A Chicken Coop of Goodness

I arrived home just at 8pm this evening with high anticipation of some good TV. Little did I realize how much good TV was happening at 8 o'clock. I already had my DVR scheduled with the results show for Dancing with the Stars and the second episode of the current cycle of America's Next Top Model.

When I turned on the TV it was tuned to the Food Network and my favorite, Good Eats, was on and it was about waffles. How could I miss that?

Then I found out that it was Barry Bonds' last game with the Giants. I just had to watch that. So I had all four of my tuners going at once.

But then I suddenly remembered that Joanna had said Kid Nation was on tonight. I watched it last week but hadn't set a series recording. I abandoned Good Eats and flipped over to CBS. I tuned in after the chicken controversy but caught the water challenge and Michael's triumph at the town council meeting. I was so glad to see him get the $20k gold star. He deserved it so much more than the graffiti-drawing suck-up Greg.

ETA: I just tuned into Bionic Woman and, hello, John just might be right.

The Return of the Dance

Oh, I'm so excited that Dancing with the Stars is back. It is the most fun on TV. My favorite stars so far are Hélio Castroneves, the IndyCar driver, and Jane Seymour who I've loved since Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve.

I was a bit apprehensive when I saw that last year's profressional champion Julianne Hough was paired with Hélio. She is so good she deserves to last to the final. I didn't think to give him much of a chance so I was worried she wouldn't be around very long. But their foxtrot tonight was divine. Hélio was so elegant and smooth. I can't wait to see him dance more.

Jane is paired with Tony Dovolani who is one of my faves of the pros. They also danced the foxtrot and it was perfect dance for her. I'm not sure how she's going to with the Latin numbers. Can you believe she's 56?

Last night everyone was saying that the boxer Floyd Mayweather was going to be the toughest competition for the guys but he was awful. I felt so sorry for his partner while they were dancing. I was disapointed the judges didn't call him on how awful he was. At least they gave him the worst scores of the night.

The new pro Mark Ballas (who is paired with Cheetah Girl Sabrina Bryan) is too adorable for words. I'm glad he got an excellent partner (they rocked the cha-cha last night) so he'll be around for many weeks to come.

SepteRemember: John #8

In 1984, my older brother Mike got married in Idaho. John and I were in high school and were so excited to go, perhaps because we took our exams and got let out of school early to travel there by car. The car we took was the little red Toyota Tercel, or the Toy as we called it. There was just enough room in it for Mom, Dad, me and John.

John and I had saved up to buy our first ever Walkman for the trip. I don't remember what tapes we took along but we kept hearing one song over and over on the radio: True Colors by Cyndi Lauper. Hearing that song sure takes me back to the cramped backseat of the Toy and fighting with John over whose turn it was to listen to the Walkman.

We did some pretty cool stuff on that trip. If you happen to be going anywhere near southern Idaho (like Yellowstone), I highly recommend you go to Craters of the Moon National Monument. Now that's some odd landscaping. However, I wouldn't recommend the slow drive through Route 12 north of there where all you see for miles and miles are trees and waterfalls (and more waterfalls). Okay, some people (Dad) might like it, but for me it got rather tiring. I was happy to get back to civilization.

SepteRemember: Mom #8

One of the longest-lasting memories I have of my mom is the letter she wrote to us kids expressing how disappointed she was in us and our lack of interest in doing our chores. I think I may have been in junior high at the time or possibly younger. I remember crying and crying about it. I think I could've withstood a spanking better than those pointed words on the page (carbon copy, I think). I found that letter years later and still felt so guilty and sad.

Squawk!

That's just stupid of them to vote off Chicken. That Ashley is worthless. She and her huge breasts and ugly lip piercings should've been outta there. Or the most-annoying-so-far Peih-Gee (or PG). I thought for sure she'd be first one out. You know how the tribes love to get rid of those early in-your-face, let-me-tell-you-what-to-do "leaders", especially those with a high, whiny voice.

I was disapointed in Frosti's performance in the challenge. I expected him to fly over those walls seeing as how he's a practitioner of Parkour. (btw, he's orginally from Traverse City and is, interestingly, half Russian/half Japanese)

I just love Courtney, the ultra-skinny, platinum blonde New York City waitress. Her interviews are hilarious.

TP to the HC

Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there something seriously and inherently wrong with using Handel's Hallelujah Chorus to sell toilet paper?

SepteRemember: John #7

I don't like to drive and haven't from the very beginning. As John is only a year younger than me, I was particularly enthusiastic about him learning how to drive and getting his license. So, of course, he could drive me around.

