Mia's bill

I came into my "office" to find the Cabbage Patch dolls and various stuffed dolls all piled up together in my office chair.
After I sorted them out and reclaimed my chair, I found this bill: I hope it's not for me to pay:

My special talent

Just tell me, where do you want to go on vacation or who do you want to see in concert?
I'll make sure it's cancelled.
It's my gift.
I set something up, make reservations, long lists and elaborate plans and poof! It goes away.
Look at my past year, for example.
For the first time ever, we decided to go on a cruise (even though I don't like water, traveling with lots of people or staying in enclosed spaces).
We chose Alaska and started packing layers of warm clothes, essentials like binoculars and gloves.
The ship was to sail in mid-May but the ports in Canada closed and our cruise was off, as in cancelled until further notice.
We signed up for a Cher concert and for a Frankie Valli concert.
Both have been cancelled for now, postponed for a while and now postponed until 2021.
We tried to head out to Iowa to see my brother. That got a legitimate kibosh from his Home Health Care nurses.
We were set for a relaxing Bear Lake vacation with raspberry shakes and a visit to Minnetonka Cave. I checked faithfully on availability — despite CoVid 19 — until the first of the month.
We just got a call.
Ideal Beach Resort is closed. Our condo is no longer open to us or anybody else for the coming weeks.
That means three families who were going with us are having to make other plans.
That means the menus and grocery lists I've been assembling are no longer needed.
That means no Jet-skiing, no mini-golf, no lounging in the lovely Bear Lake water. No hike to Bloomington Lake or tour of the cave.
The nice lady who had to call and deliver the bad news said we can rebook to another resort and save our trade fee. (We have two days to do that!)
But Marc and I are a little reluctant to choose another place to pick on

.
It feels a little like we have the Midas Touch.

Mia's map

We were at the end of a sunny Sunday afternoon.
We'd eaten dinner. The parents were chatting with the grandparents .
The kids were playing in the sandbox when Mia came up with an idea.
"I want to make an inside-outside treasure hunt," she whispered. "Ok," I whispered back. "Do you have a treasure?"
She nodded and went off into the house, full of purpose.
I wondered what she'd do. We have treats in various places in the house but would she feel like she could "borrow" what she needed?
Mia is 9 and this is grandma's house so I figured she'd be fine.
She came back a little later with a tiny treasure map and a plastic bag filled with cookies left over from dinner.
She looked around and quickly buried the sack in the sand with nobody noticing.
Then she announced to her siblings that there was treasure somewhere. She handed them the map.
Off they went.
Not much later, they came back and unearthed the treasure.
They were thrilled with the cookies and proud of their success.
I think her treasure map is worth sharing...

Bee back soon...

In my ongoing effort to grow a decent zucchini, we planted carefully this year.
Marc prepared the soil.
I re-read my Western Gardens book and planted seeds in two little hills.
We watered faithfully and kept our fingers well crossed.
Now we have lush, flowering, big-leafed zucchini plants.
But no zucchini.
The plants are huge with large yellow flowers.
The leaves are green and there is a lot of potential.
But no zucchini.
(Actually there's one, a tiny 3-inch fruit that we reaped and cooked and ate. Given the size of the plants, there should be more!)
We couldn't figure out what was wrong until we read a story in the newspaper about a serious lack of bumblebees.
Apparently we are not the only ones out there wondering what happened to our garden crops.
They are not being pollinated.
The bees are not coming by and doing their job.
That's apparently because there is a shortage of bees due to global warming, pesticide use and loss of habitat.
In fact, according to the Deseret News story, there are 93 percent fewer bumblebees than there have been in the last 20 years.
The bumblebee may make the endangered species list.
I'm worried and not just about my zucchini.
I think it's a serious sign of trouble.
We are cutting down forests, wiping out coral reefs, warming the arctic ice and generally messing up the planet.
I think it's time to redefine ourselves and our goals.
There's a lot at stake, billions of dollars and food for bears since the huckeberries in the wild aren't getting what they need either.
Meanwhile, to be clear, I need my zucchini.

A new ride...

Marc doesn't ask much of a bicycle, just for it to let him log thousands of carefree miles and to keep on chugging day after day, ride after ride.
He tries to "hop on his bike and take a short ride" every chance he gets.
So when he didn't immediately fix his latest flat and get back out on the road, I knew there was a problem.
Seems the tire had developed a malady that popped the inner tube the minute he put one back into place.
It hissed when Marc put it in the garage. It made a booming sound in the night.
I slowly realized it was time for a new one — a new bike, that is.
(This is after the Trek had been in rigorous service for 20 years.)
Marc has faithfully hit the road for years, working off calories and burning rubber in hot and cold weather.
He has replaced almost every part of the bicycle, especially inner tubes and tires as he has a tendency to run over bullheads. ("I don't know where they come from, Sharon!")
He's been quite happy and tracked himself religiously over the years.
He's ridden to the various canyons and back again. He's biked around Bear Lake a few times. He's flown home from Midway on his wheels.
I sometimes go with him but not often. I slow him down.
I know he loves the speed and the wind in his hair.
He likes to live dangerously, I think.
He does wear a helmet and he will come in out of the rain if he sees lightning.
He claims he doesn't go too fast probably because he can't usually get a top speed of more than 15 miles an hour.
(However, he does tell me the new bike goes faster all by itself!)
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I asked him if it was time for a new bike and he said, "Maybe."
The next day he had one on hold at the bike shop in town.
There is a bike shortage right now, he told me. One has to move quickly to get the one you want.
We are now the proud owners of a new, sleek Trek that amazingly has everything he wants in a bike.
The old gadgets fit right on.
It's lightweight and very nice.
I'm happy for my husband.
Just not sure if I've been taken for a ride...

