They thought that sounded pretty good. So, they asked if i had bought a jar. No, I said, it was too expensive. They accepted that answer, and I thought it was over. However, on Christmas Eve we had a family tradition called stocking night. We each had a stocking, and things were put into it to remind that person of some incident. In a later posting I will go into detail about that annual event.

This Christmas Eve, I was going through my stocking and discovered a jar of Smucker’s natural peanut butter. Then Julie said, “It was only 39 cents more than Skippy. I told her that some time in her life 39 cents an item may be too much. They just laughed.

On her first shopping trip to the store after her wedding, Julie stopped by the house and showed me several bags of groceries. She asked if i knew how much she had spent. I said, “about 39 cents and item too much”. She laughed and said I never forget. she was right.

Martha stilled abstained from eating it. Then our kids got older and they started eating it. Martha stilled maintained her abstinence. After our kids got married, at restaurant meals, everybody ate blue cheese except Martha.. I thought she would never change. However, when our grandkids became eaters of it also, she finally started eating it.

Her comment after that was.”I can’t believe i didn’t like it.”

Tacos were the creations that the Mexican workers took to work with them. They were their noon meal. What they took to work was what they had left over at home and wrapped it in a tortilla. This meant that it could have been any of their leftovers. I haven’t been able to determine what all the options they had. Perhaps someone will let me know.

What I have been doing is trying many different combinations of food and spices. I even tried the plant based taco filling. It was OK, but I haven’t repeated it. My basic recipe is ground beef, taco seasonings, cheese, salad fixings, and sour cream. However, I have gone on to many other trys. My favorite is chicken, either breast or thigh meat with black beans as a base with all the seasonings, salads, cheese and sour cream. Fried cod is another favorite of mine. I have even threatened to try grits and spam.

When the kids were still living at home, I used to make tacos that they referred to as making your hair sweat. I have since backed off from that amount of heat, and have found that taste is more important. I will continue to play and expirement.

Happy taco Tuesday!!!

When I actually answer one of these calls, it is a series of questions. Do you have insurance? Do you have both parts A & B? Then they connect me with one of their reps. who goes over the same information. When I tell them I am 87 years old, they hang up. Many of these calls are to get enough information of your plan that they can file illegal claims. they are also looking for you to say certain words like yes, and ok which they are recording to use in their scams.

AT&T has an app which will block these calls. The problem with that is that the legitimate owner of that number cannot call you, and you cannot call that number. I had installed that app. I removed it when I discovered that it was blocking the number of friends and family.

I went into a mode where I ignored any number I didn’t recognize. Then I discovered that I was missing legitimate calls. However, legitimate calls leave a message. So that is the way it is going for me now. I ignore the calls and look for messages.

Then at 3:30 P.M. we jumped in the car and drove to the theater to watch the Return of the King. It is 3 hours and 21 minutes long.
When that finished I dropped the boys off at their house and drove home.

When I got there, Martha told me that the movie Gladiator was showing at one of the local theaters. Guess what, I got her in the car and we went and watched Russell Crowe in Gladiator.

I think it took days for my eyes to recover, and I will never do something like that again. The total was 11hours and 21 minutes. It wasn’t a world record, but I was proud of it.

About a half hour later, someone called in to the show. They told Bob that it was a sleepy dusty delta day. They won all kinds of prizes including sports tickets, restaurant tickets, and a couple of airline tickets. she said i should have explained it better.She was probably right.

However, I still remember Bobby Gentry and a medley of her hit “Ode to Billy Joe”,

I had no clue what was happening until my granddaughter Libby texted me and told me I had gone viral. Now a year later, I have lots of followers, and I cannot believe the atmosphere of the web site. I have only had two bad comments. The first said my scrambled eggs looked like crap, which they do. and the second was trying to be funny when I posted the Saturday breakfast that I always made for Martha. He commented that we at least knew what Martha had died from. He apologized many times for that, and I quickly for gave him.

This website has become a home for giving and caring. It is a wonderful thing.

Glen said he would supply the bottle if I got rid of the letters. I couldn’t see anything wrong with that, so we did it. A week later we got our first bottle. Martha was concerned that we were doing something illegal and would have problems.

Well, the next week a police car pulls into our driveway, and the officer comes to the door. He rings the bell, and with great trepidation Martha answers it. He ask if this is the Mitchell residence. She says yes, and he hands her a bottle of Jim Beam.

It is funny that the guy we got the original letter from claimed to only get a few bottles. Glen and I got fifty-six bottle. That was better than two cases of booze each.

I haven’t the term chain letter in the last fifty years.

I suspected my phone was the problem. So I tried troubleshooting and couldn’t find anything wrong. So the next step was to turn it off and back on to reset everything. I turned it off, and then back on. When it came up I tried calling again with the same results. So, I decided to call my next-door neighbor Jose. I dialed Jose and ended up with the same results.

All of a sudden, the answer came to me. The blue tooth connection to my hearing aid had turned itself off. TaDa! I restarted my hearing aid and called Jose again. He answered and I could talk to him. It turns out I could have yelled to him. He was at my front door. When I first called him and he didn’t hear a thing from me, he thought I was having trouble and came to my aid.

That is one of the advantages of living in the Willows. We look out for one another.

At a very young age I read a book about a boy playing hockey. I became fascinated with the sport. I read everything I could find in the local library on the sport. Then I discovered that I could listen to the Blackhaawks on radio at night, picking up the signal from the Chicago station. Johnny Gottsileg would announce the games, and I would eat it up. Oh, how I wanted to be a part of it. But that never happened.

My senior year in high school we had a very cold winter. The lakes in Garvin Park actually froze. I went down to the Salvation Armory store and found a pair of speed skates for a quarter. I bought them and headed for the park. It turned out to be a very frustrating experience. Let’s just sum it up to say it didn’t turn out like how I had imagined it in the playground of my mind.

I didn’t get to learn how to skate until I was thirty-one years old and living in Northern Illinois with an eight-year-old son who wanted to learn how to play hockey. If you have read other stories in my blog, you will realize that I ended up coaching hockey for 22 years. I guess my dream came true.