| |
|
INFLATED's Recent Blog Entries
|
 
Friday, January 07, 2011
I got raves about dinner last night. The recipe is Amazing Pork Tenderloin in the Slow Cooker at allrecipes.com
Our son now works until 9 PM at night. When he came home from work, he told my husband that he and another guy are going to go get wood this Saturday, load/unload it and cut it up since my husband is having trouble with his back and hip hurting. We are to get snow and I hope they will be able to get to the place where the wood is. I have never been there and I don't know what the terrain is like.
I told my husband about the love note and he kept pestering me about where it was. I told him it was in the kitchen. He looked in the potato chip bag and in the refrigerator for it.....hmmm, lol! He asked if it was on the freezer ( he keeps his Bible on top of the upright freezer) and I told him, "Yes." He asked if it was in with the bills.....hmmm, "No." He eventually figured out it was in his Bible and read it and said he didn't remember me giving it to him. I don't even remember writing it, but it was hand-written on a piece of notebook paper. I don't remember giving it to him either.
Our wedding anniversary is coming up this month, 33 years together. When I worked at KMart, they sold T shirts with logos on them like the logos on restrooms of a man and a woman. The woman had a veil on her head and the shirt was printed with, "Sentenced to Life" and another had the same logos and it said, "Game Over." I thought they would be a good gag gift, but I didn't buy either one.
We laugh at The Lockhorns cartoon in the newspaper. There is a 50% chance that my cooking will turn out so Loretta reminds me of me and Leroy has a few characteristics that my husband has. Our marriage has been good and unless he trades me in for a newer model, I think he will keep me around for another decade or so.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
I was cold when I woke up this morning. The dog was up on the bed and she was shivering. I put on my flip-flops and went to the basement and built a fire in the wood stove; there were hot coals left from my husband making a fire before he left for work.
Last night after church, another man in our church told my husband that the company he works for was wanting to get rid of some pallets, but that my husband would have to pick them up when a supervisor was at the business. My husband has off for Martin Luther King's birthday and the business will be open that day. So in the Providence of God, we were given some more firewood.
Today I was going through a box of recipes I had gathered out of newspapers and magazines and found this written on a piece of paper:
Rodger,
I love you of course you know,
Although I seldom tell you so.
It is for you each day I pray,
And in secret these words I say,
"God bless my husband and ever be
Close to his side , while he lives for Thee."
I hope today is a better day for you. I love you.
I put this piece of paper in his Bible and will wait to see how long it is before he finds it.
This afternoon I heard a knock at the door and usually it is young people trying to go on a trip. They want to sell magazines, but they have no information from the magazine publishers. I tend to think it is a scam and never agree to it. I didn't answer the door. Princess went to the door and whined.
Later I looked out on the porch and there was a plastic bag with a note on it from the dog trainer. It was a mousetrap, but you hook a large piece of pliable plastic to the bait area. You set up your dog to get into the trash and this piece of plastic moves like a fan when the trap goes off. She had purchased it for us as a gift and stuck it in the mailbox. She told me I may have to set up things for Princess so she can learn not to get in the trash, but the situation will be controlled by me. The price on it was $5.50 and she had marked out the price. I thought that was nice of her because she usually has at least two training sessions a day of at least two hours each and she doesn't live close by. She had gone out of her way to give this to us.
Supper is in the crockpot and I hope to stay nestled in my house during the coming snow, the forecast is for several days of snowy weather and temperatures around freezing or colder. Lately, I view my day sort of like a pioneer woman might have: Keep the fire going, tend to the livestock (for me -just a dog and a cat), make sure the family is fed and be thankful to God for bringing us through another day safely.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
It is late and I need to get this typed and get ready for church tonight. We don't celebrate the holidays, so they came and went. I believe my Saviour was born of a virgin, died for my sins and rose again from the dead in case you are wondering. There are no commands to do an annual celebration of His birth and the day is not given in the Bible. It is your constitutional right to worship as you please or not at all.
Monday, a few weeks ago, our son left for work and came home to say he was caught with an expired registration sticker and needed to borrow money. His car had been impounded and the officer had taken his driver's license. I asked why and got no answer. He took my van to get to work, driving without a license. He had such long waits at the DMV, he had to leave there to get to work on time.
