Author: Becky

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be sharing more Saturday about the Thanksgiving celebration we’ll have tomorrow. But I did manage to get a photo of Lynne’s chocolate chip cookies. Delicious.

While Lynne was with her other family today, along with some food prep for tomorrow, I washed, dried, and ran a hem around fabric I got last week at Jo-Ann’s, turning it into a Thanksgiving tablecloth. Crafty!

Someone’s in the kitchen

Today, my MacBook came home to me (cha-ching!), but I feel like I’ve been in the kitchen since yesterday, and I’m just now getting the Mac back in business.

Here’s a recap.

Lynne got here Tuesday afternoon for a visit until Saturday. She’s spending Thanksgiving day with her kids/grandkids from the other side of their family on Thursday, so we’ll have the Houndstooth Hall Thanksgiving dinner with her on Friday, which will also be her early birthday celebration. =)

The dinner I prepared for Tuesday night was a hearty homemade soup that simmered most of the day to go with cornbread.

One of the chapters I wrote in the sixth book of the Neverending Saga has two characters sharing a lot of confidences while they have a pre-Christmas baking day together. Maybe that’s what made Lynne and me decide to have a full-on baking day like we haven’t had in a long time. Tuesday night, while I took on dog watching/feeding duty, she and Tom went to the grocery store to get all the supplies I didn’t have or she hadn’t brought with her. After they got back, she and I began shelling pecans from her friend’s pecan trees.

Today, Tom worked from home, so as soon as I got up, I put together Jim’s delicious egg casserole for breakfast and added fresh cut fruit on the side.

After breakfast, the real work began. While Tom worked in the home office, Lynne and I shelled more pecans, enough to use for rum balls, bourbon balls, and Kahlúa balls. This was our first venture into Kahlúa balls. They all taste very good. =)

While I was rolling out the rum, etc. balls, Lynne made two servings of crack dip, one for the Hall and one to take with her tomorrow. It’s basic: cream cheese, chopped green onions, chopped pastrami, and dry Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix blended together. No one knows why it’s so addictive. It just is.

I grated enough cheese for two batches of sausage cheese balls. These are also highly addictive. We both rolled them out, and now there’s one container for the Hall and one she’ll take tomorrow.

Oh! I forgot she also made a gazillion deviled eggs. One to take with her with sweet pickles, and one for the Hall with dill pickles.

Stacked here in the fridge, our deviled eggs on the bottom left, and above that, her many containers of sausage and cheese balls and deviled eggs that will go with her. I can’t remember what’s in the dish middle/top, but those are the Hall’s sausage balls under it, and on the right, that’s the turkey thawing for Friday’s meal.

Okay, it was driving me crazy. That Corning Ware bowl contains leftover chicken I chopped for us to use to make chicken salad sandwiches when we all ate lunches at different times. We also still have leftover soup and cornbread. So probably no cooking until Friday. (I’m sure there’ll be photos of that, too–can you tell Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday?)

We haven’t had these in so long, and in the ’70s and ’80s, they were a constant treat: a brownie recipe created by Lynne’s Uncle Austin, and they will melt in your mouth.

Another one of Lynne’s specialties is chocolate chip cookies, and she made a batch for us and a batch to take with her tomorrow, and I don’t seem to have a photo of those.

Finally, I grated (in the food processor) enough cheese/baking mix/margarine mixture to make three batches of cheese straws, which we halved–one for the Hall, one for her to take tomorrow. Lynne and Tom, who was by then off of work, rolled them into doughs and seasoned them with red pepper (hotter for Lynne’s batch, a little milder for ours, because I don’t like too much heat). Because the batches contained a variety of cheese brands and margarines (usually, I use butter, but the actual recipe from Lynne’s sister calls for margarine, so we did that this time), they were different colors and textures. They all taste great, though!

We put in about a dozen hours of kitchen time, and while Lynne handles most of the baking, I handle most of the clean-up. It’s a good thing I actually like washing dishes, because there were a lot of bowls and pans used, washed, and reused throughout the day. Even the dogs are worn out; I can hear them snoring all over the Hall. It’s about to be lights out for me, too. A good day hopefully gives me a good night’s sleep.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Tiny Tuesday!

The kilt looks are finally completed, with some shirt exchanges once I sewed a new shirt. Now all the dolls are wearing belts I made, and I made and added their chains and sporrans (note the houndstooth), some embellished with their emblems. If you didn’t care about any of this to start with, I’ll put only one doll here and the rest behind a cut to save real estate on your monitor. If you do look at them all, thanks. I learned a lot of new things and spent my time on this project mentally plotting the rest of the Neverending Saga. That also gave me the opportunity to make good changes to the sixth book before diving into the seventh.


The Mogul

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Mood: Monday


Rosalynn Carter
August 1927–November 2023

Robert Templeton, Iowa and Connecticut, USA
pastels, 1977
photo ©The National Gallery

The late Mrs. Carter lived a full and interesting life, and she had more influence and impact than some people may realize. I’ll always see her as a model of dignity, strength, and compassion. She was a true “steel magnolia,” and I love that her Secret Service tag was “Dancer.”

I’ve always had interest in the First Ladies of the United States. The photo below was taken by Barbara Kinney in 1994, shortly before First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. It’s amazing to recall this many First Ladies were so alive and vibrant in the same time period.


