was born in 1909 and Ivy died in 1915 so Grandma didn’t really remember her, but she remembered stories about her. Ivy passed away at the age of 29 from a kidney condition.

Based on the photographs of her and others in the book, she seemed like a very adventurous and fun person.

My favorite photo of her is this one:

This is her and her sister Carmen.


Second is this one:


I also like this one and wonder what she’s doing in this photo.

And I love this posed shot with these four women, though there was nothing written in the album to tell me who they are. I think one is Ivy and maybe Carmen again.

I just love their poses and the artistic elements of this shot.

The album, by the way, is made with photographs glued to black pages with no plastic to protect them.

I used to sit in the floor of my grandma’s living room, haul that album and other old loose photos out of a box and just pour over them. They fascinated me — the outfits, expressions, locations I could recognize from the tiny village I grew up in – a portal to life long ago.

There used to be a train station in the little village  (which is only a few houses and an old church and cemetery) I grew up in. There is a path by the creek that is overgrown but yet still features a cleared path where the train tracks used to be and that never seems to grow over no matter how many years have passed.  Parts of the stone used to build the railroad bridge is still located there, but most of the railroad tracks themselves are gone.

There is one photo in this book of a group of women and a few men sitting along the tracks and the platform. As I was preparing this post I noticed I had not taken a photo of that photo so I can’t share it here. That’s probably because it was a pretty dark photo – so dark I could barely make out the three men sitting behind the women in all white.

In the photo, though, I can recognize the exact spot it was taken even though it was 116 years ago. Behind the group, to the left would be the field where cows now roam and beyond that field is the house that I grew up in — a house built maybe 150 years ago.

The house is still standing but in not great shape and no longer owned by us.

The photographs that really interest me in this book are the  unique ones. The ones where no one is looking at the camera or if they are they are doing so it is in a playful way.

There is one photo where we can see a man through the bushes and I imagine he is on his way to the shore of the pond that used to be there behind the cemetery.

I have created this story in my mind that Ivy took that photograph of him secretly because she had a crush on him, or maybe they were an item. Further on in the book there is a photo of her with this same man. They are sitting in the buggy of a horse and carriage.

Maybe they weren’t “an item.” Maybe they are related somehow, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the name in the genealogy.  

It’s always made me wonder if they ever had a relationship, but it ended because of her health issues. She never married before she passed away.

I’d better stop rambling about family history or this blog post could go on for a long time.

This is a subject I find myself blathering about to people who probably consider faking a heart attack just to get away from me.

We are expecting cold weather again this upcoming week but we have nowhere to go, other than maybe visiting my parents once or twice.

What have all of you been doing? How is the weather where you are? Do you have anything exciting going on during the upcoming week?

Saturday Afternoon Chat returns: small illness, school update, and very, very cold temperatures

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 9 Comments

I miss my Saturday Afternoon Chat with my bloggy friends.

I tried to combine this post with my Sunday Bookends, but I don’t find I enjoy it as much because I don’t want to ramble in that post since it is mainly about books and what I’m watching and part of a link up.

On Saturdays I can ramble a bit and it feels more like I am chatting with my friends. Not that people who read my Sunday posts aren’t friends….yep. there I go again. Digging a hole. Ha! I have a talent at that.

Well, hopefully my regular readers understand me and how much I just miss chatting with you like old times.

It isn’t that I have a ton to chat about right now — or at least anything exciting.

Little Miss has had a light cough and a fever, but not a lot else, for the last three days. Her illness started on Thursday and messed up plans she had to go visit her friends today, but, hopefully, we can reschedule.

She had us a bit nervous Friday night as her temp jumped to 103 and then 103.4 Saturday morning but she was otherwise acting fine. Her nose wasn’t even running. She was somewhat tired, had no appetite, and that annoying dry cough, but it didn’t hit her as hard as some other illnesses have.

The plan before she became sick was for The Husband and I to hang out alone in the afternoon — at least after the Crafternoon Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I hosted (more on that further down in this post). The Boy was going to go with her too so he could see his friend, who is the brother of Little Miss’s friend.

We’re a little baffled how Little Miss caught anything since we’ve been out of the house only once this past week. Her symptoms developed 12 hours after that one quick outing and we think that was much too quick, but, of course, it is possible. Our other theory is that one of the boys brought it in and passed it on to Little Miss (and probably me in a couple of days) but didn’t get any symptoms. The Boy is especially good at being a bug carrier, not getting sick, and then passing it on. We tease him about it sometimes.  

It’s been too cold to leave the house and do much.

