The very first store I walked into was a furniture store inside of a beautifully madeover cottage.  I knew the second I walked in that I was out of my league.  So I pretended to be one of the la-di-da ladies, dahling…told the women sitting behind the beautiful oak desk that I was looking for a lamp for my newly remodeled bedroom.  She took me in over the tops of her eyeglasses and I don’t think she fell for it one bit.  But I browsed anyway.  Holy cow.  I would never pay $250.00 for a stupid lamp.  I looked at them and oohed and awed properly, but no, it’s not quite the one I’m looking for.  Thankfully she doesn’t hang over me, she lets me alone.  I walk towards the back and this is where you pick out the fabric to go on the $2000.00 sofa or couch or loveseat that you pick from the front of the house.  Dear God.  Fabric costs a lot just to cover a piece of furniture.  I sauntered out after a bit and went to this fancy clothing store next door.  Their SALE items didn’t even make it below the $100′s.  I pretended to like a few pieces, even tried on a dress that was really pretty but cut too low for work, so I passed on it.  Talked to Willie the cockatiel in his cage.  I liked him, he kept whistling and he said all kinds of words. 

I then passed over to the Home and Bed Shop.  And here is where I completely messed up.  I found the bed quilt, the shams, the bed skirt and the decorative pillows that I’ve been trying to find for years.  There it was, all made up on a king sized bed.  I walked around and around that bed.  I knew it was way out of my price range.  It was just perfect.  The quilt is  a light sort of Seafoam green and it was just the right texture…not real thick, not real thin.  Very nicely made, you could tell it could be washed many times before wearing out.  Good stuff.  I’ve longed for a new bedroom ensemble for years but just never saw anything that caught my eye.  The other night, the dog was playing like she was digging a hole on top of the spread we have on the bed now and I scolded her.  Tim said, “This old thing?  She can’t hurt it!”  I knew then it was time for something new.  When the hubby notices, it’s time.

The lady who ran the place kindly questioned if I was interested in the price of the whole bed set.  So I said, “Of course, dahling, please do work up a price on the whole thing.”  Meanwhile, I’m melting in the smells of beautiful soaps on the counter and find myself piling several bars up there that I’ll get even if I don’t get the dang rest of it.

Believe it or not, the price was right.  I’d been pricing stuff for years that sort of piqued my interest, but never enough to spend the money.  But this truly was in my price range!  I couldn’t believe it!  Of course, I acted like, “Oh yes, that is definitely a good price, my dearey,” and she started my order.  I could have taken the stuff off the bed, she was all set to package it up for me, but no, I want it brand damn new.  It’ll probably be the last one I buy, haha.  I bought the soap and one of the decorative pillows on the spot.  Another decorative pillow will follow with the order.  All by itself it looks fancy on the bed.

So I sashayed out holding my new bag of goodies and danged it I didn’t near break my neck on a parking stump thingie that you pull up to when you park your car.  Don’t know the correct name, but it’s long and about five inches high and PAINTED BRIGHT BLACK AND YELLOW so you don’t miss it.  I stumbled on that thing and if anyone saw me, they probably thought the woman had thrown me out of the door.  Not to mention that in my fright I bleated, SHIT, WHAT IN HELL WAS THAT?!”  loud enough for my Callahan friends to hear. I turned around and gawped at it as if it had just popped up as I came out the door. So much for trying to make a poised, dainty exit, I blew that all to hell and back.  Aw heck, who am I fooling I thought to myself as I climbed into my dirty HHR that was sitting amongst BMW’s and Mercedes.  My car was probably as uncomfortable as me in those surroundings.  Give me the dirt roads and woods any day.

So maybe I’m not one of those fancy, rich people, I don’t really care.  I have a new look coming to my bedroom for the first time in years and I’m excited about it.  You can take the girl out of the country, but you just can’t take the country out of the girl.

Course I do.  She came over and made my entire vacation day.

She asked me why I hadn’t written anything in my blog lately.  I have no good excuse except I’m too busy at work now to do so.  LOL

So Connie, since you asked, I found something to blog about!

Connie is the wife of my brother Brian, who died in 1996.   She is the sister I never had.  I’m not positive, I’d have to check my diaries, but I believe she came into our lives around the time I was 12..13… somewhere in there. We lived in Miami at the time my brother met her in high school. I fell in love with her the first time I met her.  I think she realized that I needed a sister to show me and tell me things I didn’t know and couldn’t talk about with my mom.  You know how mom’s and daughters are about some things.   I wasn’t close to my mom until I got older and left home.   Connie coming into our lives was like having a bright shining star enter the room every time she’d step through the door.  She would put on make-up and let me watch and show me different ways to wear eye shadow, she showed me how to put on a bra the right way; not that I had any boobs, but I wanted to know if ever I did.. (Which I never did, haha, bras were useless on me).   I remember one night I heard her come into the house and I was in bed and she told my mom she had some old bras to give me that she thought I could wear, and I couldn’t wait to see what she’d given me.  I was grinning in my bed like I was someone!

