Pre-A to Z Thankfuls

Imma slipping a Ten Things of Thankful in here (early, for a change) before I start posting my A to Z Challenge posts, which begin tomorrow. In case you aren't familiar with the A to Z Challenge, for the month of April (excluding Sundays, except THIS Sunday, and I don't know why they chose to start it on Sunday except that it's the 1st but that makes for six days IN A ROW of posts and I'm kind of panicking a little, can you tell?!) you write one post a day and theme each post with the letter of the alphabet for that day. 

It is fun but HARD.

In the meantime, here goes the thankfuls:

1. I will be so thankful if you will follow along on my A to Z journey. My theme for the month is Pinterest Wins or Losses. I start out of the block pretty low key, but I've got some doozies planned.

2. Spring is being kind of snarky this year. It's been rainy. It's been cold. It's supposed to snow on Easter Sunday. But the flowers are popping out regardless and they are lovely.

A violet fighting its way up through the dead
grass and old gumballs.

3. My dad had to go to the ophthalmologist last week, had his eyes dilated, and couldn't drive until they UNdilated, so I made him run some errands with me rather than sit around the doctor's office. We got some items needed for my A to Z Challenge posts (it feels as though I spend several thousand dollars on the thing, although that could be a slight exaggeration), and I took him into Red Racks for his first visit to a thrift store. I think he will want to go back there, as we happened to hit it on Senior Citizen Discount Day AND he found this sign to hang up at the lake house:

He was pretty amused by this. It's
now hanging outside the front door.

4. I got tired of my hair and cut three inches off of the front and it's mostly even (or, as my mother would have said about it being uneven, "Can't tell it from a moving horse").

5. I don't shop for myself much, but I ran into Old Navy and came out with three t-shirts and two pairs of capris and only spent $50.

6. Emma got to join us at the lake house this weekend. She was going to stay at school and do homework but changed her mind and came home. (The Med School Student has a big exam on Monday, so he couldn't come.)

7. We haven't brought the cats with us to the lake house since Christmas, so they came this time, and right this minute, they are snuggling together in a chair and SOMEONE LOOK OUTSIDE TO SEE IF A LEAD BALLOON IS RISING.

Spooning kitties.

8. I have my first two A to Z posts written. Already! My usual MO is to write them and post them with mere minutes to spare before the daily deadline. A turning point perhaps?

9. After running an errand with my dad today (turn about is fair play), we ran across a couple of tom turkeys and their harem of about a dozen females. I did an abysmal job of getting a picture, but the fellas were all puffed up and pimpy and would have made a great photo if I had been quicker:

They unfluffed as they approached the road, but
they were certainly gentlemen about watching
their ladies cross the road safely.

Turkey butt.

10. This week marked the sixth anniversary of my bilateral mastectomy and free tram reconstruction surgery. Monthly self examinations are CRUCIAL, my friends! KNOW. YOUR. BODY. Annual mammograms are not sufficient. 

Now, go out and be thankful!

Linking up with Josie Two Shoes and Ten Things of Thankful 

Ten Busy Things Of Thankful, More Or Less

When last we met, I had been so very, very busy that I had to do two weeks worth of thankfuls in one post.

Sooo, this week will have to be THREE weeks worth, but I PROMISE it won't be three times as long. Nobody likes me enough to read all that.

I made the commitment to do the A to Z Challenge, so part of the reason I have been too busy to take the time to write is that I have been working on my challenge posts. Okay, the writing has only taken place inside my head, but it's still preparation! 

We're getting into the busy time of year for preschool. Or maybe I should say "busiest" instead, because we're ALWAYS busy. It starts in mid-March with Big Wheel Day, an event where we set up the gym with centers to resemble a town, and the kids bring tricycles and big wheels and ride them on the "streets" of the town and visit the centers. For example, we have a bank (you get play money and a sucker), a grocery store (play grocery carts and empty food containers, such as cereal boxes and milk cartons, all cleaned and taped closed), a beauty shop, a tattoo parlor (before someone says it, of COURSE they're temporary ones), and a McDonald's. The McDonald's is a HUGE hit, because the kids pick up a pretend Happy Meal there: a "hamburger" made with a vanilla wafer bun, an oreo "burger" made from a spring Oreo (the kind with the yellow filling - cheese, get it?) and some red frosting (you guessed it - ketchup) and shoe string potatoes for the french fries. These Happy Meals are so well loved that we all have to take one home to our own kids, most of whom are graduates of the preschool. Here's one of those kids now:

Med School Boy's last Big Wheel Day
was 18 years ago....