Some days the temps have been 14 to 17 degrees with windchills of -5 to 3.

I am not a fan of the severe cold we often experience in January and February in our state. We often have more cold than snow. I was looking through some videos from last winter yesterday, though, and it looks like we had some warmer days in February because I have videos of Little Miss and her friend playing at the playground in shorts and sweatshirts. 

Circling back to the Crafternoon event — it was so much fun! Erin and I joined four other women and a junk journal group to do crafts and chit chat via Zoom. It is such an amazing thing to me that we can all see each other almost in person, via our phones and laptops, and connect in a different way than blogging, maybe even a deeper way. Being able to actually see faces and chat back and forth is a wonderful way to get to know people, hear different perspectives and make friends from all over the world.

We had a citizen of the UK, someone from Germany, and a handful of Americans all on the same call sharing about their lives and showing their crafts and simply having fun on a chilly winter afternoon.

We are going to host another one of these in two weeks so if you are interested please email me at lisahoweler@gmail.com or Erin at crackercrumblife@gmail.com and we will add you to the email list and send you the Zoom link.

Since I’m not sure if I can pass anything on to my parents, we are probably staying home Sunday (tomorrow) instead of visiting them like we usually do on Sundays.

That will give us another day to recover and relax.

Next week Little Miss and I will be back into the swing of school which has been including studying early American History, including the Revolutionary War. We just finished a historical fiction book called Johnny Tremain that focused on the early days of our country, right before the Revolutionary War started. Next up we are reading The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare.

In Science we are studying Marine Biology and I think I might be having more fun with that than Little Miss some days. She knows a lot about life in the ocean so she sometimes fills me in on whatever the curriculum didn’t.

One thing I learned that totally shocked me — sand dollars are alive.

Yes, I might be a bit of a moron. I made it this far in life without knowing that. I think I was probably taught this at some point but just forgot because, seriously, how can we remember everything we learn in school or life? It’s just not possible.

This information sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching sand dollars move on the ocean floor.

Here is one of the videos I watched with Little Miss.

In math we are studying division. Little Miss hates math but once she catches on, she does very well.

In English we are reading books and studying a variety of subjects — singular and plural nouns, how to write addresses, and how to write book reviews, which I thought was interesting.

The Boy is still attending a technical school in the mornings. He learns about a variety of subjects, including masonery, which is their current area of study.

A couple of weeks before Christmas he dropped a large concrete block on his finger and I received a call from the school. The shock of the pain caused him to faint and his finger was also very sore for a few weeks. The nail did get dark but it did not fall off like the school nurse thought it might.

For English, he and I are making our way through some British literature and poets. We finished The Hound of the Baskerville’s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and are now planning to start Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Before the end of the year, I hope to study some poets, Shakespeare, and finish off the year with an Agatha Christie book.

My son is a senior this year and I’m struggling with accepting that I will not have to plan for his school year next year. Usually, I am choosing curriculum for the kids in early summer but this year I will only be choosing curriculum for Little Miss and that is a bit . . . I’m not sure what word I want to use here. Disconcerting? Depressing? Heartbreaking?

I’m excited for The Boy who will be moving on to his next chapter in life, but I’m also worried about him. Life is so crazy for a young person when they are first starting out and — well, that’s another topic for another day, I suppose. I could fall down a rabbit hole of worry with that topic.

It’s no surprise that the Bible verses that speak the most to me these days are focused on worrying about the future.

One of the things I am worrying about is a sore knee that is clearly a pull of some sort but one I hope will heal and not require a doctor’s visit or surgery of some sort. I’ve ordered a knee brace and am occasionally using a cane to keep weight off of it while I work on healing it. I am a horrible patient because I do not do well just sitting and propping my leg up to wait for it to heal.

I’m not a very athletic person but I do get up to do dishes, cook, let the dog and cat in and various other things. Sitting in one spot and asking others to do it for me is not easy for me to do.

So that’s a little of what has been going on with us.

How are all of you doing?

About the two canes….and how they made my personalities change

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Saturday Afternoon Chat: A nice birthday weekend, more cozies to read, and complex feelings after some news

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

This was a week of highs and lows. Thursday was my birthday and it was a nice and very relaxing day. We received some news early in the day, however, and even struggled with what kind of news it was since it was the passing of a family member we haven’t had contact with in years. It’s hard to know how to handle the death of someone who wasn’t very pleasant to know, was abusive to your husband, and then stopped communicating (which actually came as a blessing).

The weather was beautiful that day, though. I didn’t go anywhere. I read a book and wrote a little bit on the third Gladwynn book, and watched an old movie.