We ended up moving back to Jacksonville and Brian came with us.  My oldest brother Leslie was in Korea. It seemed like every weekend Brian was headed back to Miami to see Connie.  He’d be singing, “Going back to Miami…going back to my girl!”  She eventually ended up in Jacksonville, they got married, and had two beatiful children.  But before then, she’d come spend the night with me, so she could be near Brian, but she always paid attention to me.  We made up our own song…”OHHH the gopher guts are sweeter and the beetle brains too… they’re shot with sugar, through and through!”  It was a cereal song tune that we put our own words to.  We’d sing it and laugh like hell.  She introduced me to beer and raw eges to make your hair shine.  We would dance to music and I’d try and follow her moves because she had so much rhythm.  She’d dance with her eyes closed, engrossed in the music. 

Connie and I always stayed close to this very day, even though my brother has been gone for almost 15 years.  So hard to believe.  I used to love to stop by their place after work before I went home just so I could see them.  She’d always pull out some snacks to munch on and the three of us would sit at the table in the kitchen and talk, even it was just for 30 minutes.  I can’t open a Triscuit box without thinking of those days, I mean it.   If I was ever upset about anything I could always run to Brian and Connie’s and they’d listen to me and let me cry.  Brian worked on my cars over the years until I met Tim, who can fix anything. I know Bri must have been relieved!   But I knew Brian would always help me out of a jam.  They both were there for my mom when she needed help.  They were the best couple I knew to this day.

I wish we could see each other more often, but we do talk on the phone as often as we can and I know I can always count on her to listen to me when I need a friend.

Connie….thanks for all the years…I love you immensely!  See you soon!  Doe

Cat's Maple Tree Tapping

Interesting, huh?  Looks cold and looks like a lot of work, but wow, how cool, I thought to myself.  I saved this picture to my screensaver.  Today she sends me this picture.  Now keep in mind, our weather here today in Florida is just beautiful, the sun is finally out and the wind is blowing a gale, and I can’t wait to get out in it…)

The Cars in the Yard Today

I looked at this picture and thought, “Wow, what an April Fools Day they are having!”  Then I noticed that odd shape sticking out of the front of the truck.  Emailed her about that…she said “They stand the wipers up so they won’t freeze to the windshields…better than trying to dig them out to warm up the car…”

Well, duh, now that I see that, it makes perfect sense.  Glad we don’t have to do that here in good old sunny Florida…

I proceed to ask her how her maple syrup making is going and  she tells me this and I quote…

“Well, let’s see, my maple syrup experience…where do I begin…We put out 15 taps in maple trees out to camp and in a week I had 35 gallons of sap.  My next part was boiling it down…where we have too much snow this year I couldn’t get to the fireplace.  So with my real smart intelligence that I have I set up two gas cookers in the shed out to camp (the ones used for deep frying a turkey).  I had one going real low to keep the sap hot and the other one boiling like hell, getting the water out of the sap…then I’d add the hot over to the boiling.  Do you know how long it takes to boil down 35 gallons of sap??? I DO!!!  I started at 1:30 p.m. and was still at it at 3:30 a.m., 13 frigging hours…and it was now down to only one gallon left…so I took it in camp and finished it off.  Took about another two hours to get it to 219 degrees…had my jars all ready to put it in.  By then I was so freaking tired…out of 35 gallons of sap I ended up with the grand sum of  5 DAM PINTS of syrup!! I call it liquid gold!!  Everyone has asked me for some…I tell them, “Are you for real!”

15 taps with hoses…$30.00

Trip to camp everyday…gas for car…$30.00

Propane gas to run 2 cookers 13 hours…$35.00

Candy thermometer – $5.00

Cheese cloth for straining…$4.00

Learning experience….PRICELESS!!!

I learned I’ll never do it again!!  So basically that is my maple syrup experience in a nutshell!!”

I had a really good laugh over this and just had to write it down.  Gee…I wonder…should I ask her if she’ll send me a pint of that liquid gold?  By Fedex?  I’d better not…I don’t really like maple syrup THAT much, I’m hooked on the cane syrup.

It didn’t last but a few seconds and I felt myself waking up.  I thought I was dreaming, which yes, I agree I was, so I willed myself back into the dream and in a few minutes, just as I was dozing off again, here came that tingly feeling, that feeling you get when “someone walks over your grave” and I was in the back yard again and I was saying to myself, “I did it, I did it!” and I floated around some more.  Both times things seemed a little blurry, it’s hard to explain, but at the same time, the colors of everything were magnified.  It’s like a TV screen that keeps going in and out.  The more I floated the more clear things became.  I could look back at the house and see the bedroom door and then turn around and see the whole backyard too.

The third time I woke up, (I never truly WOKE up), it was like I was back in the bedroom and I wanted to turn the stupid TV off so I could concentrate and go again, but I felt paralyzed to move, but I finally got away again and this time ended up in the backyard of the trailer we used to live in next door.  There were people sitting around in the yard when I floated in and they were looking at me like I was an alien.  When I reached the ground, my legs wouldn’t hold me up and I was trying to explain to them that I was sleepwalking.  My words were coming out really groggy.  They stood up to walk over to me and none of them were smiling and this scared me enough that this time, I did wake up.  All the way.  And try as I might, I could not go back to sleep again even though I wanted to, because I wanted to try it again.