We had a couple cars at the time, one of which was a full-size Chevy van. John's a pretty good driver but for some reason he kept veering to the right side of the road. I asked him what was going on and he said he was trying to keep the steering wheel straight. I looked over and sure enough the horizontal supports on the steering wheel were askew which made driving like an airplane pilot a bit of an adventure. He thought he had to have them parallel to the ground.

Stay on the road, John!

Happy Birthday, John!

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday

Misery is in the air
People dying everywhere

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday

Now you've lived another year
Surely death is drawing near (but)

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday

You are now entering your 40th year of life. Congratulations on making it this far.

SepteRemember: Mom #7

When I think back on all the birthday presents I've received from my mom perhaps the most memorable one was what she sent to me in Barcelona. My birthday is often near Easter and she wanted to send me something that didn't weigh very much and therefore wouldn't cost too much to ship. So her ingenious solution was to send some marshmallow peeps. If I remember right, they were the yellow kind. She also sent a tape of a Tigers game she had recorded from the radio so I could experience a bit of home while I was in baseball exile.

SepteRemember: Mom & John #6

This is one of my favorite photos of our family. I was too little to remember sitting for this photo session but from this shot it sure looks like we had a lot of fun. Well, I look a bit mesmerized. And John seems awfully interested in that funnel. I bet there's candy inside. Mom looks a lot like her sister Joyce in this photo. Joyce married my dad's brother Dave so their girls are our double cousins. I always thought that was pretty cool.



From this footnote to the proceedings it look as if Dad was:

1. 1) really tuckered out,
2. 2) suffering from narcolepsy, or
3. 3) hamming it up as usual.

And for some reason, I don't appear that amused.

SepteRemember: Mom #5

While I'm pulling out the old photos I just had to include this one of my mom when she was a girl. Aren't those curls awesome?


She still likes having curly hair. I remember (not so fondly) our forays into home perms when I was in high school. For some reason, mine never came out like the box showed. And boy were they smelly! Mom sure put up with a lot for us girls.

Mom goes to the hair salon nowadays. I've sworn off perms and other curling mechanisms. I did henna my hair red for many years. But after seeing some white hairs recently I've let my natural color grow out just to see what it looks like.

Here's a couple photos from this week of my mom with her mom and her birthday candles in Pennsylvania.

SepteRemember: John #5

Here are a couple other pictures of little John. Isn't he sweet? These are from 1974. He turned six that year.

The first one is John with his dad (nice beard!) and grandpa: three generations. John is the youngest of six as is Dad. I don't know about Grandpa. I don't think he had that many kids in his family. At this time Grandpa was living in Virginia and we were up in Michigan. This may have been the trip where he moved up north to live with us.


Grandpa moved not only himself but his TV too. We didn't have one before then so you could often find us kids hanging out with Grandpa in his room with our eyes glued to the tube.

This second photo is from Carolyn's birthday party in June 1974 when she turned 9. That is not Carolyn's midrift. I doubt Mom would've let us wear something like that. Mike was the only dark-haired one of us six kids. I wonder if he ever felt odd about that. Knowing him he probably just thought that made him special. Doesn't he look like he's up to something? John looks like he's eaten a tad bit too much birthday cake.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

A really really bad poem in honor of my Mom's birthday today:

Happy Birthday to my mum
She and Dad's where I come from
Tho' she's doesn't squeal and cry
When we say hello or bye
I always know she cares a lot
So let her never be forgot
(or her soup of yummy corn)
on this day that she was born

I hope you're having a lovely birthday wherever you are.

SepteRemember: Mom #4

Mom had to work hard to feed all us growing kids (and Dad) while I'm sure she would've rather been doing things other than slaving away in the kitchen. Dad loves to garden and we would grow lots of corn, peas, beans and tomatoes, among other things.

A lot of my memories of Mom are preparing those veggies for canning and freezing. I never liked to be out in the hot sun with the bugs biting me so I was able to whine my way into helping to snap beans or husk corn and help Mom freeze them. We'd have an assembly line of water to blanch the corn still on the cob while the sink would be full of cold water with drainers ready for the cooled off cobs. When I was old enough I got to help with cutting the corn off the cobs. That can be tricky! Ah, the joys of homemade frozen corn. One of my mom's still oft-requested meals is her chicken corn soup made with that juicy, milky corn.

