All Four Bicycling

My mother didn't know how to ride a bike. I've known this about her, but for the last however many years, this fact has eluded my memory. Today as I was riding my bike next to my daughter, I remembered.

I occasionally glanced over to see my daughter riding her bike next to me. I thought about my old childhood memories riding my bike. It was always the three of us. My mother never came. I'm sure she had things to do around the house, or maybe she wanted quiet time away from us. But it may have been that she didn't know how to ride and could not come with us.

We went to Martha's Vineyard twice. The first summer we went, the boys rented bicycles and biked to the beach from the town. My mother and I took the bus and met them there. I remember feeling sad I didn't get to ride a bike with the rest of the kids. At the same time, I was too scared to ride on a rental bike (and I don't think any of them actually fit me.) The second summer we went, I rented a bike and rode to the beach with the boys. My mother rode the bus by herself. On the way back, we had to ride back through the crowded town streets. It was my first time riding a bicycle without back-pedaling brakes, and I wasn't completely comfortable with hand brakes. As we rode through the town, there was a downhill road, my bicycle picked up speed, I didn't know how to comfortably stop using my hand brakes, and I lost control and there was a minor collision of some sort. I was okay. 

This was the souvenir I'd picked out from one of the trips.
My mother wanted to buy things that would be practical with purpose.
I wanted something pretty. This...met both the the requirements.
Sort of. It's a business card holder. Little did I know at age 11-12,
I would have business cards for it a decade and a half later. :) 

My daughter finally got the courage to try and ride her bicycle again without training wheels. It helped to go riding a few times with our neighbor's kids. Watching them inspired her to ride again and try without the training wheels. I've known she's been ready for years now, but her own fear was holding her back. We started her on a balance bike and she was very comfortable with it around 2-3 years old. However, her fear of not having her feet touch the ground and the inconsistency of spending time outside practicing prevented her from learning how to ride a bicycle until now. It's still pretty early if you ask me. 

I don't have memories biking with my mother. That's an activity she got left out of because she didn't know how. I'm hoping my children's memories of biking will be able to include all four of us.

Candy is for Kids

We live by the local high school and every year they do a Homecoming Parade down the street a few streets behind us. One of my former students was on the student council and told me about the parade. That year, my husband rushed my kids out to go see it, but they were already reaching the high school. 

Last year, I somehow did not have classes to teach that evening, so our whole family went out to sit by the street and watch the parade. The kids had so much fun. It's a good thing we brought our wagon because we had no idea the sheer amount of candy and goodies my children would be showered with.

This year, nobody informed me what date the parade would be. But it just so happened I was driving by the park where the parade begins and saw a giant trailer being decorated with glittering banners and footballs. My brain started churning, and I remembered the Homecoming parade. I did a quick search online and confirmed the high school Homecoming parade was that evening. I didn't get to go but my husband took the kids in our trusty little wagon.

You bet they returned home with a wagon full of goodies. 

This is a filing box filled with candy...probably 5-6 pounds.

No, I will not let them eat all of this candy. Some of it will be given away to my students. Some of it will be given away at our church fall festival. And the rest will probably end up as Halloween candy set outside our porch because I end up working on Halloween evening. They're lucky if they get 5-10 pieces of the haul 😂. To be fair, they get candy everyday after school from their teachers, so they're already averaging one piece a day.

***

I used to be a sucker for candy. (pun intended.) One of the most comical memories of my childhood was opening the refrigerator as a young child of 4-5 and seeing a bag of Skittles in the snack drawer. You bet I pulled it out and wanted to open it immediately. My mother and I would drive to my brother's bus stop to pick him up after school. I had my skittles in a little plastic cup. I even remember them starting to melt together because of both the heat and my little-kid fingers reaching in and out every time I ate one. 

That evening, my dad returned home from work, and he excitedly told me, "I got a surprise for you!"

"She already found it and ate it all," was my mother's flat reply. I'm pretty sure my dad had a look of silly shock on his face, but maybe I'm just reconstructing this memory in my head. Either way, that definitely wasn't what he was expecting to hear.

***

I ate one fun size bag of Skittles from the pile the other day. Although I enjoyed the sweet treat, it doesn't hit the same as it used to when I was younger. I will not be sad to see it all leave our house. 