Sure, go ahead and say I’m crazy, I don’t care.  It was fun as heck and I hope to be able to do that again.  Soon.  Tonight.  I want to float to somewhere I’ve never been before.  And No, I’m not on drugs.  LOL



I’ll be the first one to admit that I love to type.  It’s fast, easy and to the point.  Boom, zoom, it’s out there.  You don’t have to dot the i’s and you don’t have to cross the t’s.  However, I also like to write.  I like the way a pen feels in my hand and there are some great pens out there.  Yes, emails are wonderful, I absolutely cannot imagine life without emails now.  Best invention since white bread. 

I saw this past Christmas where more and more of us are getting away from handwritten notes and cards.  For years, I had trouble finding room to display all the cards I’d received.  I know that postage is pricey and ridiculous and we’re all in a crunch to save money and mailing Christmas cards is expensive.  I didn’t send near as many as I usually do.  But you know what?  I missed those handwritten cards.  I truly did. 

My birthday.  Thanks to Facebook I had birthday wishes from people that have never wished me a Happy Birthday or hadn’t in years because I mean, who can remember all those birthday’s anyway?  Get real!  But hey, look, there it is on Facebook!  It’s Donna’s birthday.  Shoot her a message.  It was great!  I loved it!  But you know what really meant the most to me and I didn’t even realize it so much until this year?  It was the few special handwritten cards that I did receive.  The joy of slitting that envelope to see what someone had picked out to send to me and what they had written in it to wish me joy on that day.  The ones you read and then press to your heart because they were just so darn sweet.  Yes, I enjoyed my “social network” cards, don’t get me wrong, I did.  I also realized that I had done the very same thing to other friends on their birthday – Facebooked or emailed them instead of sending a card.  It works, it’s great and I’m truly not dissing it.   I just think it is wrong, wrong, wrong to not teach children how to write in cursive.  I’m a little old fashioned that way, sue me.

You know what else?  200 years from now, or maybe not even that long, – handwritten letters may turn out to be worth money.  Can you imagine?  I mean look at the stuff on Antiques Roadshow that turn out to be worth a pile of money!  Stuff we or our parents had at one time and tossed out because they were old or ugly or we weren’t using them anymore.  I still grieve that I didn’t keep my Barbie and Midge, Ken and Skipper.  Dang things would be worth something now and I took good care of them too!  Shoot!!

So I’m saving my letters and maybe someone behind me will save them just for the heck of it, and maybe, just maybe, many years from now some tekky group that can’t even imagine  cursive writing will come across them and they might be worth more than just great memories to me.  Won’t THAT be a hoot…

The Dam Doll

This is a doll I had back when I was about 12 years old.  Back in the 60′s.  They were popular back then.  They were called Trolls and all my friends had at least one.  I also had the little ones with the different color hair.  I’m sure you can still buy them somewhere but I never see the original DAM dolls.  She was made by Thomas Dam and his family in Denmark.  She is about 7 inches high.

I never did name my doll.  I enjoyed calling her my Dam Doll.  I would say, “Has anyone seen my Dam doll?”  or,  ”I’m going outside to play with my Dam doll!” and then laugh like crazy.  Mom and Gram both knew why I was doing it and really didn’t say too much because sure enough, it said Dam right on the bottom of her feet!  I’d be sure to point that out if they got on to me about it.

You really have to admire the little dress I made for her.  It’s what you can now call “vintage”.  I cut her hair too.  It used to go down to her feet.  i was into shoulder length, I suppose.   I was always cutting my doll’s hair.

Sure wish I’d kept my original Barbie, Midge and Ken dolls.  I think they’d be worth a small fortune by now.   Story of my life…saved a lot of stuff from childhood and my teenage years but nothing is worth a lot of money.  I sure wouldn’t part with the memories though…

I’m looking forward to:  outside fires, a cane boil, lots of stews in the crockpot, leaves falling, and crispy skies, Thanksgiving, football games, Christmas, being with friends and family and shivering happily by the fire.  Singing, laughing, dancing…

And I’m really going to miss my sister in law picking flowers and putting them in my kitchen window.  Here is her last creation…

Sil's Pick of the Day

All day long this has played in my head.  I used to love this show.  LOL

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed.

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.

People yakkity yak a streak and waste your time of day
But Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And this one’ll talk ’til his voice is hoarse.
You never heard of a talking horse?

Well listen to this: “I’m Mister Ed.”

Railroad Street-Mattawamkeag, ME 1910

This weekend is Mattawamkeag’s 150th anniversary.  I would dearly love to be there.  My only consolation is my friend Cat is going to pick me out some memorabilia when she goes with her grandkids. 

Happy Anniversary Mattawamkeag, Maine!  I sure do miss you…especially in the summertime.  I wish I could relive just a few of the childhood memories spent there on summer vacations with Gram. 

one side of Mt. Katahdin