Please Stand By

I found this image on the internet somewhere and used it as my desktop background on my computer at work.  Several people thought it was funny but not surprisingly the 2 girls under the age of 30 had no idea what it was.  

I explained about the old TVs and how you had to wait for them to warm up and how the picture got smaller and smaller when you turned them off.  I explained how this screen might be used when the TV station was having technical difficulties and how a similar screen was used at the end of the evening.  One co-worker said "You mean before the next show came on?"  I explained that shows only used to air from 5 am starting with the farm reports and ended about midnight with the National Anthem, there was nothing on in middle of the night.  I got a dumbfounded look.  I also explained we only had 3 channels to choose from...another dumbfounded look.   Guess it's a good thing I didn't go into how we didn't have all programs in color for a good while either.

If this makes you think I'm old, I know the feeling.  So many changes have taken place in technology since 1958 when I was born.   Not all of them for the better in my humble opinion, but at least it's entertaining to watch the younger generation try to figure out how to do things when their new gadgets don't work.

Salsa Time!

No, not dancing, I'm afraid my dancing days are pretty much over.  I made salsa today and canned it.

This is my big Anya pot.  My dear friend Anya gave me this pot and it holds a humongous amount.  It's a really nice stainless steel pot with a heavy bottom and a lid too.  I actually had one batch in the pressure canner already when I remembered to take this photo, you can even see the steam rising.  

I use a lot of canned tomatoes, especially Rotel tomatoes and salsa.  It gets expensive even if I buy the store brand so I decided to buy the #10 cans of tomatoes and some jalapenos & onions and make my own.  I roughly chopped 2 large onions and opened the #10 cans.  The tomatoes were whole so they had to go in the food processor with the onions.  I had gotten 3 large and 2 regular size cans of tomatoes marked down because they were dented so those went in too as well as 2 jars of marked down chopped jalapenos drained and 2 fresh jalapenos seeded and chopped.  I did add some salt and some garlic powder.

This was all heated in the Anya pot.  As I filled the jars I added fresh chopped cilantro and half a spoonful of citric acid as you can never tell about tomatoes anymore having enough acid.  It took pretty much all Sunday afternoon but I now have 22 pints of salsa and 3 quarts of tomato veggie juice.  The juice was the nearly 2 quarts of juice from the #10 cans and 1 ice cube of beet juice, 2 ice cubes of greens juice and about a pint of carrot juice from the freezer.  I froze these when I had a juicing day a while back.  I added salt and garlic and onion powder to the juice.

Here's the salsa, the juice was still in the canner when I took this photo.  

Counting the cost of all the ingredients I spent about $16.  Rotel tomatoes come in small cans and it would take over 2 to fill a pint.  Just figuring on 2 per pint this would have cost about $44 for Rotel.  If you consider this is also salsa, this would have cost about $110 for the same amount of decent salsa.  I like my $16 much better.  And even if you figured in the extra $14 I spent on 2 dozen jars it's still cheaper.  And that's not counting the 3 quarts of juice which will be pretty much like V8, have you priced that lately?  I buy the store brand at Dollar General and its nearly $3 for a 2 liter bottle.

And yes, you can see my previous canning jars in the back ground, I still need to reinforce the shelves to store them.  With all this it will be a priority for next weekend.

Saturday I also canned 1 pint of leftover beef roast, 4 pints of leftover beef noodle soup and 3 pints of leftover sloppy joe beef.  Now I have some easy lunches or dinners.

TAST Week 4 ~ Cretan Stitch

This week's stitch for TAST was the cretan stitch.  I am definitely not a fan of this stitch.  It's very simple and yet I had such trouble with it.  I kept getting the needle on the wrong side of the thread and kept getting my spacing wrong.  I think I frogged out as much as I embroidered in.  But it does make for a very nice fill-in stitch on aida cloth.

My subject for this past Tuesday was the Eskimo Pie.  Christian K. Nelson of Iowa patented the Eskimo Pie on January 24, 1924.  

I chose this bit of history because it brings back some wonderful memories.  When I was about 4 or 5 I spent a lot of time during the summer at my maternal grandparents' house and Nana always had Eskimo Pies in the freezer.  I could have one whenever I wanted, not much spoiled was I?  I am an only child and adopted too so go figure.   

Nana was the one that taught me to cross stitch when I was about 4 and Mom taught me sewing not long after and later on how to knit.  

There are a lot of neat memories from those early years, summer drives with Papa on country roads with cornfields so high on either side of the road that it was like driving between fences, listening for hours to old 78's on the record player, molding all kinds of  things from a roll of aluminum foil, making new gowns for Barbie from Kleenex and tape, stringing and re-stringing buttons to make necklaces  and trying to figure out how Papa could keep up with one baseball game on the radio and another on the TV and still keep them straight.  Not to mention the best fried chicken dinners with creamy mashed potatoes and milk gravy on Sundays.

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I think I need to buy some Eskimo Pies now.

TAST Week 3 ~ Feather Stitch

January 17 was Ben Franklin's birthday in 1706 and reading some of his works kept me occupied most of one summer when I as an early teen.  Thoreau was another favorite from that time.   

With the feather stitch we were given this week I had to go in slightly different  direction as far as design.  I had found a wonderful outline of Franklin but it just did not lend itself to this stitch so I went with the story of his electricity experiment.  I used feather stitch for the kite tail and the tall grass.  The grass was fun since I didn't plan anything and just let it meander and sometimes overlap.  Everything else is back-stitched.  The threads are 2 strands of cotton DMC except for the white kite outline which is pearl cotton, the rod on the top of the kite which is silver metallic and the end of the string which is silk ribbon.

