Meatloaf

I have really been pretty lazy with cooking in the last couple of weeks. My husband would probably like it if I had a cooking blog as I would have to do some cooking!

I'm not an expert on cooking. It's a family joke  that I never sit down to a meal that I have prepared without criticizing something about it. My kids think that I inherited this trait from my mother who always did the same thing. She was a good cook - so maybe we both were just fishing for praise. :)

There is one thing that I do make that I always like - my meatloaf.  It is a recipe that I got from a Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that I got over 50 years ago for a wedding gift. That cookbook is long gone as it finally fell apart, but I kept a lot of recipes from it.

In an attempt to get my children, when they were little, to eat more vegetables, I added the carrots in the recipe. They add moisture to the meat loaf, and my children did not seem to know the difference. Here is the recipe.
                         
EVERYDAY MEATLOAF
2/3 cup bread crumbs dry

1 cup milk
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup onion chopped (I usually add more onions than this.)
2 carrots, grated
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1 dash pepper
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1/4 cup catsup
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon dry mustard   

INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix well bread crumbs, milk; meat, eggs, onion, carrots, and seasonings. Form into loaf and place into loaf pan.

I use a flat pan with sides instead of the loaf pan so that I can pour off any grease that accumulates around the meatloaf. I usually start doing this about half-way through the baking. I shape the loaf with wet hands. This seems to work better and is supposed to keep the meatloaf from cracking when it bakes. I used to make my own bread crumbs in the blender or food processor but for the past few years I buy the ready made kind - much easier!

Spread with Piquant Sauce made by mixing brown sugar, catsup, nutmeg and dry mustard. Bake 1 hour. Servings: 8

This is a good dish to prepare in the morning. ( Remember to take the ground beef  out of the freezer the night before, if it is frozen.)  I cover it with plastic wrap and stick it in the refrigerator. Then I can just put it into the oven an hour before dinner is to be served.

Ready to stick in the refrigerator until time to bake for dinner

Baked and ready to eat.  (I started slicing it before I remembered to take the photo.) Makes a messy pan!

My Grandchildren

I have not really talked about my grandchildren - mainly because of privacy issues - but they are a big part of my life. There are eleven of them ranging from five years old to twenty-eight. All except two of them are fairly close by so that I see them frequently.

This past Friday was Grandparents' day at the school of my three youngest grandchildren.  They always have a big production at their school for this particular event - with performances, food, and visits to the children's rooms where they present us with gifts they have made.

My twenty-two year old grandson was with us for the weekend as he had a job near us to do.  My nine year old grandson is with us today.  He is recuperating from being sick over the weekend and needed to stay home from school. He is on his Grandpa's computer while I am working on this blog.

My seventeen year old granddaughter is having irregular hours at her school this week because of exams. Because of that she is spending tonight with us so that we can take her to school tomorrow for an exam at 11:30 in the morning (she has a working mother - as do all of my grandchildren).

I've always felt that I never knew what love really was until I had my first child.  However, I have found with my grandchildren that love really is absolutely unconditional - they can do no wrong! :)

Peru Scrapbook Pages

Here are some old digital scrapbook pages that I have done.

My husband's step father would always want to show us thousands of slides of their trips every time we would go up in the summer to visit them, and I swore I would never do that to my children.  However I couldn't resist making a couple of pages of this Peru trip for my 2007 Family Scrapbook.

For some reason, visiting Machu Pichu was always on my "bucket list" though I had no idea I would ever get to go. (Goes to show - you never know what life will hold for you :)  It was a rugged trip for two old people, and I almost killed my husband with it (he developed a huge blood clot in his leg shortly after that trip). However, I think both of us would do it again.

Scrapbooking Continued

I spent all day yesterday at this computer working on that scrapbook. Barely got the bed made and - thank heavens - there were leftovers to have for dinner!  I was cross-eyed by the time my day ended.

I do feel like I am on the right road with this now. Although there are a lot of years of his life that I do not have any info for, I am scrapping what I do have in time order. This makes me feel organized.  I also changed my page theme a little.  The scrapbooks I have made before do not continue a theme - other than being about my family.  Thus, everytime I made a page, I could do something different - making it as elaborate or simple as I felt like.  That is more fun but takes longer - so, I am going to keep the page designs for this book simple and the same throughout the book.

