Quiche and other personal egg trvia

Try feeding 30,000 mouths every day.  Well, actually I didn't do it alone.  My dad was in charge. 

You see, I grew up on a chickenfarm.  Laying hens.  Baby chicks.  Vast array of responsibility and opportunities and experiences - too vast to expand on here. 

From daily chores
to weekend work - (I was always working while my friends hung out together)
to moving day (moving chickens)
to 1000s of day old baby chicks peeping together inside one building until your ears hurt
to manure (oh the manure)
to making the hens cooooo by crowing for them just like the ol' rooster (I was good at it, too)
to egg gathering contests
to skunk shooting sprees
to baby chick debeaking days
to marketing old hens with crazy people as buyers (that could be a story in itself)
to picking mites off of me before I went to school (chickens frequently got mites on them and then so did I - ick, you're right)
to eating eggs and stewing hens in more ways than you can imagine.  Including QUICHE.  and angel food cake.  and custard.  and jelly roll,  and egg noodles.  Eggs poached, eggs over easy, eggs hard boiled, eggs softboiled, scrambled eggs, eggs benedict, eggs fried, egg sandwich, egg salad.  Sorta sounds like Bubba Gump, huh?

I certainly gained a work ethic through this rural life in Montana.  My dad had to decide whether or not he would go to town to work (because our rural acres were not enough to make a living for a family) or figure out something on the farm.  Figure out something, he did, building all 5 chickenhouses himself and managing the operation from day old babychicks to marketing and placing eggs into grocery store display cases all over the area.  (I could tell you about every alley, every restaurant or institution or grocery back door, and I could definitely tell you which restaurants you'd want to eat in and which ones you would not want to eat in from that back door exposure).

We were known as 'Pepper's Eggs'.  My dad's nickname was Pepper.

And here's the big news:  As a teenager, I even made the front page of an egg magazine, sitting on the back of a convertible car on the Rimrocks overlooking Billings with....you guessed it....baskets of eggs!

There are fascinating stories being told this week using the letter 'Q' for inspiration.  Go check it out with Jenny Matlock:

Pretty Funny!

Just hours before flying into the wild blue wonder to check out our kids’ new life in Kansas City, I got a call from a friend, “Do you want to go through my girls’ old clothes before I give them away to the community giveaway site?” Uhm, sure, I need one more thing to do before getting up at 3 am to catch a 6 am plane! Sheez, there were so many, I just took tubs and tubs and bags and bags of little girl clothes home and spread them all over my basement for sorting.


Over a movie, I went through them piece by piece and finally sorted by spring/summer, winter and baby. Winter and baby stayed home. Spring/summer got to come to Kansas City with us in an extra suitcase.

And what a kick that all was. Our fashion reviews grew in strength and excitement with each day.

Day 1: Kitchen: little girls cautiously and orderly tried on new clothes – capris, tees, shorts, jeans, skirts, tops, swimming suits

Day 2: Family room: little girls, with excitement, tried on new clothes, learned a model routine from their Gwamma and tada’d for Gwampa’s camera.

Day 3: Basement tv room: little girls, with reckless abandonment tried on new clothes, traded clothes, found mama’s and gwamma’s sun glasses and posed with exuberance for Gwampa’s camera. They stretched the event out as long as they could.  Mama realized that these 3 and 5 year old girls were already at an age where they can trade clothes.

Day 4: Big sister cleaned out her drawers to give her old clothes away so that her new clothes would fit.

All Days: Never saw the grandgirls in their own original clothes after Day 1’s fashion review.

PRETTY FUNNY!

And just think. I get to do this again when they come to visit me next month – We’ll do winter clothes then.

Check out other great "P" stories

Off to See the Wizard?

Oft, I meet myself coming and going.  It is so again this week.  Instead of an easy topic, it shall be a short one.

No, really I'm not off to see the Wizard.  But I am off to Kansas.  Off to check out the new and improved digs my kids bought and moved into last month.  Off to see my son's new office location overlooking the Plaza in KCMO.  Off to see what their neighborhood, and the pre-school and their church and how close is the grocery store and what the big back patio looks like and how long my son's commute is to work.  And I'm off to play with my blonde grandgirls...we will play princesses, have a date while their mommy and daddy have a date, make May Baskets, color, swim, cook, off to take duck and butterfly hats to them at the airport, just anything.

You see, they moved another day further from me and I mourned the loss of driving to their home now.  But now I charge forward and go embrace their new environment.  It's what a mother (and gwamma) needs to do.

'You've always had the power to go back to Kansas'

What Name?

It’s been a bit “N”utty around here lately. I’m meeting myself coming and going. So I come to you with a quick and easy topic this week……ME! Nadeen. Which can be confusing sometimes. Why?


