Memorial Traditions/Food Traditions

This blog entry has been entered in Scribbit's Write Away Contest for June.

My family and extended family is very food oriented. We enjoy food. Food draws us together, and gives us common ground. At times food is an expression of love for one another, a comfort, a sign of celebration and a tradition. We never get together with my parents, siblings, Aunt and Uncle without some kind of food involvement.
I personally love food. I use food not just to comfort myself at times, but to comfort others. Cooking a good meal is one of my joys in life, and sharing food makes me feel like I am giving someone a hug. I love cooking not just for myself, but for other people as well. If I bring you a plate of cookies, a cheesecake, a hot meal or any kind of food, that is my way of giving you a hug. If I make you a special meal, and I spend a lot of time making it, then you are an extra special person to me. I am by no means a gourmet chef although there are some meals I make that take hours of preparation. I simply enjoy cooking, I enjoy eating, and I enjoy feeding other people.
Many of my childhood memories are tied to food.
Going with my Dad to run an errand and getting to stop for a special donut at the bakery is one of my earliest memories.
Decorating sugar cookies with my sisters and cousins every Christmas Eve was one of the highlights of the Holidays.
Making giant cinnamon rolls for our teachers as gifts every Christmas was one of the things we loved to do. Food was one of the things that taught us how to give and be generous with others.
I remember my Dad teaching me how to make omelets when I was nine, and how much I loved to make scrambled eggs for my little brother because he loved eating them.
Licking the beaters when someone made cookies or cake was something we looked forward to back before the days when everyone worried about salmonella and other food poisoning.
When we would visit my Grandma Irene she always had a big glass bottle or two of sprite in the door of the fridge. She had Golden Grahams cereal for us to eat at breakfast and she made fried chicken and black eyed peas for dinner. I was young enough when she died that I don't have as many memories of her as I would like to, but I make oyster stuffing just like she did whenever I make a turkey dinner.
My Grandma Nora was a great cook. She made a wonderful hot potato salad every Christmas. She never gave anyone the recipe, but eventually my Dad and my Aunt worked it out together from their memories of her making it, and now we enjoy that tradition of eating hot potato salad every Christmas Eve. I can remember eating her gingerbread while it was still hot and the fresh whipped cream melting into the top of the cake. Soups, beef, potatoes...Grandma Nora always fed us well.
After I was married we moved to Utah. Both of my Grandmothers had passed away years before then. D's Grandma and Grandpa lived in Salt Lake City though, and I enjoyed being close enough to visit them, and to have a Grandma in my life again. Grandma W was always baking. She kept frozen cupcakes (already frosted too) in the freezer, and as soon as we got there she was always pulling out some kind of treat from the freezer for us to eat. She made twice stuffed potatoes, and jello with carrots grated in it, and she made the best wheat and honey bread I have ever had. Unfortunately she took that recipe to the grave with her, much to all of our dismay as well as Grandpa's. She also made cinnamon twists often, and I have the recipe written down in her own handwriting. It is a treasure to me.
When Memorial Day comes around I always find myself thinking of those Grandparents and missing them. A few years ago I had an idea of how to share a little bit of our memories with the boys. So every year around Memorial Day weekend we buy or make food that our Grandparents made or loved. Hot Potato salad, pringles potato chips, fried chicken, twice baked potatoes etc. My Grandpa Bill loved circus peanut candy, and Lemon Meringue pie. The boys look forward to this time of year because I buy a bag of circus peanuts and tell them about how my Grandpa Bill loved them. I tell other stories too, and the food works like a bridge to make memories for my boys. The Great Grandparents they never met become real to them, and become a bigger part of their lives instead of only being a part of their history.

I met my first Blogger today...

I suppose I should say that I met my first blogger that I didn't know from anywhere other than their blog. It was Millie! We were only able to meet for a few minutes, but I am very happy to say that I have met her in person, (and I got to meet most of her kids, and her husband as well and they are all very nice) and she is just as great in person as she is on her blog! Go check out her blog if you aren't already reading it, its one of my favorites. Thanks Millie! It was wonderful meeting you!

Have you gotten your Star Wars Stamps yet?

