Casa De Oro and other stuff

Sis-in-law Keri likes to have lime in her coffee when she dines at Casa de Oro in Jefferson Iowa. One of the owners who is of Hispanic descent told her it was tasty so she tried it and agreed with him. I like cream and sugar in my coffee but I am trying to cut back on sugar so I decided to drink it black with lime like Keri. I was absolutely amazed.  I really like it!!! Maybe I am just crazy about lime right now because Sally Louks gave me a papaya and told me she sprinkles hers with lime juice. Now in the past papaya has been okay with me but with the addition of the lime juice I love it! Now I am not talking about the bottled lime juice you buy in the grocery store, I'm talking about honest to God limes off a tree. So give it a try. Lime juice in your coffee and if you are lucky enough to have a papaya sprinkle lime juice over it too.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

 We will be enjoying a full and satisfying Thanksgiving meal in Allen Hall with all our winter friends but you can be sure we will be remembering our summertime friends and all our family. We are extremely thankful for all we have wherever we are as well as being thankful that we can scratch our itchy feet and get by with it. The list is long on what we are grateful for today and every day.

Time Traveling with Colleen

Time travel, 2014

November 19, 2014

~by Colleen O’Brien

I generally get to leave Iowa before sock-weather hits. The very act of pulling on the socks because of cold toes goes against the grain.

This year I didn’t get outta Dodge in time.

The morning I left Jefferson for southern climes I had to put on socks because as I loaded the last bag into my car at 5 am, trudging through a foot of fallen leaves, my toes turned blue. The argyle, over-the-calf socks I found in a drawer looked silly with my flipflops and knee-length striped skirt. It was a curious fashion statement, but when I’m cold I lose any sense or care of how it all looks.

By the time I arrived at my first overnight, in St. Louis, I had shed the socks. It was warm there, the trees just on the turn. It was the picture of Iowa two weeks prior.

Next stop, Cincinnati, which is about the same latitude as St. Louis, so it was balmy, the trees just beginning their show, the roses still blooming along the Ohio. This trip was all a lovely, lengthy autumn, and again – still — I was able to watch emerald leaves transform themselves to crimson and gold.

My mistake was lingering in Cincinnati too long; it was not south enough for a three-week stay at this time of year. The morning I left my daughter’s, the frost was on the pumpkin – 20 degrees. This time it wasn’t just the socks, it was the coat, hat, gloves and scarf, plus a car warmed up by my son-in-law and toasty enough he said that I would be rewarded once I dashed from porch to driver’s seat.

Driving south quickly turned into a treat because with each mile I traveled away from early winter and back into autumn – the golden oaks and flaming maples set against the deep green piney woods warmed my heart as well as my toes. It was a visual feast in lovely weather; not a cold breeze from any direction. My second day out, it snowed three inches in the frigid and gloomy Cincinnati I’d left behind. Lucky escape, thought I.

And the weird phenom of backward journey, returning to warmth and beauty from cold and ugly, struck me as a form of time travel worthy of contemplation.

I’d wanted to time travel since I read Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when I was in high school.

Twain wrote this in 1889.

But long before this, in 1843, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, in which Ebeneezer traveled all over the place – backward and forward in time – if only in his dreams.

I went on to read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and eventually to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series (2000s), all the while intrigued by the notion of time travel. Time is weird to begin with – some minutes lasting way too long and some days disappearing as if they never happened.

I never really thought I’d ever time travel, however much it appealed to me and however many fantasies I’d dreamt up in idle moments. But in my own 21st-century time machine — my trusty 2006 Honda — I found myself going backward in weather while I traveled forward in hours and days. The timing was just right, the climates I passed through all doing the same thing I’d witnessed in Jefferson – a spectacular autumn of warmth and color that went on and on and on, mile after gorgeous mile.

What a good trip.

Even the eerie phenom that I suffer through all the time – when I awake I have to figure out where I am – way too many strange rooms and almost-familiar sleeping platforms: my bed in my bedroom in Jefferson? My futon in my office in Jefferson? My sofa in my living room in Jefferson? My girlfriend’s guest room in St. Louis? My daughter’s “Mom’s room” in Cinci? A motel room in Georgia? Or am I already in Florida and in one of those beds there? It takes a minute, but this is my normal awakening, a somewhat unnerving but quickly resolved pattern of too many beds for one aging dame.

When I return in the spring, my time travel can’t reverse itself – no backward movement from subtropical hibiscus to hyacinth peeking out of the snow. It takes a special combination of time – the autumn of the year; weather – winter moving slowly southward; and luck . . . to time travel if one lives in real life rather than in a novel.

Dear Tech Support

Husband Operating System

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend to Husband and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the Flower and Jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend. In addition, Husband uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance and Personal Attention and then installed undesirable programs such as Hockey, Football, Golf and HBO/Game of Thrones. Conversation no longer runs, and any endeavour to upload Housecleaning simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do?

Signed, Desperate

Dear Desperate,

First keep in mind, Boyfriend is an Entertainment Package, while Husband is an Operating System. Please enter the command: ‘http: I Thought You Loved Me.html’ and try to download Tears; do not forget to install the Guilt update. If that application works as designed, Husband should then automatically run the applications Jewelry and Flowers, but remember – over-use of the above application can cause Husband to default to Grumpy Silence, Garage or Beer. Beer is a particularly bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta. Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law (it runs a destructive virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources). Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband.

In summary, Husband is a great system, but it does have limited memory, is somewhat erratic, and cannot learn new applications quickly. It also tends to work better running one task at a time. You might consider installing additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Steak, Pulled Pork and Hot Lingerie.

Good Luck, Tech Support

Attention Grandma's- the doll to get for Christmas

For your young granddaughter for sure.
The lammily doll

https://lammily.com/

Let's fix their self esteem early on.