Terrapin Station

My One Thousandth Post

Yes, friends and fans, here it is.  Post 1,000!

I've been trying to think what would be appropriate for such a momentous occasion, and decided that I'd wait and see what the day brought to me.  And it just arrived, in the form of an e-mail from Tennyson's mom with a link to a memorial to him that she and his dad put in the Lawrence, Kansas Journal-World:

***

TENNYSON LeMASTER
REMEMBERED

Even after one year, Tennyson, our hearts break and we gasp at the thought of your passing, and we continue to mourn. We pine for you immensely: your voice, your love; your humor and your wit! The world lost a wonderful person on July 5, 2007.

You may rest in peace, however, assured that neither your Daughter, your Mother, your Father, nor your Brother has forgotten you. Neither has the Red Lefty band. And neither have your many other Friends and Relatives, We all remember you through tears and heartache, and we shall miss you forever.

MOM AND POPS

***

And here's a brand new picture of him, one I've never seen before, from a CD I just got in yesterday's mail.  No coincidence, I'm sure.  It's the back side of a German-produced CD of a band he was in in the mid-90's called Polio.  I think I heard them play once.  Tennyson's in the middle, on top...dimple in chin.   

I miss you, my friend, but I also know you are always with me. 

Love, Mary Beth

Fabulous food

Here's my new favorite recipe, from Marilu Henner's Healthy Life Kitchen. 

Sweet Potatoes with Spinach Curry Chickpeas

2 lg. sweet potatoes, peeled, diced
1 16-20 oz. can chickpeas, rinsed & drained
1 15 oz. can diced tomatoes
10-12 oz fresh spinach, stemmed & coarsely chopped
1/4 c. cilantro (I use more!)
2 scallions, white & green parts, thinly sliced
1-2 tsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

Steam sweet potatoes ~15 minutes, or until tender. 
In a large saucepan, combine chickpeas, tomatoes, and 1/2 c water.  Bring to a simmer over medium heat.  Add spinach, cover & cook just until wilted - about 3 min.

Stir in sweet potatoes, cilantro, scallions, curry powder, cumin, cinnamon, and salt to taste until well combined.  Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, about 5 minutes, until flavors have blended.  Serve hot. 

2 cups = 2 WW points.  Yummy!  And in my house, no one likes it but me.  Mwa ha ha!

Thankful List

Just over at the BabyGator's place and she reminded me I need to be thankful.  So here is my list of what I'm  thankful for:

• Tupelo Johnny, who came and helped Ken get SO MUCH WORK DONE. They had fun, too, in a working guy way. And while we were here we did some fun stuff...ate out, went to 2 movies, went to the fireworks last night. I think it was a good thing for all of us. We'll miss him.
• CareNow, which should be calling me any minute to say it's my turn to come in and see the doctor. I have an ... unpleasant thing ... which over the counter remedy made MUCH WORSE. EEEEEEEYAH. So I am going in for the Rx med for it.
• Sunshine in the day, breezes at night.  Can this really be July?
• Grilled steaks last night, plus baked potatoes and a spinach/strawberry salad that I got the recipe for from the paper.
• Kiwanis Fireworks show - really a great one, though one of the songs was not my favorite.
• That July 4th is over, so that maybe the party that went on all night last night, 2 doors down, complete with loud fireworks through 4 am, will not have to happen again any time soon.
• That the place where the new metal gate scraped my heel to pieces is healing. I just love to watch my body heal itself...

In Memory

Those memorial pavers that were installed at church last week - had been on order for a long time.  I hadn't realized how long.  But I was communicating with Tennyson's mom by email, to send her a photo, and was shocked to realize that today marks one year since his death. 

Not so many people in my life have changed who I was by being in it.  But he did.  I will never forget him.

Interestingly, Mrs. LeMaster has now hooked me up with a group of folks who were friends with him back in jr. high days...I didn't know them because they were a year older than I was, and most had known each other from another local elementary school.  They have an online forum with stories...Reading their reminiscences is very weird...there are names I have heard, stories I've heard references to, but they are not people I knew.  But they do share with me a home place and memories of teachers I knew and of a particular person we all remember well. 

A reminder that our lives twist and turn and where we are now, and who we hang with, is likely not where we'll be in a few years.  Or in twenty-five.  What a long strange trip it's been...

My husband and I each got invitations to our high school reunions in the mail last week, ON THE SAME DAY.  His from Corsicana HS - 40th reunion.  Mine from Westchester HS - 25th.  Neither of us plans to attend our reunion, though we were briefly amused at the idea that he could go to mine and I to his, and see how confused we could get the people....