Garden Updates 2023

It was a hot summer. My garden did not fair very well after...the middle of June. I think I was able to eat maybe 2-2.5 pounds of tomatoes I grew myself and maybe 3-4 small bell peppers. My basil has been producing and thriving through the summer. I have more basil than I know what to do with. My bushes are still full and I feel like I've pruned them a lot. My freezer is full of pesto. My refrigerator is full of pesto. There's a lot of pesto. 

I turned all this basil into pesto. Two colanders turned into about 2 cups of pesto. 

It turned perfectly orange. Beautiful.

These I used green and turned them into a delicious stir-fry.

Some of my tomato harvest.

Now that fall is officially here (although yesterday's high was nearly triple digits again), the plants are beginning to thrive again. My pepper plants are about twice as tall as they were last year at this time. I attribute it to consistent and daily watering. My garden is on an automatic watering system and it waters the exact same amount at the same time every day. I love it. I do still walk around the corner to say hi to them in the mornings and do a quick visual inspection, but I'm not hand-watering the plants on that side. 

I use tomato cages for pepper plants. Works like a charm.
These are about 5 feet tall (including the raised bed height).

I pulled one of my three tomato plants because I'm pretty sure it was diseased. I left two of them because I wanted to see if I could get a fall harvest. I'm not entirely sure I will, but it doesn't hurt to try. One of my tomato plants is now coming back for the third time. Yes, you read that correctly, the THIRD time from being cut back twice.

This tomato plant has been pruned twice. It's on its third life. 

The first time was not on purpose. When I bought the tomato plant at the store, one of the larger stems was bent and hanging over. When I planted them into my garden, I cut off the bent stem and replanted it in another pot. Tomatoes propagate extremely easily and this stem grew nicely and became a great producer for me in early summer. About 4-6 weeks ago, I cut it way back again to let it restart for the fall. It's now got some blossoms on it along with growing new foliage. If I'm lucky I may get another 1-2 clusters of tomatoes. 

The best surprise I got was seeing monarch caterpillars on my milkweed plant. I inherited this plant from the neighbor behind us when they were moving. It died last winter in the freeze and started growing again this spring. When I went out in the morning for my daily watering and walkthrough, I saw caterpillars all over my milkweed - eleven to be exact. I opened out patio door and called my children to come out and look at them. 😂 I think they enjoyed it but weren't as impressed as I was.

How many can you find in this photo? 

These caterpillars are not to be confused with tomato hornworms. I have gotten rid of my fair share of hornworms this summer. Those little suckers are resilient. I threw one over the fence and it SURVIVED. And it was a 10 ft fall onto cement. What can I say...nature is pretty amazing, even if I'm not a fan of how they amaze. 

I don't know how much more gardening excitement the rest of the year will bring for me, but it's been a pretty fun journey this year since I started in April. 

2022 I started with peppers. 2023 I added basil and tomatoes.  2024 I may try beans! Stay tuned. 

Writing New Memories

My daughter is beginning to learn how to read and this week, she started putting together her own sentences. Cue the bad spelling, nonexistent spacing skills, and large letters! Honestly though, I love it. It's so much fun to watch her learn and grow in this way. And I can take....a decent amount of credit. But not all of it. 😁

I posted this picture with her first "sentence" on Facebook and asked others what they could interpret it, and reading all the responses was very entertaining. 

So this is what it is actually supposed to say: The phone [fon] is not working [wrcceen]? Yes.

Translation: The phone doesn't work and it's confirmed. Apparently this was a conversation she and her brother were having regarding an actual phone in our house. 

This is the phone they were referring to, and they are correct. It does not work. It has not worked in over 10 years. Instead, it's been a wonderful "toy" for my kids.

I purchased this phone 12 years ago from eBay. It was the first phone I bought with my own money. I was going through a tough life transition and felt the need for some change. So upgrading phones was something I'd thought to do. New phones without contracts in the models I wanted were $300+ at the time and I was an unemployed college student. So I purchased this used phone that seemed decent from the description for around $200 if I remember correctly. It arrived, I started using it, and everything seemed great. 

The phone lasted me all of about 7 months. One day, it randomly shut off and wouldn't turn on again. I tried restarting it and all the tricks I knew how or could get as advice from others. Nothing worked. My brother ended up giving me one of his old phones and that's what I used for the year and a half after. After that, I told myself I'd never buy a used phone again. And that's stayed true for the last 10 years. I was lucky enough to be able to use other people's used phones for free. 😆 Until last year.

