The Four Seasons - A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice

During a recent trip to the library I checked out  this book, The Four Seasons, A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice. I found it to be an enjoyable read. I do wish I had realized before finishing this book that the author had put a dictionary of  Italian words at the back as this would have helped with the all of the Italian words that she used in this story. The copy of the book I read also included questions for book club groups. There are good reviews of this book at Amazon  and used copies there begin at 15 cents.

The author, Laurel Corona, has a website that I also found interesting - especially this article about writing and perfectionism.  I  have a tendency to over edit which really increases the time it takes me to write anything - even emails.

In 1999, shortly after my husband retired, we were able to take a Mediterranean Cruise beginning with 2 days and a night in Venice.  After reading this novel, I got down our album of  photos of that trip, wiped off the dust, and enjoyed looking at them.

Ali Edwards WITL

I spent some time reading Ali Edwards' WITL plan at her site.  She is selling some of the scrapbooking items she recommends for this project (scrapbooking a week in your life), but she also gives great instructions as to how to do it and shows step by step how she did this in her life. It is a great idea though it entails a lot of work.

Quite frankly, it was interesting to me to read about her life as she is working and caring for her family (the voyeur in me is coming out :).  Of course, my life is much different now than hers - but I can certainly remember those days and wish I had recorded the life of my family as she is doing.  Of course, we didn't have digital cameras and computers then.

She also includes some great quotes in her blog. Here is one that really struck a chord with me:

As I was ending my day I came across this quote from Emerson: 

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

I have been reading a blog called Cooking My Life. Maureen, the writer of this blog, is following Ali Edwards, another scrapbooker, who has given a plan for WITL (week in the life) scrapbooking. Maureen is posting some collages she has made with this topic, and I have enjoyed looking at them.  It's fun to get a glimpse of someone else's life.

Recently I found a tutorial on how to make overlays for scrapbooking with Photoshop Elements at a website named Technique Speak. I have been experimenting with this and have made my own collage using overlays. Though this is not a week in my life, it's a pretty normal morning in my life. Be sure to click the photo to go to a separate page and then click again to enlarge it.

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..