Sunday, March 22

Again, we awoke to rain and trees full of chattering blackbirds. I skipped my exercises this morning, and just went about a usual Sunday routine of reading the newspaper, programming the DVR for the week's shows and movies, and doing a couple of loads of laundry.

Mother came over around 9 a.m. and put a pork roast, with carrots, onions and herbs and spices in the slow cooker. Hubbie peeled potatoes, and later, I mashed them. We had the meat, potatoes, and veggies with gravy made from low-sodium beef broth and thickened with cornstarch, and individual cups of applesauce.

After lunch, the sun came out and the temperture rose into the comfortable 60s. So it was a lovely afternoon for an outing. At 2 p.m., we went to the museum to hear one of the Master Gardeners, known as "The Herb Lady," speak about herbs and dyes in the Civil War era. The lady, dressed in a costume of the time, talked about using walnut, butternut bark, indigo, poke weed and sassafras, among others, in making dyes. She also talked about medicinal plants.

At one of the museum exhibits, there were printed instructions for making dye from onion skins. It sounds like a fun craft, though I don't know if I'll ever get around to trying it.

At another exhibit, there were various small plastic bags containing seeds, with two probes, one black and one red, that viewers used to touch the screws holding the bags of seeds and then screws that identified the seeds (a red light glowed with a correct answer). We were able to identify some seeds, but others, like soybean seeds, stumped us.

The museum is currently mounting an exhibit about early freshwater pearling and mussel shell button industries in the area. I commented that I'd written an article about a local pearl diver years ago, and the museum director asked me to provide a copy to her to see if she can use it in the exhibit. So when we got home, I looked up the article and made a copy to take when we visit the museum Wednesday for a film fest offering.

Later this afternoon, we watched a movie I'd recorded on DVR..."Vertical Limit," rated PG-13. This movie is about a mountain-climbing team trying to save other climbers, who have run into weather trouble and are stranded in a cavern. It's definitely an action movie, in which the characters are constantly getting into positions where they hang precariously or fall from cliffs, or are inundated by avalanches. The film stars Scott Glenn, Chris O'Donnell, Bill Paxton, and Robin Tunney, among others.

Then, after a sandwich and salad supper, we watched "Alive," a 1993 R-rated movie starring Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano, about the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team and family members who crashed in the Andes, and ultimately had to resort to eating their dead to survive. It's a gripping true story of survival.