A reporter from one of our local tv stations came to tape a segment about Big Wheel Day for that evening's news, and I was standing there, MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS, when he asked who was doing the interview, and the director said, "SHE is," pointing to me. This is how I had dressed that day, and believe me, it's not what I would have chosen had I known I was going to be interviewed:

I didn't want to see myself babbling on tv while wearing pigtails and, ironically, a Razorback hat, so I avoided the news all day. That evening, however, I got a text from a preschool mom telling me how excited her son was to see me on tv at Big Wheel Day on the news that evening. Ahh, my heart!

Got some spring going on around here! Hyacinths and daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks. The Bradford pears are blooming, the trees are budding and a few have baby leaves making an appearance, the tulips have thrown up bulging buds, and the grass is greening by the day. 

Anyone know who Chris Long is? You do?! Cool! For those of you who don't, he is a defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles (you know, that team that won the Super Bowl this year); his dad is Howie Long, now a sports analyst for Fox Sports. I started following Chris Long on Twitter a few months ago because he's funny. The other day, he tweeted about Three Billboards in Ebbings, Missouri, and while I wouldn't ordinarily reply to a tweet from a celebrity, this one time, I did:

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED:

Rode that high for quite awhile.

This past week was Spring Break. Teachers LIVE for Spring Break, even part time preschool teachers (sometimes ESPECIALLY part time preschool teachers). My daughter and I road tripped to Nashville to spend part of the week with my best friend and her daughter. We ate entirely too much very good food and we talked and laughed more than you would think was possible. I wish Terri and I could tesser back and forth, because it's a hella long drive and we need to be able to spend more time together.

I have never been away from Nora Pearl that long before, and she was beside herself when I finally got home. 

The Med School Student came home for Spring Break as well (there's another thankful: all three of us, at three different schools in three different states, had spring break the EXACT SAME WEEK). The whole family took a quick trip to Kansas City to visit my brother and his wife. We visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum and saw the visiting Picasso exhibit and ate my favorite Kansas City pizza (and probably favorite pizza of all time). 

Saturday, my husband and I attended the March For Our Lives in Kansas City. It was FREAKING COLD, with 6,000+ in attendance, but what an uplifting, promising event! Two of my childhood friends were also in attendance, and thanks to the miracle called the interweb and me being next to the biggest tree in the entire park, we managed to find each other.

Dana (friends since we were 11) and
Teresa (friends since we were 4)

Initially, his reason for attending with me was
to make sure I didn't get arrested....

The A to Z Challenge starts ONE WEEK FROM TODAY. YIKES! Once again, I am doing a Pinterest Challenge theme, so feel free to send me interesting Pinterest pins you would like me to try to replicate. PLEASE, I BEG OF YOU! In spite of what I said in the first paragraph, I am woefully underprepared for the A to Z Challenge and need ideas! Nothing is too bizarre for me to consider! 


Linking up with Josie Two Shoes and Ten Things Of Thankful

Two Weeks Of Thankfuls In One

The past couple of weekends have been BUSY, and I didn't even get my TToT written last weekend. It was a good busy, though, because I spent each weekend with one of my kids, and my thankful cup overflowed. Here's how they played out:

Weekend #1 was spent with Kyle in Oklahoma City. 

It seems we have a favorite pizza place everywhere we visit. I think we like pizza. When in Oklahoma City, we always make a trip to Hideaway Pizza (shout out to my friend Melissa for introducing it to us some 8 years ago). We had the Pepperonipalooza pizza, and it was worth every greasy bite.

We ate breakfast at a bakery that wasn't as good as the reviews implied, but the good news was it kept us from overeating doughnuts and pastries.