Last year, I purchased my second phone with my own money. The one I was using suffered a fatal fall and the screen shattered and was completely unusable. Before that, I'd kept using phones with cracked screens. I even paid to repair a cracked screen, and the casualty last fall wasn't worth another repair.

For all these years I'd resented this phone because it was one of the first "large" purchases I'd made for myself as an emerging adult. And it turned out to be such a huge flop. Now, I get to add a happier memory to it because it will forever be the topic of my daughter's first written sentence. 😊

Savings

This summer, one of my favorite stores closed. With it, came store closing sales. I went multiple times in June. I probably would have gone more but I was dealing with health issues so I wasn't as active as I normally am. 

On a Saturday where I was feeling better than normal, we went as a whole family and perused the store for a while. During this trip, I spotted a dicing attachment for my food processor which I had been contemplating buying for a while. I hadn't expected to see it because I assumed it would be one of the more popular items which would have been snagged up sooner than later. Who knew it would still be there at 30% off!

We bought it and stored it away in the kitchen cabinet, and it stayed there for a few months. Each time I thought about using it, I just decided I'd dice my vegetables by hand and it would be fine. Yes, it's true, dicing my vegetables by hand is fine, but I had spent money on this attachment and it was non-refundable. 

One morning, I was cooking after picking up the kids from school. For this particular recipe, I needed to dice four carrots, four celery sticks, and one onion. I decided that I would pull out my dicing attachment and use it instead of cutting these vegetables by hand. 

Now this was my first time using this attachment, and I had actually never looked into how to use it. So I spent the first 20 minutes looking up videos online on how to attach the pieces together. This attachment came with two pieces. One had the grid which does the dicing. The other piece has a slicing disk that spins around. So I had to watch a video to figure out how to insert them properly into my food processor bowl. 

The two pieces to my dicing attachment.

Once I assembled the food processor and had everything set up, it was smooth sailing from there. I was able to dice my four carrots, four stalks of celery, and a whole onion in a few minutes. 

Not a bad dice for an automatic tool. 

I wouldn't pass a chef exam dicing like this, but hey,  I'll take it.

Normally, I don't buy attachments like this because they usually make for more work, however, I'm kind of torn on this one. These are completely my own thoughts. This is not a paid review. 

Pros:

1. It dices well. The pieces are mostly uniform. They're not perfect, but it is definitely faster than I could do by hand.

2. I can put in whole sticks. This makes it especially convenient for carrots and celery. Other vegetables such as onions or potatoes would need a preliminary cut in order to get the shape to fit right through the feed tube. 

3. It saves my fingers. Never once did I have to worry about cutting myself with a knife. And I've done that a lot. 

4. It's really convenient for large batches of vegetables.

Cons:

1. Food gets stuck in the grid the very last round because nothing else follows behind to push it out. They do provide a tool for you to use to push food out, but it takes quite a bit of effort.

2. Not good if you want your food to look pretty. There were definitely some misshapen pieces, especially at the ends of each stick of food pushed through.

As someone who cooks a lot, I think this attachment will come in handy for me with specific recipes I make. I would definitely have to plan ahead because clean up is not the simplest so it needs to be worth my time to pull it out. I'm glad I have it and I will use it in the future. However, knowing what I do now, I'm 50/50 on if I would buy it again. 

This is only my first use of this attachment so maybe over time, I might feel differently. But I will say after using it the first time, I felt very satisfied in my "efficiency" and didn't have any blisters on my hand from using the knife. That's probably a huge value in itself. 

Pivotal

So I have not been blogging as much as I want to because life has been crazy this summer. My kids have started school (I know, they're old enough. Can you believe it? I both can and can't at the same time.) And life has felt like it's gone into turbo mode with them in school. We are doing a hybrid-type program with school and parent-guided homework so I feel like I just got dumped extra work even though I have some time away from both my kids now. But life is busy and I can't complain about where we're at, but wow, it's picked up a pace I wasn't quite expecting to be honest. 

I've always liked to be an intentional person, but the older I get, the more I feel the need to be intentional. One of the things I like is to be able to tell people from my past about where I am now and how I appreciate them for being in that phase of my life. No, I'm not going around messaging every person I went to high school with. But there are specific people who stand out for one reason or another. 