I’m also known as:

dEE
Deenie (dEEniE)
Gwamma Montana

When I was born a hundred years ago, by his own admission, my dad couldn’t spell. So when this little girl came out of the deep dark recesses of my mother’s womb, my mom had her reasons for naming me what she did. My dad asked, “Do you spell that Nadeen?” Which most people don’t. But my mom said, “That sounds fine.” Thus I’ve had to spell my first name AND my last name all my life because everyone wants to spell both of them according to norm, which they aren’t.

She wanted to name me Nadeen so my nickname could be Deenie. So it was until I got into first grade and decided that I was too old to be called a childish name like Deenie and I announced to everyone that I was now Nadeen. So it was for 24 years.

Along came a nephew and he couldn’t say Nadeen. Without prior knowledge of my past (sheez, he was only a year old), he started calling me Deenie. By then I was fine with the Deenie label because I wanted to be that young little girl again. And so I went by 2 names. One everyone else used and one that family (and my parent’s friends who I grew up around) used.

Fast forward 18 years. I taught a Bible study to my niece and classmates of my son. Of course, the niece always called me Dennie and the others picked up on it, but I wanted it now to be unique, so I capitalized the EEEEEEEE’s! Sort of 3 names now.

About that time, I hooked up with some gals via the internet but I was well aware of those nuts lurking out there that might want to steal my birthday or something, so when I hooked up with these gals who possibly could be escaped convicts, I didn’t totally tell the truth when I signed up with them as dEE (short for dEEniE, short for Deenie, short for Nadeen)  Well, that’s the only name by which they know me. When I met up with a bunch of them for the first time last month, it was only natural that I be ‘dEE’ to them. They don’t know Nadeen. Now….4 names.

Of course, both Gwammas to my grandgirls had to have last names with the same starting letter. Can’t use that. And since their Mama always said, “Gwamma in Montana”, it got shortened to “Gwamma Montana”. Probably my favorite title of all! Are you counting? 5 names.

Now enters the confusion: who am I? I have to actually stop and think what environment I am in before I introduce myself to someone. Life is so confusing, isn’t it?

So now you know.

And Happy Thursday to you!
Nadeen

Or is it dEEniE?

Or dEE?

Nah. Just call me a Biker Princess.

Don't forget to check out the other great Alphabetizers at

Magical, it is!

Montana, Montana,

Glory of the West
Of all the states from coast to coast,
You're easily the best.
Montana, Montana,
Where skies are always blue
M-O-N-T-A-N-A,
Montana, I Love Youuuuuuuuuuuu.

Picture a group of about 10 lifelong friends singing with gusto this state song for Montana.  10 grown, of-sound-mind, productive adults, surrounded by stunned folks from the far reaches of other regions. The others are stymied by the love affair these usually sane friends have with their state of origin, even when some have moved away from Montana.

Yes, I’ve been a part of this Seattle party bunch for a number of years. A Seattle 'Montana' party is always thrown when we visit our transplanted friends. And never does an evening end without our traditional and quite unique rendition of our state song. Comes from all those 4-H days we spent together building our characters and friendship, I’m sure.

Here's our first party in 1987:

And it grew even larger:

Maybe by now you can tell I love my state.  And we love to celebrate it!

But even better yet, I love exactly where I live. Before you read on, go back to the top of this page and take a good look at the picture on the masthead.

Ok, are you back?

That picture is taken from my deck just outside my kitchen window. What you see is the panorama I get to look at every single day as I awaken over a cup of coffee or as I read my Bible in my nest in my bedroom. In the summer months, sometimes it is over a 9 pm farm supper. What you see is the Yellowstone River valley, the foothills where I work and finally the glorious Beartooth Mountains, which frames the northeast entrance to Yellowstone Park (can’t quite see the ‘most beautiful highway in the USA’ per Charles Kuralt but almost ~ the Beartooth Highway)  Matter-of-fact, where my husband grew up just 12 miles north of here they could see 4 mountain ranges from there - the Beartooths, the Crazys, the Pryors and the Snowys.

But wait, we aren’t done.

Turn around. Actually, we are quite lucky that we can’t see it. It is I-90. I walk up over its overpass sometimes on my morning walk. You can barely hear the traffic noise. But within a mile, I can get on this thoroughfare and within 40 minutes be Billings and to all the shopping that a Montanan needs (well, maybe Cheesecake Factory hasn’t made it yet but you sure can get a great prime BEEF dinner here in Montana!). Billings is the metropolitan center of Montana. We have a class act medical community, cultural arts, breweries (always 5 o’clock there), friendly people, a thriving business community and a great climate.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/30000.html  (Check out the persons per square mile!)

I tell people that I live in a perfect place: An hour from the mountains and an hours from the metropolis. Thank you, Grandpa Joe, for landing this chunk of a great state some 70 years ago!

By The Way: That’s our Pride-and-Joy Field in the forefront of the masthead picture. A field that can actually make it rain when the hay is cut. It’s Magic!

Hmmmm, I thought my “M” words were mountains and metropolis and enter stage left was Montana   But maybe all along it was     ‘Magic’!    Magical  Montana. Sweet!

