Choice Morsels

The Mama Kat Thursday topic for today is: "Share a recent text exchange that made you laugh." I think I'd freak out if someone told me I had to start texting. That would mean having to start carrying a phone with me everywhere . I would hate that. Personally, I don't text. I have a phone so dumb, it flips open like a Star Trek communicator (which in itself is geek-cool). Every key has 3 letters one would have to tap through to write anything , even if I wanted to. Which I don't. That said, I did see funny sequence of texting in the recent movie, "Mom's Night Out." The film is about a woman named Heather, who is desperate for some grown-up time away from her kids and her house and invites her two friends, Izzy and Sondra, for a dress-up night on the town at a fancy restaurant, while Heather and Izzy's husbands baby sit the kids. Unfortuantely, the ladies arrive at the restaurant only to find out there's been a misunderstanding in

Today I mowed the back yard and hedged 2 of my Azaleas. I might have done more hedging, but my lower-back said, "nope, we done." There's a rain system somewhat stalled over Lousiana/Mississippi, which isn't good news for them, that we might get some heavy rain from tonight into tomorrow morning. Really, these pictures represent my adventures in Florida gardening, where it's either too wet or too dry and the weeds & insects are ferocious. Today's pics: First, a couple pictures of my shady "naturalized" bed under the 3 trunk native maple in the back yard.  By "naturalized" I mean this area is planted in an unstructured way, so it looks woodsy & wild. Around the tree from left to right is: a purple hydrangea, a pink Astribe, a hosta in tipped pot, a large hosta & a Lady fern, plus tons of variegated Vinca Major ground cover everywhere! (Sometimes called Bigleaf Periwinkle or Greater Periwinkle--it has blue flower

I continue to work on adding things to my various rain gardens. Yesterday I was moving some young native orange lilies into place down the length of the outside of flag stones edging the back yard rain garden.  I'm excited to see the grassy shoots of the rain lilies I planted in there starting to popped up and look forward to taking pictures of them in bloom.  I've decided to move some of my Chocolate Elephant Ears into the gravel portion of that rain garden to pick up the color of the Giant Red Leaf Tropical Lily.  Today's feature Garden Pic is the first blooms of my Blue Stokes Aster: I bought it at Lowe's last fall, splitting it into 3 sections when I planted it. It's a full sun perennial that spreads , so I was deliberate on where I planted it. Though classed as 'blue' you can tell this blue leans to the lavender, but that is ver y common in flower color classifcation. After all, purple has an element of blue in it! That's why you

Greetings!  Today we met a couple single Air Force guys from a neighboring Air Force base at a restaurant about halfway between us for lunch. They're in charge of a singles Bible study at their base that we've been helping them with long-distance and they had particular questions they wanted to talk over with us. It was a nice lunch, though long. It was 4 p.m. before I got back to the house. Today's Good Eating recipe is for the delicious light carrot cake I made for hubby's birthday!   Included is the Mascarpone cream cheese frosting I used and notations of optional things I added to the cake, like oatmeal and raisins. I frosted this cake because it was for a birthday, but it would be excellent served plain, without frosting, as a coffee cake maybe with just a light coating of cinnamon & sugar on top before baking. Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup sugar  2 teaspoons baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1/2

Today's Finds are funny stuff from Pinterest: This poster for Call Of Duty: Modern Playground 4 is a scream! (For those who don't know Call of Duty is a video game.) Next:  One way to take a group photo: And a good idea for you next Facebook page: (Applause)  What a great idea. I'd do it, if I liked Facebook. Come back Monday for a great Carrot Cake recipe! Have a great weekend!

The exciting Mama Kat blog prompt for this week is:  "Share a quote from someone that has stuck with you." I can think of a number of quotes over the years that have stuck with me for one reason or another. When I joined the Air Force and went to tech school to learn how to be a medic, one of my instructors said to the class, " You're not here to be served, but to serve."  He meant our job as medics wasn't about making ourselves feel comfortable, it was about making our patients feel comfortable. He was talking about a worth ethic and it struck me as so relevant, I adopted it as own and lived by it for the next 5 years in service. Indeed, in any job since then I've used it for focus. It wasn't until I started reading the Bible a few years after tech school that I realized where that Air Force instructor drew that bit of wisdom he quoted. He got what he said from something Jesus said in Mark: " For even the Son of Man did not come to

