Saturday Revue

 Here it is Saturday afternoon, and there really isn't much to report! It's been TOO HOT to do much of anything!

This is our current reading on the themometer on the back porch. (Around 3:00 pm) However, I understand that the "heat index values" are up to 111 degrees, according the the severe weather alert we have on our phone app.  That's pretty doggone hot for us here in this part of Florida, and there's no rain in sight!  We are extremely thankful for our central AC, which is running all the time, but it is doing the job! Thank You, Lord, for whoever evented air conditioning!

Even though I grew up in Florida in the days before air conditioning...we didn't have it at home, or at school, or at church, or in our cars, or anywhere!  Somehow we survived, but looking back I do remember that as a child I either stayed outside and played...

yes, that's me...keeping the intruders out of my wood pile fort. LOL

 or I sat in front of a fan a lot.  I wore as minimal amount of clothes as I could and it seems like we made koolaid or juice popsicles in those tupperware things and enjoyed eating them to cool off. Life was much simpler then, even if it was hot! The windows were open at night and we could hear the tree frogs "singing" back and forth to each other. Sometimes they got so loud, especially after the rain, that we could hardly sleep for the noise. But thankfully my Daddy had put a big attic fan up in the attic, and he would turn that on at night and it would pull in a nice, albeit humid, breeze and also the whirring of the fan helped drown out the sound of the frogs.

My Sister Doris (washing the dishes) and I , drying the dishes, barefooted and trying to keep cool in our short shorts in the summertime.  

I know some of you may live where you don't really need central air conditioning that much, but trust me, if you lived in Florida in the summertime, you'd be very very thankful to have it.

So what else is new?  Let's see,

There's a new store in town!  "The Trading Post" at Deep Creek...

Deep Creek is the Farmer's market place where our son sets up a booth a couple of times a month in their outdoor Saturday morning market.  But now they have added a very nice indoor "Trading Post" store, where vendors can sell their products  every day (Wed-Sun) without having to be there because the store owners will handle the sales.  It's a lot like what we did at Dixie Cottage, and since that store is no longer in our town, the timing was just right for this new store to open.

No, this isn't our son's booth, but he does do similar work as this, and I thought it was interesting that this fellow's store name is "Benjamin's Sawmill".

Our son Benton doesn't have a booth yet in this store, but he does plan to set up one soon. He's just been too busy with their other projects to do this one too.

Some of you who remember our Dixie Cottage days may remember these items...yes, this is the same woman who was in our store, with her beautifully made bird baths and bird feeders, crafted from vintage glassware...

You may also recognize the items in these photos below!  I was surprised to see these pictures of MY birdfeeders that I purchased from her a few years ago. I had sent these pictures to her, showing how much our birds loved them, and she had asked permission to use these photos in her booth display some time ago. I'd forgotten about that, and when I saw these pictures today I was so surprised!!

You may recognize our Sand Hill Crane family when they had two little colts! This was several years ago!

Here's another interesting woodworker booth.  I love these items...and so many more that are there for sale in this new store.

Many many interesting things to look at...

And I found something special for Sunshine and Blackie!

These two little mice are stuffed with catnip!  I was so excited to get them and couldn't wait to give them to our kitties!

LOL! Here's Sunshine...he got up and moved away and wouldn't go near it!

Blackie wasn't there at this time, so I am still waiting as I write to show it to him. I will keep you posted.

Okay, I tried again when I fed them.  Blackie sniffed the mouse, but was more interested in eating.  Sunshine gave it a wide berth once again.  Wouldn't even sniff it. So...maybe mice stuffed with catnip isn't exactly their "thing". LOL. I think they'd prefer the real deal...you know...real mice? LOL. Thankfully I don't have any of those to offer them. 

I suppose since these kitties have been raised in the wild they aren't interested in fake toys. Oh well, I tried. LOL.

This is how they wait for me to bring them their breakfast in the morning...

The longer I stall, the closer they get to my window! LOL.

But this is how they spend the rest of the day...

On these "dog days of summer" I can't say as I blame them.

Thankfully while I was writing this earlier this afternoon, the sky turned dark and I could hear thunder in the distance, and sure enough, we got a surprise afternoon thunderstorm!  It cooled things off all the way to 92 degrees! LOL.  But we are truly thankful for the rain, and also that it didn't bring any strong winds or other severe weather.  It was a good reminder to be patient and wait on the Lord, and He will bring good things to pass!!

Psalm 37:3-8 has some good reminders for us today...

"3 Trust in the Lord, and do good;

Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.

4 Delight yourself also in the Lord,

And He shall give you the desires of your heart.

5 Commit your way to the Lord,

Trust also in Him,

And He shall bring it to pass.