The Med School Student allowed me to take photos of him AND HE KIND OF SMILED!

We got a tour of the school. It was brief, as he is mostly in the same lecture hall every day, but we got to see his module (the medical students [and there are around 160 of them] are divided into small groups of roughly 20 students each called modules, or "mods," for short). Each mod has a room with desks around the perimeter, and each student is assigned one. Some study there, some eat lunch there, others (like my son) have hardly anything there.

His desk in the "mod."

Hmmm. Which white coat belongs to the
guy who's 6'4"?

Since eating out and having us pay for it and giving us the med school tour was the only thing my son planned for us to do that weekend, it was up to me, the consummate tour manager, to come up with activities, and I found a doozie: The American Pigeon Museum & Library! As goofy as it sounds, it really was interesting. Did you know homing pigeons were used in WWI and WWII to send messages back from the front lines? And that they were dropped by airplanes in special containers (yes, there was a parachute attached) or carried in little harnesses by paratroopers? Admission is FREE, which makes me even thankfuller for finding it (I did leave a donation, however).

In case you didn't believe me.

Been there. Bought the shirt.

Birds of a feather....

We hit a few thrift stores while we were there. I picked up a few OU t-shirts to wear to the gym, and my biggest coup was finding an Arkansas t-shirt deep in Sooner country.

We ate a ginormous lunch/supper at Ted's Cafe Escondido. It's not my favorite Mexican food, but it's an institution in the OKC area (and it now has locations in other cities, including Kansas City, I believe), but the reason to go (besides Kyle saying he REALLY wanted to eat there) is they bring you hot, freshly made tortillas and queso for dipping, and they KEEP THEM COMING throughout the meal AND IT'S FREEEEE!

Before we left town on Sunday morning, we ate at a restaurant named Good Gravy. 40 different kinds of gravy, and biscuits so light you practically had to hold them down with a fork. I went old school and had sausage gravy with my biscuits, but my son had bacon jalapeno and declared it delicious.

Pick your poison.

Weekend #2 was spent in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with Emma:

Emma's sorority held its Moms Weekend last weekend. She and I had been looking forward to it for weeks, so imagine our dismay when the weather forecast was for rain. Not "chance of rain" or "scattered showers" but 100% chance of rain for two days straight. The good news is it took the guesswork out of which shoes to wear, since rainboots were the only feasible choice.

Parking was available in a garage that was only about four blocks from the sorority house. That's the good news. It was full to the brim of student cars, and the only metered spots were taken, so I parked in one of the few open student spaces and hoped for the best. I was neither towed nor ticketed - whew!

Every Friday at the sorority house is Chicken Finger Friday, and that's how we kicked off the weekend. The chicken fingers were crispy and flavorful, there was yummy macaroni and cheese, and, best part, THEY HAD GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE AND IT WASN'T EVEN THANKSGIVING!!! We sat with group of Emma's friends, and I don't think there is anything a whole lot better than listening to a group of girls giggle and talk together. 

We sloshed and slogged our way back to the car and went to the amazing Rick's Bakery for treats and then to see "Greatest Showman" again (5th time for both of us). I want that movie to stay in theaters FOREVER.

Rick's Bakery. This isn't even half of it.

Brunch at the sorority house Saturday morning, and it was lovely! Rumor has it the house mother has given the boot to at least three chefs so far this school year, but I think this one is a keeper. We toured the house (it has three stories and a new addition was just completed this summer that doubled the size of the house) and Emma shopped for her potential room for next school year when she lives in-house.

I look rained on.

It was Bid Day for fraternities that same day, so the boys who went through spring rush found out which house they would be in, followed by parties that started around noon and ended some time around 2 a.m., I believe. Emma thought it would be a hoot if I went to some of the house parties, and we were joined by a couple of other mom and daughter duos. (Bear in mind it is raining BUCKETS while we do this, with some lightning and thunder thrown in.) We were greeted with great enthusiasm by fraternity boys at each house, and I hope their livers survive until they graduate....

Shootin' a little pool at the Phi Delt house.

We are the cool moms.