Ben's kite was made of silk because that would not conduct electricity and he attached a sharp pointed metal wire to the top to draw in the lightning.  The string for the kite was hemp which does conduct electricity and to this he tied a metal key.  Attached to the end of the hemp was another piece of silk so the electricity would not travel that far.  

After considerable time of waiting on a stormy day in June 1752 he finally saw that some loose threads of the hempen string were standing erect.  He immediately put his knuckle to the key and felt a very evident electric spark.  This led to many more experiments with electricity and its harnessing.  

A very interesting man was Ben Franklin, no wonder all the women adored him.

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See all the other wonderful projects in our study group at Tuesday Stitchers.

Yarrow Wound Wash

Its a very balmy and humid day here with temps in the mid to high 70's.  And yes, it really is January.  Last week we had nights down to 32...welcome to Texas.

Today I should be doing dishes and sweeping and mopping floors, but am I?  Not when something more fun enters my mind.

I made decorated labels for my yarrow wound wash.  Printed out on scrapbook paper and accented with pretty silver borders I bought months ago.  I think it turned out quite nicely and will look ever so much prettier in my bathroom, not to mention that it now says what it is instead of what it used to be--which was Bombay Sapphire Gin.  It was a bit pricey but I really liked the blue bottle which will be used for years to come.

This is a photo of what's inside, lots of yarrow flower heads in the gin.  I made this 2 years ago from the yarrow that grows in the garden and you can see I've used a bit of it.  I use it just like alcohol or peroxide, though I have both of those in the cupboard too--in their boring plastic bottles.

Yarrow is a wonderful antiseptic and helps woulds heal faster, I tend to think all the herbal stuff in this gin will help as well.  According to the sides of the bottle it has almonds, lemon peel, liquorice, juniper berries, iris roots, angelica, coriander, cassia bark, cubeb berries and grains of paradise.  The fact that its 94% proof probably helps too.

Anyway I went to use some on what may be a spider bite, I don't know as I never felt it until it swelled a bit last night, doesn't look bad but I'll keep an eye on it as we do have brown recluse spiders here.  After use I decided it was time for nicer labels, one on front and back, both the same.

So what are you doing for fun today?

Coping with Food Poisoning

Just a warning, this post is a bit graphic but may help you in case you need to deal with food poisoning in the future.

Something I ate Sunday night gave me food poisoning, I pretty much think it was the chip dip which was milk based but it could have been the mayo or the ham I made the sandwich with.  Even though I hate wasting food, all the above items are trash now because I'm not going to chance being this sick again.  

Monday I woke up feeling a bit off, got more nauseous as the day progressed and left work when the vomiting brought up nothing but bile and I positively could not get warm even though it was 75 degrees outside.  Later at home the diarrhea started and dry heaves.  I dozed off and on from 2:30pm til 9am the next morning with hourly trips to the bathroom.  

Tuesday was spent trying to get liquids in myself as I was dehydrated, the headache told me that.  I was in no shape to go the store so instead of gatorade I had pure apple juice cut half & half with water.  I chose apple juice because apple pectin is supposed to help stop diarrhea.  Later I boiled some home canned broth with a handful of rice as rice is also good for stopping diarrhea and rice water calms an upset stomach.  I also made some coffee which I rarely drink, only to try and relieve the headache - unfortunately that didn't work as well and I eventually took some ibuprofen.  Around dinner time I added onion and garlic to the broth to get some more nutrients and anti-bacterial elements into me.  I drank the broth not actually eating anything solid.

Wednesday, this morning I am better with no more major symptoms but I'm feeling very weak and light headed from not having solid food and still being somewhat dehydrated.  I am also hypoglycemic so that doesn't help either.  I made a watery oatmeal for breakfast about 10am.  I think I will go for some more broth for lunch, maybe with some noodles in it.  The protein in the broth should help with the hypoglycemic light headedness.  

There's not really anything doctors can do about the ordinary food poisoning like this so take note and have what you may need in your pantry.  Doctors recommend the BRAT diet for kids with diarrhea, bananas, rice, applesauce and toast.   Garlic and onions are anti-bacterial fighters as is vinegar but the acid in the vinegar just did not appeal to me in this instance.

I should be back to work tomorrow and much my old self again, also 10 pounds lighter.  But this is not a diet plan I recommend. 

TAST Week 2 ~ Buttonhole Stitch

This week's embroidery stitch for TAST is the buttonhole stitch, sometimes called the blanket stitch.  Traditionally this stitch was used to bind off raw edges on a blanket or set very close together to bind off the raw edges on a buttonhole.

As you can see in the photo, the event I chose for my design was the date that the oil boom started when the Lucas Gusher came in at the Spindletop oilfield near Beaumont, TX.  This image is from the original photo I found online.  I used to live in and still live near Humble, TX, another oil boom town.  Humble Oil Company sold 50% of its stock to Standard Oil in 1919. Over the years other mergers and changes occurred and it all became Exxon.  There are still pumping oil wells in Humble.

Now that the history lesson is over ... I used a buttonhole stitch with a varied length for the horizon line back-stitching for the derrick in 6 strand floss and both buttonhole and back-stitching for the oil spurting up.  For the oil and the words I used 1 strand of black and one strand of brown Balger blending filament as it has a sheen and a copper color running through it.  You probably can't see it in the photos as it is very subtle.

You might see some reddish lines, they were from the dressmaker's transfer paper I tried using to mark the design.  It does not work on Aida cloth as its too bumpy.  I ended up using the old-fashioned method of rubbing the back of the design with pencil and tracing it, using clear packing tape over the paper so it would not shred as I had to press down fairly hard.  The red will wash out.

Check out what the other stitchers in our Tuesday Stitchers group have done.  Thought everyone's projects are amazing and creative, I have to admit that Jen Claire's  prayer flag idea has me wanting to make some too.    No, no, I cannot fit any more projects into my life right now!