Okay...most people who know us know that our family enjoys Star Wars. We don't dress up and go to conventions together or anything, but we enjoy the movies, and our boys have been known to pretend they are Jedi for hours on end. I will admit that I have a soft spot for Star Wars since one of my earliest memories is going to my first movie in a theatre at the tender age of four (just thirty years ago). That movie was Star Wars.
When I saw the signs up at the post office advertising Star Wars stamps I thought it would be pretty fun to get a set. I thought the boys would enjoy seeing them, and I thought that they would lend some personality to any letters I wanted to mail. That's right...I actually use stamps for postage! Some people collect stamps...I use them to mail letters.
I will admit that there have been occasions when I got some pretty cool stamps at the post office, like the DC superheroes set that came out about a year and a half ago. I enjoyed looking at them, and then I used them all up. (You can take comfort in knowing that you can actually still get these DC hero stamps online from the USPS-they were that unpopular.)
I went to the post office this morning and bought my stamps. I got there early because we live in a small town, and I knew our post office probably wouldn't get a lot of sets of the stamps. Even though I got there about 12 minutes after the post office had opened, they had already sold at least 20 sets of the stamps. The postal clerk said that there were people lined up when they opened the post office. I was a little surprised they were going so quickly and glad I didn't wait until the afternoon to come in and get stamps.
I expected the Star Wars stamps to be in a regular book of 20 stamps. Instead what I found when I went to the post office this morning, is that they come in a sheet of 15 stamps that looks like a collage poster. The sheet has no convenient place to fold it in half for storage, and to be honest the stamps look so nice to me, that I am a little afraid to use them. Looking at it, I can almost hear it begging to be matted and framed. The reverse side of the sheet has descriptions of the characters or ships depicted and their role in the Star Wars Saga. I had planned to buy two sets of the stamps. One for using, and one to possibly save. Since there were only 15 stamps per set, I went ahead and bought three sets since I really did need to get some stamps. The postal clerk seemed surprised when I said I planned to actually use some of them for postage.
So do you have anything you collect? Are you a secret hoarder of Hot wheel cars, tiny little spoons, stamps, various parts of your children (Umbilical cords, teeth, hair? I recently found a couple of baggies that had hair from first haircuts of my boys...but I had no idea whose hair was whose...so I tossed them. That topic could be a whole blog in itself.), beer steins, trains, hubcaps? Give it up...I would love to know!

I never would have thought of it...an Iron with a headlight...

A few weeks ago we were up visiting the folks (mine as well as D's Dad) and since my sister's baby was getting blessed in church the next day we stayed the night. Our church clothes had gotten somewhat...mashed along the way so my father-in-law let me use his iron.

First let me say that I am not big on ironing. I avoid it when at all possible, although at one point in life I worked at a dry cleaner and spent a good portion of my day ironing. When they make a shirt press like the one pictured at right for the home then I will be happy to go back to keeping everyone's church shirts wrinkle free. It was a lot of fun pressing shirts with that machine. However, a standard iron just doesn't do it for me.

Maybe its just all in the iron you choose though. Our iron is one that we got for a wedding gift. Its very basic and it has served us well. Its nothing very fancy, but it does the job. The iron at my Father in Law's house however, is more than just your basic iron. For one thing, its a lot heavier than our iron, its all shiny and metal, and it is a SHARK. That in itself says its a tough kind of iron. So I got the ironing board all set up, got the church shirts laid out and ready to go and started to iron. The Shark did a nice job. Lots of steam, and its just so shiny it made me smile. Then I noticed it. There was a little light on the front. Kind of like...a flashlight. I asked my F-I-L "Your iron has a light?" He just said yes. He seemed to think it was perfectly normal. But to me, the ironing challenged one, it was unheard of. I tried to think of a usefulness for the light.

Scenario #1...you live in a studio apartment which you share with someone, and you have to get up and iron early in the morning to get ready for work. You don't want to turn the light on and wake up the roomie, so you can use the Shark to iron in the dark!

From there my scenarios became less...realistic.

#2: You wake up in the middle of the night and hear a noise that sounds like there is an intruder in the house. Quietly you plug your Shark iron (that you conveniently keep next to the bed) in and wait the mere moments it needs to heat up. Knowing that the 12 foot cord is not going to be enough you have plugged it into a 30 foot extension cord that is properly rated to provide adequate power to the Shark. Covering the bright glow of its headlight with one hand (while carefully keeping the edge of your hand away from the hot part of the iron) you creep out of your room making sure to keep plenty of extension cord free. You startle the intruder and are rewarded with a great view of his surprised expression in the headlight of the Shark as you send the iron hurtling towards his face. He will never know what hit him.

#3. You wake up in the uncomfortable hide-a-bed at Grandma's house, hungry for a midnight snack because the three TV dinners she divided between seven people was just somehow not enough for you at dinner. Afraid the light will alert her to your foraging for your own survival in her kitchen, you grab your trusty Shark iron and extension cord and use the handy headlight to make your way into the kitchen...(the TV dinner part of this story is true...if you want to lose weight...go live with my Grandma.)

