This weekened I learned about substitutions and posed with the Wienermobile.

Sorry about the wait. I had a few technical difficulties with this post.
Thanks for your patience! :)
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I have learned A LOT this weekend during my getaway to a conference with some of the ladies from our church. I could share all the lessons I've learned but it would take a few days to write everything, so I'll keep it to the most universal lessons.

Lesson #1 - Sometimes there's no substitute for the Real Thing.

For instance . . .

This is not peanut butter. Tasty. But not peanut butter.

In fact, it has been nowhere near peanuts,

which is why it's allowed to play at our house.

That is to peanut butter as a tuna sandwich is to this:

Mmm. Grilled Tilapia. To perfection.

Tuna is the only fish that's allowed into our house

and although I did just find and learn to make tuna steaks

(with herb-roasted rutabaga that was shockingly tasty)

it's just not the same thing.

With a husband that's allergic to seafood and a daughter that's allergic to peanuts,

I do not get very many chances to indulge in these favorites.

So that was my first order of business at the IHOP after our first meeting.

For those of you who have never heard of IHOP (yes, to the incredulous, those people do exist), it stands for the International House of Pancakes. And they have all sorts of breakfast foods. Of course, there I was searching the menu for fish, and then thanking God profusely that somewhere in the world they have grilled tilapia for breakfast. So I ordered my fish. And asked if I could order a side of peanut butter. The waitress looked at me without batting an eyelash and went on to the next person at the table. This raised all sorts of questions for me. Do other people order peanut butter with their fish? Did she just assume that our orders would be strange after she saw our group come in all grins and goofiness?

Ooh-ooh! Side-note! I have to write this one down to commit it to memory.

I learned that the opposite of eggs over easy is . . . eggs over hard.

I'd never heard of such a thing until one of my pals ordered their eggs that way.

We were all looking at her funny, but she worked as a waitress and is well informed

on the subject matter. You can also order "over well" and "fried eggs, hard" alternately.

I prefer runny eggs, but I'm just getting the information out there for the rest of y'all.

And so you don't look at your buddy like she's getting all creative with the breakfast lingo.

(Short-order lingo! *light bulb* That would be fun to learn!)

Anyway, my food arrived and so did my peanut butter on the side:

Oops, she brought me honey.

I took a picture of the table where my peanut butter was supposed to be.

Funny thing is that I didn't take a picture of the PB when it arrived.

About halfway through my heavenly fish, she brought the peanut butter.

 I opened the little Smuckers packet and just smelled it. Ohh. Nice.

I swirled it on my spoon, put it in my mouth and deposited it on my taste buds.

Right as the waitress began to ask me a question.

You know . . . The alternative is much weaker.

I forgot how thick peanut butter is.

Especially right off the spoon.

Makes it hard to talk.

I smiled dumbly.

There are parallels with hot cocoa.

I usually use the hot cocoa mix:

While the crunchy miniature marshmallows are weirdly charming,

I am usually a little disappointed when the mix settles to the bottom.

This is the hot cocoa I had at the IHOP:

The only thing at the bottom was melted chocolate chip morsels.

I was thinking about all this that night as I was getting ready for bed. We had all congregated in the hotel room where my sis and I stayed and we told stories and laughed and talked into the wee hours. Over the course of the weekend, I had a chance to get to know these ladies, to find out our common interests and share our stories, and just spend some time together. And it was a blast. I just enjoyed their friendship.

I've had times in my life when I've settled on substitutes, and one thing I've learned is that when you are choosing your friends there's no thing like the real thing. Imitation friends seem like the real deal, but when you get to them there's just no substance. Real friends will listen when you have something to say. Imitation friends can't wait until you're finished so they can get to what they have to say. Real friends are there when you need them. Imitation friends are there when they need you. A Real friend will tell you when you get back from the bathroom that the back of your dress is tucked into your panties. An Imitation friend will tell everyone else. Oh, yes. I know it's true. Thankfully not from this weekend.

Just like the hot cocoa, a really good friendship takes a little time and attention to simmer and mix. But if the ingredients are good and you can be patient, the reward is well worth the wait.

Lesson #2 - It's ok to ask.

This might seem like a simple thing, but can you think of a time when you wanted something and never asked? I know I'm not the only one. Just because you ask doesn't guarantee you'll get the answer you want, but at least you'll get an answer. Kind of generic, but I thought I'd toss that in there.

Lesson #3 - The Wienermobile is still seriously cool,
even though I don't like hot dogs.

Shivering in my four layers for a pic with the Wienermobile.

I mean, really. Can you imagine driving this thing around?

I will just say that I really want to learn how to drive this thing.

Just so I can pull up next to someone and ask,

"Pardon Me...do you have any Grey Poupon?"

Lesson #4 - Your old stories have new meaning to someone else.

