One of my friends on Facebook is an author who just published her second book, “Anna’s Visions.” I found the story line to be intriguing, a woman who has visions of the future, especially for her granddaughter.
Since I like a real book in my hands, I am ordering the paperback from Amazon, although people who like to download books to their Kindle or Nook can buy a digital version. The paperback is only $12.99, which is reasonable to me, especially since my purchase will be supporting a friend.
This year for Thanksgiving, I was asked to join a small group of good friends and help cook food for the people who stay in our local homeless shelter. The shelter is actually in a church and is mostly supported by that church’s congregation and private donations. Every year they have a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone who needs a good meal.
We will have to report for duty around 7:00 tomorrow morning to start cooking everything. The church has a nice commercial kitchen and a fellowship hall big enough to seat about 120 people. I have never cooked for a large crowd before, so I am a little apprehensive about this, but I like the idea of doing something good for other people not as fortunate as I have been.
My mom is not Italian but she has a special secret family recipe for spaghetti sauce. It is very complicated and takes 2 – 3 hours to prepare it. I love her spaghetti sauce, but for most nights when I want to have spaghetti for dinner I jut open a jar of Prego spaghetti sauce.
I’ve tried a lot of different sauces, including Ragu, Newman’s Own and Bertolli. I have even tried the generic store brands. I just always seem to gravitate back to the Prego sauce and I dislike the Ragu so much that I would rather eat noodles with just olive oil and parmesan cheese than to ruin good pasta with Ragu sauce on it. There is something about the Ragu taste that reminds me of the canned chef Boyardi raviloli and beefaroni that you feed children. I can’t stand the taste of those!
My dad taught me and all the kids how to drive. He started us out gently by putting us behind the wheel of an older car and letting us drive it around the long dirt driveway of our summer cottage and across the grass field so we got used to the acceleration and braking without any risk of wrecking into anything.
Then he let us drive on the straight pavement to get our bearings on where the wheels were on the pavement and how the steering handled differently on pavement. After that we learned about parking, and then it was short trips in real traffic. The hard part was traffic because I knew what I was doing and the challenge was looking out for the other drivers and being prepared to react when they did something stupid.
My mother lives too far away for me to be able to visit on Mother’s Day, so I shop for a lovely Hallmark card and make sure I get it in the mail a week before Mother’s Day. I can’t take a chance that the card will be late getting to her. It either gets there before Mother’s Day or it was a waste of money.
It also has to be a Hallmark card, as no other card means you care enough to send the very best. yes, my mother is a victim of advertising because she totally believes that Hallmark slogan.
My other brothers and sisters will make a point of stopping by my mother’s house with some kind of gift. My brother Raymond usually buys a box of chocolate candies. She always loves to get a Whitman’s Sampler box. Even though there are more expensive chocolates, she loves the Whitman’s chocolates. My sister will buy her a house plant. Our youngest will buy her some kind of book or magazine. That pretty covers the gift assortment for my mom.