So I really couldn't think of a use for that headlight, and F-I-L didn't offer me one although he seemed to think it was a perfectly normal thing to have on an iron. In preparation for this blog I looked up some info on the iron (to get a picture) and I found out that it has a "Headlight for easy, shadow free ironing ." I guess that makes sense. Although, I am sure I could come up with a dungeon scenario if you need more reasons to get an iron with a headlight.

My Bloggy World Meme

1. How old is your blog?

Almost ten months.

2. How would you categorize your blog?

It is uncategorized...thus the name I Blog About Nothing. For more on this see one of my earliest posts. D once said that if I continued to blog about things like products that help women pee standing up and whose job it is to change the toilet paper roll people would classify me as a bathroom blog, but I think I have broader reaching subjects than just the bathroom.

3. Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered?

Not generally. Not on this blog anyway, unless I decide to post a light saber picture...but I haven't put one of those on this blog yet.

4. Do you lie in your blog?

No. Do you believe me?

5. Are you passive-aggressive in your blog?

I looked up passive-aggressive on Wikipedia just to make sure it was what I thought it was. For your enjoyment here is the definition.

Passive-aggressive behavior refers to passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to following authoritative instructions in interpersonal or occupational situations. It can manifest itself as resentment, stubbornness, procrastination, sullenness, or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is assumed, often explicitly, to be responsible. It is a defensive posture and, more often than not, only partly conscious. For example, people who are passive-aggressive might take so long to get ready for a party they do not wish to attend, that the party is nearly over by the time they arrive.

My answer is...not that I am partly conscious of.

6. Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop?

I have written about the idea of quitting before. It wasn't a threat, but I thought about stopping. I certainly didn't put the idea forward to get people's attention. I think all bloggers go through times (often repeatedly) where they hit a wall in the blogosphere and aren't sure if they should continue on. So they take a break, and most times they miss it and they come back.

7. Have you deleted any of your own posts? Why?

No, but I have gone back and edited grammatical errors or reworded things to make more sense.

8. Do you delete mean comments?

Once when someone took offense at my blog about why Anakin Skywalker turned to the dark side. The person was not one of my regular readers and took me too seriously. I wouldn't have had a problem if they had not used inappropriate language, so I deleted it. I have also deleted comments that were spammy in nature.

9. If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less?

I honestly don't know. Hopefully they would like me just the same.

10. How many blogs do you follow?

I don't have to follow them, they come right to my computer! (Okay, about 30 that are in my favorites and a few others I check out less frequently)

11. Which blogger do you want to meet in real life?

Well...there are many I would like to meet. Pretty much all of my favorites. I don't think I could pick just one.

12. Does your family read your blog?

Yes, my Mom does sometimes and some of my sisters although none of them ever comment (snobs).

13. Do you have a hit counter? How often do you check it?

I do. Once every couple of days. I don't get a lot of hits so why check more often?

14. Is blogging narcissistic?

Only if you keep reading your own blogs over and over...

15. Do you feel guilty when you don't post for a long time?

Yes.

Bonus: Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognizes you from your blog?

No...but I don't wear my PJs and slippers to the store either.

Motivation

What motivates you? This morning I was motivated to get out of bed because my three year old was digging his feet into the small of my back. He somehow manages to come downstairs in the early morning hours and crawls into bed with us. For some reason he is most comfortable sleeping at an angle across the mattress, and as soon as D gets up for work, #5 takes over that side of the bed and turns himself sideways so as to better torture me.
Motivation is an interesting thing. Some people are motivated purely by their own desire for something better, or to achieve something. Social pressures, competition, someone else's opinions can all be motivators to people.
Lately I have been decidedly unmotivated. It has been a struggle to get things done. I think that a lack of motivation has often been something I have had to contend with in my life. If things get overwhelming I just shut down. Desperation has often been the catalyst for motivation to kick in.
I am a known procrastinator. I always felt like I worked best under pressure in high school when trying to complete my assignments at the last minute. Now I find that I don't necessarily have due dates for my assignments. It is even easier for me to put things off until they get too overwhelming for me to contemplate. I am suddenly looking for motivation.
Of course there are people I want to please or impress. I have a family that I want to take care of and I have religious convictions. Sometimes all of these things are not enough to motivate me. I am not travelling down a bad road, but I am not travelling at all. Not moving is certainly not going to get me anywhere.
I think that perhaps my lack of motivation is directly related to my own self esteem. If I fail at things, then people will certainly be more likely to see me the way I see myself most times. Apparently other people's opinions matter to me because at the last minute I tend to pull a rabbit out of my battered top hat, and make it through whatever it was I was supposed to be working on. Still in everyday things I often fail. Most of those failures are kept between me, myself and I.
I think I need to do some things for me. I don't mean being selfish and going out on a big shopping spree or anything like that. What I mean is that I need to realize that not only do my husband and children deserve a clean house, but so do I. I deserve a place that is not so chaotic, where I can relax and enjoy life. I deserve to get things done in a timely manner so that I don't have to endure the stress that comes from putting it off. Not only do my husband and children deserve a wife and Mom who is in better shape, but I deserve to feel healthy and able to keep up with the physical demands of having five kids. My motivations need to change because as many thoughts towards change as I have had, they have not been enough to actually move me in any direction that I need to go.
So will doing it for me be enough to really motivate me? I honestly don't know. Maybe if I combine my motivations I will actually get up and move down the path I want to be on.
What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? How much are you worth in your own effort?

