Sunday Thoughts

Hello friends happy Sunday, it has been a very full week. We are still on kitten patrol over here. Feeding and caring for the kitten babies takes a lot of time. I always do the morning feedings and most of the evenings too if Mark is working. It is so much fun to go out in the mornings and see all the little kittens running and jumping they remind me of little popcorn kernels popping around everywhere. I was talking to my nephew on the phone a couple of days ago and he said so ” I hear you have become the crazy cat lady”. I said ” well I don’t know about that. Just because I now have six cats and am sitting here knitting a sock, Oh wait!!!! maybe I am!!!”

I get up early anyway and this helps out a lot because Molly, my big old girl, is still having the liver issues and she has to have a pill one to two hours before she can eat. So I get up, give Molly her pill, let Scruffy out to pee, feed Scruffy and Kitty Kitty and then feed the outside babies and mama kitty. Yep that’s eight. I usually do all of this even before I have my coffee. I just can’t bear to think of them hungry. I then get my coffee, breakfast, and get ready for work. By that time an hour or so has passed and I can feed Molly.

***Orange kitty has won my heart he is such a playful goof ball. And what an eater. He is twice as big as the others.***

***This little guy seems to be the runt of the litter. He is very small but still very playful.***

Molly is getting around a lot better. On Wednesday I was starting out the front door with my purse and keys. Molly comes to the door like she needed to go back out. I let her out to pee. She made the rounds of the front yard and just as I thought she was heading back in she veered to the side of the house and trotted off into the woods. This wouldn’t normally bother me except I was close to being late for work as it was. I ran back in the house and got the leash. I didn’t dare leave her out because she can’t handle the heat of the day. Back outside and no Molly!! I yelled for her, of course she’s almost completely deaf so that was a waste, and nothing. I went to the back of the house and no Molly!!! for an old lady who can barely walk because of stiff arthritic legs she had gotten away pretty quick. The temps were already high and the humidity felt like walking through water. My hair was frizzled beyond belief and I had sweat running everywhere. My makeup was history. I knew she would be back as soon as she had made her rounds through the woods and sure enough about fifteen minutes later she came wandering back. By this time I had already messaged my co workers and let them know I was running late.

***Look at Molly feeling quite proud of herself after she made her mommy late for work. She know she’s still in charge.***

Work was a full week of being busy. Our visitation has slowed but we are still fairly busy. This upcoming weekend will be Labor Day weekend and after that we will see shorter work hours and much fewer people. I am always ready for this breather.

I have been knitting on the blue stripped socks. I did almost an entire sock yesterday and today. I am almost out of yarn and trying to finish this sock without having to start another ball. I do have an extra ball but I hate to start one in the middle of a sock because it seems like you can never get the stitches quite tight enough. I remember telling another knitting friend that I finished an entire sock once in one day. She said yes you can do that but you will get nothing else done. This is so true. I get consumed with the stitches and nothing else gets done. It’s o.k. it’s sort of mindless therapy.

***Will I make it without having to start another ball of yarn? I don’t think so. I still have several inches to go.***

I also started another granny square afghan. I saw a picture of one I really liked on Instagram and I had almost all the same colors of yarn. I am using the same color sequence. Lord knows I do not want or need another afghan I may give this one to one of my nephews. But I just love making them. I realized I have become that aunt that knits and crochets things and gives them to her family whether they want them or not. HA!!!

***I am loving this afghan. I throw all of it into a big green canvas bag so I can easily carry it with me when I go from room to room.***

When I was growing up my grandmother made afghans for us all the time. Through the years they seemed to disappear one by one until we had very few of them left. My parents house had an old basement and part of it was a root cellar where my mama kept things she had canned. When my parents died and my sisters and I were cleaning everything out of the house we went down into the basement and found one of the afghans stuffed into the corner of the dirt cellar. Vines had grown through the afghan and it was covered in dirt and mud. My sisters refused to try and salvage it but I cut the vines away and it was actually in pretty good shape. All the stitches were still in tact. I took it home and cut the vines out piece by piece and washed it several times. It looked just like it had when she gave it to us. I still have it and treasure it because it was made by her.

***This is the afghan my grandmother made. I think it looks pretty good to have been rescued from a root cellar.***

I am glad to have the diversion of my fur babies. It keeps my mind off of the bastardly Covid virus. Not completely, because it has been hitting closer to home lately with lots of people I know and love getting sick and even having to be hospitalized.

I hope your weekend is going well and you will take a minute to say a prayer for the people in the path of hurricane Ida, The people who lost their lives in the airport attack in Kabul, The fires in the western states and all the people suffering from Covid. These things have been weighing heavy on my mind and heart this week.

Always remember,

Love your day your way!!!!