My sister and I had a story-off at the hotel the first night, telling all the funny and embarrassing stories about each other we could think of. Like the time when we were teenagers and I was teasing her about something during a car trip with our parents and so in retaliation she crammed a blue Sweet-Tart up my nostril. And it got stuck. Hopelessly stuck. And I envisioned my future-photos album. Senior pictures, with a blue nostril. Wedding day, with a blue nostril. Posing with my firstborn child, with a blue nostril. Little old lady at the retirement home with fourteen wiry chin-hairs and a blue nostril. The last one made me laugh so hard that the Sweet-Tart went shooting out of the nostril across the back seat of the car.

I forgot to tell the ladies that one day last year my then three-year-old Waybums came to me in tears because she had crammed a blue bead into her nose. I saw her blue nostril and all those images came flashing back to me, and though she insisted that it was NoT funny, I couldn't help laughing. I told her my story and it made her feel better.

My mom told me once that one of my accomplished uncles once had to go to the hospital when he was a little kid because he had gotten something stuck up his nose. I asked my Gramma about it and she said that indeed he had. I asked what it was and she said that it was either a clover blossom or a sheep poop. This fellow is a brilliant patent-holding engineer, so I take comfort that one can make mistakes and still go on to make great achievements.

As far as my plans for achievements this week...

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned that libraries are still relevant.

Can you remember the last time you set foot in a library?

The last time I visited a Library was when I lived in San Diego. I was a newlywed with a LOT of spare time on my hands because my sailor was gone for long stretches and I didn't know many people out there. My goal was to check out the thickest books in the place and spend my lonely nights trekking across the wilderness with Sacajawea or giving War and Peace yet another chance. Three times I've tried to make it through that book. Three. I own it now, and I still haven't gotten through.

I remember the library program I attended when I was a kid. I devoured books, so it was a piece of cake for me to complete the goals. And there were other kids to do crafts with, and Sonya the Librarian. She was so sweet and relatable and she knew a lot about books. She had pretty blonde hair. And I didn't realize it then, but she was also a little person. It was probably less noticeable because I used to be little then, too. And little kids have this wonderful ability of seeing people as just purely people, regardless of color, size, age, physical ability, or economic status.

And from Pre-K to high school, I loved visiting the library. It was sometime around college and Internet access that I stopped going. And then after I got married we moved around so much that we never settled anywhere long enough for me to get really acquainted with the local library.

I was looking online for new things to learn when I stumbled upon an article asking:

Will libraries become obsolete? It's an article from 1999.

When I read the title, I was a little worried. After all, I loved my library experiences as a kid. And so today I set out to discover if libraries were all that I remembered them to be, and whether or not they'd become an abandoned gas station along the Information Superhighway.

The first thing I noticed when I got to the library was that this place has a really nice building. Three stories, (LoL - Oops, I mean levels... It would be a short article if there were only three stories at the library), comfy chairs to lounge in while you read and very friendly people at the circulation desk. We felt immediately at home.

The first stop was getting our library card. One for me, and one for Waybums.

She was so proud.

I didn't realize what a right of passage it would be to her.

I started looking around for books and the kids were pretty good about keeping quiet and not running around like crazy. Within five minutes I felt like I had won the "learning-things" jackpot. I've already added "vermiculture" and "geocaching" and "dairy farming" to my to-learn list. And I found out that our library has an immense selection of pretty cool-shaped cake pans that you can check out. So, I see cake decorating lesson in my future, as well. :) After perusing around for a bit I decided to take the kids to see the youth area. After five seconds I felt like I had won the "kid-entertainment" jackpot. Wow!

They even had a Lego table so Kodi-Pie would have diversion.

No, wait - what's this? A whole PLAY AREA??

With wooden trains and Dr. Office beads and The Works!

I had been worried that our trip would be short

because Little One would get bored.

With Kodi occupied right there,

Waybums and I start looking around at the books.

There were so many. This is just a tiny section...

It was like a reunion with old friends. Ramona. Barbar. Clifford. She looked around in wide-eyed wonder. "Mother! It's just like when Beast gives Belle a library! There's so many books everywheres!"

But her indecision came to a swift end when we found the dinosaur section. She did a little happy dance and started making a pile. Once she'd selected her books, she brought them over to a plastic playhouse castle where an adorable little girl asked if she wanted to come in. They sat there looking at the books and giggling. Kodi continued playing with the Lego table. I sat down and checked over a few articles in a Parenting magazine. It was delightful and laid-back and I enjoyed it, too!

The only thing I didn't account for was that it would be too fun.

So fun nobody wanted to leave.

Poor kid was heartbroken when I told her we had to go.

She was on the brink of tears when a nice young fellow on staff saw her sadness and reappeared with a special treasure that brightened her day immediately. Her very first bookmark. :) It said, "My heart belongs with books" and he gave it to her because he could tell that she loved books a lot to be so sad to leave the library. She smiled shyly and gave me a huge hug and we went home with our glorious loot.