6 He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light,

And your justice as the noonday.

7 Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him;

Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way,

Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.

8 Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;

Do not fret—it only causes harm.

I underlined the words that show us a better way to live, especially in these difficult times when the world is trying to go in the opposite direction of what this psalm is teaching us to do.  If we can just remember these words and apply them to our own hearts, we would be amazed at how much better we will feel and get along no matter what is happening around us.  

Trust, Dwell, Feed, Delight in the Lord, Commit, Rest, and Wait on the Lord, Do Not Fret, Cease from anger, forsake wrath, and again, Do not fret!  

God's Word is right and true...we just need to believe and do what it says.  Amen!!

Have a blessed and beautiful rest of your weekend, my friends!!  

Tuesday 4~ The Warm Months

 The Warm Months

Welcome back to Toni Taddeo's Tuesday 4.

Warmer days

Spring has come and Summer is approaching. Our friend Linda tells me the temps in Florida are already in the 90s and humidity through the roof. But days are grow\ing longer for everyone. How does it effect you?

1.Daylight is getting longer... what do you do with the extra daylight? Is it useful, productive or not?
Even though I'd prefer that we didn't have to do the daylight savings time switcheroo every year, I am thankful for the longer days of summer. It gives me more time in the evening to go outside when it's not quite as boiling hot and water the plants and maybe take a walk.

2. If you live where its more moderate do you spend more time outdoors? If you live in the tropical climate does it keep you inside?
Does the extra day light cause more heat and more use of utilies for you?
We live in Florida, like Linda mentioned above...actually not too far from her, about an hour's drive north, so yes, our temps are just like what she said...hot and humid and we need rain.  And yes, the tropical climate does keep us inside most of the day. The high temps and high humidity are pretty miserable if you have to be outside working in it especially. We try to do all outdoor chores/yard work, etc., either early in the morning before 9:30 or 10, or in the evenings after the sun starts going down.  

3. How do you cool your home? How do you cool yourself off in the heat of the day?
Our central air conditioning runs 24/7. We are very thankful to have it. When I grew up here in Florida we did NOT have AC, and it was pretty miserable...but we really didn't know the difference because no one had AC, not our schools, churches or even our cars. So we lived with a lot of fans going and wore as little as possible to keep cool in the summer time. As kids, we spent most of the day outside, playing in the sprinklers if we could...or those who lived near the lakes or springs or were fortunate enough to have access to a pool...we went swimming as often as possible!

4. Do you enjoy a good barbeque outside in the warmer months or do you cook outside and eat inside?
What foods do you enjoy on the barbeque? If you don't barbeque, what foods and drinks do you enjoy in the warmer months?

We may do a barbeque on the weekend if our kids come over and our son Scott is here to do the honors on the grill. But it is too hot here during the daytime to eat outside, and unless you have a screened porch, it's pretty miserable to try and eat outside in the evenings because of the mosquitoes and deer flies and horseflies, and other bugs. However, if you have a nice shaded area outside where you can have an occasional picnic, it is fun to do so...especially if you have a place to go jump in the water and cool off!  

What do we enjoy cooking on the grill? Well, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, steak (if we could afford it). And if we have planned ahead, it's nice to have potato salad, cole slaw or a tossed salad, or some good fresh corn on the cob, watermelon, sliced tomatoes.  Drinks? Iced tea, water, or soft drinks. I'd love a good fresh homemade ice cold lemonade if someone wanted to squeeze the lemons!  Or a root beer float!

Now, on a personal note of what's going on here...speaking of the high heat and humidity and yard work, our son Benton came over early yesterday morning to do some yard work for us. Of course, one thing led to another, and he found himself doing probably more than he had expected. All of a sudden he was seized with some pressure/pain in his chest and came inside. He was very overheated and had not been drinking any water. The whole situation was very scary and long story short, I ended up taking him to the emergency room. They checked him over thoroughly and decided to admit him and keep him overnight for observation, even though the tests all came back good regarding his heart. This morning they may do a stress test, depending upon how he did during the night. It's only 6:30 a.m. here now as I am writing this, so I haven't talked to him yet, but last night he was feeling much better once he finally got settled in a room and had some good supper. That was a close call and maybe a wake-up call for him to pay a bit more attention to his overall health. We are very thankful to God that this turned out much  better than it might have.  

Also, this morning my hubby will be having an MRI as a follow up to the CT scan he had last week. Prayers are appreciated.

Speaking of gardening...You can imagine how I felt when I discovered THIS creature eating my brand new roses!  That is an Eastern Lubber Grasshopper, and the only good one of these is a dead one. Sesriously. They are extremely destructive and as you can see by the picture below, they will devour your plants in minutes!  

