No Mixing

Some people will think I'm making this up, but I never tasted a casserole until I went to college.  No mixing the food before eating. It didn't seem unusual; that's just how it was.  My dad didn't believe in them.  In fact, he referred to them as "damn" casseroles, using the same tone of voice as describing Utah Fishermen.  His thoughts were that a good cook didn't have to throw stuff in a pot and mix it all together.

There were a few more eating rules, such as:

1-Meat, potatoes and vegetables for the meal, but they needed to be spaced so as not to touch each other.
2-Gravy could go on the mashed potatoes but not usually on the meat, except at Thanksgiving.
3-One should apologize if one should accidentally get a drop of gravy on the edge of the gravy bowl.
4-Anyone who actually put the gravy spoon to rest IN the accidental drop of gravy on the edge of the gravy bowl was considered so insensitive as to probably not be invited back.  The rest of us knew better.
 
5-Cheese was not put on the dinner plate.  It was pre-cut in a plastic Tupperware container and was put on a smaller saucer that was also used for the bread, which also was not put on the dinner plate.
6-Jam had to be so thick as to rival the consistency of half-setup cement, and the more sour the better.
7-Place settings were done quite properly, forks on the left, etc.
8-A separate plate or dish was used for dessert.
9-Whipped cream had to be handmade, none of that Cool Whip stuff or Spray Cream.
10-Food was passed from right to left.
11-Baked potatoes were to be scooped out with a spoon before eating and the shells were not to be put back with the uneaten baked potatoes.
12-Nothing was served from a pot on the table.

The mid-day meal began at noon.  The table was cleaned up, leftovers put away and dishes washed, dried and reshelved by 12:15.  If you missed that window, you wouldn't have known we had eaten.

I gave up trying to maintain all the rules when I was raising my family.  If they got Campbell's soup warmed in a microwave and served in a paper bowl with some toast, they considered it a warm home-cooked meal.  One can live indefinitely while still using paper plates, paper cups and plastic utensils.  I'm not proud of it, but can tell you it's possible.

When I went to college, a roommate made a casserole.  I was hesitant and felt just a tad disloyal as I tried my first bite. Wasn't good, wasn't too bad. That's still my take on casseroles.

The Big Box

I remember the Christmas that my dad took me out to one of the old sheds, one rarely used that once had a bat in it (the flying kind) which cured any searching-for-presents virus I might have had.  He pulled out a big box, about five feet long by four feet high and 9 inches wide.  I could not believe my eyes nor contain my joy when from the box, he pulled out a brand new bicycle and proceeded to assemble it!

It was blue, and wonder of wonders, it was a 2-Speed bike, unheard of at the time.  The lower speed was for going uphill and the higher one for picking up speed going downhill.  It looked almost exactly like this one, but without the back carry-stuff-on-it bar:

That thing took me more miles than Alladin's magic carpet.  It was used daily in the summer to go get the cows, pass them up to block off the McCullough's driveway, then pass them up again to ride them fast into the corral.  It took me to the store, to Colleen's house, to softball games.  It got crepe paper streamers weaved in it's spokes to ride in Clifton's summer parades.

I do not remember it ever having a flat tire, though it must have.  I do remember crashing it once.  I was on my way home from the store and on the downhill run past the canal where you pick up significant speed, so much so that it's almost impossible to slow down enough to be safe.  All would have been well except that a danged snake was crawling across the road and my bike ran right over it!  It traumatized me so much that I lost control and took a bad spill on the asphalt.  My pants got ripped and my knee was dripping blood, but the worst part was that the handle bar turned completely sideways and there was an ugly scratch on the right handlebar.  I limped home and thought for sure my dad would kill me, but he didn't.  He just straightened out the handlebars and life went on.

Happy Christmas Eve!

Yikes

There's an old country performance with a "That's Good/No, That's Bad" routine.  We kind of had that here at the home this week.

Sunday I woke up with the flu Nik had last week so stayed home from church.  About noon I heard Kyle in the kitchen saying "Sh**!" Kyle usually doesn't talk like that, for sure around me at least, but I was too sick to say anything and truth be known, I've said it myself from time to time, though I keep trying not to.

Shortly thereafter, he came running into the living room where I was resting and said, "FIRE! WHERE'S THE FIRE THINGEY?"  I told him it should be in the broom closet and dragged slowly off the couch.  By the time I reached the kitchen, he was spraying it inside the furnace closet in the vicinity of the breaker box.  It did put out the fire.

I was too drained to get scared or angry; my main thought being, "Boy, this is going to be expensive"...sort of like the plumber we had to call in last week when the kitchen drain wore through and collapsed in on itself.

Kyle told me the power had gone off in his room so he was going to check the breaker.  Before he slid open the door to the breaker/furnace area, he noticed a light and wondered why he hadn't seen that before.  When he opened the door, there were flames shooting out from a plug.  Now this plug had apparently been hanging from the ceiling in there for decades and none of us had ever noticed.  I don't even want to know how it ties into the system.

