When they arrived home from the festival, my wife was excited to show me that she had purchased some hickory syrup from a vendor at the festival. Neither one of us had ever even heard of hickory syrup before, and she said that the booth caught her eye. Having lived in New England for much of our lives, she was familiar with maple syrup – but what was this hickory syrup stuff like? The vendor was giving out free sample tastes, and all three of them had a sample. They all agreed that it was quite tasty, and bought a small bottle of it to bring home to share with the rest of the family. They told me that there was live music, and a lot of vendors and free food samples. And lots of funnel cake booths! Back in New England we called them “Doughboys” and they are so tasty! I guess that the next time my wife extends invitations to go to a festival I should accept it and go along.

After the festival they stopped at a grocery store to pick up the fixings for lasagna for dinner, and when they arrived home they prepared a really nice lasagna and served it with garlic and cheese bread. We created our own dessert by combining lemon cookies and vanilla creme cookies – the combination of the two cookies was much tastier than either cookie by itself. We talked about putting some vanilla frosting in between the cookies to make them stick together, but decided against it for today. Maybe next time!

I hope that everyone ELSE had a good Mother’s Day!

When I go to any other place that sells sweet tea, it is not nearly as sweet. In fact a lot of the times I order a sweet tea and I would have to say that the tea that I get had no sweetener in it at all. So I end up dumping three or four sweetener packets into the tea.

I wish that McDonald’s would sell a sweet tea that had a sugar substitute in it. I like the Truvia and the Splenda sweeteners, and if they would use those sweeteners in their sweet tea I would not be so worried about the calorie count in it. Now that I know how many spoonfuls of sugar there are in their sweet tea I might start ordering the tea unsweetened and just add my own Truvia or Splenda. I gotta watch my weight!

To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the mail box is on the opposite road of the house that is receiving the mail, and that makes it even more difficult to find someone’s house if you don’t already know where you are going! That is why I think that every rural house should have an address plaque at the end of their driveway with their entire house number clearly visible from both directions.

Properly placed address plaques are not just to make life easier for visitors coming for a social visit, they are important because in rural areas it can be difficult for rescue services to respond to an emergency if the location is not clearly marked. Every house should have clear identification, down by the road, and on the house itself. It could save a life!

Apparently this is a game that is increasing in popularity, and it really surprised me! On the one hand it seems to me that it would be considered “lame” by many of the adolescents that I know. But on the other hand, it seems to me that it is a portable game similar to horse shoes, and I have seen quite a few people playing horse shoes lately. That in and of itself really surprised me, but there it is, what can you do?

Over the next several weeks a wonderful transformation was created. Brand new Pella windows were installed, new doors, new vinyl siding, and about a dozen solar panels on the roof appeared. Shortly after it appeared that someone was actually living in the place! Every day when I would drive past this now wonderful example of urban renewal at its finest I would think about how much I wished that I had the kind of money it would take to retrofit my own house with the newest technologies for climate control and energy conservation. But it wasn’t very long before the house was abandoned again and vandalized again, back to holes in the windows and the beautiful solar panels broken. Every single one of them was full of holes. I don’t know if it was a hail storm, or vandals, but every one was ruined. I never found out the story behind that poor house, but it is once again a very sad and lonely house. It’s a real shame.

I’m thinking that I’m going to have to try to find out if I can watch reruns of the show on the Internet of the show to try to see the episodes that I’ve missed so I can catch up! Geez, you get busy for a few months and then all this interesting stuff happens!

So I called the heating company and told them what happened, and they told me to call their carpet cleaner Round Rock company to come out and clean up the mess and to send the bill to the heating company I was happy that some professionals were going to come in and disinfect and dry out the carpet with their huge fans that make me think of airplane propellers I was quite relieved.

Ever since I’ve been on my own, I’ve always filed my taxes much earlier than the deadline; I don’t even know if any of the Post Offices stay open that late on tax deadline day. One thing is for sure – that mad dash to the Post Office on tax deadline day is one family tradition that I don’t want to continue and pass down to future family members. The stress of waiting until the last minute for anything just is not worth it!

Going to the Lost Dog Cafe with Sue and Jarod today was interesting. I’ve heard about the Lost Dog Cafe before, and have wanted to go there for the past few months, so I was really glad when they suggested that we go there today. We split a large Polynesian pizza, which was really good. It has been several years since I’ve had a Polynesian pizza that had bacon on it; most of the pizza places just puts ham and pineapple on it. This one had ham, pineapple, bacon, and shrimp on it. I asked for ginger ale to drink and was given a brand of ginger ale I’d never had before – I think it was called Dominion ginger ale. It was sweetened with honey, or maybe raw cane sugar – I can’t remember which, but it was very good.

After the pizza, we drove Jarod back to his apartment, and he invited us to come in and check out his new digs. I’ve been there before a couple of times, but Sue never had been there before, so we went in for the nickle tour. While Jarod was showing Sue around, I asked if I could use the bathroom, and Jarod told me to go ahead and use the one that was in the hallway outside of his room.

I was rather surprised to see that there was a new vessel sink in the bathroom; it looked a little bit out of place in the house. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the look of vessel sinks! The house is an old brick cape cod style that was built probably in the 1940′s in an older neighborhood. Seeing the clear vessel sink and an oriental-inspired faucet that looked like a stick of bamboo just seemed a little bit out of place in that house. I know that I’m not an interior decorator, but I would have expected a more traditional pedestal sink in a house like that. I wondered what prompted the building owner to choose that style of sink.