Easy Weekend

Happy Sunday, how was your weekend? I didn’t really have a lot to do except the usual grocery shopping and laundry. I had planned to take my mother in law out for a ride but she called a couple of days ago and said they were on lock down at the assisted living facility. This is to last for two weeks, apparently someone in one of the nearby buildings has COVID and they are restricting visitation for awhile. Mark had to work so I felt so strange with nothing really planned. It was wonderful!!!

For several weeks I have been wanting to just get out and drive and see the countryside and take pictures. You know how much I love taking pictures of church steeples and I also love the little country church signs that pop up near every stop sign. So that is what I did I took pictures of these signs I think they are just precious. I will be doing a post on them soon probably on Wordless Wednesday. They do speak for themselves.

***The beautiful countryside near my house takes my breath awa***y.

I was also on the hunt for blackberries. We have a huge patch of bushes down on our road. I watched day by day as the red berries started turning. Of course it’s not really our road it is a county road so I guess the blackberries were public property. But I watched them every day waiting for them to ripen. My plan was that I would go down with a container and get just enough for a blackberry cobbler. Mark loves blackberry cobbler, I do not. But I do try to make one for him every year.

But a strange thing happened, no sooner than I would see the big plump blackberries ready for picking than they would disappear. What??? I had an idea of who was getting to them first. I assumed it was a woman who lived a little closer to the blackberries than I did. She is at home every day so I was sure she had plenty of time to get them. I thought about calling her and asking for just a few for a cobbler. But it was not her. As I was driving home one day I saw a teenage girl out walking her dog. I had noticed her before. She has beautiful long read hair and she is always taking such good care to watch her dog on our crazy roads. As I got near the blackberry bushes I saw her with a plastic container in one hand and the dog leash in the other. I knew she had those berries in the container but you know what? It made me feel really good that this young girl was picking blackberries to make a pie or perhaps to give to her mom to make a pie. You don’t see that every day.

So there I was in search of blackberries as well as taking pictures. I decided to visit the Mennonite market near my house. No blackberries there but they did have some amazing looking okra which I had also been wanting. I bought the okra and continued on my way.

I got a lot of pictures and bought groceries and went home to take care of the babies. We have added another baby to the family I will have more on that in a future post.

***A beautiful steeple on this very old church in nearby Tellico Plains.***

On Sunday I watched a couple of movies on Netflix and started knitting another sock. I did laundry and went to feed and check on my nephew’s cat while he is gone for a few days. I ordered a pizza on the way home and went home to finish laundry. A relaxing and fun weekend.

***I am loving this blue and white striped yarn.***

So how was your weekend? I hope you did something fun and relaxing!!!

Always remember,

Lover your day your way!!!

The Dog Days of Summer

Hello friends and happy Friday? Wow, end of the week and end of July. I got up at 5:00 AM to do some work I brought home with me last night and to try and put together this post.

I missed my Wordless Wednesday post because I have just been too busy to put pictures or anything together. Do you ever feel that way? I hate to think I am just passing from work to home to work again but that is the way it is for me in July. July is almost over and I will be relieved because our work load slows somewhat. Although, I am curious to see if that will happen this year. It’s a strange year again and hard to know what will happen with travel, the economy, and so on and so on.

A lot of things have been going on the last couple of weeks other than work. We had the Anniversary party for my sister and her husband, I had a dermatology appointment. I had a suspicious mole on my back. My regular doctor wanted me to have it checked out so I did. It was nothing. Just a spot that can be caused by heredity, age, it seems like I am hearing that one more and more HA!!, and a couple of other things that are nothing really.

We had a four month check up for Mark at Vanderbilt on Tuesday he got a great report. The trip to Nashville and back in one day is exhausting. We had to deal with fog in the early morning and traffic and interstate road work on the way back. About nine hours on the road, roundtrip, with all the delays and traffic.

I think I mentioned a couple of posts back that our Molly girl is really starting to show her age. A week or so ago she would not eat, she would not go on our walks with us, she seemed to be out of it. We took her to the vet and the vet suspects a tumor on her liver because her liver enzymes were crazy weird. This is causing her some issues with not wanting to eat. She has lost about ten pounds in two or three months. We were sent home with a bag of meds. The vet also mentioned that we could do ex-rays to determine if there was a tumor and then refer us to a doctor who could do surgery. Our girl is 13 plus years old, that is what we know for sure, because she came to us as a stray we are really not sure of her exact age. I don’t think that we will bother with ex-rays because if she did have a tumor putting her to sleep to do the surgery would be very risky.

We started her on the meds a little over a week ago and she is doing much better. Her appetite has increased although we still have to do a lot of coaxing, babying and pleading to get her to eat. She can only eat soft foods because of her lack of teeth. The vet told us to feed her high protein food, mainly cooked by me, because she is anemic. I didn’t want to tell her that I barely cook for us so this would definitely be a change. I told Mark the babies’ food has started to cost more than ours. Not to mention the prep time. Oh what we do for our babies. We also have a schedule for the meds and for her feedings so this has to be done at regular times to keep her tummy happy.

