Just like everyone else, we are in the middle of the holiday season. Our calendars, and our lives are full.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, the town of Claremore has an event called Dickens on the Boulevard. Because the town was established in 1883, participants dress up in period costumes and downtown becomes, to the best of its ability, an old western town. Many of the downtown buildings are two-story with current businesses downstairs and upstairs were largely left unimproved. For years, tours of these upstairs buildings helped the people of the town understand better the history of their town during this event. There are two major railways that cross through, the depots long ago removed. These railways are the heart of how the town came to be.
In one building, Boarding House books is a current business where the owner kept the upstairs in the same rooms that travelers stayed in. Each room is lined with a different category of books. You can still see the covers on the walls where the original heating system ducts had been run through the building. Another building had a similar set up, but this was the original brothel and the rooms were rented by the hour instead of the night. The Madam’s quarters had an elevated tub to accommodate the plumbing that had been added in the ’20s. Across the street, there is another building that housed a doctor’s office, a dentist office and, I believe, a lawyer’s office. When I first visited that upstairs building, magazines from the ’40s through the ’60s were scattered about on furniture and pictures of old movie stars graced the walls. In the corner of the dentist office, there were stacks of photos of horse racing. Apparently this dentist also was the photo finish photographer for the race track. All that wonderful memorabilia has been long removed and it now houses apartment spaces for tenants.
Actually, this year, I was a little disappointed because there were no tours being held. The upstairs of these buildings are now either living spaces or are too dilapidated to be safely explored. Seeing this history up close and in person was truly interesting and I loved being a part of it. In years past, we had vignette skits and I always played the part of the madame in the brothel, then gave tours to those in the tour when my skit was over. One year, I got to be a tour guide and I loved that too. All the while, wild west gun fights rang through the street while women in frumpy costumes stood on soap boxes to tout temperance. This year, the crowd was given square dancing lessons. Fun, but not the same.
We had another bout of rain that left our driveway suffering, despite Tom’s efforts to minimize the damage. We also did some work to help our animals fare the weather better. Preparing for Upcoming Storms can be seen here.
My poor turkey is finally looking better after her molt. When a bird loses their feathers, they are very sad looking. One week, a predator managed to kill and drag away two of my hens and a duck. That was disappointing.
As part of a project with Toolman Tim on his Workshop Radio podcast, I am putting together a Cookbook of the Collapse and I am also posting cooking videos for this cookbook. As part of my series of Cooking from the Pantry, I posted Texas Trash Pie. It can be seen here.
On my Farm Animal Life YouTube channel, I posted Home Hatched Layer Chicks. It can be seen here.
Tom took vacation time the week after Thanksgiving and was able to shoot a couple of deer to put into our freezer. His hunting blind is pretty sweet. His uncle built it before he got too old to climb up into it. To help that, he installed a spiral staircase. The deer blind is fully enclosed to keep out the winter wind with windows all around to facilitate shooting. It is furnished with two school chairs to sit in. Tom takes his coffee and a wool blanket to keep warm while waiting for the deer to come wandering through.
For our first Thanksgiving meal, Tom smoked a turkey, I made brownies, and Kinzie brought dinner rolls to Tom’s cousin’s house where ALL the family gets together. I believe the body count is in the thirties each holiday. Tom’s Aunt Frankie is now in her nineties. All day long, people sit down next to her to chat with her and reminisce, always showing their love for this beautiful woman, myself included. While we chat with Frankie, the youngest frequently pass through, always comfortable in their surroundings in cousin Bridget’s house. All the other ages in between chat, monitor the children, help serve and clean up, visiting all along the way. I like going to Tom’s family’s house.
After learning how many children that came across our southern border have disappeared, and especially after a toddler of two years of age told of looking for her parents in the United States, I was moved to post a podcast about these poor children. You can listen to the podcast on your favorite pod catcher, or you can watch it here.
