Author: Lisa -Southern Patches

Hello everyone, my name is Lisa I am a southern girl born and raised in East Tennessee. I love discovering new places and things to do. I have a lot of favorites, shopping, traveling, knitting and photography are all at the top of my list. I am married with my fur babies my only children. This blog is actually named after my beloved basset hound Patches. She passed away a few years ago but will always have a huge part of my heart. Come with me and we will explore some wonderful places and discover some really fun things. Are you ready?

Goodbye July, Hello Monday

Goodbye to July and hello August. I can’t say I am sorry to see July go. I love fall so that means that the end of July is bringing my favorite season closer.

July was a hard month for us. We lost our precious old Molly girl. If you didn’t catch that post you can read it here: Goodbye Molly Rose. She was fifteen years old, approximately, and she passed over the Rainbow Bridge on July 7th. I was just getting over Covid and still feeling weak and loopy from it. My brother underwent open heart surgery, but he is doing very well and that is such a blessing. My little mother in law suffered a heart attack and is still recovering from that so whew!!!! Yes it has been a rough month.

And now. July was an awesome month!!! Lots of great things happened!!! My brother is doing great and recovering wonderfully from his surgery. My little ma in law is recovering nicely and still feisty and waiting to go back to her room at the Assisted Living Center. Mark did not get Covid when I had it. I am feeling much stronger. And sweet Molly is running and playing and happy across the Rainbow Bridge. We were able to visit with some sweet family members from Texas. And while it has been hotter than Satan’s breath we have had some nice rain showers and everything is a brilliant green. I guess it’s all how you look at it.

I had a lot of fun this past weekend. I went out on Saturday morning to buy groceries and decided to make a slight detour to the farm market near my house. I knew their vegetables would be crazy good right now and yes they were and very plentiful.

This is the long road leading to the Farm Market. Last year it was totally gravel and soooo dusty. It looks like they have put some concrete or something on it.
Acres of vegetables are grown.
I have been craving okra I was so happy to see this.
I love my mountains.

After I left the Farm Market I drove on over to nearby Tellico Plains, the downtown area. I went to the Museum Marketplace.
This is a thrift store and antique store with locally handmade items and just a little bit of everything. I only bought one thing this little powder box. I am not sure if it is pewter. It is heavy and old and I will probably keep my earrings in it. It just caught my eye and I had to keep circling it which usually means I need to go ahead and buy it. So I did.

I am not really sure how to clean this if you have any ideas please let me know. It is heavy.

This little group of music makers travel all around downtown Tellico playing in lots of different shops. Today they were set up
at the entrance to the Marketplace and I just had to stop and chill and listen for awhile. They have been playing together for ages
and they are just amazing.

I bought potatoes, cucumbers, okra and a huge cantaloupe. The prices are so much better than Walmart or anywhere else in town and so delicious and fresh.

I bought a spiral ham at Walmart and was planning to cook the ham and veggies on Sunday and maybe do spaghetti on Saturday night. Mark suggested I cook the ham after I got home on Saturday and we made sandwiches and then just reheated the ham on Sunday. That way we only had to do the veggies on Sunday. So that is what we did and it worked out great!!!

I cook okra the way my mama always did. I don’t know how you do yours but this is how we ate okra when I was growing up and I just love it this way. I wash and cut up my okra. I could’t help but laugh as I was cutting the okra. It is a little slimy and sticky inside the stalks. My brother Joe and I used to get the ends and stick them to our heads and pretend they were horns. HA!!! My mama never found that as amusing as we did. Anyway back to the okra. After I cut it I roll it in a little flour or cornmeal, whichever I have on hand, I used flour this time. Salt it. And then I put oil in a medium sized skillet over medium heat and cook it until it is nice and soft. Then I drain it and put it in the oven and finish it by baking it. It makes it nice and crispy. I cannot stand soggy okra. It is so yummy this way. How do you cook okra?

It rained most of Sunday and I worked on the temperature blanket. I was a little behind but here it is through June. If you don’t know, I started crocheting the temperature blanket in January. You crochet a different color, which corresponds with the temperature, for each day. I used blues for the colder months and I have been using red and orange for the warmer months. The last couple of months have been totally orange and red. I think orange goes to 88 degrees F and anything above that I am using the red color. If you want to check out all the colors and the temperature chart just check out this blog post from a few months ago:
I am making a crocheted temperature blanket.