That's what's left of this rose!  I sprayed the bush with some insecticide and he fell off and disappeared, but I would've preferred to have been able to have stomped the life out of him to be sure he was dead. Yes, I will not have mercy on those creatures!    As a matter of fact, I did find another one on my azalea bushes later, and he's no longer among the living.  

But on a happier note, I found some fresh South Carolina Peaches at the farm market the other day, and was happy to bring them home to enjoy!

I rarely eat ice cream any more, but there's really no better way to eat some fresh sliced peaches than on top of a bowl of ice cream!  Oh, that's another summer treat I should have mentioned above!

And if it was the 4th of July, we might have made homemade ice-cream! That's a family tradition that goes way back. But this store bought variety will have to do for now.  Our best cranking guys are not able to do any serious hand-cranking of ice-cream right now. (actually, we have an electric machine, but that's not as much fun).

Well, I must get a move on. The kitties are waiting to be fed and the Sand Hill Cranes are lining up at the back door for their morning treat:  (Hubby has taken on the feeding of the Crane family as his own special project, and they look forward to this every morning and evening!)

This was the scene at the back door just now! I can barely step out the door...

But then Sunshine is a bit more finicky and needs to be  encouraged more to eat than 'Blackie'...

But he finally dives in and gets his share too... (most of the time they eat back and forth out of each other's dishes)

And then of course Mr. Duck shows up, thinking he can get in on the breaksfast bar, but thankfully I was out there to send him away.  He thinks he's one of the cats and wants to eat their food too. Sorry, Mr. Duck...not today! Trust me, he's not starving. There's plenty of food in the pond out there for him.  He just happens to prefer cat food. LOL.

Okay, on that note, I must go. Your kind thoughts and prayers are always appreciated.

A thought for today from our devotional readings...

Isaiah 30:15 NKJV

15 For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel:

“In returning and rest you shall be saved;

In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”

My trust is in the Lord, and I know He will take care of all these matters that concern us. Amen.

How We Survived the Summer BEFORE AC! Updated

UPDATE:  I just thought about this post when I saw one of my friends' posts about being thankful for air conditioning...and this is what I wrote about this subject almost exactly five years ago today! This will be my "Thankful Thursday" post this week. I am STILL very thankful for AC, along with all the happy memories this invoked from my childhood summer vacations...


Original Post 6/30/2012:
I started writing a response on Facebook to my husband's cousin, who asked the question, "How did people live here 100 years ago?"...speaking of the 97 degree temperatures here in Florida today.  He is originally from New Jersey, and has not had to endure too many hot summers in Florida before I take it.  Although, Florida is probably much cooler today than most of our northern and midwestern states!   Anyway, as I started responding to his question on Facebook, I realized that I was writing much too long of a response for the comment space, and decided I should switch it to my blog instead.  I will make sure that cousin John gets a copy of this response! 

So here goes:

Although I didn't live here in Florida 100 years ago, I did live here prior to AC, and it was HOT. But we didn't know what AC was, so we just adapted. We had fans, and windows that opened wide, and  mildewed shoes from the humidity. We dressed accordingly...for kids that was easy, shorts and halter tops and flip flops.  We played outside all day and cooled down with a water hose...drank from it too, and didn't die from it. We went swimming in the lakes and local springs as often as possible, and didn't get eaten by alligators or bitten by snakes. We built forts in the woods and ran barefoot most of the time.    We didn't have AC at school either, but we still survived and learned a lot of reading, writing and 'rithmetic. (sometimes to the tune of the "hickory stick"...or the teacher's ruler in my case).  We did not stay indoors and play with video games or watch tv all day.  That was forbidden! (didn't have video games, and TV wasn't that sophisticated yet). 

One of our campsites in the Smokey Mountains

Eating lunch at a roadside park on our vacation
(I took this picture, so I wasn't in it. )

Our cars didn't have AC either, but we took vacation trips to the mountains to "cool off" and slept in tents on air mattresses that we had to blow up by mouth! 

We cooked our food on a campfire or a Coleman stove, and swatted mosquitoes and watched out for bears.   We didn't have McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendy's, so we stopped at roadside parks and ate picnic lunches while traveling along the winding mountain roads.  My mother could create the most delicious meals out of a cooler and with that Coleman stove. After eating our lunch we would often wade in a nearby mountain stream or creek, and look for interesting river rocks and stones to add to our rock collection.  Finding places for all of our "souvenirs" in the car was sometimes a bit tricky, especially since there were six people crammed into a rather small car, but somehow we managed to bring our treasures home with us. 

