I am afraid my husband’s off-world origins are beginning to emerge in his progeny.
’bout the cutest thing ever though, isn’t she?
My alien granddaughter
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What I was doing 25 years ago today
Yep – having a baby. Our baby, who is now 25 years old, in the Army Reserves, living in Georgia with her husband.
When I had Lauren, our life was pretty rough. Earlier that same year, Larry had broken his knee [again] in a motorcycle accident and he had been out of work ever since. We were leaving the house we had planned to buy and scrambling to find something else. We weren’t being evicted, but it was only a matter of time, so we decided to take the initiative ourselves. The owners were not being real reasonable with us anyway, raising the price [it was worth more because of work we had done on it] and the interest rate among other things. And we owed them a couple grand in back rent, because not only had Larry been out of work, but the tenants had moved out owing us a couple months of their rent and utilities. It was a mess and we never did pay them back what we owed them, something I will always feel badly about.
We found a trailer that we could afford and moved it over here, on the farm, where 25 years later, we still live, though in a much bigger house than we had back then.
The point of all that is to say that life was very stressful right about then. My pregnancy had been a horror show of illness and feeling so terrible that I was sure they would find out I had a fatal condition and that I would die moments after giving birth. Two weeks after she was born, we moved into the new place with no running water, until the following April. [Larry’s Mom, bless her crazy mother-in-law heart, came down twice every week and got all of my laundry, which she took home, washed, dried, folded and returned all neatly sorted by person.] The only thing that felt sane to me were moments like the one in this picture, when I was holding my girls, playing with them or feeding Lauren in the middle of the night. The middle of the night feedings were always a favorite time for me with both girls – quiet, dark, peaceful.
Matters improved as the months went by – we got things squared away in the new place, Larry went back to work, I got everything put where it belonged and finally, we got the well dug and the water turned on. I had to do my own laundry again. I thought about pretending that we still didn’t have running water, but a well digging rig in your yard is not easy to hide.
25 years ago today, I was a Mom for the 2nd time.
Squash is what I got
So instead of Pumpkin Bread, we have
Squash Bread
3 cups all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup regular oats
2 cups sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
Mix all of that together in a big bowl
Throw in on top:
3 generous cups pureed squash [you can use pumpkin if that is what you’ve got]
2 eggs
2 egg whites
1 3/4 cups lowfat buttermilk
1/4 cup oil or melted butter
Mix it all up until blended and decant into 3 greased large bread pans or 9 little ones.
Bake at 350 for 45 min to 1 hour – until toothpick comes out clean. Remove from pans and
cool on wire rack.
This is fairly low fat stuff, which is my intention. Now that I am doing WW instead of Atkins, I can BAKE which I haven’t been able to do for the last 5 years. I still have to watch my carbs, but a slice or two of this is going to be just fine. And wow, is it good!
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"Just when I think I am out
they drag me back in!”
If you could see my face right now, it looks exactly like Al Pacino in the Godfather III. Really!
OnPoint has sent me an email to say they have a project for me beginning the 26th. Guess I am not unemployed anymore.
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Squash Wrangling
Since sometime in August, my kitchen has been inhabited by an ever changing group of pails. Larry brings the pails in,filled with various offerings from the garden which I am supposed to turn into preserved foods for our winter sustenance. We aren’t out on the prairie and will certainly survive on the offerings found at Price Chopper and Super Wal*Mart, but food we grow and put up ourselves is always more satisfying than the stuff we bought at the store.
I have already run through beans, beets, summer squash, sweet and hot peppers and enough tomatoes to entirely fill a 1967 VW Beetle. Now we are down to winter squash. We’ve been eating them right along and the discovery of a recipe for pumpkin sausage soup, which I modified to use squash, depleted them somewhat more. Anyone who parked their vehicle in our driveway for more that few minutes went away with some squash in there and I have plans to take some to my sister’s next week.
Still, I had a an awful lot of them sitting there, so I decided today that I had to deal with them. Here they are in the sink, waiting their fate. I washed and and peeled [just the Sunshine squash gets peeled – the skin is too thin after it is baked and it all crumbles into the flesh, so I just peel it beforehand] 
and split and seeded and roasted and cooled and scraped and packaged and froze 4 different kinds of winter squash [squashes?] I ended up with 8 quart bags for the freezer and another quart plus that I am going to use tomorrow for squash bread. I was pretty proud of all my efforts. I had saved some fresh ones to take to my sisters and didn’t quite get all the spaghetti squash done, so I was down to 1 5 gallon bucket in the kitchen, a season low. 
Larry came home from work tonight and saw the packages on the counter, having their final cooling before being put in the freezer. He said “Oh great – can I bring in the rest of them?”
REST OF THEM??????
“Yep – I have 3 more pails of them down in the garage.”
*cue sound of me jumping out of high building*
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”
Oh never mind – we live in a one story house!
