Aunt Genevieve

Yesterday (July 30th) at 8:50 p.m., one of my very favorite people passed away--my Aunt Genevieve.  She has been a good example and a good friend to me.  All those years with Mom here but not herself, I relied on Aunt Genevieve kind of like a mom.

Her life has been fruitful and long.  I hope I will do as well with the next 46 years of my life as she's done.  She's had such suffering for years that I would not insist that she stay here longer but I will miss her very much.    After 97 years, I am sure there are as many people to greet her in the Hereafter as there are those of us who will miss her here.

I loved this picture of Aunt Genevieve on Todd's Facebook page and so I "lifted" it for my blog.  It is a nice way to remember her, 'til we meet again.

The Birthday Bunch

Since my computer is limping along and all my pictures are resting safely in an external drive until everything is solved, I am reduced to stealing pictures.  :o)  It is pretty slick, too.  I lifted this from my friend QV. 

This is the March/April birthday bunch and we went out to lunch for our birthdays the past two years.  I think we may have even had a mid-year lunch, just to stay in practice.  This is a nice group of ladies. 

The idea came from something a speaker mentioned at our friend Sheila's funeral--that she and a group of women had gone to lunch for years since they shared the same month for their bithdays.  I mentioned this to Gloria and we both decided to implement that idea in honor of Sheila.  Gloria, Melanie and I almost share the same birthday and Diane is not too far from us in the same month.

Then, we kind of mixed that up and included some from March and April, probably to include Gail and Vickie, since they'd served with Sheila and me in the Relief Society presidency just before Sheila's passing. 

Other than Gloria, all these women were Swedish weavers with Sheila, too (although there are a couple of Swedish weavers left out, too). I think all our Swedish weaving has taken a nose-dive since Sheila is no longer the ring leader. 

Maybe I should dream up other "reasons" for lunch groups and keep them going, a different one every month, or something!  :o)  Maybe if I didn't have to cook up Young Women activities every time I turned around, I could drum up the energy for that. ;o)

Good night!

Anyway, I wanted to make sure this photo got in the blog so it could go in the blog book.

Surely it is time for a new post

Today, my brain is still drained from days and days of trying to rehabilitate the computers at my house.  We took the desktop to a computer guy but we opted to do some of the reinstallation ourselves (that "we" being "Just Me") and I did the work on my laptop.  A lot of trial and error on my part . . . .  There is still a lot of installation to do on this desktop.  Everyday I'm thinking of my former programs I now need to find somehow, somewhere and install.  About my desktop computer, all of my documents and pictures were saved, thank goodness, but it takes a while for me to find them.  All of my I-Tunes music is gone.  I hadn't thought about the computer guy needing to save that.  I guess I thought all of it was online rather than . . . duh . . . "downloaded" onto my computer.  Live and learn.

July is an hot month here.  (No surprise there, really, except that the spring was so cool and even early summer was uncharacteristically cool, so July has sneaked up on me.)  I feel like I am subconsciously trying to avoid m e l t i n g . . . . I need to go to my mother's house today and do some things.  However, I know the cooler is off.  When I go today, I will leave the swamp cooler on so I won't have such a mental block about working in there.  And so I will not melt. (P.S. I did melt yesterday at my mother's.  The heat had built up too much for the swamp cooler to take care of.  I'm trying again today.)

My daughter is into seventies music.  We listen to it on the radio in our car and when she hears a song she likes, she jots down the artist and song title and then she finds it online to hear it again.  There are times when a song will come on the radio and I am instantly whisked away to my teen years--just about the age my daughter is now.  Speaking of melting, the years just melt away . . . for a few minutes.

This has caused me to think a lot about music of any particular decade.  When I was younger, the local radio stations played the popular songs.  Will the kids of this decade have a shared set of songs that will define their decade?  It seems like everything is so individual today--each person listens to his/her own music.  It seems that today there are no "anthems of a decade"--at least none that a whole grade could agree on. 

Also, when I'm whisked back to my youth with those songs, I remember school.  We had grades seven through twelve in one school.  My class was the last year to graduate with that particular set up. My graduating class had seventy-nine kids in it and it was the second largest graduating class ever to graduate from my high school.  I knew many of the kids in the grades on either side of mine--five years ahead and five years behind.  There were about five hundred kids at the school at any given time. Today, the students in my children's grades are four times the size of my grade, and the two grades in a "junior high" have more students than my whole school did.  Those "junior highs" have just two grades at each school.  There are a lot of good things about the changes that have come about since I was in school in the Tri-cities.  However, I do not think you can match today that sense of knowing pretty much everyone in the whole school at any given time that I had back in the day.
    
I'm sounding old. Maybe that is what happens when a person has been m e l t i n g.

Speaking of school, we have less than a month before school starts here in the Tri-cities so there is that need to buy school clothes and start saving up money for school fees.  L and J will both change schools this year.  L and T will be at the same school--they have not been at the same school since elementary school.  I'm looking forward to finding out how that school works now that I have L there.  T isn't a big talker so I've remained in the dark about exactly how things work at that school.  One bright spot is that all three will ride the same bus for my last year of having all three in the public school system.

OK, now I need to go face Mom's house and hope it is cooler than yesterday.

When someone has her eye on you . . . .

When we eat around our counter, Rosie our dog perches on the back of the couch and her eyes just bore into the back of my husband as he takes each bite of food.  We can all be at the counter eating but she just sits and stares fixedly at him.  Here, he has turned around and is looking back at her, but usually she just sits exactly like she is in the picture during his entire meal.  I think this is a picture of optimism.  Rosie's stare-down will once in a while result in a snack at some point and she is willing to wait and wait in hopes of that one in a hundred chance.

My birthday cake recipe

I made a cake for myself for my birthday and I'm holding that cake, above.  The recipe, below, is for a cake pan but I did 1-1/2 times it for a sheet cake.  It is so good that I forget it does not have chocolate (I cannot eat chocolate).  So I thought I'd post the recipe with the picture.  It is one of my very favorite cakes.

Oatmeal Cake with Coconut Frosting

Cake

1 ½ cup boiling water 1 cup old fashioned oatmeal [not quick cooking]	Pour water over oats and set aside.
½ cup softened butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup white sugar	Cream together.
2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla	Add to creamed mixture and mix together.
1 ½ cup flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon baking soda	Combine dry ingredients in separate bowl. Add oatmeal mixture to creamed ingredients THEN add the dry ingredients to creamed/oatmeal mixture.  Pour into 9x13-inch pan sprayed with Pam.  Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Frosting

½ cup butter 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup evaporated milk	Boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.  Remove from heat.
1 teaspoon vanilla ½ cup nuts 1 cup coconut	Add to butter mixture.  Stir to combine.  Then spread over warm or cooled cake.

Note:  Recipe(s) may be “time and ½’d” to fit into a sheet cake pan.  In that case, reduce baking time to 20 or 25 minutes.