She read herself to sleep, and cuddled with her bookmark.

The Internet is great and so full of information, but the trip to the library offered one thing that the Internet could not. A connection with real people, in real time. I had a chance to chat with other moms, and the girls had a chance to play with other kids. We got to know the librarians, and one of the staff even made my daughter's day a little brighter. We haven't really been plugged into our community here. My husband goes to college and works in our previous town and I used to commute to get the kiddo in our previous town. We visit family out of town often. I feel like we had a chance to get to know our community better today. And that's a lesson worthy of note.

As far as which cake pan I'm picking out first...

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned how to start a furnace fire, and tips on longevity from a raccoon.

It's been a day full of busy activity. While I've been learning all these fascinating things, I've also been working on a month-long lesson on how to organize and simplify my house. (Which I'll share when I've finished that lesson.) We have moved four times in six years including a cross-country move and an international move, and I'm tired of living out of boxes. There's a glorious, spacious bedroom upstairs that has been moonlighting as a storage area, and it's time to get settled and get to use the space. I've been doing a lot of sorting and purging and regrouping.

So, today, when I wasn't playing with the kids and attending to their many cabin-feverish requirements, I was working on the house and trying to think of something interesting to learn.  I came up with a couple of ideas that will work well for later, but nothing that really worked for today. My husband is a chaperone for our church's youth retreat and so I decided to have supper at my grandpa's house with my mom and hang out with my parents for awhile. When I got there, my mom suggested that I could learn about Grampa's wood-burning furnace. I thought that was intriguing and so I went out to the car to get my camera and stumbled upon another lesson.

Grampa's dog Drake (AKA "Get-Down-Dog") sat on the swing, looking like some kind of furry sentry, watching for mountain lions or something and so I snapped a picture of him.

Just as I was about to go into the house I heard a startling and unfamiliar sound coming from near the barn. Whoah! What IS that? If you don't mind spoilers - it sounded like this.

Drake went rushing off to the source of the noise and I followed him...at a distance. I might be curious but I'm not ready to sign up for rabies shots. I couldn't see anything, but there was a lot of noise. Drake was lecturing the critters for trespassing, "Grrr-snarl-ruff!" And they were trash-talking him, "Chareeka-chatta-grruhchuk." And then Drake just stood there barking.

Silly raccoon.

I learned a couple of lessons from this incident.

1. 
   
   Petty bickering amongst yourselves can lead to much greater confrontations from elsewhere.
2. 
   
   If you are going to stir up a ruckus, you better have a good retreat available.
3. 
   
   The raccoon that runs has a better chance than the one who climbs a slippery metal pole in winter.

I tried to distract Drake, but he was pretty worked up. I suppose he understood the raccoon cussing better than I did. The masked bandit kept slipping and then climbing up and slipping and climbing up and finally fell from the pole and was snarling before he hit the ground. He got chewed out and chewed on, and to his credit he solicited more than a few yelps from the ol' dog. Drake came away and I didn't know if the racoon escaped or if he was dispatched. But I know enough not to go into a dark barn where there might be an injured animal. He's probably in the haymount, nursing his wounds, thinking that he's not going to argue so loudly around this farm again.

So, I went inside with my camera and commenced my lesson on Grampa's woodburning furnace. Before the lesson I knew two things. The first was that Furnace + Baking x Cooking = Hotter than the Sun. There have been a few years when I made the mistake of wearing a sweater to holiday festivities and wondered if the doctors would chuckle and call the press if they got a heat-stroke patient in mid-December during sub-zero temperatures. The second thing I knew is that I can tell if something's been at Grampa's house by its faint campfire meets echoes of homemade bread smell.

Here's what I learned tonight:

You need fuel for the fire. Obviously.

Here Grampa takes the Waybums into the firewood room so he can show her how they get the wood down there. All my life I knew that the room used to be a "cistern" but I never knew what a cistern was until I looked it up tonight. I always thought it was a kind of septic tank. LoL! Not quite. When I learned that a cistern is a kind of water reservoir, the references my grandma had made to using it suddenly made more sense. That's just one of the many back-burner things I'd never got around to really learning about. I thought I knew what it meant and so I never thought to ask. I know it probably seems dorky to someone who knows the meaning of the word. But we all have things that we think we understand but don't have it quite right. Just clarifying the meaning of one word suddenly helped shift a dozen stories my grandmother told me into focus. The most distinctive memory I have of this room was during a tornado when I was a kid. My brother, sister, grandma, mom and I were all crammed in there. I remember it felt like an adventure.

The furnace has two doors.

The larger door on top an the smaller one underneath.

The top is where the firewood goes...

And the lower door is where the ash is collected.