Yesterday we went out as a family for my birthday and it was another relaxing day with beautiful weather.

We went to lunch at a nice restaurant, visited a garden center, a library with a used bookstore, and then a playground and creek.

The garden center is decorated for fall with pumpkins and gourds lined up all over and flowers blooming in their garden.

Little Miss wanted a white pumpkin so she can paint it later so we picked up one of those for her and a natural soda for me.

We stumbled on to a shoe sale that we thought was next week, which was very exciting for us because it was an amazing sale and let us stock up on shoes for us and the kids. It derailed our trip to a Barnes and Noble, which is about two hours from our house (any Barnes and Noble stores are two hours from our house – in one direction or the other.)

 I haven’t visited a Barnes and Noble for probably 15 years and my husband was going to take me to one as a surprise. I decided it would be better to save gas money (it was another 45-minute drive) and buy the shoes instead. I didn’t know where The Husband was actually taking me but I had guessed maybe he’d found a Barnes and Noble near us so I told him I was okay if we didn’t visit it this time around.

The thing is, I wouldn’t have bought a lot of books anyhow because I rarely buy new books. I prefer to buy them used or on clearance. I’d rather get a few books for $10 than one for $15. It would have been nice to walk around the store, but now that I know there is one not super far away, we can find another time to go. Plus, we needed the shoes and there is a used bookstore in the library of the town we were already in so we went there and we brought home 15 books for less than $20.

Most of my books were cozy mysteries and Little Miss chose quite a few of them. I’ll share more about the books I picked out on my Sunday Bookends tomorrow since that’s where I usually talk books I’ve been reading or have added to my collection.

After we visited the bookstore and library, Little Miss wanted to try out her new water shoes at the creek so we spent about 45 minutes at a small park that also has access to a creek.

Earlier in the week Little Miss and I picked up her new glasses and the next day I took her to Kid’s Club, which is a program at a church near us, where she met her friend that she’d invited.

Little Miss loves her new glasses with multiple colors on the earpieces and pink along the rest of the frame.

We both enjoyed looking at the trees that had changed in the town where the optometrist is and I had to laugh because one of the trees is changing into a beautiful orange color that is matching the color of the car parked at the house it is next to.

Wednesday night Little Miss and her friend had fun at the church program while my friend (Little Miss’s friend’s mom) and I chatted together in the parking lot.

This weekend we are continuing to relax since The Husband doesn’t have to work for the first time in – I don’t know how long actually.

We plan to hang out and watch movies and one of us should probably wash some dishes since we played hooky from housework the last couple of days.

These days off came at a good time since the death in our family was my estranged mother-in-law. My husband wrote a bit about his relationship with her on his personal Facebook page but I have decided not to share that here.

The bottom line is that my mother-in-law was abusive mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically. She picked favorites out of her two children and you can take my word for it that my husband was not that child. She has not spoken to us in more than five years and lives several states away. In other words, this “loss” doesn’t feel much different than when she was alive.

It’s a complicated situation when a person loses a family member who wasn’t very kind. There is grief there but it’s different than the grief other people have. It’s partially a grief of what could/should have been and also grief of there being no closure or apologies for past hurts. In this situation that apology would most likely never have come thanks to mental illness on the part of my mother-in-law.

I wasn’t even sure how to feel and spent part of my birthday a bit numb and dazed. Should I grieve the woman who tried to manipulate me the way she did everyone else? Two days later, I still don’t how to answer that. I feel sadness for a woman who chose to have no relationship with her son or beautiful grandchildren – even when we lived less than a mile from her for many years before she moved, but I can’t honestly say I feel a sense of loss or grief. I feel guilty for that and I also feel odd admitting that, but it’s where I am right now.

I should be crying, shouldn’t I? I should be thinking back on fond memories or saying things like, “Sure she wasn’t nice at times but…”

Yet I have none of that to offer in this situation and it’s a surreal place for me to be.

It’s only happened one other time and in that case I could at least think of one or two really nice and genuine things the person did – while also wondering if any of it was real since so much lying was revealed at the end of that person’s life.

So moving on to my plans for the rest of the weekend as I navigate this weird headspace I am in.

I’m looking forward to working more on my book this weekend and on some reading.

Next week we don’t have any appointments scheduled so it will be mainly school and maybe a playdate at a local creek with a couple of friends.

The temperature is supposed to drop next week and I am looking forward to the fall-like weather. Yesterday’s 83-degree temps were not very welcome by me, even though it was a very beautiful day.

How was your week last week? I hope you found some time to relax and unwind. Let me know in the comments.