May and June 2017 Happenings, and Relay For Life Event, Poem “Smart”, and Ice Cream Maker

May 6th was the Deerfield Beach, Lighthouse Point, Hillsboro Beach Relay For Life event. This year Pompano Beach joined our event. It seems over the past several years it’s been more difficult to get people to want to organize and devote time to putting on this event which raises money for many functions of the American Cancer Society including cancer awareness, prevention, research, services provided to cancer patients and their families, etc. So having several cities join together seems to keep the event continuing and we get to meet new people and teams this way too. The weather was great this year, no rain thankfully. Bobby Rubino’s in Pompano Beach provided a delicious dinner of chicken, ribs, and other wonderful foods for the survivor dinner. We thanked them for their kindness and generosity. I walked the survivor lap and many other laps, I think I walked about three miles or so during the event. As always,, the luminaria ceremony when it gets dark is the most touching. Seeing all of these bags which only represents a fraction of the people who either are conquerors and won the battle with cancer, or lost the battle to cancer, really makes the reality of cancer touch our hearts. Like others there I have lost many people to cancer, and I have had it several times myself. So far, I have been one of the conquerors.

 I am still making my own breads, cookies, pasta, etc. and I am having lots of fun doing research looking for new recipes using ingredients I have on hand, or some that I want to try. I have some saffron and wanted to look for recipes using it and a friend of mine didn’t know I had some and she gave me a package so now I am looking for bread and other recipes using it. I made some bread the other day using fresh rosemary that someone gave me, it came out really great, it was a big hit with people I gave some to, and I made some adding garlic powder and dill to the rosemary, it was also delicious. I also made pasta for a lasagna I made and it tasted better than the store bought pasta.

I am still crocheting blankets for the NICU (Neo Intensive Care Unit) of a local hospital. I think I’ve been doing too much crocheting because my hands and wrists feel it, but I enjoy making them and it gives me something to do in my spare time. So far, I’ve donated 36 blankets. By doing this crocheting, and cooking and baking from scratch, I have not been doing other things like updating my website, adding links to older stories connecting them to the photo albums, etc. So, today on this rainy Sunday, I am working on my website and adding some more links. I already added about 40 links in stories a few weeks ago and I have about that many more to do. I plan on adding some more today and finishing this project in a week or two. Believe it or not, I am still working on 2011 links and stories. This is when I did my first and very extensive trip driving 12,000 miles from south Florida to northwest Washington State and numerous states and places between them.

 When I was at a local store the other day buying some more yarn for the blankets, I saw this plaque, I also bought a glass that says No All Who Wander Are Lost. I am planning on leaving sometime in July o another excursion. I don’t have all of the destinations planned yet and I might not until I am on the road. Most of my trip will be similar to previous years, visiting my friends in Texas and then spending about six weeks in Albuquerque both before and during the Balloon Fiesta. I am not sure if I will be attending and volunteering at the hot air balloon events in Shreveport, LA, and Longview, TX. I had fun last year at those events, but it was also 100 degrees and I had no electric hookups.

That is about all for now, I want to work on adding links in stories to the photo album for that location so my readers can see the photos I took at those places, such as Crater Lake, Mesa Verde National Park, Acoma Sky City, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and many more locations.

June 11, 2017 – I just finished adding links to all of my stories so that the albums of pictures I took are available to everyone to look at. At least as far as I know all albums are linked to a story, and hopefully the correct one. It’s been a time consuming but enjoyable task. I got to see pictures and read stories about places I got to visit and experience and people I met along the way. I forgot some of the experiences or pictures and it was really a special treat to experience them again. I have posted approximately 150 photo albums, that’s a lot of pictures. I think I have taken over 40,000 pictures since June 2011. No wonder I wore out my camera!!! And I have 290 stories posted.

What a blessed life I have, even with challenging life experiences that I have had during my lifetime. I am so grateful, all of my experiences and the people I have met and interacted with in any way have made me the person I am today and enabled me to have the life I have today. I admit that there have been times that I probably wasn’t grateful or very accepting at the time, but for almost 30 years I have continued to look for things to be grateful for… no matter what as Lois used to instill in me. You can read stories about Lois doing a search for her name on my website. She passed away in 1989 and she is still an influence in my life today, as are several other people.

I ordered a small ice cream maker the other day and it came yesterday. It makes 1.5 pints of ice cream, frozen yogurt, gelato, or sorbet at a time. I made cookies and cream and butter pecan ice cream so far, next is blueberry cheesecake ice cream. I used to have an ice cream maker that had a tub that had to be frozen to make the frozen dessert and if one batch was made I had to wait until the container froze again to make another batch. This ice cream maker is different. It is Cook’s Essentials Thermo-Electric Self Freezing Ice Cream Maker by Maxi-Matic so there is no waiting time to make additional batches. It doesn’t seem like 1.5 pints is much, but it’s 2 1/2 cups, and when I went to the grocery store this morning to buy ingredients for the ice cream, I saw that famous brands sell their ice cream in 1 pint containers.

Here is a Shel Silverstein poem that I really like, it makes me chuckle.

Smart – Poem by Shel Silverstein

My dad gave me one dollar bill ’cause I’m his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters, ’cause two is more then one!
And then I took the quarters and traded them to Lou
For three dimes– I guess he didn’t know that three is more than two!
Just then, along came old blind Bates and just ’cause he can’t see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes, and four is more than three!
And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs down at the seed-feed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them, and five is more than four!
And I went and showed my dad, and he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head–
Too proud of me to speak!

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