I realize this picture is sideways, but I kind of get a kick out of all of you turning your heads to the side to look at it, so I think I'll keep it that way. :) Sometimes it's more interesting to look at something from a different perspective.

After Grampa's demonstation I decided to do a little research on this furnace.

The furnace is a Longwood dual fuel furnace that can burn either oil or wood, and the name "Longwood" comes from the fact that it can burn logs up to five feet long. The founders of the company that manufactured it actually started out as earth-movers working with their Caterpillars, hauling mud around when people built houses or needed a pond somewhere - that sort of thing. Well, when this gentleman built his own house he didn't really like electric furnaces and so he designed and built a custom wood-burning furnace for his house. The neighbors liked it and wanted one for their own - word of mouth spread and they went from moving dirt to manufacturing furnaces. I love stories of such versatile people who stumble into success by accident, but had the good sense to run with it.

It was a good learning day. A little bit Wild American. A little bit This Old House.

Most of all, I just learned how much fun it is to see Grampa teaching the kids about things. He's such a stand-out fellow. Guys nowadays don't even have enough gumption to change out of their jammer pants before they go to the store for a gallon of milk, and my 80-something Gramps uses a cane to go up and down the stairs and make a fire twice a day. They just don't make 'em like they used to...

This was the cutest moment. He went to all the trouble of lowering the seat on this old-school exercise bicycle so Waybums could reach the pedals. She's barely there, but Grampa told her he'd help her try it again once she grew some more leg. :)

Off to sleep perchance to dream.

I'll keep you posted.

Today I learned about finding confidence and the art of flowers.

I think flowers are delightful. They’re bright and cheery. They smell beautiful. And in our culture they are a symbol of one person expressing something nice to another. What’s not to like about that? And today I was able to see the art of floral design first-hand.


The place of my study was Floral Designs by Jean, a quaint small-town flower shop owned by my best friend’s mom. Before her flower shop, she’d worked two factory jobs and was laid off from both. When she had the opportunity to go back to school for training, she took floral design and business classes. She explained that there were classes that covered specific aspects of floral design – bouquets, weddings, funerals, corsages, etc. that she had to learn before she could get her certification.


The most interesting thing I learned was that there is a LoT of prep work that goes into the flowers before they are all purdy and ready for us to buy. They arrive at the flower shop in a box, from exotic places like Columbia and California. It’s somewhat amazing to think that somewhere in the world there are sprawling fields of flowers that are destined to grace our wintry domain. As soon as she receives the flowers, she sets to work to condition them. She puts a special flower preservative with the water in the floral buckets and sets them to soak. (It’s the same type of stuff you get in those little square packets that come with your bouquets.) She explained that sometimes flowers will come in tightly closed, and in those instances she puts them in warm water. So, take note, if you receive flowers that have shy blossoms, putting them in warm water will help them bloom.


The next step she takes is stripping the flower stems of their leaves. She explained that only the stems should be under water. Leaves that are under the water line will start to decay and breed bacteria that will shorten the life of your blooms and discolor the water. And usually make it smell funky. This was sort of an “Aha!” moment for me because my fresh garden flowers usually had that problem, and now I know why.

With the roses, she said it’s good for the flowers to keep their leaves, above the water line. The thorns, however, had to go. Those things are wicked! It’s not just for your sake, either. Can you imagine reaching your hand into a bucket of rose fangs all day? Yeouch!

When I usually get a bunch of roses, I run water over them as I cut their stems. But at the shop, she cuts the flowers in a bowl of water. Snip- snip-snip. What a handy idea! You save on water, time and moola on your water bill. She lets the flowers sit to condition awhile at room temperature before putting them in her cooler.

I watched her assemble a pretty springy bouquet…

…fix up some standard Valentine’s Day bouquets for the cooler…

…prepare a plant for someone in the hospital…

…and turn a broken-off rosebud…

…into something really lovely.

I learned a lot about flowers today. (I also realized that it’s nice to have grown-up conversation over salmon spread and crackers.) It was great to see someone who is skilled in their trade at work. A couple of weeks back I helped take down the Christmas decorations at our church, and I was tasked with arranging some silk flowers in the entry. I'd jab a few flowers here and poke a few fillers there, but I was never really sure about what I was doing. So I took notice today when Jean was assembling the flowers and fillers. She'd narrow her eyes, spin the bouquet around and poke what needed to be poked where it needed to be poked. After 18 years of assembling bouquets, she knows what they're supposed to look like. She has a vision in her mind of what it's supposed to be and then she just follows that vision. Now there's a thought worth exploring.

Confidence and vision go hand in hand. If you know where you're going, you can take surer steps to get there.

What a great day of learning. And fun! So, for taking the time to teach me today’s lesson, Jean at Floral Designs should get a blue ribbon…

…I’m sure there’s a dozen shades of blue in there. :)

~~~

A lot more lessons to come…
…I’ll keep you posted.