First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Ladybird Johnson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush.

Button Sunday

For good or ill, below is a list of November 19 trivia.
Courtesy of The History Calendar.

Today in History – November 19th

1493 – Christopher Columbus discovered Puerto Rico, on his second voyage.
1805 – Lewis & Clark reached the Pacific Ocean –first European Americans to cross continent.
1850 – Alfred Tennyson became British Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth.
1861 – Julia Ward Howe wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
1863 – President Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address.
1893 – The first newspaper color supplement was published in the Sunday New York World.
1916 – Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn, one of the most successful independent film makers of all time.
1928 – TIME magazine published its cover in color for the first time.
1969 – Apollo 12 made man’s second landing on the moon.
1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to set foot in Israel on an official visit.
1980 – CBS TV banned Calvin Klein’s jean ad featuring Brooke Shields.
1985 – President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met for the first time.
1997 – Septuplets were born to Bobbi McCaughey. It was only the second known case where all seven were born alive.
1998 – The impeachment inquiry of President Bill Clinton began.
1998 – Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of the Artist without Beard” sold at auction for more than $71 million.
2001 – President George W. Bush signed the most comprehensive air security bill in the country’s history.
2002 – The U.S. government completed its takeover of security at 424 airports nationwide.
2003 – Eight competing designs for a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center were unveiled.

SCIENCE, INVENTIONS, PATENTS
1895 – The “paper pencil” was patented by Frederick E. Blaisdell.
1954 – Two automatic toll collectors were placed in service on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.

MUSIC HISTORY
1968 – The Supremes performed at a Royal Variety Show with Queen Elizabeth in attendance.
1971 – B.B. King marked his 25th anniversary in music by opening a European tour in London.
1990 – Milli Vanilli were stripped of their Grammy Award because other singers had lent their voices to the “Girl You Know It’s True” album.
1995 – Bruce Springsteen’s thirteenth album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” was released.
1996 – Prince released the 3-CD set “Emancipation.” The release was on his record label NPG Records.
1997 – The American premiere of Paul McCartney’s “Standing Stone” was played in Carnegie Hall by St. Luke’s Orchestra.
1998 -Motley Crue’s retail store, S’Crue, opened in Los Angeles.

FAMOUS BIRTHDAYS
James Garfield 1831
Tommy Dorsey 1905
Indira Gandhi 1917
Larry King 1933
Dick Cavett 1936
Ted Turner 1938
Calvin Klein 1942
Meg Ryan 1961
Jodie Foster 1962

Caught in the act!


Anime, caught in the act!


Of stopping to smell the roses.

My laptop is at Apple getting some battery care. So I’m using my old HP laptop. It’s a challenge to go back to Windows from Mac (Macs were actually part of my “origin story”; I used one of those little ones even before the first PCs I ever used).


Like this.

From Mac to HP: different command keys, different screen, different keyboard and mouse (I never use my touch pads no matter what make of laptop I use; I plug in a full size keyboard and a real mouse–except on the Mac, they’re wireless). See Becky relearn!

Photo Friday, No. 884

Current Photo Friday theme: Fall


Renaissance Festival, Todd Mission, Texas, 2012

You can’t see leaves changing colors in Houston this time of year, but there are other fall sights in the countryside.

Bonus photo from the Renaissance Festival in 2008. You never know who you’ll find in the woods, be it musketeer, Viking, pirate, tavern keeper, knight…

It’s the little things


Here’s a silly product post for which I receive no free stuff or financial perks. I just feel like talking about it, and I’m not really even suggesting it for anyone else.

I started using Purpose® face wash back in the 1990s, and the reason I remember this is that a friend who I was around mostly in the 1990s asked me if I had a favorite product for cleaning my face, and this was it (and she had another friend who’d highly recommended it to her). For years, I used it, primarily because it’s so basic and doesn’t have a scent that bothers me.

Then suddenly, even before the pandemic and the supply chain problems, no one locally carried it anymore (I mostly bought it at Walgreen’s, and once they took it from their shelves, I looked at other places with no luck).

I tried other gentle cleansers, but most of them had scents I couldn’t tolerate–I felt like Goldilocks with my “too strong,” “too soapy,” “too perfumy” judgments and kept giving those soaps away to anyone who’d take them, or used them in my foot bath, because at least the scent wasn’t right under my nose. I wanted my “just right” Purpose®.

I rarely wore makeup in the pandemic years, and even when the public decided the pandemic was over, since I’m one of the stubborn people who continues to mask, because there are SO MANY different viruses and bugs and flus, and I don’t care if people think I’m weird, masking when I’m in public makes me feel a little more secure. If half my face is hidden, who cares whether I’m wearing makeup?

However, a few days ago, I decided to put on eye makeup, and then I thought about Purpose® and how much I missed it. So I did an online search and–BAM!–I could order it online, including this packet of four.

I don’t know. I can name so many horrors and problems in the world and among people I know, and I ache for all that and stay awake at night because of it. I recognize how utterly insignificant a face soap is in the larger scheme of things. Yet I also understand it’s not about the product. It’s about something that gives you comfort or brings a little normalcy to your life, whether an emotion or memory or moment of laughter or act of kindness, and yes, even some simple, tangible thing that has the power to make your world feel more like the world you want it to be.

I wish all those things for everyone.