Just when I thought I couldn’t lug another watering can to another hanging planter, the skies opened up today. Thanks to my pal Charlotte who probably sent it our way from Ireland. She was talking about expecting rain there last week.
I love walking around in weather like this. It’s not pouring rain, we are having spurts of rain. I was hand pulling weeds as I walked around earlier as the earth was now damp instead of holding those buggers in like cement.
We went over to my father-in-law’s yesterday to give him some belated birthday gifts. When you don’t know what to get, get a basket of food. Older people love that. Brian had gone with me to the store and we picked out a few things we knew his dad liked but probably rarely bought as a treat. We all looked nice, I even wore a new aquamarine colored skirt, a neat crochet type top and pretty shoes and beads hoping we were taking his dad out to eat. No, as usual, he didn’t want to go out. We ended up at Boston Fart-ket, I mean Market ( that food made us so gassy) and we brought him a platter back and he ate all by himself. Dad-o was trying to push some 20 yr old Estee Lauder make-up off on me that had sat on the back of a toilet all those years. What a nice gesture, like I am only good enough to offer old stuff to, but he won’t say I look nice.
We also stopped in the 90 degree heat and bought him a large, beautiful pot of golden dahlias and a smaller pot of marigolds. Sometime this summer, we will paint the trim on his porch too. Our other gifts were a wheelbarrow and a shovel that dad-o wanted.
Later dad-o told Brian to go check out the ’tiles in the bathroom’. Hmmm….did he finally Mop&Glo the small floor? No, he got taken in by an infrommercial that was hawking tile restoring stuff. The damn grout he was restoring is suppose to be terra cotta colored! I don’t know if he ruined what he did or not but it has a milky white coating over it now. Instead of worrying about stuff like that, he should get his yard tidied up. Hire someone-save your money. Talk about eccentric.

Are there any types of designs that you won’t stitch?
Because I do charity stitching for Love Quilts, I have done almost every kind of design from Precious Moments to flowers. I think the Precious Moments are cute, but I wouldn’t do them for myself, maybe for Tori if she asked.
Computer generated charts can be the pits sometimes if the person who did the chart didn’t adjust the colors correctly. I bought one of Rose from Titanic on eBay and started to do her only to find that her face was gray! That was a waste of money. If I ever try to do the design again, I have a lot of color fixing on it.
I also probably wouldn’t do a design that I have seen dozens of times on the internet. I won’t name the designer, but these are usually of elegant ladies. If you love them and do them, that is wonderful, but I am quirky, I like things that are a bit different. At least do them on different color fabric than what the designer suggests or change the colors to make it your own.

Jessica Savitch was a popular news anchor in the late 70s-early 80s until her untimely death from being trapped in an over turned station wagon that had ended up in a canal in New Hope, PA. Personally, I can’t go in that area without thinking about Philly’s very own ‘Golden Girl’.

“A native of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Jessica Savitch began her broadcasting career at age 14, working on a radio rock show for teenagers. While earning her degree in the television-radio department at Ithaca College, she was an announcer for the College’s television station, WICB, and worked in radio at Rochester’s WBBF. After graduating in 1968, she joined WCBS radio in New York City. She moved to television at KHOU in Houston and in 1972 became the news anchor at KYW-TV in Philadelphia.”

The tv movie about Ms. Savitch (1995) starring Sela Ward was on Lifetime this morning. She really was a wonderful news anchor and I remember admiring her when she anchored in Philly and was not surprised when she went on to national fame.
I know of the house in Kennett Square where Ms. Savitch lived with her family before her father died and her mom moved the family to Margate, NJ. For some reason I thought she went to Kennett High School, so I guess I just forgot that she moved away from here when she was about 12. I am sure she used the same building as Sean if she didn’t go to Catholic school. I’ll have to look in her bio sometime. She’s like one of this area’s most famous residences, right up there with the Wyeths. I am sure she traveled down our road many a time.

Jessica Savitch-gone 22 yrs. It’s hard to believe.

Not a happy scene from Ladder 49. 

I got my hair ‘touched up’ and the stylist thought it would be interesting to see how my hair looked ironed since she does that to her own hair! Man, is it straight! BTW, this is what happens when you take your own photo. I would say to hold your chin up, unlike me.

It was Bri and my follow-up visit today to check out our bloodwork from last week. I was pretty good all day until an hour before our appointment. The weigh in is the worse to me. I was feeling bloated all week and nothing fit right. Bri and I went in together to see the PA (physician’s assistant) and held our breath. I guess you generally know how you feel most of the time. Well my cholesterol was about 146 but my triglyerides were again borderline high. The good news is that my liver function tests were normal. Thank goodness! The PA didn’t think I needed to get the AMAs (anti-mitrochrondrial antibodies) checked if the LFTs were in the normal range. She will send them along to the GI doc for evaluation.
What’s really excellent is that Brian’s cholesterol and triglyerides came down quite a bit from last year but are still higher than they should be. It’s the fish oil people! He’s been taking fish oil capsules for about 6 months. I should take it. I just don’t want to take 1,000 mgs of it. He says it gaves him tummy trouble sometimes. That I don’t need.
If we can work on the above and throw some exercise in there, we are doing pretty good for middle-agers. I have a few more doctors to see this summer-gyn, dentist, eye doctor, but I have to keep optimist about those upcoming visits and just get through them.

Not exactly the best documentary to watch after you’ve eaten the food scorned by the producer of Super Size Me. Morgan decided to eat at McDonald’s for 3 meals each day for an entire month. He wanted to see if a court case against McDonald’s (by two teenage girls) was worth sueing this world force fast food restaurant for. Morgan threw up after he finished his first ‘Super sized’ meal. Morgan kept eating and eating. He went from being a healthy 30 something man who weighed 185 to a sickly guy who weighed 209 pounds. His liver was ailing badly. His cholesterol was through the roof. As a footnote at the end it said it took him only one month to put on 24 pounds and 15 months to get it off.
Is this more than a wake up call for so many of us? This guy was consuming tons of sugar along with the massive doses of fat.
I have to admit I like a fast food burger maybe once or twice a month. I could go for pizza over burgers anytime. I prefer the broiled Burger King Jr. Whoppers. I like McDs fries better. My favorite is Wendy’s Crispy chicken sandwich. I am overweight, but I have been around the same weight for years. My blood pressure is good (usually) and my cholesterol was borderline high last year. Brian’s was high. We are going to the doctor tomorrow to see what our bloodwork shows. Always scary to me.
One of the doctors said it’s okay to eat at these kind of restaurants once in a while. Sometimes it’s just too easy to drive on through and get a sack of fat. But I have to say this was an eye opener. I didn’t look when the man who drank 4 gallons of soda a day was getting a gastro bypass operation.
I say eat sensibly and move your butt by gardening, walking and doing exercises. That’s the only way to be fit. I should live by my own words.

Cotton candy pink petunias. 

My ‘crop circle’ of baby flowers. The wildflowers are closest to the middle. The next row is a strong showing of zinnias. This is partially shaded by our old chestnut tree. Incidently, we use to have a satellite dish here and had a hunk of cement in the middle of the yard there, hence the garden. I have a dish of colored stones and plastic do-dads in the middle that I try to pass off as a bird bath.

Glorious lilies-they remind me of a sunset.