Sandi Chats

Well Christmas 2019 is in the books, and we are almost ready to step through time into 2020! Since I failed, once again, to get Christmas cards out, I will take this means to recap the year and extend our holiday wishes to all our friends. 2019 began with a huge change as I retired at that time. Looking back now I realize it was a bit like stepping off into thin air. I had been at my job for over 20 years with all the security that afforded me, and now that security blanket was gone. But it was also freeing to realize that I didn't need to be at work tomorrow. We saw a dream come true when we left the cold and snow of Nebraska for sunny Arizona at the end of January. If you kept up with my Facebook group from that time, you know how that went. If you didn't, rest assured it was all we had imagined and more. We bummed around on the Arizona desert for two months, managing to miss the worst winter Nebraska had seen for many years and all the subsequent flooding. We embarke

As a poor person, I am always intrigued by stories of people who have made money or gone from rags to riches. Possibly the reason for this intrigue is the hope that I will eventually discover some secret that will help me become rich. So far the secret hasn't really made itself known to me, but I have reached some interesting conclusions. When I think of rich, I am talking fabulously rich. History is full of examples: 1. The oldest example I can come up with right off the top of my head is King Solomon in the Bible. He amassed a vast empire of wealth and opulence in his lifetime. The Bible talks of his unusual wisdom, which I am sure contributed to his ability to amass wealth. However, it also says he had 700 wives and 300 mistresses, which would bring his claim to wisdom into doubt! However this also contributed to his wealth in that many of his wives were given to him through alliances made with neighboring kings. Pretty sure that King Solomon made each of these business de

After a nearly five month hiatus from blogging, I am back. And what a five months it has been! I didn't even get settled into my retirement routine before we headed south to Arizona for a couple months. Now, we didn't have any premonitions or inside info, but it turns out that we missed possibly two of the most miserable months of winter weather that this country has ever seen! It was cooler than normal in Arizona also, and the locals there said it was the worst winter they had seen in a lot of years...temps hung in the 50's to low 60's, which was a darned sight better than what Nebraska was experiencing.  We headed back to Nebraska at the end of March in preparation for my bilateral knee replacement. I knew having both knees done at the same time would be challenging, but I simply didn't want to go through the surgery twice in a short span of time...and besides I couldn't decide which knee to do first since they were both bone-on-bone and needed the surgery

Day 6 Our trip is rapidly drawing to a close, and we have completed that "fall colors" part of the tour. Today we have a different plan. Once again, Shannon picked us up and we headed for Newport, Rhode Island. The sunshine of yesterday disappeared again, and it was threatening rain. Shannon was very knowledgeable and chatty and kept up a running commentary of the sites and historical information for the places we were passing. Along the way everyone felt the need for caffeine so we pulled into Starbucks. Now that was a new experience for me, I had never even passed by a Starbucks, let alone stopped. I wasn't in need of caffeine, and the choices were nearly overwhelming so I just looked around and recorded the experience with a picture on my phone. Arriving in Newport, we headed to the marina where we were to take a sailboat ride. We bundled up because it was very cool and very breezy. Mom opted to just sit it out in the warm bus because of the damp chill. The

Day 4:  Picking up where we left off, you may remember that in my previous installment we had just finished a grueling and traumatic day on our trip with Mom's fall and the debacle of being on our own in New England at night.  Saturday morning dawned cold and rainy once again, and after the unpleasant excitement of the previous day, we opted to sit out one day of the tour. Mom as still feeling kind of unsteady and we were both exhausted. So we nestled down for naps and listened to the rain hit against the windows, glad that we were warm and dry and resting. We did make a quick dash to the Outlet Mall for some shoes for me and a pair of sunglasses for Mom as she was somewhat self-conscious of her black eyes. Shopping in New Hampshire was kind of nice for the fact that they have no sales tax. A marked price of $19.95 is exactly what you will spend!  That evening we joined our group for supper at a seafood restaurant where we got the commentary of what we missed. This time I co

I have just finished the second week of retirement...and I have been busy, almost busier than I would have been at the office. I have been wondering how I found time to go to work, but the answer is clear--I just left everything undone here at home. The first week I spent cleaning out some places in the house that have really been bugging me, mostly some cupboards that were full of something but I was not sure exactly what. So I cleaned out what was not being used and filled it with stuff that we needed to keep, and now I kind of like those cupboards. There is still that pesky "container" cupboard, you know, the one where you keep all the plastic storage ware with all the containers and the lids that never seem to match the containers! And the one I avoid trying to fit anything more into even though containers and lids are piled all over the counter. Pretty sure the trash will need to go out following the completion of that project! I got reacquainted with a dust rag earl

Day 3 Our tour resumed on Friday morning with our bus driver, Johnny O--who promised we would not run out of gas today! Once again I was allowed to ride shotgun and got the best view of the trip. We headed north to Maine. The day was cloudy and cool but at least the fog had lifted and the rain had stopped. The fall colors were brilliant! It's not hard to figure out why the New England fall colors tours are such a popular thing! Our first stop, which wasn't even on the schedule, was Yummies. This is a one-of-a-kind candy store, kind of a "big box" store for candy. There was every kind of candy you could imagine in this store, stacked in boxes clear to the ceiling. It took great restraint to limit myself to a reasonable amount of candy! We all wandered around and made some purchases. Next we were off to stop at Stonewall Kitchens which is a shop for everything kitchen. They specialize in their jellies and condiments as well as lotions and kitchen utensils, li

For a number of years now my mother and I have talked about taking a New England Falls Colors tour. But then Dad got sick and she was tied down, and then we did a trip to Michigan and just hadn't gotten around to doing the New England trip. Last summer my brother gave us the nudge we needed to start planning on that trip this past fall. Just the planning was nearly overwhelming! We had to locate and book a tour and make plane reservations. The tour was just a shot in the dark, and we just picked one that seemed to offer us the most of what we wanted out of a tour. We are so inexperienced in making travel arrangements that we had to enlist the help of Heather to make the plane reservations, but we got that handled too. We left home in the rain on Tuesday, October 9th and drove to Sioux Falls. We had to fly out at 6:00 AM on Wednesday morning so we went a day early and spent the night in order to be fresh for our trip. While we were in Sioux Falls in the rain, back home every

I had said I might post a recipe or two on here, but for some reason I didn't get around to fixing the soup I had planned on a few days ago. But I do want to talk about a way of eating that I have recently adopted. By recently I actually mean 9 months ago. I had been feeling kind of rotten in my stomach and sometimes found that I couldn't always swallow very well when I was eating. I did the 21st century diagnosis, Googled my symptoms and drew my own conclusions...gluten intolerance. I had tried to go gluten-free a couple years before, but after a couple weeks I couldn't tell it was doing any good so I went back to eating gluten. In the meantime I found out that it takes 6-8 months to get results...bummer! So I did my research and wiped all the gluten from my diet. It sounds overwhelming, but actually there are only a few items you can't eat...wheat, rye and barley or any grain that is crossed with one of these grains. Rye and barley are not a problem as