Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 This is a grilled cheese sammy I made for Ellen a couple of days ago. It’s on keto bread, so low carb. But it has real cheese on it, which I can no longer indulge in.   Apparently I truly have become histamine intolerant or something. On the way to the Paul McCartney concert my “new” pants I got at a local thrift store set off my histamine alarm bells and my ears buzzed for the next 12+ hours; tinnitus I believe. In the thrift stores they don’t wash donated clothes but spray or steam them with some sort of solution. Even after I’d washed them the smell was super strong. I put a throw over my lap when I realized what was going on, but the damage was done. I’ve washed both pair of jeans twice since we came home and they still smell!  They must have really doused them. Anyway.  The point being. I’ve had to get new pants because I’ve lost about 20 lbs so far. I probably could lose more weight  but my “safe” foods include too many carbs; including oatmeal, rice, pot...

Yesterday we took a long drive to Tulsa to catch a concert from a living legend!  Yes. Paul McCartney!  He is going pretty strong for a guy in his 80s!   We stayed in a motel just a bit on the edge of the city. Then Gary drove us downtown. The traffic wasn’t all that bad. Not half as bad as Portland Oregon, that’s for sure! We had an absolute blast and I don’t regret one minute of it!  

So Gary is progressing right along with the house across the road.  He got the gross sink, fridge and range torn out of the kitchen and a new sink put in.  He put in new dry wall pieces and plywood around the bathtub area, then he painted the bathroom.  All of the flooring had been ripped out of the house by the ex-wife.  So Gary went around pulling out all of the staples and sanding down the plywood to smooth it out. A Lowe's rep came out this morning to measure the house for new flooring.  It came out to a total of 568 feet.  That includes the two bedrooms, the mini laundry room, kitchen, bathroom and living room. She put on her report that the subflooring looked like new.   Gary got a call from the store stating that since the subflooring was so bad they were going to have to put down new plywood and padding under the linoleum.  And to top it off they were going to charge us for 1000 square feet of the flooring, for a grand total of $5800 ...

Oh look. I’ve figured out how to get pictures into a blog post from my phone. Hooray!   Well. This will help me out tremendously because I don’t always have the time, patience, or access to blog from the laptop. Not to mention our internet is horribly spotty. Up and down all day long. Gary says if we weren’t getting it for free we would be looking for a different provider. Hmph! **** At the moment, after midnight on this Friday night waiting on pins and needles for my child to get home from a trip to Springfield with friends, I cannot remember if I have talked about this in here before or not.  But this Alpha Gal Syndrome, while my case is supposedly mild, has morphed my system into some sort of histamine intolerance, or mast cell activation syndrome. This is not uncommon, according to what I read in the various AGS groups on Facebook. In a nutshell it means that every strong smell, from food to household cleaners and soaps, lotions, deodorants…whatever… gives me an allergic r...

 A month after my mother passed away in December 2021, our neighbor passed away in his truck in his driveway.  That there is a long story in and of itself, but we will save that for later.  Though...well...on with the story.  After he passed we decided that we would attempt to purchase the property; not necessarily because we wanted it for ourselves per se, but because we didn't want anyone else to have it.  We wanted to be able to control who lives there.  From hence forth I shall refer to the neighbor as "Tuna" because that is what he wanted everyone to call him, something about his having been in the Navy when he was younger.  (He was in his 70s when he passed.) Gary always referred to him as Fish.  Haha..  Tuna did not have any children of his own.  And he was divorced.  He and his ex, Betty (not her real name) had moved to Missouri from Massachusetts in the mid 90s, I believe.  They bought this place together, mostly using...

  "It seems hard to believe" is the somewhat tired phrase that all parents use as their children grow up.  I remember twelve years ago driving by the high school and thinking; "Wow, someday Ellen is going to be going here." It seemed like it would be forever 'til she got there. But now for real it seems hard to believe that high school is behind her and she is rocketing along in time toward her adult life and career. This past weekend was Welcome Week at the university, so she has been there meeting people and learning the ropes, as it were, already.  She is still nervous about making friends and I know the first few days are going to be awkward. I am sure, though, that she will soon find her "place" and make plenty of friends. She was worried that she won't get the full college experience because she will be living at home, but she was reassured because this past weekend she met many other commuters who live in different communities around the uni...