I got Good Mail Today!

I got my first official Good Mail today!

THANK YOU Annie for the lovely set of cards, and the pencil.

If you have never heard of Good Mail, you can check it out here. My definition of Good Mail is mail that isn't a bill, or junk mail, and it makes you smile. It also makes you smile to send Good Mail...so send some today!

The Things They Come Up With These Days...

I have not blogged on either one of my blogs the last few days. The reason for this was because we were celebrating our 11th wedding anniversary. My Parents and Sisters were lovely enough to take all five of the boys overnight so that D and I could enjoy some time to ourselves. It was wonderful.
After we picked the boys up from Mom's on Friday, we decided to run a few errands. Living in the small town paradise we live in has a few drawbacks, one of those being a very limited choice of places to shop. Since we were in the big town of Vancouver, WA for our anniversary, we did a lot of browsing around. D had received a gift card for Christmas (three years ago) for a certain electronics store that purports to have the "Best" prices and many things to "Buy". Luckily, the gift card had no expiration so we went there to peruse for things to use it on.

While we were there, #3 happened to notice something as we walked by heading for the restroom. He pointed it out to me on our way back. I have included a picture of it here for your proof that such a thing does in fact exist. Yes...its a beautiful side-by-side refrigerator/freezer. What is that in the door you say? A TV? Why yes...it is!

At first I was only planning to put a picture of it on this blog, and a few lines of ideas on how this would actually be a useful item to have in the kitchen. My ideas included things like:

When you get up for a midnight snack and can't decide what you want, you can watch a sitcom while you think about it.

Your kids will never want to take food in the living room again! They can just watch TV right in the kitchen.

etc...etc...etc...

Then when I was online looking up this beautiful picture, I happened to glance over at the paragraph next to it. Here is a snip from that paragraph just for you!

Moon B. Shin, vice president of overseas sales & marketing of LGE, said, “The TV refrigerator allows housewives to enjoy music, movies, satellite broadcasting, and cable TV in the kitchen, enhancing their pleasure and convenience. For instance, housewives can order food and kitchen items from home shopping channels and also cook dishes while watching cooking shows.”

First of all...have you actually seen one of those cooking shows? There is no way that anyone I know could cook along with a show and keep up with it. And I always personally find it necessary to actually be IN my kitchen when I am ordering kitchen items from the Home Shopping Network. This would help me avoid the embarrassment of accidentally ordering something I already own. Not to mention the subtle reminder that my place is in the kitchen. I enjoy being in the kitchen. But I also have laundry to do, carpets to vacuum and a toilet to clean. Where is the TV built into my medicine cabinet or my Washer and Dryer? I think they should also include the sales pitch that this TV is great for Men who don't want to sacrifice family time to watch football (or is it the other way around...) Now they can watch the game and still enjoy a pleasant meal with their family! Kids! You can rot your brain while you do chores in the kitchen! And lets be honest here...Are Housewives going to really cook along with their favorite cooking shows? Or are they going to turn on some Daytime TV and watch it while within arms reach of a half gallon of ice cream?

Seriously...do we have to have TV everywhere? Its in the car, the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, and I just did a Google search, and you can indeed put one in the bathroom!

Or in your hot tub. I can already see the headline about the family that stewed to death after deciding to attempt to watch all three LOTR movies in succession from the comfort of their hot tub.

What will they think of next! For those of you who are fans of the amazing Refrigerator/TV, start saving your money! You only need about $4000.00! Yippee!

Wordless Wednesday

Star Family Reunion

(There's One in every Family)