Memories

My 34th Birthday

 

Here we are, halfway through the next month and I still haven’t recapped/talked about my birthday.

I should tell you I hate birthdays. Not because I don’t like getting older. No, I’m fine with that. That means I’m still alive. I just hate the day. In more recent years I haven’t had good birthdays. It’s been forgotten by family and friends (not all, please don’t take offense if you remembered!!!). It gets treated like another day. It’s just not a big deal. And I guess I feel like it should be a big deal? I don’t know. Maybe I’m full of myself… ha.

When hubby and I got together, it seems like he gets week long birthday’s and I barely get a day. I guess I was a bit jealous of that. The reason he gets that is that if his birthday falls during the week, we’re supposed to get Tbug to celebrate, but that doesn’t always happen. So we celebrate on his birthday. I’ve thrown him surprise birthdays. Plus we’ve celebrated his real birthday on a weekend we had Tbug. Multiple times all of this has happened.

This year, my hubby decided to give me a week long birthday. This morning I saw a quote on Facebook:

I know good men still exist because I am lucky enough to have one.

A friend from college commented that she couldn’t help but think back to our Memoirs class and how much she learned about him. Maybe this is something I should have written about in class… Although I’m not far enough removed from it to use for a memoir.

Anyway, let’s quit procrastinating and let’s discuss

my birthday.

My birthday started out the weekend before my birthday, if you ask hubby. I had been wanting to eat at the Japanese Steakhouse for a while. He decided we were eating there and that was the start of my birthday.

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How To: Can Tomatoes

The other day I was down at my grandma’s and she made a comment that really kind of stuck with me. As you know I started a garden this year. This is my second attempt but first successful attempt at a garden. That’s cool, right? I planted green beans, corn, tomatoes, peppers (assorted), and carrots. At my house, we really don’t eat many raw tomatoes, so I called my grandma up and asked her to help me can them. She agreed. So what exactly did she say that stuck with me? That she was proud of me for learning how to do this because it is becoming a lost art. Wow! It was one of those things I thought of but never really made note of.

How to: Can Tomatoes

Midwestern at Heart: How To: Can Tomatoes. This is my Grandma's tried and true method of canning tomatoes so you have fresh tomatoes from your summer garden all year long.

The first thing you want to do is decide what you think you’ll use these tomatoes for. I told her I was going to use these for tomato sauce or pasta sauce eventually. Keep that in mind when trying this method!

I have a mixture of Beefsteak and Roma tomatoes in my bucket.

Midwestern at Heart: Bucket of Tomatoes

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10 Reasons to Visit Cozumel, Mexico

I keep mentioning Cozumel and our trip. Are you sick of hearing about it yet without hearing about it? Yeah, me too! haha. So here is 1 of a couple posts on Cozumel… But this one is Why You Should Visit Cozumel!

1. The SCUBA Diving! Oh my gosh, the SCUBA diving in Cozumel is amazing. The water temperature is like 80-84 degrees F year round (26-29˚C). The sealife is out of this world. There are reef and nurse sharks, turtles galore, fish of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and so much more, including if you’re lucky a potential Hammer Head Shark AND Seahorses. No, the sharks aren’t scary. At first I thought they would be, but they aren’t. When people yell or give the Shark sign, others go running, camera in hand. The visibility seems endless. You could be at the surface, see the ocean floor, take off for it and it’s sitting at 80-100 feet down. I mean the visibility is a dream.

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Did You Make It?!?!

You see this pier right here? I have a fun story about this pier…. Hold on….

So in May, I’ve mentioned in passing a few times, we went to Cozumel, Mexico. When you board a dive boat, right there under that roof is usually where people enter the dive boat they are going out on.. that and a little bit to this side even. You know, those big pillars are to tie boats off to to keep them at the dock.

I’m not sure exactly how deep it is right there at the end of the peer, but it’s deep enough that dive boats can get in easily. I’ve heard around 20 feet… I now my friend Grady accidentally had his gear dropped off a boat and they had to free dive down to get it.

Okay, so now that you have a little back ground history…. Let’s proceed with today’s story.

The last night we were in Cozumel, around dinner time I ran out to get sunset pictures (the above photo is from the first night….). There were 3 people, appeared to be a mother and 2 kids possibly. The girl I assume was daughter was probably early 20’s and the guy I assume to be son was late teens. So guesstimate mom’s age by those numbers… if she was near 20 when she had said daughter, we’re looking at least at age 40.

They were getting ready to go out and do a night dive. They didn’t seem real confident in their diving abilities based off their conversations of, how do I put this on, where does this go, did I set this up correctly, etc. Hey, as a new diver I was there too. It happens to everyone until you get some dives in under your belt.

Now, those things on your feet, they’re called fins, not flipper. In our group if you call them flipper’s someone starts singing “Flipper, Flipper, Faster than Lightning”… you know the theme song from the show Flipper form the 70’s…. <crickets>

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We Lost Her

If you remember here recently I asked for some prayers for my husband’s grandmother. At that time we weren’t sure if she’d ever leave the hospital, but she did. She pulled through and they released her. It actually got to the point she’d have good days where you knew she knew who you were and then there were days like in the hospital when she’d look at you dazed and confused.