Jason came right over and checked it out, ran to Lowe's for a plug end and repaired it.  So far so good.

It dawned on me a while later that if I hadn't had the flu, I wouldn't have been home to respond to Kyle's question about the fire extinguisher and who knows what could have happened, especially since the flames were in the same area as the gas furnace.

When it comes to Guardian Angels, we must have several.

I Do

Remember when you were a kid and got swinging so high you were sure you were going to go "over the top"?  I do.

Remember when you got pushed so hard by somebody that you flew out of the swing entirely and landed on your back on the ground, knocking the air out of you so hard you thought you'd die for sure?  I do.

Remember getting your fingers pinched in the chains so tightly you thought your fingers might come off? I do.

Remember twisting round and round until the chain/rope wouldn't turn one bit more, then letting go, unspinning so fast the world was a blur, then spinning back up and repeating the pendulum motion until the swing just stopped--but your equilibrium didn't?  I do.

Remember standing on a wooden swing and moving your knees to pump you up faster, standing there with wiggly legs sure you were going to slip and fall on your back and knock the air out of you so hard you thought you'd die for sure?  I do.

Remember swinging in those big farm tires that were so uncomfortable that no matter how you got situated, you were miserable...that and the smell of too much rubber next to your nose?  I do.

Remember when your desire to swing, low or high, changed to a serious case of nausea just watching someone else swing?  Maybe you're too young, but I do.

Remember holding onto a rope, sitting on a board, swinging from a tree out over water?  I do not...nor have I ever regretted it.   It ranks right up there with skydiving or bungee jumping.

Who Goes There?

One day (of course at night on a Saturday) the lens fell out of my glasses.  Being blind as a bat, I held the missing lens in place the best I could with one hand and used the other to drive to the nearby Shopko.  The optical shop was closed but they don't have a wrought iron gate, so their displays were still available.  I was searching through them for one of those little tiny screwdrivers that I buy and never find again, looking a little like Sherlock Holmes working a case, when someone called out a friendly, "Hi, Kay!"  I figured if they knew my name, I should say "Hi" back and did so.  Without my glasses, I don't recognize my own face in a mirror so I pretended to be looking at the display with rapt attention, which of course I was.

When she got closer, I saw it was my good friend and neighbor, Belle.  I've known her for a quarter of a century.  She raised Kyle from when he was a baby until he was well into grade school.  She was such a good babysitter that he (and many others) would stop in and visit with her on their way home from school years after.  He still stops and gives her a hug now and then.  Anyway, I explained my dilemma and she laughingly helped me find a little screwdriver.

THUD!

I've debated whether or not to come clean, but figured why not? The few Cliftonite people who read my blog probably already know about it, and surely no namesake still survives.

My dad named his cows (and their names just might have been the same as some of the women in town whose personalities and traits may have had some semblance to certain said women).  It seemed perfectly normal to me and I thought my friend's dad must have been a little strange, as their cows were all named "Cow". I questioned almost nothing my dad ever did or said...other than that one time when I learned my lesson.

There was one cow that was a bit high strung. I'm sure she far surpassed her namesake, especially as time went on.  She always made me very nervous, staring me down on a regular basis.  Dad knew about this and told me to stay away from her the best I could, advice I took quite seriously.  One day, however, I was stuck in the middle of the corral, boots on, mucking in the manure, when I found myself unavoidably in the same general area as this bovine. I was trying to hurry as fast as bow-leggedly possible when she gave me a look that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  All I seemed to lack at the moment was a red cape.

Pure adrenaline shot through my entire body.  In one second, I learned cow language and the words she screamed were: "I hate you and I am going to kill you...right now!"  I was a good ten paces from the fence but covered them all in about five seconds flat, even leaving one of my boots right where it got stuck, finishing in stockinged foot.  (At times like these, you don't care about such details.)  I hit that fence at full speed, second rung from the top.  If I had had five more seconds to build up speed, I could have cleared the thing like an Olympic high jumper.  At almost exactly the same moment my foot hit that rung, she smashed into the fence right below me, THUD!

I don't remember going back for the boot, but my dad took her to the auction the very next day.

I REMEMBER A HOLSTEIN NAMED ANNIE

WHOSE “HOMING DEVICE” WAS UNCANNY;

SHE WAS CRAZY AND MEAN,

A WILD MILKING MACHINE

AND WAS ALWAYS CHASING MY FANNY!

Yoooohoooo

Teeley, Kyle and I were watching it rain the other night and noticed Swirl outside 30 feet away playing under the swingset. Tee opened the door, Kyle whistled and Swirl came running in. It's bizarre how she responds to his whistle. If we whistle, she just looks at us like "Huh?" That's if she even looks up at all. Tee was saying how funny it was and how Kyle would probably do the same for his kids one day. 

That lead to a discussion about the farm. I told them how we used to stand at the top of a field and make a long whistling yoohoo noise. The cows would look up and saunter on over, head up the road and turn into our yard. In retrospect, it's probably more remarkable that an entire herd of pea-brained cows were so well-trained that they even responded at all, let alone monitored themselves and automatically turned into the right yard than that it is that Swirl responds to Kyle's whistling.