After the parties, we attended a cookie and cupcake decorating session at Rick's Bakery, and we got to take our creations with us FOR FREE! 

Sugary goodness.

We found a Vietnamese restaurant right by our hotel and had big bowls of pho to warm our bellies after walking around in all that rain. 

Naturally, after all of the Moms Weekend activities had already concluded, Sunday turned out to be warm and sunshiny, but maybe we'll remember this one a little more fondly in years to come as the one where we practically needed hip waders do go from place to place.

Bottom line: great kids, great times. Can't be more thankful than that.

Linking up with Josie Two Shoes and her Ten Things of Thankful blog hop.

Transfer: A Six Sentence Story

When I left Kansas City, where I grew up, to attend college in a city over 150 miles away, I left behind my sweet friend Meri, who was two years younger than I was; she and I became close friends during my senior year in high school, and before I left for college after a summer of probably too much fun, she promised to come visit me. It took until spring before the right combination of schedules that coincided and Meri's mom agreeing to allow her to ride a Greyhound bus by herself occurred, but finally, the weekend had come that Meri would come to Springfield.

Meri's mom took her to the bus station on a Friday afternoon and put her on a bus headed south; she was to ride it until she got to Joplin, where she would transfer to an eastbound bus and arrive in Springfield around 10:00 that night. I was anxiously awaiting her arrival, but not long before it was time to go to the bus station to pick her up, I got a phone call, and on the line was a sobbing Meri.

"I'm in F-f-f-f-fort S-s-s-s-smith, Arkans-s-s-sas!" she sobbed, "I f-f-f-f-fell as-s-s-sleep and m-m-m-missed my tr-tr-transfer!"

I swear I DID NOT LAUGH at any of this, or at least, not until she safely arrived in Springfield, more than 12 hours later, and I've forgotten how Meri and I spent that (shortened) weekend, but I will never forget her story of waking up in a bus station hundreds of miles beyond where she should have changed buses, then, thanks to the kindness of ticket agents and bus drivers along the way, returned to the original transfer point (successfully changing buses this time) and on to her original destination - me! 

Linking up with Ivy at Uncharted for Six Sentence Stories with the prompt "transfer".

Fling: A Six Sentence Story

It was May of our junior year in high school, and my best friend and I had spent much of the weekend together, going to a movie on Friday night (she had Junior Mints, I had Hot Tamales), then hanging out with a couple of guys from our class (they had different intentions than we did, and not long after one of them flopped onto the backseat and squarely onto Jane's purse, we called it a night). We spent a gorgeous Saturday afternoon at an art fair, even getting a light sunburn as we walked among the booths of paintings and other fine arts, ate dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant, and drove around in my 1970 Nova (gold, two-door, three-on-a-tree) with the windows down and the music up, and it was close to our curfew of midnight before I was finally heading down a side street in Jane's neighborhood to drop her off at home.

As we neared her house, Jane dug in her purse for her house keys, and as she rummaged around, she cried out, "EWWWWW!!!" and I felt something wet and sticky hit my leg as she tried to fling something from her hand; I immediately grabbed the object and heaved it across the car (grazing Jane's lip as it passed), through the open window and into the darkness, and as soon as it cleared the window, Jane screeched, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!"

"IT WAS A MOUSE!" I screamed to her, and she screamed back, "IT WAS MY KEYYYYS!!!"

I stopped the car, trying to understand how that icky, wet, squishy object I threw out the window could be her keys when she said, "My Junior Mints spilled in my purse and Jim must have squished them when he sat on my purse last night and the sun today melted them and NOW MY KEYS ARE OUTSIDE SOMEWHERE IN THE DARK!"

We looked at each other and burst out laughing, and we continued to laugh, as only best friends can, as we got out of the car and began searching through the grass, finally finding the Junior Minty keys in the bushes and then laughing even harder, tears streaming down our faces, when we realized how close those keys came to going through a chain link fence that was the only thing separating us from a rather large and not happy to see us dog, and then, we laughed some more....

Linking up with Ivy at Uncharted for Six Sentence Stories with the prompt "fling".