The next day, hubby told him to be at the DMV when it opened, but he was late getting there. He came home and told me he had taken the day off without pay. He asked to borrow more money. Total -over 1,300 dollars. He said his former girlfriend had not paid his car insurance for a couple of months, he had an unpaid speeding ticket-the truth came out why his car was impounded. We had to scramble to get it out of impound before New' Year's Eve. He said the local police department said the officer was off duty the second day he was at the DMV and the police department had to fax something to the DMV stating the officer had taken the license after they spoke directly to him. My son had to pay for an ID because the DMV would not accept the one he had from his work-a badge. All in all, it wiped his finances out and put the hurts on ours.
I told his sister about the event and she wants us to pay her health insurance almost another $400. Hubby agreed to that as a birthday gift to her and it has stressed me big time. We have enough for one house payment saved up and hubby is complaining about his hip and back hurting.
My Mom is in a nursing home and her stuff is stolen out of her room. I listed it from receipts and the ones I listed totaled a few dollars shy of $150. Small things like lipsticks, hair brushes, ink pens, perfumes and toiletries, I didn't list. Every piece of jewelry and every stuffed animal has disappeared along with artifical floral arrangements that set on her windowsill.
Me, I am doing okay with the weight, no gain, but I haven't been exercising. I have heavy chores to do like carrying in logs for the wood stove and holding them on sawhorses while hubby cuts them to length. I carry them into the house to the wood box when we are out of wood (inside) to burn.
Princess completed her dog training. The day before the trainer came for the last session, Princess chewed up the blanket on our bed where it hangs down over the mattress, a roll of paper towels and got into the trash can and had a mess of that on the carpeting. I know she is bored and she will go out and curl up in leaves along the fence line and stay out in the cold even when it is in the teens. We fix the latch on the cellar entrance to where she can push open the door and come in, but the door is still closed. Then someone has to go shut the door.
We are nearly out of wood and there are at least two more months of very cold weather. My faith is being tried and our kids look on us as the money tree. If my son loses his car, if he has not paid for his insurance like he says he has, he will lose his job. I know God rules over it all, but I expect that there will be some chastening coming soon.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Today I want to get my blog finished and can't think of a title for it. I suppose that may come to me as I type.
My husband told me yesterday, that the place where we are getting our wood from, is just about depleted. The wood was given to us because he helped a man load two sections of a large half-pipe for skateboarding, when those that said they were coming to help, failed to show up. The wood has lasted us for two winters, so I just thank God for it. We use the wood stove to heat the whole house in the winter.
After church yesterday morning, I told hubby to drive down the street in back of our street. There is a trailer (from a tractor trailer) with Firewood spray-painted on it and there used to be wood pallets stacked there that were given away. Hubby doesn't get home before dark, so it would be up to me to go there and find out if we can have the old pallets, if they are selling them, or what is involved. There were very few stacked there and they looked to be in excellent condition. My husband said he didn't think they would want to get rid of those. So it will be something I will have to check into.
Last night as my husband was taking a shower, he said his back locked up and he almost called me to help him get out of the bathtub. He told me this after he put on his pajamas and was going to sit in his recliner while his hair dried. I awoke today with new motivation to get rid of my excess weight. I took care of my Mom before I had to put her in a nursing home and if I need to care for my husband, I don't need the excess weight making my job that much more cumbersome.
Hubby already has a 20% disability from the Veterans Administration due to his back. He loaded and unloaded a pickup truck of wood Saturday and carried in some logs on Sunday. I had our son put a huge log in the stove last night because I knew it was going to be a struggle to lift it and position it inside the wood stove. It burned all night. My son's girlfriend was massaging our son's back last night, so we all have aching backs.
My husband bought an electric chain saw this year from Aldi's and as we drove to/from the church building and I looked at downed trees, I thought to myself that now we have no means of going somewhere and cutting wood unless there is a power supply. I worried about the cost of buying wood when hubby said he wanted to use the wood stove. The answer came when the man we bought wood from, gave us all the downed trees that were on the acreage where he was getting
the wood he was selling to us. All because my husband lended him a hand with moving the half-pipe. I have learned to trust in the provision of God.