Mom also made homemade spaghetti/pizza sauce and ketchup to store in her walk-in pantry. We would often come home from school to the house smelling of long-cooking tomato sauce as an electric kettle of ketchup would be bubbling away on the counter.

The whole family would be involved in food collection. We'd load up the family van and take trips over to nearby orchards to pick cherries and peaches and pears. While Mom would can most of the peaches, she'd always save some out for peach cobbler. And the same was true for the cherries. Watch out for the pits!

Our area was famous for pickles. They even called the raw cucumbers growing out in the fields "pickles". Mom would make pickles at home of the dill variety but my favorite was her lime pickles. She'd go down to the pickle shed where they sorted them for size and quality and would bring home the big ones that were due to be discarded. We'd peel them and slice them lengthwise into long strips removing the seeds as well. They looked like little canoes. After the pickling and canning, they'd get almost translucent and so crispy. Yum, yum, yum.

What were your favorite homemade foods when you were little?

SepteRemember: John #4

My dad's sister's daughter got married in the summer of 1972 and requested that John and I be her ring bearer and flower girl. I'm sure we were very excited and not that well-behaved but someone else will have to report on that as I don't have really any memory of it myself.

The traditional family story of this event that everyone loves to tell is that John fell asleep during the reception in the nave of the church under some coats. I'm sure he was just worn out from all that ring bearing.

SepteRemember: Mom & John #3

One of my favorite things about my family is that we always took a lot of family trips. This picture is from the summer of 1972 when we visited historic Williamsburg. Poor Mom and John got put in the stocks for being bad. (left to right: some stranger, John-3, Mike-8, Carolyn-6/7, Mom-36, me-5, Dad-37)

If you look closely you'll see I'm holding my birthday present from that year. I was taken to the the toy department and had the opportunity to pick out whatever I wanted ("within reason" I'm sure Dad said) and I chose a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh. I still have that sad bear in a box at home. He took some damage even yet that summer when John and Mike threw him into the pool at camp. At least that's what I remember.

SepteRemember: Mom #2

I celebrated my sixth birthday in the cold house in the valley. My mom made me a super cool cake in the shape of a cat. That's her with the fancy cuffs.



I don't have a lot of specific memories of helping out in the kitchen when I was that age but I do love to cook so I bet I was always under Mom's feet while she was trying to get supper on the table.

I've always been a fan of cats as well. One of my first memories is of playing with the cats by the back door of our house in Virginia. Supposedly I would get up very early and go outside to be with the cats.

SepteRemember: John #2

We moved to Michigan when I was five and John was not quite yet four. The first house we lived in was part of an old farm in a valley. The house was pretty small for all eight of us. In fact, my parents' bed couldn't fit upstairs so they had to sleep in the living room. It got really cold there in the winter and we'd run downstairs to the wood stove to get dressed in the morning.

There was a big barn by the house that I'm pretty sure was off limits for me and John but I'm also sure my older brother got all us youngers into trouble many times for playing in it and climbing up into the haylofts.

Years later, John and I would ride our bikes over there because of the valley. We loved coasting down the big hill, pass the Vickers' house, and then pumping furiously to get up the next hill, just to coast back down again.

SepteRemember: Mom #1

Mom always prepared the bulletins every week for the church services and the church newsletters every few months or so. She'd create stencils on her electric typewriter then run copies off on a mimeograph machine. The ink couldn't dry fast enough so would often bleed from one copy to another. One of us kids would be drafted to stand by the machine and insert scrap paper in between the copies. It got hot and smelly but it was a fun challenge to be fast enough to get the scraps in before the next copy shot down onto the stack.

After printing there was always sorting the scraps out from the newsletter sheets and collating. Mom would put stacks of each page around the dining room table and we would run around it collecting one page from each stack. Then we would staple and attach mailing labels. It was quite the industrious printshop and mailhouse. Of course, it helped having six kids.

SepteRemember: John #1

John is about 18 months younger than me. One of my first memories of John is sitting together by the side of the road waiting for the school bus to deliver our older siblings back from their day away from home. We would play in the dirt and hang out by the mailbox of our rural red brick multistorey house in Virginia. The olders would jump off the bus and we'd all run inside for an after-school snack.

It's possible I'm making most of that up as I was probably only four.

Do You Remember...September?

September means a lot of things. The sidewalks loosen up as the tourist population decreases. Kids and teachers go back to school. Football starts up again.

For me, it means the birthdays of two of my favorite people in my family: my mom and my younger brother. I'll be posting some memories of them throughout the month.