Book Thing

The Big Read, from the NEA, was designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They’ve come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don’t explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I’ve used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A quick count shows that I've read about 75 of them.  What else this means, I don't know.  Found at BesoMami

Friday Five: Marse Fourth of July

Sally says:  I have to admit that I am chuckling to myself a little; how strange it seems for me a Brit to be posting the Friday Five on 4th July! I realise that most of our revgals will be celebrating in some way today, but I hope that you can make a little room for Friday Five! From my short stay in Texas my memories of the celebrations are of fireworks and picnics, one year we went in to central Houston to watch the fireworks and hear the Symphony Orchestra play, we were welcomed and included, and that meant a lot!

So lets have a bit of fun:

1. Barbeque's or picnics ( or are they essentially the same thing?)  Hmm.  Neither.  Ken and Johnny are working today, so I have a day off to putter...We'll be grilling steaks this evening and then going to the Kiwanis July 4th celebration this evening at the UNT coliseum. 

2. The park/ the lake/ the beach or staying at home simply being?  Home, that's the place for me!  until tonight.  I'll be working with my Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (WOW!) and taping the King of the Hill Marathon.  :) 

3. Fireworks- love 'em or hate 'em?  Oh, I like real fireworks shows.  I hate firework stand fireworks...they're noisy and dangerous and insanely expensive, and you can never find a place to set them off because you have to be outside the city limits, and usually there are burn bans by this time in the summer...There were some going off in the street last night after 1:30 a.m.  Gee, thanks. 

4. Parades- have you ever taken part- share a memory...You know, once on the 4th of July I went over to Fonn Villas, a nearby subdivision where my friend Cindy Stromberg lived, and we decorated our bicycles and rode in the parade.   This would be about 3rd grade.  Ralph Waite, who played the father on The Waltons, was there because he was the brother of one of the ladies in the neighborhood.  The show was still playing...I remember Cindy's mother being very starstruck to meet him.  I had never seen that show...we weren't big TV watchers. 

5. Time for a musical interlude- if you could sum up holidays in a piece of music what would it be?   John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Will Smith is my movie boyfriend

oh yeah.

We saw Hancock last night at the Denton Movie Tavern.  A great story and not hard on the eyes (I mean Will Smith...I'm not so crazy about movies full of fast action explosions etc., but really, what kind are there anymore?)

Gladys Swarthout

So, my Gramma Beth (Elizabeth Swarthout Butler) had a cousin named Gladys Swarthout...who was a fairly well known opera singer in her day.  Here, through the marvel of Youtube, is a video from one of her movie performances, Romance in the Dark, from 1938.  There are several others, also. 

Pretty great sight reading!?  No!?

My friend and choir director, Peter, keeps saying I have a high soprano range.  With a lot of work recently, I am becoming better able to access the voice that's been hiding in there all these years.  Don't know that I'll ever match Cousin Gladys, but it's great fun to see her singing and acting. 

So why am I sitting at this computer?

Because I can, I guess.  I'm taking a vacation day.  Aaaah. 

Yesterday I left at 4:30 a.m. to drive to Austin for a meeting.  I drove back afterward and got in just before 8 pm.  Long day but I got to listen to a whole audiobook.  That was cool. 

I've sort of forgotten how to drive an automatic shift car (I was in a university vehicle) - it was very weird.  I was relieved to be back in my standard shift Beetle. 

Nothing on calendar today but a haircut.  Then grocery, laundry, other stuff that I never have time to catch up with regularly. 

Photo Round-Up

Here are some photos that have been collecting in my phone...that you need to see. 

I mentioned earlier that Ken, Johnny and I went to Babe's Chicken Dinner House in Sanger, Tx the other night.  Babe's is a local chain with about 8 restaurants and fantastic homestyle food, served family style.  The green beans caused me to MOAN the first time I ate them...they tasted just like my Memamma's.  The server told us they ought to taste good; the beans were fried in bacon grease before being cooked in the pot liquor with the side meat.  Uhmmmmmm.  Also:  the biscuits (with honey and sorghum molasses available); the mashed potatoes, the cream gravy...this is NOT a place you'd eat every meal, but wonderful for a treat. 

While in Sanger, I took some photos.  Here is one of the big rooster outside Babe's.  Sadly, in this picture you cannot see the sign taped to him.  It says, "PLEASE DO NOT RIDE THE CHICKEN!"

So I didn't. 

Here's a photo of the little building next to Babe's. 

Notice that they are a Notary Republic.  Hmmmmmmm....I'm a plain Notary Public.  Maybe I need to upgrade next time?

Babe's has very country decor, with chickens everywhere.  Here is a sign I spotted en route to the Ladies' room (HENS):

Over at the church:  Here is part of Gina's Garden, built in the close between our Parish Hall and sanctuary.  It honors Gina Holland, the wife of our rector, who died two years ago.  The dark-colored bricks have just been installed; they are our first round of memorial bricks which were ordered several months ago.  Our two are shown below

this one for Ken's parents and brother:

 

and this one for my friend Tennyson:

Just a few more:  Here are Ken and Johnny working like crazy on Lot 1, where the President parks:

and finally - Ken and I on our 9th Anniversary, May 31.  We were at the Harley Davidson dealership when this was taken.  :)