Looking for the gardening catalogs

Yesterday's Britt-Arnhild's Blue Garden was about going to the garden centers, reading the seed catalogs, and starting to think about and designing this years garden.

Reading her Blog made me think about my father whose birthday would have been today. My father was a Pastor who always served in small country churches and who also had a rather large family to raise. Once the New Year arrived, dad would always look forward to the arrival of the seed catalogs. I think he viewed this, as a race to see which of his favorite seed companies would get their catalog to him first. I can remember as a young boy entering his study and seeing the stack of seed catalogs on his desk.

Soon the packages would begin arriving in the mail and dad would begin his yearly hobby of turning the basement and most of the southern facing windows into a greenhouse. As I mentioned, my parents weren't rich and had a large family to support, so Dad never had any of the fancy greenhouse products one saw in these catalogs. Rather, his was a collection of odds and ends. He built his own hotboxes and had a rather eclectic assortment of heaters and lights. Dad would ask us to bring the small, empty milk containers home from school so he could use them to start his seeds.

Soon there would be new plants starting all around the house. Later he would move all the seedlings outside during the day to begin the hardening process. Finally Dad would have all his flowers and vegetables out of the house and the yard and the rather large garden would no longer have that dead, barren look.

And every time Dad would move to a new church, he would carefully pack up his collection of plant starting items and his stack of old seed catalogs. Once at the new church, one of his first items of business would be find a place for his garden and the unpacking of his eclectic assortment of basement greenhouse items.

Take My Eyes

I have never written about any books I've read, or movies I've watched on MyTippy. However, I just watched the movie "Take My Eyes". I found it to be a deeply moving story about domestic abuse. It touched on the difficult issue of a wife/mother taking her son and leaving her abusive husband. However, it isn't a movie about the triumphs the women had escaping this relationship. Rather it touches on the much deeper issues of self worth, love, trust, and a whole range of other deep emotions, emotions both on the wife and on the husband's side of these issues.

I won't say this is a movie you want to watch if you are looking for something to brighten your day. However, if you want to watch a movie that will suck you right into the scenes to where you can feel the emotions, you might like this movie.

The January Doldrums

Having survived the excitement of the holiday season, I now find myself in that period between Christmas and Easter when the weather begins to warm up. The only time I will get out is for doctor appointments. I do not even go to church during this sneeze and squeeze season.

You ask what exactly is the sneeze and squeeze season? It is that time of year when there are a lot of people with colds who will sneeze, or blow their nose and then want to shake my hand. Not wanting to risk another lung infection, I follow my doctor's advice and stay home. Sometime I will go with P to the grocery store, however that often means a trip in my wheelchair through the salt that is spread on the grocery store's parking lot. As a result of not wanting the salt to damage my wheelchair, I don't make many trips to the grocery store either.

So these next couple of months are basically spent at home alone while P is off to work. However, I do keep busy doing Sudoku puzzles, reading the newspaper, watching old police shows on TV. I am often busy Instant Messaging my family. Also it is my responsibility later in the afternoon to take the main dish for supper out of the refrigerator and place it in the oven.

As I read over this post, I think to myself "wow UP you really don't do much do you?" However, I must say that because of the progress my Spinal Cerebellar Degeneration disease has made, this is about all the activity I can handle without completely exhausting myself. As I am finding out one day of exhausting myself will take me four of more days to recover.

Maybe the January Doldrums aren't such a bad thing after all.

What a Wonderful and excited time I've had

I think it has been a little over two weeks since the last entry in my Blog. However, they were a busy two weeks having fun with family, helping (a little) with the Christmas baking, and teasing everyone about what gifts they might have gotten me.

In fact I get the feeling that I've teased everyone so much that they were thinking about returning all of my presents. One item I received as a Turkey Fryer. I have a friend at church who is always telling me how good the Cajun marinate injected fried turkey taste. For the past 6 months I've been watching the sale papers waiting for the Turkey Fryers to go down in price. Finally towards the end of November, I spotted a Turkey Fryer at the price I was willing to pay. When P. went shopping that day, I asked her to buy it for me. She returned home and said that the store was out of them, but she had received a rain check for the Turkey fryer so if I didn't get one for Christmas we could always use the rain check and buy it at the sales price after Christmas.

Of course I kept mentioning that I would REALLY like a Turkey Fryer and kept watching the sale papers to see if I could find one at an even better price. I even tried to get my sons to go on E Bay and purchase one for me. Everyone would either ignore me or tell me that I should wait for the after Christmas sales. Finally they started telling me that if I didn't stop talking about Turkey Fryers, they would not help me fry a turkey even if I did buy one.

Imagine my delight, when on Christmas morning, I opened a large present and discovered the Turkey Fryer I asked P. to buy in November. Now I will have to wait until warmer weather and a weekend when everyone is back home to fry a turkey.

As a young boy I always got excited at Christmas. Now that I have children and grand children I think I get even more excited at Christmas. For some reason the rest of the family doesn't seem to reach the same height of excitement that I get too. Maybe that's a good thing. We might not be able to live with each other if we all were as excited as I get.