Grace Notes
* We recently made a quick trip to Texas to watch our 9-year-old granddaughter play basketball in a tournament. We had been wanting to go watch Karsyn play, but it had not worked out during their regular season. The opportunity to attend the season-ending tournament, when her team was the number one seed, provided the hope of seeing her play more than one game—if they won the first game. They did win their first game, which was the first game of the day at 8:am. Their second game wasn’t until 2:pm, so that gave us time to go back to the house, get some good food into everybody’s tummys (hence a stop at the donut shop!), and have a little break before the next game. But Karsyn’s team didn’t play as well the second game so that ended the tournament for them, which was fine with our grandkids because that meant we had the rest of the day to goof off. The only problem was, it was way too cold to be outdoors. Too cold... in Texas? It was not only cold, but we had a blizzard for an hour or so with huge, fluffy snowflakes. With the ground being too warm to capture snow, there was no accumulation. But things truly are bigger in Texas... those were the biggest snowflakes I’ve ever seen!
* On our way down to Texas, we stopped in at our hometown of Goessel and visited my dad in the nursing home. He is doing well, all things considered at the ripe age of 95. I’m pretty sure I won’t be making it that long. Dad had an appointment with another new-to-him doctor who gave him a “Thumbs Up!” good report. He says he continues to outlive his doctors as one-by-one, they are retiring and he gets assigned to a new one. This Doc asked him if he wants to live to 100, to which Dad answered, “I don’t have to.” But the doctor said he didn’t see any reason why that wouldn’t be a good bet.
* Last Sunday we enjoyed having our Fort Hays granddaughter and her boyfriend come for dinner, after which we put them to work reinstalling shingles that had blown off our house and our garage in the big wind of Dec. 15. My husband has (wisely!) decided he will no longer climb around on rooftops, and the young man that has our granddaughter’s heart had no problem walking around up there. Even though he had not worked with shingles before, he was very capable of doing the work with good common sense and enough technical know-how to do a good job. Just the kind of decent, hard-working young man that we would have ordered for our granddaughter, if it had been up to us. He gained a lot of high marks that day, and we hope he’ll stick around for a lifetime.
* Last week everyone all around the world got to have a once-in-a-century-kind-of-day to be alive as we enjoyed the date of 2-22-22. Yes, earlier in the month we got to write 2-2-22, which is also cool, but this time it was made even more fun since it landed on a Tuesday, prompting the respelling of the day to “Twosday,” which was highly appropriate. I wish I would have been the person who thought of that. Then I saw pictures online of ladies wearing tutus and wished I had thought of that, too. A friend who we grew up with announced on Facebook that 2-22-22 was deemed “National Zwieback Day!” If you’re not aware of what zwieback is, this Mennonite girl can tell you that it is basically a dinner roll, only it is made up of two buns—kind of a dinner roll on top of a dinner roll—thus, zwieback were the perfect treat on Twosday, 2-22-22. I baked almost five dozen Saturday, the 19th, and they were all gone by the 23rd. However, of all those delicious buns, I gave two dozen away. With a little help from my husband, I could have eaten them all, but then I would kind of look like a zwieback myself!
* After last summer’s close encounters with a skunk—twice!—for our dog-child, Charley, and having seen skunks twice last week near our house, with help from the City of Stockton we now have traps set up at various places around our yard. We do not want to go through that experience again and hope we can get them caught quickly.