I actually started doing this with poignant books I read, too. I write to the author. In the last year, I've written to two. I heard back from the manager of one author. I don't take it personally when I don't hear back because there's numerous reasons why they don't respond. But on my behalf, I wrote to them, and that's the most I can expect of myself to do. I have yet to write to an author that I've been wanting to write to since I was a child. Her book has meant a lot to me, and yes, I've written about it on the blog. If you know what book/which author I'm talking about without me linking the post, then you really know me well and keep up with the blog. 😊 The main reason I haven't gotten around to writing her is because she does not have an online contact form. I've got to write or type out a letter to her, stick it in an envelope and use a stamp to mail it to her. Can I do all this? Absolutely. But unfortunately, it's so much easier for me to do something on a computer, phone, or iPad, so anything that can't be done from these three technologies is usually put off or forgotten. 

Recently, I messaged an old friend on her website. Her name has popped into my head multiple times throughout the years. I don't expect a response from her because if I did, chances are, I would be disappointed. We went to middle school together for one year. We met through communication applications class, or better known as "speech class." Now this isn't speech class for those needing extra help in pronunciation and speaking English. This was the communications class on presenting speeches, poise, gestures, and everything public speaking. Why in the world did I choose this class? 

Because it's my weakness. And for some reason, 12-year-old me thought, why not pick an elective to work on something I'm not good at? How mature of me, right? Instead of choosing an art class or home economics to craft and cook, I chose to suffer through a semester of writing and giving speeches to a class full of people I don't remember except this one friend. 

At the end of the school year, she found out she was moving. Again. She was used to it, but it didn't make the move any easier. At the end of the school year, my mom died. Life would never look the same for me ever again. She wrote me a note for the last day of school, and put it into a pouch she made along with a friendship bracelet and her school picture. I kept them all these years in a little box at my dad's house. 

How many 8th graders know how to sew/put together a knit pouch like this today?

Yes, I'm sentimental. I'm actually less sentimental than I used to be, but still sentimental nonetheless. But it's these little building blocks of memories which have led me to where I am today. 

In a year neither of us knew would be so pivotal to our lives, we had each other. 

Dressed to the Nines

When I was a sophomore in college, a friend at another school asked me to be his date for a formal. I said yes, and of course I went shopping and bought a new dress. I found it on sale and paid a great price for it. A few weeks before the formal, he told me it was being postponed. I was slightly disappointed, but he said he'd let me know when it would be rescheduled and see if I could still go. 

The following spring, he told me the formal was scheduled for February. However, he had started dating someone, and so had I. He still asked me if I wanted to go to formal with him since we had originally planned to go together before it was rescheduled, but I declined as it wouldn't feel right to since we both had significant others. 

I purchased this dress nearly 13 years ago. And sadly, I never got the chance to wear it. When I graduated from college, I did an unofficial senior photoshoot wearing this dress. My friend who tagged along ended up taking some photos herself and snapped this photo of me. 

She ended up being our wedding photographer (we were her very first wedding!) and is a well-established photographer now.

I had a lot of fun at the photoshoot, and the pictures I did receive bring back fun memories, but the dress was never showcased or seen by anyone other than the two of them. 

When I graduated from college, the dress moved back home with me and stayed in my closet for a year while I lived overseas. It stayed in my childhood closet when I moved back home. It migrated to our apartment with me after I got married and moved out. And finally, it came to our master bedroom closet when we purchased our first house together where it's been since. 

Occasionally, I found myself pulling out the dress, admiring it, trying it on, and lamenting the fact I would probably never get a chance to wear it in my life. The dress was long, black, and formal. How many occasions would I have to wear a dress like that again? 

2023 was going to be the year. I was asked to play piano at a wedding, and the wedding dress code was cocktail formal. Miraculously, the dress still fit. This was going to be possibly the one and only time I would ever wear this dress. 

My husband and I enjoyed our time at this wedding. We didn't bring the kids with us as kids weren't allowed, but we had wonderful friends who kept them overnight for us so we didn't have to pick them up late and drive all the way home. So this was the first wedding in a long time where we could feed ourselves without needing to keep children quiet or prevent them from spilling/breaking/dropping anything they weren't supposed to. 

The outdoor area was beautiful although I'm so glad they
changed it to an indoor wedding. Best decision ever. The high was 102. 

I waited 13 years for a chance to wear this dress. I would never have thought so in college, but I'm glad I didn't have anywhere to wear this dress until now. My first (and potentially last) time wearing this dress will be with my husband. There's no event more special than one I get to attend with him by my side.

Happy nine years to the absolute best person I could have ever chosen to spend my life with. 🥰