A man and his new friend.

Road tripping...

My younger brother is gravely ill in Iowa.
So Marc and I thought we could (with a little luck, a supply of masks and a lot of disinfectant wipes) pull off a trip out to see him, maybe give him a last in-person goodbye.
It's so hard to sit here thousands of miles away and try to love and help by remote control.
We found an affordable air flight out to Des Moines and started plotting out a road trip back to Utah that would include seeing Marc's son and his wife in Nebraska and checking out Mt. Rushmore and maybe Yellowstone.
We knew it might be risky to travel through several states and mingle with populations that might have Corona Virus. We also knew they might not welcome out-of-state visitors.
But, anxious to break out of our self-imposed isolation, and thinking we could be careful enough, we booked a flight and a car and called my sister-in-law to let her know we were coming.
"Oh! Absolutely not!" she said in alarm. "The Home Health people here forbid it! It's too much risk!"
Ok. I understand. We got kind of carried away with the vision of the freedom of the open road. I totally see the wisdom in protecting my brother and his precarious state.
So, we reined it in and redrew our plans.
We dropped the visit to Iowa. We cancelled the plane ride. We decided NOT to stop in Omaha because now it was pretty much out of the way.
We decided on a four-day run that would include some Mormon Trail history sites, a hike around the base of Devil's Tower, a trip over to see Mt. Rushmore and visits to Yellowstone, the bears and the geysers.
Marc had his GPS all programmed. I had a cooler stocked with snacks and provisions for roadside picnics.
It looked like fun compared to staying within our four walls and Utah's restrictions. (This way we were dealing with Wyoming's, South Dakota's, and Idaho's as well.)
It turned out to be low level fun and a LOT of driving, over 1,700 miles on our rental Outlander.
Marc had never been to Wyoming so a half-inch on the map didn't look like the endless road it was. The GPS counted a gravel and dirt road as a real road.
The travel time we calculated didn't factor in the construction areas where we waited and waited for the pilot cars to come free us.
We didn't expect the hotel in Cody to NOT have an elevator or to supply soap as a given.
We only missed Old Faithful's eruption by 10 minutes.
On the plus side, the little ELKS movie house across from our hotel in Rapid City showed us a zombie movie about a pandemic with Brad Pitt playing the lead. That took our minds off our troubles.
We fit through the 8-foot, 0-inch Needles Eye tunnel in Custer State Park. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-QbHhYSSdk)
We had some unique picnic lunches, sitting on the side of the road in the sun.
We saw the Crazy Horse Monument.
We didn't get eaten by a bear.

New oven, old me...

There's a lot to keep up with right now what with all the rules that go along with the Pandemic.
If I decide to go shopping, I have to remember if the store is open, grab my mask and plan a good route.
If I want to look around at anything, I have to pretty well know what it is I want before I start.
I need, more than ever, to plan things ahead even though there is not much to actually plan.
It's blowing my mind.
That became clear the other day when I decided my granddaughters and I would bake some banana bread.
I had ripe bananas begging to be put to good use.
I had a trusted recipe in my recipe card box.
I had brown sugar and white sugar and oil and eggs.
We started organizing the ingredients.
One granddaughter greased the glass baking pans and started beating the eggs.
The other one measured out the spices, poured in the oil and the sugars.
We mashed the bananas.
At one point, the question came up? "Should we mix all the wet things first and then the dry things?"
"No," I showed them the recipe card. "It says, mix in the order given."
We soldiered on, adding everything in a bowl and pouring the mixture into the two loaf pans.
I looked at my new oven which is supposed to be a new age convection oven if I wanted it to be.
I decided I didn't want to fuss with a newfangled process so I punched in the button that I thought kept it being a conventional oven.
(One button said "Conv bake." The other said Conv roast." Above that it said "Bake" but what oven doesn't?)
I opted for the "Conv bake" thinking that meant conventional bake.
I soon realized I chose wrong.
The bread was bubbling and the fan kept coming on and off.
I'm thinking I mistakenly put it on convection oven mode so I decided to keep the temperature down and cut the baking time.
I turned on the oven light and started watching carefully.
The bread turned brown, then dark brown and continued to bubble.
It smelled really good and I crossed my fingers a lot.
Finally, after 45 minutes had passed, we lost hope.
I figured the convection oven process had ruined our good effort.
We pulled out some underdone, burned banana loaves.
"Maybe we needed some flour?" said my older granddaughter carefully.
What? Flour?
I looked at the recipe card. Sure enough, it asked for three cups flour.
Why had I not noticed that earlier?
The last line was hidden in the slot for the recipe card so that's a bit of an excuse but not really.
I had blown it and let down my granddaughters who now had to settle for a couple of store-bought donuts instead of warm, fragrant, homemade banana bread. I'm embarrassed.
Blame it on the Pandemic, I say.

P.S. We regrouped and tried it again. This time the bread rose, the oven was great and I didn't get in the way of Adell and Hannah's success. Woo hoo!