I Got Candy From A Boy And Other Thankfuls

As I started organizing (hah!) thoughts of thankfuls in my head for this week's Ten Things of Thankful, I was positive Valentine's Day had been the previous week. Nope. This one. And here's how it started:

Monday was Valentine party day for my MWF preschool class. I got dressed that morning in black leggings and a sweater and shortish black boots. I came out of my closet and stood in front of my husband IN BROAD DAYLIGHT and asked if I looked all right, since it was party day and there would be parents visiting. He said I did. I mentioned that my right heel felt a little funny as compared to the left one, and he said "Is there something stuck inside your shoe?" I said nothing other than my foot and then I left for work.

I was getting the classroom ready for the day and told my assistant teacher that my right heel had felt funny all morning. She looked down at my feet, told me to turn around, then announced that I was wearing TWO DIFFERENT BOOTS. 

My husband looked RIGHT AT ME that morning and didn't notice a thing. I immediately texted him to say he obviously never really looked at me when I asked him to that morning, and as a result, he needed to bring me a boot so that I would match by the time the parents got there later that morning.

Thankfully, he had not left for work yet, and he was able to bring me a boot, and NO, I DON'T CARE WHICH ONE, JUST BRING ME A DAMN BOOT.

No wonder the right one felt funny,

That was Thankful #1. Here are the rest:

2. My daughter came home for the weekend (she was feeling a little homesick, even though we had just been down to Arkansas to visit her the weekend before), and we had a pleasant, relaxed weekend; however, the freezing rain we got while she was home forced her to stay an extra day and not go back to school until Monday afternoon. Fortunately, the professors in both of the classes she had to miss excused her absence because of the weather.

3. Two days of Valentine parties over and done with, plus I got chocolate from several students and now have it safely tucked away for me, me, ME!

4. This picture, drawn by a five year old boy on a box of chocolates:

It says I love you, followed by a picture of me.

5. Priceline. I got a $100+ hotel room for $53 a night. 

6. I had a message last week from one of the counselors at the high school saying Emma had a scholarship that hadn't been picked up yet and it expired on March 1. I didn't know what she was talking about, but when I reached her, I found out that there was, indeed, a $1,000 scholarship for Emma from the Joplin Schools Foundation. I had no idea she had received this scholarship, and when I called Emma to get some information the school needed to process it, I asked her if she even knew she had received it, and she said Oh, yeah, I knew that. WHAAAT?! I'm very thankful to the counselor for following up on it with us. Every little bit helps!

7. The Winter Olympics. Aren't they fun?

8. Our big ol' boy Pete has had a rough couple of months which led to him having surgery on his arm for a puncture wound. Life finally seemed to be back to normal for him; that is, until the other night when my husband took a step back while in the kitchen directly onto Pete's tail, and when Pete took off after my husband moved his foot, there was a rather large tuft of fur left on the kitchen floor. Now poor Petey has a two inch long bald spot on his tail. A BALD SPOT. I'm thankful (and I'm sure Pete would concur) that my husband didn't land square on Pete's tail and only caught fur, or else we'd have a cat with a tail in a splint right now.

Poor, poor Pete!

9. This picture of my brother, which makes me laugh:

1958-ish. Family friend in background.

10. Spring is near! 

Daffodils popped up this weekend and
already have a bud!

My heart has been so heavy since the latest mass shooting, this time at a high school in Florida. Maybe this time, something will finally be done to bring an end to these. Persist. Resist. Be the change.

Linking up with Josie Two Shoes and her Ten Things of Thankful blog hop.

Here A Biscuit, There A Biscuit

When I was a kid, my mom (usually) only used bad words for three situations: when she was trying to start our Chevy Bel Air station wagon (ca. 1967), as it had a cold engine even if it were 100 degrees outside; when she tried to get a cake out of a Bundt pan in one piece; and when she had to open canned biscuits by banging them repeatedly on the edge of the counter.

Fortunately, fuel injection came along and cars now start with the turn of the key, cooking sprays like Pam are a vast improvement over the old greasing and flouring method of preparing a Bundt pan, and canned biscuit containers got much easier to open.