I hadn't whistled that call for years, but as soon as I did, both Teelay and Kyle immediately groaned. Apparently, I used it a time or two when they were younger.

MOO

Over the Edge

I saw a commercial the other day that said I could go online and participate in an "interactive commercial" for their product. The day I do that, please call the guys with the strait-jackets.

Usually, I'm faster at hitting the mute button on the remote than that, but this was such a shock, I listened to see if I'd heard right. They weren't kidding. You can literally become interactively-involved with commercials if you choose. What the subject of that particular commercial was luckily escapes me.

Everyone in our family knows to hit the mute button the second a commercial comes on. It's an automatic response that sometimes catches people off guard. Kyle's friend, The Amazing Cam, thought muting the commercials was unusual and confusing at first, but he's used to it now.

Speaking of the Amazing Cam, he made Kyle a new backboard for his birthday that is totally unique and wonderful. (Go Orem Tigers!) If he made them to sell online, I'd have to watch his commercial; heck, I'd BE in his commercial!

By some miracle, I was able to get a picture of the new basketball going through the hoop for the first time...talk about being interactive!

Make Mine An Android, Please

Nik talked me into getting a smart phone the other day. I had been hanging onto my old Samsung slider for some time and the keypad was "losing touch" shall we say. Nik is like my Uncle Larry, a gizmo guy. Give him a new anything and he has it figured out end to end within 24 hours. All I want is something that remembers phone numbers, can be used as an alarm or calendar, and fits in my pocket.

The good thing is that my kids know me pretty well by now, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. Sometimes I actually get a little ticked at how well Kyle knows me, but he's almost always right. That actually makes me a little ticked, too, but what can you do?

We walked into the Sprint store which was manned by no less than 11 sales people. I've waited for almost an hour before at a rival store just to get someone's attention to ask a basic question, but with Nik along, you only need a sales person to ring up the purchase.

Nik: "Mom, there are two kids of smart phones, IPhone by Apple and Android by Google."

Mom: "Do they have them in some pretty colors?"

Nik: "These over here come in 3G and those over there are 4G. G has to do with speed."

Mom: "This one is too fat and that one is too ugly."

Nik: "This one is a slider. You turn it sideways and it has a qwerty keyboard for typing."

Mom: "That's quirky, not qwerty. Why in the heck would somebody re-arrange the danged keyboard and who has fingers that small anyway? What is the matter with people?"

It went like that. I ended up with a 3G Samsung Transform Ultra, a $50 rebate, and a qwerty keyboard that I tried and will probably never use again. I came home, went on Ebay and ordered a lovely blue Hawaiian-flowered case and can tell I'm going to have to order at least one spare battery. It's been three days and I have a headache from looking at the screen learning how to download apps and create groups, change settings, etc. I start to panic when the battery gets near 70% power. It's almost like one of those simulated pets where you stay up nights making sure you feed and play with it so it doesn't die. The screen is so sensitive that I had to take off one-touch dialing because I was calling people randomly. Ring..."Did you call me? No, I thought you called me. Sorry, new phone...." (If you are one of the few people I haven't "pocket-called" yet, please accept my apology in advance.)

One of the greatest features is that I now have Voxer and can talk to my daughter in Canada for free. It's sort of like a walkie-talkie setup. Nik set us up on an app called GroupMe; all the family were invited. It was fun for the first while, but then it became sort of like a wild Facebook; every time anybody said anything, everybody else got a notification. People were clamoring to get out of the family. Too much of a good thing....

I can't wait to Vox my grandson, Carver, and tell him GRANDMA HAS A TRANSFORMER PHONE!

The Oxford Cemetery

The year Morley Weyerman was the Seminary president and I was the VP, our kind and humble Seminary teacher (Blain Morgan) sought to do more than teach classes. He wanted us to learn through hands-on service, so he contacted area church leaders about a service project. Someone suggested the Oxford cemetery could profit from some care. That was a real understatement. The only way you could tell it was a cemetery rather than a field of sagebrush was if you happened to stumble over a headstone.

We met with Brother Morgan and set up a plan. I'm not sure now how the ball got rolling but people were contacted and a date was set. On that magic day, half the townspeople from Clifton and Oxford (and maybe Dayton) met at the cemetery bright and early in the morning. There were shovels and rakes and gloves and trucks and tractors...my dad's included. While Dad and Kenny Kendall's dad and perhaps Cluff Kendall were busy with their tractors doing the things that tractor drivers do, the rest of us were loading up weeds and junk and rocks in the backs of trucks. Dozens of people spent quite a few hours clearing the area, and when we were through, it looked amazing.

Every time I take Highway 91 from Clifton to Downey, I glance over at the lovely Oxford Cemetery and feel a little swell of happiness in a job well done. One man's attempt to teach some young people the value of service obviously worked. Thank you, Sir.