The neighbor across the street has a hauling business and I may ask him if we could purchase scrap wood from him that he comes across. He has two pallets leaning up against a fence right now. I think these things to myself, then I will make a list and go to check on the availability of free wood or buying it at a minimal cost as I locate places that might have some. The city newspaper used to give away broken wood pallets that advertisements were shipped in on. That would be another place to check.
When my kids were young, we were living way below poverty level as to our income. I had to have gall bladder surgery. Our kids were too young to take care of themselves and I knew that I wouldn't find a job that paid enough to pay a babysitter while I worked.
I was lying in bed one night and it was storming. I was thinking of our situation and how I owed $500 to the anesthesiologist for my surgery. I remembered when I was a teenager how I sold nightcrawlers (fishing worms) to a local bait house for a penny a piece and then when it was hot and dry in the summer and I wanted to fish, the owner of the bait house discounted the price of bait to me. A light bulb in my head turned on! When the storm was over, I went out into our yard with a flashlight and found nightcrawlers. I was too slow to really catch but a few.
There was an alleyway in back of our house and I shined the light on the concrete surface of the alleyway and worms were crawling there, all I had to do was gather them up. I felt like the woman in the Bible that had the miracle of oil which she sold to pay her creditors. (2 Kings 4:1-7) I gathered three, 3 lb. coffee cans half full of worms (approximately 4.5 lbs). The worms seemed to be floating down the alley. I had two old washtubs in the basement and I mixed up sand, wet peat moss (with the water squeezed out) and garden soil in the wash tubs and dumped in the worms. They thrived.
I called the local hardware store and they agreed to buy the nightcrawlers at 50 cents a dozen, two dozen in a container. I also put up index cards at the local supermarkets and soon had fishermen calling the night before for early morning pickup of bait for their fishing trips. One man had the index card folded in his wallet. I made $65 the first week I sold them. When I got the $500 paid off, I went out of the worm business.
50 cents x 2 dozen = $1.00 = 24 worms
$65 x 24 = 1,560 worms
I wrote about this because I am sure you have heard the expression "pennies from heaven." As disgusting as worms are, God used them to help us to pay off $500. Then He used the worms again when I wrote about this experience on Associated Content and was paid for my article, $10 for 6 articles.
Now when I run into a problem, I take some quiet time to pray to God and ask Him to intervene with an answer. I brainstorm possibilities and write them down or check into my ideas. I wouldn't have thought about making money off of bait living in a city. When I was a teenager, we lived beside Deep Creek Lake in Maryland. There was a ready market for bait. I did learn though that God uses all the experiences of a lifetime. Paula Deen was poor but she was a wonderful cook. She used what she had, her cooking skills, to get to where she is today.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
I fell asleep on the sofa last night. I woke up and looked at my wristwatch and it was 9:22. I didn't know if it was still Saturday or if it was Sunday morning and I needed to be ready to leave for church by 9:20 AM. JOLT!
If there was a feeling that got my attention, that was it! I remember the phone ringing at our old house and my husband was then working as a prison guard. He jumped out of bed in his skivvies and said, "Sallyport, Officer L_ _ _ _ speaking." I watched him put his hand over the receiver and say to himself, "Why am I in my underwear?" I thought, Can't you see the bed you just crawled out of? I had to put my face in the pillow to smother my laughter.
Last night we didn't have wood in the house to get through the whole night. I tried one log and it caught on fire right away but it was too long to get the stove door shut. Around 4 this morning, I had hubby and our son up trying to help me with that. The smoke detectors were going off and the basement was smoky. I am so tired of this. My husband had to buy a pickup truck to haul wood, then a chain saw and it never ran right. This year he bought an electric chain saw, a maul and wedges. I bought gloves and a hatchet recently, but he can't manage to get the logs cut to the right length. I filled a 2-liter plastic pop bottle with water and put it in the basement. We also have two fire extinguishers and I was tempted to use one on the stove this morning.
Today I plan on a nap. The temperature in the house over night didn't drop below 68 degrees. Tending fire today will be hubby's job since he hasn't brought in any wood.
First Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
Last Page
|
|
Get An Email Alert Each Time INFLATED Posts
|
|
Member Comments About This Blog Post:
Hang in there 
....hope these 