Cheers!

Lydia O.

She would sit in her chair devouring yet another book when suddenly the back screen door would bang shut. She slams her book closed and jumps up from the chair and hurries to the kitchen to cook, once again trying not to reveal to her husband the ‘idle’ time she has just spent reading . . . again.


Lydia loved to read. As a little girl, she would walk the many blocks of Great Falls to the library getting book after book to read. When she married a man, also of German heritage, she moved over 200 miles away from her city life to a farm in rural Montana. A farm that eventually turned into a 30,000 head chickenfarm. A farm that consumed their days.

And yet her reading, and eventually her writing, remained her personal love.

She took those colorful words that she absorbed and jotted versions of them on pieces of scratch paper as snippets or even full paragraphs to use for a later writing. She attended writing classes. She wrote more.

And then one time she submitted a piece to a publication, hoping to possibly get published and acknowledged. Like so many writers, it was declined. And sadly, that was the end of that. She no longer would submit her work and allow getting rejected ever again.

And yet the scratch paper ideas mounted up, getting filed by topic or…just getting filed but never thrown away. As first and second generation Germans, she wrote about both hers and her husband, Pepper’s, ancestry and migration to the ‘new world’.

She eventually became the unofficial Stillwater County historian, interviewing and writing about communities and people and even acting as director of the budding county museum. If she got paid, it was only a token.

Lydia O. is the pen name she chose. Olga was her German middle name – she hated it - but found it unique enough to tag it onto her name for her pen name.

She now sits in a nursing home consumed by that ugly disease called Alzheimer’s and can’t remember a drop of what she so ravenously wrote about. She can’t even remember she was a writer.

THE POINT OF THE POST IS:  As I become more and more exposed to many blogs, different interests and styles of writing via the internet, I think about how my mother would have embraced a blog site of her own to release those thoughts and ideas that continually bounced around in her head.   Methinks she was born abour 30 years too early.   And what a gift it would have been to my silblings and children and grandchildren to have.

So, I dedicate my Alphabe-Thursday submission to my mother, Lydia O., the writer in my family.

(P.S. I have the bittersweet task of going through the massive house she lived in for 60 years and deciding what to do with not only the antiques (collected before antiques were fashionable) and family heirlooms brought from the ‘old country’ but also all those snippets.) 

Do check in at Jenny's blog and find tons of other fascinating "L" post for Alphabe-Thursday.  It gets better and better with each week!  It is a world-wide depiction of how diverse not only the internet is but also how diverse God's precious people are!

Enjoy!  (thus ends the advertisement for this week!)  :)

Important Dates Coming Up

Hi,


Here I am with a couple reminders for you to keep you on top of things….

This Friday and Saturday (April 9 and 10), I will have a booth at the Stillwater County Chamber of Commerce Business Expo. The Expo is an opportunity for local businesses to greet and meet local consumers and display what they have to offer. ThatBeMe! as one of those 48 businesses. Stop by anytime on Friday from 1-6 pm or Saturday from 9-3 at the Stillwater Pavilion in Columbus. I’m in the business of giveaways (aka promotional products). Surely I’ll have something to give away to you or show you stuff to that you could give away!

and…

Below is a ‘ditty’ sent to me from one of our suppliers. Not only is it a good reminder to say thanks in a tangible way to important people in your life but it also could give you a familiar chuckle about life. Enjoy!



IT'S COOL TO BE APPRECIATED

"There's nothing to eat," said my husband, his head deep inside the refrigerator. "I can give you directions to the grocery store.", I offered. "Have you seen my favorite jeans?" he asked a few days later as he got ready to head out with some buddies. "Yep still in the laundry pile, I answered". Funny all my hard work and the little things I take care of on a daily basis were quickly becoming blatantly obvious. One knee surgery and 12 days on the couch and suddenly I was feeling very appreciated.
Nothing like feeling appreciated. Luckily there's no need for surgery, we've set aside days each year to recognize and support all the important people that surround us. Three important ones are coming up:



Administrative Professionals Day - April 21, 2010 - Recognize the support staff that make your business tick.

Teacher Appreciation Day - May 4, 2010 - Show gratitude to those that shape and educate our future.

National Nurses Week - May 6-12, 2010 - Honoring the tireless and compassionate caretakers at hospitals, schools, and clinics (after surgery, I can't think of any better professionals to show gratitude to)

Even a small practical gift can say "thank you" appropriately. We've picked our Spectrum Simple & Cool Cooler. A small basic cooler that anyone can use, whether for toting lunches or carrying a six pack. Comes in 26 colors. Pinks, oranges, blues, lavendars, or earthy colors - you can pick as many colors as you want to reach the minimum, so it's easy to tailor the gift to the recipient, making them feel that more important. And the cooler is eco-friendly, so you can let them know you appreciate the earth as well. It's as simple as this - It's cool to be appreciated. Use this fun colorful cooler for all those hard working professionals.



Great idea, huh? nk