I would love to share it here. It's certainly more fun to do things if you can show them off.  However, there are family names involved, and I feel insecure about that - though I don't know who would care. I guess I could "redact" them. :)

Back to Scrapbooking

I wrote a few posts back about my latest scrapbook of my husband's father, who died when my husband was only 3 years old. I have had all the materials (playbills, newspaper clippings, etc.) laying out on my dining room table for the past couple of weeks waiting for inspiration to hit me. Unfortunately, it didn't, and all of that stuff was getting on my nerves. Of course, I know that frequently inspiration comes if I just start working at whatever. So yesterday I spent a lot of time sorting everything and putting them into folders according to a timeline.

I really was not satisifed with the page design I had created previously and decided that I needed to give it a little more thought. Today I spent some time on  kuler , an  Adobe website with ready-made color themes. They can be downloaded to Adobe Photoshop but not to the old version of Photoshop Elements (V.3) which I have. However, it gives me the hex numbers, and I can manually put the colors in.

I chose these colors from a bunch of heritage color themes.

There are three living generations in my family named after this man - my husband, my son, and my grandson.

I keep thinking about him as I work on this book......wondering what my husband's life would have been like if he had been able to know his Dad...........wondering if he knows that I am making a scrapbook for him.

Old People Who Blog

I don't usually talk to my friends about this blog. Most of the women I know in my age group are not interested in anything related to the internet other than email. They look at me a little funny if I do mention that I am blogging.

Bloggers Over 50, a website I found recently, has a long blogroll of bloggers. They all seem to be in their 50's and 60's.  Looking for someone more my age, I googled "elderly bloggers"  and came up with The Ageless Project - a site where "elderly people"  -(:( I don't feel elderly) - can register their blogs under the decade in which they were born. The dates start back in the 1910's and there are some interesting blogs on this site.

Some of them have family members who are web designers, etc. and who maintain their blogsites for them.  I am patting myself on the back that I am learning to do this all on my own.   Sometimes I think that is more fun for me than the actual blogging.

Book Review: mr. muo's traveling couch

I liked Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (see my report on this) so much that I read  mr. muo's traveling couch by the same author, Dai Sijie. I was not disappointed.

The inside flap of the book cover gives a better description than I can:

After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalsis to twenty-first century China. But it is his hidden purpose - to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner - that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero, Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl.

This book is really funny (though I do have to admit I have been accused of having a weird sense of humor). While reading the book, I kept wondering how it would feel to live with such an imaginative brain as this man has.......a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Here is the review in the N.Y. Times..

Technorati

I spent quite a bit of time reading http://www.blogdoctor.me/. It is chock full of information - some of which is too technical for me. Or maybe there was just so much that I could not take it in. However, I am trying to follow his suggestion of claiming my blog in Technorati......and for that I am suppose to insert this code -  7KD5VBTRMMC4I - in a post.

The Technorati Help Page says:

We realize that putting this odd code text into your feed means that all of your feed followers (and perhaps Twitter, Facebook, and other sites) will see it, but it's the best method we've found so far to demonstrate to us that you control the blog. You can remove the code once the claim is complete

I am not sure why I need Technorati  (but I will keep researching)! This blog seems to be more about my trials and tribulations in learning how to blog more than anything else............But after all I am an old lady :) and doing this on my own.

Blog Reading

Blog reading is more than an "Occasional Pursuit" for me. I am always curious about other people...what they are thinking...and how they do things. I guess I am an info junkie.

I can't figure out a good way to keep the blogs I subscribe to.  At present, I use Delicious tags and keep it opened in the sidebar. I first have to click on my Delicious tag, then click on the blog, and then it takes at least 2 or 3 seconds to load the whole blog. Of course, I don't want to wait 2 or 3 seconds!! :-)

I use to have IE as my browser and I really liked their bookmark and feed sidebar.  Firefox that I am using now.....not so much.....though it works much better as a browser on my computer.

I don't like Google Reader,either. Probably because I have to click to get Google's homepage, click on my Reader account, click on the blog.......It's all just too much clicking for me.

I spend waaaay too much time reading blogs.  I open one blog that I like, and before I know it, I follow links from it until I have clicked way off into the web and found at least another million blogs that I want to save. I can't spend the whole day reading blogs. I still have a house to clean and a husband to feed. But  I'm so afraid I'll miss something good!!

I know, I know - the logical thing to do is  to set a timer and when it goes off, just quit. Sometimes that works for me and sometimes it doesn't.........depending on my level of will power on that day..........and even on my best days, that's not so good.

I would like to know how others organize their bookmarks and use their blog reading time wisely.

A Funeral

I have spent the last few days in another state to attend the funeral of my sister. For all of her adult life, she suffered from the terrible disorder of schizophrenia. The last few years of her life were spent in a nursing home. Needless to say her disease affected our whole family.

In the face of a seemingly purposeless and terrible existence, it is hard not to question why, but I have to believe there must be a reason.........