About 6 months ago when she was in the hospital she signed a DNR. That right there was difficult for most of the family to understand, but she knew her place with God and was ready to go home when he called. She didn’t want to stay alive on machines only.

June 29, a few friends came up from Texas. Their first goal was to see Grandma W. Hubby and I ran in to town to see both Gary and Ruthie, but also Grandma W. The whole time we were there she never opened her eyes and she had very difficult shallow breathing. The nurses told the family to prepare for her to not make it through the night. She did.

Hubby’s cousin was coming down from Nebraska the next day. I’ve always heard that when people are preparing to leave this earth that there are people they are expecting/waiting to see. Once they’ve seen them, then they move on. I whole heartedly believe that.

My Grandpa was alive until I made it to Southern Oklahoma to see him. I remember driving down Father’s Day weekend 2008. I stayed with him and talked to him. He didn’t know I was there but they all said he did. My dad went down with me. My mom originally didn’t want me to see him like that because she didn’t want me to remember him like that. I told my mom, just stop me. I don’t usually speak that way, but I was going no matter what. I’m so glad I did and while I remember how he looked, that’s not how I remember him. I left around 7pm that night to make 5 1/2 hour trek back home. My mom called at 2am to say he’d passed away. I believe he was waiting to see me. And while maybe that sounds a little conceited… I still believe that with my whole heart.

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11 Quotes to Remember About Life

The other night as I was lying awake at 2:30am I was thinking about a lot of things… mainly life. I got tired of thinking about life so I jumped on Facebook. Isn’t it funny how sometimes when you least likely expect it you see just what you need?

Life is an interesting thing. I wake up some mornings and feel like I should be 20 because I feel like in life I’m where a 20 year old is, yet in a little over a month I’ll be 34 (does someone want to please verify my math….). What does that sentence mean? Well obviously, I don’t know my age but I know my birthday. Okay okay, seriously, that sentence means, I have an almost three year old. A lot of my friends had that in their early 20’s. In my early 20’s I wasn’t responsible enough. I knew that then. There was no question in my mind of that.

When I got out of college I had a pretty new degree that said I was qualified to teach high school students 9-12. I was 22 years old. If I were to teach a senior in high school, I was looking at 17 and 18 year olds. That made me 4-5 years older than they were. Would they have listened to me? Probably not. I didn’t get a job right out of college as an agriculture teacher. I spent that first year out of college as a substitute teacher and a part time server. Wow did I learn a lot that year, including how to do proofs (you know those things in Geometry that I failed in high school… No, I didn’t fail Geometry, just the proofs unit….).

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Quilt Block 25 & Putting the Quilt Together

To tell you the truth, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get this quilt put together. I have loved every minute of it, but I’m truthfully not a put it off for 6 months kind of girl. Now okay, I’ll admit, I didn’t start this challenge the first week it was out there… in fact I don’t think I got started until February some time but dang… it’s been going on for a while. Last week I thought I had all the quilt blocks done until I realized there were 25 not 24. I ran out of time last week to get number 25 done so here…

Here is Number 25. I absolutely LOVE it!

Monday I started trying to put it together. It required 167 2.5″ squares. HOLY CRAP! That’s a lot of squares. It took quite a while. Normally you sew strips together and then cut the strips and it goes faster…. but not in my case. 1) I couldn’t decide on just 2 colors for the blocks. 2) When I did decide on the colors to use, there was no making strips. So putting this thing together was going slow!

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Quilt Block 21, 22, 23, & 24

Monday’s happen to be one of my favorite days of the week these last few months, and that’s because my squirrely girly and I have gone down to sew with my grandma. A few weeks ago though, grandma had knee replacement surgery and wasn’t able to sew for a couple weeks. Sad day, but at least her knee is feeling better. Last week, Thursday became my new favorite day… I should mention at this point I’m not crazy about Thursdays. Most people think I’m nuts, but they are just a reminder that it isn’t Friday. I know… pessimistic side in deed.

Being as though we haven’t sewn in a few weeks, we had a lot of catching up to do. Now, grandma couldn’t stay up in the sewing room the whole time because her knee was hurting at one point, it was lunch time, and she ahd to do physical therapy… but that didn’t stop us! Nope, in fact, I cut out and sewed together 4 quilt blocks. I’m missing 1 block and then we can slap this baby together… oh… and 167 2.5″ squares. Boy that seems daunting!

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Quilt Block 19 & 20

The last I tried sewing I swear everything went wrong from losing material to fighting grandma’s sewing machine. I was so frustrated beyond belief I almost couldn’t see straight. But I’ve been away from working on this quilt for 2 weeks now (vacation!!) so I came back with a better attitude.

Before we left Abug and I were at Walmart and she picked out the fabric that was used in Quilt Block 19. I left the material with grandma when we left and she had all the pieces cut out for us by the time we got there yesterday.

She also had her sewing machine fixed so things were looking up… until we misplaced one of the 4″solid pink squares and didn’t have any material of the solid pink to fix the mistake. Luckily we didn’t give up and we found what we were looking for. Whew! My only other problem is I forgot where I was supposed to gage my 1/4″ seam and made a few of my seams 1/2″. Dang it!

But this is Quilt block 19 and it turned out without many problems. You can’t tell from this photo but it’s an oversized quilt block. So I present Quilt Block 19. I’m quite proud of it :). There are a few mistakes in it though. Oh well….

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