Happy Wednesday! Today, I'm doing inside stuff because it rained this morning. I usually re-dye all my black summer capri's  yearly to freshen their color again and, since I have some brown, I did a round of brown dye as well. The only down side is having to clean out the washer barrel afterwards. The light carrot cake with the cream cheese & muscarpone icing was delicious without being too sweet. It definitely will be Monday's Good Eat recipe! Today I have "before" & "after" pics of my back yard rain garden: You can immediately see why I might want one here. This is where rain water gathers, though it does slowly drain out as well as soak in.  A Giant Red Leaf Tropical Lilly in the center here is the star feature for this rain garden. It's just a baby. When mature and filled out, this leafy giant will easily be 4-5 feet tall and wide. It's burgundy-tinted color will help break up the wall of green and it wi

Today's Good Eating Topic is Herb Savvy with Pineapple Sage: Pineapple sage can fool you when you see it on the herb shelf at your local southern garden centers, because it's so small. It grows into a moderate size shrub: 30 inches tall to 36 inches wide, has red flowers and hummingbirds like it. But what else is it good for? Well, cooking for one. Just add the chopped leaves at the end of cooking time: *Use in chicken and pork dishes, cream cheese, jams, jellies and fruit salad. (Really yummy with pork!) * Pineapple sage can stand in for regular sage in almost any recipe. * The flowers, with their citrus-mint flavor, can be tossed into salads and teas. *The leaves can be used to flavor teas. It can also be used as a dried as an aromatic in home-made potpourri or sachets. Planting & Care: This is definitely more of a southern herb for zone 8 to 11.  If you plant it further north, it will require heavy mulching or a pot you can move indoors

The Mama Kat topic option for this week is: "Write about a wardrobe malfunction." I was in high school during those uncomfortable years before jeans were okay to wear to school and pantyhose was a wardrobe staple. Girls wore either dresses with nylons, the thigh-high kind that require a girdle with garters, or a nice pantsuit. (It was the very early 70's and classy wide-leg pantsuits were all the rage!) So, on my day of strategic wardrobe failure, I was a freshman in high school wearing a dress with nylons. It was a simple, sleeveless shift dress that zipped up the back with a long metal zipper that ran from my color to my tailbone. It wasn't one my Mother made. If it had been, I'm quite sure it wouldn't have malfunctioned, but this dress was a used, previously worn dress that had somehow come into my hands. It had a course, tweedy weave in a off-white color and I liked it. I guess that metal zipper just abruptly came apart in the middle, splitt

  This morning was just mowing and a little edging of beds. And by edging, I meant with a spade shovel, so I can move those nice bits of St. Augustine that are over-growing into the flower bed to bare spots in the yard. We need to go to Walmart tonight to pick river pebble, topsoil and whatever else I need to work on the back yard, particularly the rain garden area.  It's not fully dry, but dry enough and I really need to get my giant tropical lily in the ground--it's in such a small pot. Today's Garden Pics: First, my new Pink Lantana: So pretty!  Lantana is wide, sprawling shrub when fully mature, about 3 to 4 feet and about 18 tall, though very adaptable to pruning. This pink is beside a red with a bit of left-over yellow Lantana I still had behind them, all 3 planted a slight incline. I hope they'll eventually provide a cascade of color on that incline that I'll be able to look out on from my sliding glass door.   Next: Chinese Stonecr

It's now the months of May. I can safely say I've had enough spring showers at this point. (We live 50 miles east of Pensacola) Todays Finds:   A pretty cool pic of all the Batmobiles ever made from the first  60's TV model to the most recent, all on the road going someplace. Trivia: Usually stunt drivers drove Bat vehicles during filming, but while filming Batman Forever, Chris O'Donnell, who played Robin, insisted on driving the car himself during the joyride scene and promptly ran the car into a curb, denting a fender. (Chris O'Donnell is presently a regular on NCIS: Los Angeles) Some Funny Shirts: God Created Black Holes for Somewhere to Hide All the Socks Shirt So, we all know socks mysteriously come out of the dryer without their mate.  This reminds me  of a funny line on How To Train Your Dragon, where Gobber the blacksmith says about Trolls:  " They still yer socks. But only the left ones. What's with that?"

  Today's Mama Kat topic is: "Reminisce About A Recent Trip Plus Pictures!      Who doesn't like a beach retreat, right?"     The Laguna Beach Christian Retreat Center is just west of Panama City Beach and the site of our annual spring Christian conference for military singles & couples from several local bases about an hour east of where we live.       Most of the retreat facility is located across the road from Gulf and though the beach side is lined with homes, the beach is public, accessible via numerous walkways like the one below:      Hubby and I and our Eglin team of military singles put this years conference together. We decided not to have a central speaker. Instead, we divided the group into small numbers to attend various 30-minute topic presentations, then had participants pair off together to trade info on what they learned.       We had music Saturday morning & evening, led by our team member, Kullen. (In the plaid shirt. H