I've never been a huge fan of canned biscuits baked as-is, but my mom would bake them for breakfast sometimes (my dad liked them; I preferred homemade biscuits, which meant made with Bisquick, but still way tastier than canned). At some point in the 1980s, though, I learned about monkey bread, which is made with canned biscuits and butter and cinnamon and sugar and is delicious, and I usually kept a couple of cans in my refrigerator for when the monkey bread mood struck.

After I graduated from college, I lived in a little duplex that did not come furnished with a refrigerator. Fortunately, my parents had recently bought a new fridge and gave me their old one. By "old" I mean the kind with one door, freezer on top, and had to be defrosted, which I would do when the ice would get so bad the freezer door would no longer close. The refrigerator served me well, but at some point, the seal around the door needed to be replaced, so my parents came to visit and to help me put on a new seal.

It looked like this except it was white.
The blue is way cooler.

I've never taken a close look at the seal on my current refrigerator to see how it is attached, but the seal on the early 1960s model in my kitchen was screwed on with about 5,000 little screws, more or less. In order to take the screws off, remove the old seal, and screw a new one back on, the door had to be held steady; this is where my mom came in. She sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and held the door. It probably took my dad and me an hour to get all those screws removed, fit the new seal around the door, and replace all the screws, and that was with two of us doing it, as my mom sat there with the door about a foot away from her face the entire time and talked to us from behind the door.

I was wearing a sundress that had an open back (it was black with little flowers on it and I got it at Foxmoor Casuals at the mall and I loved it), and I was on the floor, on my knees and bent over so that I could put in the screws along the very bottom of the door. My dad was sitting next to me, and my mom was patiently sitting behind the door, holding it firmly, when there was an explosion. I felt something wet hit my bare back, and I screamed and collapsed onto the floor, convinced I had been shot. There was the sound of wet plops on the floor around me, and my mom was shouting, "What happened?! What happened?!" from her prison behind the door. 

After a pause my dad started laughing, and when I raised up, the something wet fell off my back and landed on the floor. It was biscuit. A canned biscuit. From a can that was in the door of the refrigerator, a door that had been open for an hour. It joined the other biscuits that had rained down and plop, plop, plopped to the floor immediately after the explosion. Turns out I didn't get shot after all....

I was not so badly scarred by the incident that I wouldn't use canned biscuits, but I certainly learned not to store them in the door, especially since they pop open much easier now than they did when I was shot by a whole can of them. 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

When my daughter was home from college for Christmas break last month, she decided she wanted monkey bread, and she wanted it badly enough that she went to the store and bought canned biscuits WITH HER OWN MONEY, but time got away from us and I never made them and the canned biscuits languished in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator (what, you think we keep VEGETABLES in there?!). She came home this weekend, and I have to say I made THE BEST monkey bread ever by actually using a recipe. I've always made it by cutting canned biscuits into quarters, dipping each piece in melted butter and rolling in a cinnamon and sugar mixture, and then baking the whole lot. Come to find out, there are real recipes for the stuff (thank you, Google), and I used the first one I came to when I searched (thank you, Pillsbury, even though I used cheap biscuits and not your fancy Grands).

Here's the recipe:

3 cans of biscuits (mine were Great Value)
1/2 c. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 c. brown sugar, packed
3/4 c. butter or margerine, melted

Preheat oven to 350. Lightly spray 12-cup fluted tube pan (that means my mom's nemesis, the Bundt pan) with cooking spray.

In a large plastic food storage bag, mix sugar and cinnamon. Cut biscuits into quarters and drop into bag and shake to coat (I did this one can at a time). Place evenly in pan. Melt butter and stir in brown sugar. Pour over biscuit pieces.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown and no longer doughy in center. Cool in pan for 10 minutes (I didn't) and invert onto a serving plate. Serve warm (but the leftover ones tasted mighty fine when they were stone cold).

It looked like this:

Look, Mama! It didn't stick!

I recommend you make these and make them soon.

If you would like to read further Biscuit Adventures with Dyanne, please go here and read "That One Time My Brother Really Bugged Me."