It really is growing and this is only through the end of June!!!

How was your weekend?

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!

A Crazy Week And A Trip to Nashville

Happy Tuesday friends. Today was Nashville day when Mark and I go to Vanderbilt Medical Center for his four month check up. This is to keep an eye on his transplanted kidney. Everything was great!!! We made the trip in the usual eight or nine hours. We leave out early in the morning around 5:00 AM and travel approximately four hours to Nashville, see the doctor, get blood work and drive back home. But more on that trip in a minute.

It seems like almost every week I say “wow!!! what a crazy week this has been” well here we go again.

Last Monday night my little mother in law had a heart attack. She pretty much scared the crap out of all of us. When you are 88 years old everything that happens can be a life changing experience. As I have mentioned before my maw in law lives in an assisted living village. A nurse from the village called my husband on his way home from work and said she had had an episode and wasn’t acting like herself. Her vitals were off and they had called an ambulance by the time Mark got there. She spent most of the night in the ER and then was put in a room in ICU. She was very confused. By Thursday she had been moved to a regular room. She is almost 89 years old so surgery was not really an option. The doctors decided to treat her with medication. We were afraid for awhile that she might not be able to go back and live at the Assisted Living Village. The residents there have to be able to do most things for themselves. But after a few days it seems as though minimal damage was caused by the heart attack and on Friday she was moved to a nursing facility where she will have therapy and then hopefully, if all goes well, she will return to the village. She is much more coherent than she was last week and can’t wait to get back to her room at the village. She told me to tell the village to hold her room she is coming back!!!

We celebrated her 88th birthday in November so she is almost 89 years old.

When you work in tourism you know that July is just the busiest month of the year. You look forward to the great numbers but also dread the long, never ending days. It is mind numbing. We have been so busy at work and still very short staffed. We are counting the days until fall, or at least the end of July. I usually do something special for our team members during the last week of July. We call it our Goodbye July celebration. We have something special every day during the week. Last year we had pizza day, ice cream sundaes, and lots of other things. I have been so busy with everything else this week and then taking today off to go to Nashville. I have some catching up to do.

The weekend was good and my sister and I met up with some of our cousins from Texas. They were in Tennessee for a memorial for my cousin’s husband. We all went out to eat afterwards along with some of our Tennessee cousins and we had a great time. Later that night we took a friend out to eat for her birthday.

On Sunday Mark and I visited his mom and decided to eat out, which we rarely do anymore, it seems like we get take out and eat it at home but we don’t make it out to eat a lot.

So a good but busy week and weekend.

Even with all the extra weekend eating I am down 20 pounds. WHOOOO HOOOO!!!!! I will have more on that adventure on Thursday’s blog. I am calling it an adventure because I just hate saying journey. It is not a weight loss journey I am going to make it an adventure!!!!

So back to today when we ventured to Nashville for Mark’s appointment. I had to get up at 3:30 AM to get everything going and all the babies fed and taken care of. We left around 5:15 and surprisingly traffic was not bad. I always drive over and Mark drives back. I am listening to an audio book by Jennifer Weiner and it is so good. I listened to it almost all the way over. We stop on the way back and have breakfast. But today we had another little adventure. Have you ever been to a Buc-ee’s? I think they are mostly in the southern states. Buc-ee’s is sort of like a gas station, truck stop, convenience store etc etc on steroids. It is huge!!!! So a Buc-ee’s just opened in Crossville Tennessee which is about halfway to Nashville for us. We decided to stop on the way back and check it out. Just being newly opened it was packed. If you are a traveler and see one of these stores you should definitely check it out it has everything you could want for a stop. There are several different foods to choose from, books, shirts drinks and amazingly clean bathrooms. Also there are probably fifty gas pumps. We had a good time checking it out.

I had to pass quickly by the fudge counter because I wanted all of it.
The barbecue smelled amazing!!!
It was very crowded
Even snacks for your doggos.

We didn’t buy anything at Buc-ee’s but we did go next door to the Dairy Queen and get our usual chocolate dipped, vanilla ice cream cone because sometimes you just have to splurge.

How are things going in your neck of the woods?

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!