I have done some more work on the trim in the bathroom, but when Tom is on vacation, I struggle to keep up with my preferred schedule. I am used to being home alone all day. Regardless, we did manage to get a couple of things done. Tom did a lot of work to repair the skirting on the north side of our house. Yes, it needed work again. He was not able to finish putting the skirting back the full way it belonged but most of the the strong north wind is now blocked, helping to keep the pipes in our bathroom on the north side of the house from freezing, so far. While he worked on that, I canned some jalapenos that his excellent gardener friend had given us.
I had not planned to go to the Claremore Christmas parade, but found out that Kinzie was going to be walking in it, so Tom and I went to cheer her on. Some of my trim work and excerpts from the Claremore Christmas parade can be seen here.
Because my youngest son and his family went to visit his father in Texas for Thanksgiving, we had another celebration the next weekend after that. The gathering was much smaller, but just as nice. I have to admit that I like our families.
My puppy, Elsie went missing a couple of weeks ago. We drove around and looked for her, but never found her. That evening, I decided to look on the Facebook page for our community and immediately learned that several people are missing their dogs that day. They suspect that a thief came through and scooped up the dogs. I was very sad to learn that was probably what happened to Elsie, but finally decided that her getting a new home was better than being dead on the side of the road somewhere like I kept seeing in my imagination.
A few days later, Beethoven went missing. Once again, Tom drove around looking for one of our dogs. It ends up that someone is trapping across the road. Our dogs, chasing deer, ended up on that property and Beethoven was caught. Tom and the trapper released poor Beethoven and he came limping home. The same leg he limps on because of an old hip injury, now has a swollen foot with a cut above it. He pouted and moaned for a couple of days and I dosed him with pain reliever when he needed it. He is recovering nicely. Maybe my dogs will stay on our property in the future. Maybe.
Early Christmas presents for the family were new phones. Kinzie’s phone was malfunctioning and mine was beginning to give me some trouble too. Tom has been using his work phone for several years with a New York area code. He could not watch the TikToks I sent him and there were other apps he wanted to use but was unable to on his work phone. He still had his old phone number that was attached to a flip phone. Yes, and old flip phone. He now carries around two different phones and I’m not sure which one he wants me to use to communicate with him. Most of the time, at work or not, it’s his work phone. Go figure. There are still some things I need to do to finish transferring from my old phone to my new one. I’m sure that Kinzie transferred just fine.
At our Sunday School Christmas party, a class mate that has always been good to me gave me a wonderful gift. She had taken a copy of a picture of Kinzie, Tom and me at Kinzie’s senior night for softball and framed it. I love this picture and I’m grateful for the thoughtful gift.
Tom is in the middle of installing a wood stove into our living room. My son, Tony, set the hardy board and tiled over it in a nice pattern that even included the letter E. Just this morning, another friend came and helped to get the new (to us) wood stove up the stairs and onto the living room tile. It’s going to look nice when it is all done.
Last week, we had the Christmas program in our church. I always sing with the “choir” (nine people) and got to read the Christmas story for the children’s portion of the program. I love to sing but get nervous and choke when singing solo so I haven’t done that in a couple of years. There is one song that I remember from my childhood that I’ve always loved. The woman who sang it had a haunting contralto voice. I could never duplicate her voice but it is a Christmas song I haven’t heard since I was a kid and decided to sing it. I Wonder as I Wander was a relative success and I didn’t make too many mistakes. I was glad to expose my friends to this beautiful song, even if I couldn’t do it beautifully.
That same weekend was the Foyil Christmas parade. Several of our church members joined Tom and me in decorating our 16 foot trailer and participating in the parade. I had planned to attempt to walk it. It was only a mile and I really wanted my foot to perform. Instead, my daughter in law’s mother brought our granddaughter, Ivy all the way out to Foyil. She left Ivy with me at the beginning of the route and picked her up at the end of the trail. It was so much fun to have Ivy sitting in my lap as we threw candy to the parade attendees. At first, Ivy was surprised that we wanted to throw candy at all, but she got the hang of it soon enough. Here is a selfie that I attempted during the parade.
There’s more to tell you about but I believe I’ll wait until the next blog post. As always, there seems to be a lot going on around here. I pray everyone had a blessed Christmas and have big plans for the new year. See you next time!