She has definitely shown improvement she is walking more and seems to be stronger. She has arthritis in her back legs so she has an awkward gait and a hard time squatting.

***Molly has been going on the walks with us. She does walk a little slower but she’s determined.***

***I finally finished the afghan for my friends’ birthday. She loves red so I picked this yarn with a few different shades of red.***

*It has been really hot here with lots of rain. The sun and rain make lots of* *beautifu****l flowers.*** *Look at these beautiful Crepe Myrtle. I love this color.*

***I am in love with sunflowers. Look at this field I pass on my way to work and back every day.*** ***They’re starting to dry up but I have*** ***enjoyed them for about two weeks.*** The picture on top is a pot of sunflowers I bought in town at a vegetable stand. I am going to plant them so I will have my own sunflowers next year..

***Turkey crossing. I never know what I will find on my road.***

Thank you for being with me even during these dry periods of my blogging. I will hopefully be back to a more consistent blogging schedule next week.

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!!!

And So It Goes

What a week, well actually the last two weeks have been a little crazy. My sister and her husband celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary last week and as our family always does, we had to have a celebration. After a lot of thought we decided that we would have this celebration at my house. Our family has not had a chance to get together as a group in about a year and a half. We were so excited. I had to plan for about twenty people.

Of course you know me and how my crazy perfectionistic tendencies take over. My husband wasn’t too happy when I informed him, with just two weeks notice, that we were going to have to paint the entire inside of the house, put down new hardwood floors, hang new kitchen cabinets, get new kitchen appliances, resow the bad spots in the grass and re-brick the entire house. He just looked at me like he always does when he thinks I’ve totally lost my mind. So we did do a lot of work both inside and outside of the house, but ahhhmmmm none of the afore mentioned things. That’s just dreaming I guess for a two week time period. I have always said you should have company every week. That way you would be sure to keep your house clean all the time. What always seems like such an undertaking always gets done and it is fine. Whenever I have a million things to do and I don’t think I will ever get done, I think of this quote by Nelson Mandela: It always seems impossible until it is done. I love this quote and whenever I think something is undoableI I always think of it.

After all the cooking and cleaning it all came together and it was such a fun time. We talked and laughed and ate and just had a great time enjoying each others company. I decided to make a wedding cake for the celebration. I wasn’t sure if I would remember how. I use a floating cake stand so that you don’t have to use dowel rods. This makes the cake look really impressive and it’s not quite as much trouble. It was three layers and I got up at 4:00 AM on Sunday morning to put the icing on the cake. My sister loves the basket weave design so that is what I did. This design takes a minute or two to do but the results are so worth it. I ordered a cake topper from our Glass Blower at work and he did an excellent job with it. I will have a full post on the wedding cake in a few days. They are really a lot of fun to put together and so satisfying when they are done.

I did get two chairs painted. My friend Lorie gave me these chairs for a birthday gift about two years ago. We were going to have a girls’ night painting and wine party but one thing led to another and we didn’t get to have our night. I wanted to have the chairs to use at the Anniversary celebration. I had been keeping them in the basement and I carried them to the garage the week before the party and painted them. I love the way they turned out. They go perfect with my deck.

***There were two chairs just like this.***

***This is what they looked like after a couple of coats of black paint and two new cushions.***

***The cake topper. Isn’t it beautiful?***

The Lovebirds. Wow fifty years. They were made for each other.

I just have to tell you this. I really pulled a boo boo on Sunday just before all of my family started to arrive. I ordered a couple of trays from the Walmart deli to supplement the food. We have a large family and we like to eat. I ran down to the Walmart on Sunday around noon to pick up the trays. I went in and got the trays and some other items I needed and took my cart, I am only saying cart for the readers who may not know what a buggy is, outside and unloaded everything into the trunk of the car. I got in and no sooner than I pulled out of the lot I realized I had forgotten ice. I decided to stop at a little market on my road home to pick it up. It was like within five minutes of Walmart. When I stopped to get the ice I reached over to get my wallet out of my purse and NO PURSE!!! I was thinking well I must have put it in the trunk with the other groceries. I ran around and opened the trunk and NO PURSE!!! Full blown panic hit me when I realized I had left my purse in the cart in the Walmart parking lot. I jumped in the car and tore off back to the Walmart. I careened into the parking lot on two wheels and got to the cart carousel thingy and there was my purse sitting in the cart just where I had left it. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I would at least have to go inside to customer service on the chance that someone may have turned it in. The good Lord was watching out for me that day. I quickly went through my purse and everything was there. I was weak with relief. I know how bad this outcome could have been.

What have you been up to?

Always remember,

Love your day your way!!!