To this day I really don't know how all six of us managed to travel in those vehicles without air conditioning through the hottest months of the year, but we did it. We rode with the windows open and the wind blowing in our faces and our hair, and sometimes we even stuck our feet up in the window to cool them off!   We played all kinds of road games to pass the time, like the "Alphabet Game", the Horse Game, where you counted horses on your side of the road, and got extra points for a horse farm, and lost your horses if there was a cemetery that the opposite side of the car team noticed on your side of the road before you could call your horses safe.  We also ate homemade cookies that my mother had baked prior to the trip, and drank water from a thermos.  I was the youngest, and also the one most prone to car-sickness in the mountains, so there were frequent emergency stops along the side of the road for me to "lose my cookies".   Yuck.

On one most memorable trip we had stopped along the way and purchased a watermelon to eat later with our picnic lunch.  We were hauling a small trailer on the back of our car with our camping gear and luggage. inside. It was mostly empty as we had planned to pick up some of our furniture that was being stored at my uncle's farm in Pennsylvania from our former home and take it back to Florida with us.  So my dad put the watermelon in the trailer with the tents and luggage.  Apparently it did not occur to him that the watermelon would do a lot of rolling around in the mostly empty trailer as we traveled over hill and dale through the mountains.  When we stopped for lunch and opened the trailer to take out the watermelon for lunch, to our horror we discovered that the watermelon had broken open and had smashed itself all over our camping gear and our clothes!  You can imagine what  a sticky icky mess that was! Fortunately, we were near Columbia, S.C., and my father remembered that the parents of one of his old college buddies lived in that area.  He went to a pay phone (no cell phones back then either), and looked up their name and number in the phonebook, and gave them a call.  He told them who he was and about our dilemma, and these dear sweet people insisted that he bring us all right over to their home and they would take care of us!  And take care of us they did!  Talk about "Good Samaritans"!  Not only did they take us in and wash our clothes and feed us, but they put us up for the night, and when we were ready to leave the next morning (after a huge southern style breakfast) they packed a cooler of food for us to take along for the day...fried chicken and all the trimmings!  Can you imagine that?  These people did not even know my Dad personally, but because he was a friend of their son from college (quite a few years prior), that was good enough for them.  They went above and beyond the call of duty and cared for us so kindly...I've never ever forgotten that!  I would hope that I would do the same if the situation ever arose...but I fear I've possibly missed some good opportunities to be such a "Good Samaritan" already.  (See the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37)

The Trolley Car DOWN the mountain from Ghost Mountain
in the Sky...quite a trip!

I guess I have "traveled" a bit away from the original subject of living in Florida prior to AC, but I think you get the picture.  It was such an idyllic time in our lives...I can think of no happier childhood than what I had, living here in Florida before AC.  I feel sorry for kids today who don't know the joy of playing outside all summer long, using their imaginations and playing in the sprinklers to keep cool or going to the local lakes or springs for a day of fun and swimming. We were especially blessed in that we were able to take camping trips up through the mountains...what we didn't realize at the time was that that was the only way our family could afford to travel to go visit our grandparents up north.  We could not have afforded to stay in motels and eat at restaurants the way people do today. And we didn't get to go to all the expensive "theme parks", although we DID have a fun time one summer at "Ghost Mountain in the Sky" in Maggie Valley, NC, I recall.  That was the closest thing to a "theme park" we had back then I guess. 

The chair lift UP to Ghost Mountain in the Sky,
Maggie Valley, NC

I have enjoyed this little trip down memory lane today. It kind of helped to "cool things off" a bit for me, how about you?

Truly, after watching the national news tonight, I am very sorry to see all of the severe hot weather around our nation, in addition to the extremely volatile forest fires out west.  I am particularly concerned about that because my youngest son Scott happens to be out there in Colorado right now.  He assures me that he is safe and on the opposite side of the city from the biggest fire right now...but I still worry.  I will be a very happy mother when I see him step off of that plane next week as he returns home.  Although his trip to seek work out there was unsuccessful, if he is able to escape this firestorm unscathed, that will be a huge success to me.  God will take care of the rest once he is safely back home, I am certain.

So, cousin John, yes, we did survive life here in Florida pre-AC, as our ancestors before us survived much greater hardships than high temperatures in the preceding century.  I fear that each generation gets a little bit softer and less resilient to the hardships of life because we just don't have to endure much discomfort anymore.  I wonder how future generations will survive when life gets really tough on planet earth in the years to come? I don't know, but I don't plan to be here that long!  I got a mansion just over the hilltop, where the temperature is always perfect, and we never to need to worry about AC, heat, freezes,  fires, or floods ever again! Woohoo!  That will be a wonderful day! Amen?  In the meantime, keep cool, my friends.