Sunday, April 26

Gorgeous day today. Too bad rain is predicted for much of the upcoming week. We were up a little after 7 a.m. this morning, and after breakfast I did a session on the treadmill, since I missed yesterday.

Once I was ready for the day, I washed a couple of loads of clothes, set the DVR for the week's shows, read the Sunday newspaper, and e-mailed photos of the Master Gardener plant sale to the regional section of our state newspaper.

I was excited this morning to see, for the first time this spring, a hummingbird at a feeder. If they arrived earlier, they have been feeding, unnoticed, in the flower gardens. The hummingbird wasn't the only one that visited the nectar feeder....a northern oriole also fed there. Each spring, the orioles stop by here for a few days on their migration north, and I'm always happy to see them. A goldfinch feeding at the thistle feeder, and a cardinal sorting through seeds in another feeder, made for a colorful display in the backyard.

Mother came over mid-morning and put a pork roast with carrots and onions into the slow cooker. We had mashed potatoes and gravy and individual cups of applesauce with the roast. For dinner music, we listened to Mozart and Beethoven.

Around 2 p.m., we traveled to another town about 30 minutes away to meet Hubbie's daughter and two great-grandsons. She was on her way home, a five-hour trip from her mother's home. Our main reason for meeting her was to give her four pints of strawberry preserves that Mother had made for her. Daughter requests and pays for four pints each year.

On the way to the other town, we stopped at a roadside fruit and vegetable market to buy four quarts of fresh strawberries, grown locally...in fact, they are grown in the fields adjacent to the market. I also bought a box of new potatoes and two boxes of yellow squash for a veggie dinner later this week.

Mother wanted to buy tomato plants at the market, too, but they didn't have the type she wanted. So we moved on to another market. There were none there, either. So she and Hubbie will scout our town tomorrow for some.

Daughter and great-grandsons arrived at the filling station where we agreed to meet about 3 p.m., and we visited for a short time. Then I took pictures, we bid each other goodbye, and were on the road back home.

The roadsides are lovely right now in red clover, evening primrose, and daisies. The fields are covered in bright yellow wildflowers, too (don't know what they are, but they are pleasing to look at).

Back home, I washed and sliced some strawberries for supper, and then made a batch of pancake batter, using plain and wheat flour, egg substitute, and sour skim milk (the milk was Mother's...it had soured before she could drink it, and I didn't want to it to go to waste).

Hubbie did the honors of cooking the pancakes, while I heated sugar-free syrup, scrambled some egg substitute for me, microwaved turkey bacon for Hubbie, heated the dinner plates in the microwave, heated hot water for tea for me, and set the pull-down table on the couch in the den. This is our usual Sunday night supper routine, because Hubbie likes pancakes, waffles, or French toast for supper on Sundays, except for Sundays when we have an unusually large lunch, when we settle for cold cereal and toast.

Afterwards, we watched TV, as usual.