Visit with Sis, Saturday

We slept late again this morning, and I skipped my exercises in favor of getting ready to go to the museum at 10:30 a.m.

A lot of people showed up for the museum program, presented by three family members from a nearby town. The mother, her daughter, and her son, spoke about and demonstrated food preservation techniques, including storing dried foods like beans and oatmeal, canning foods (using a pressure cooker), making jellies and jams, and grinding wheat flour and then storing it in heat sealed packages.

Many tips we were given are ones that Mother, Sis, and I already use, like storing dried goods such as beans, rice, pasta, etc. in the freezer, and putting bay leaves in storage containers holding flour and cornmeal, in order to keep bugs out.

Besides the demonstration, the daughter of the family gave us a history of her family's migration to our state, beginning in the mid-1800s. The mother showed us several quilts that members of the family's church made, to be distributed to those in need...they supplied quilts to victims of Hurricane Katrina, for example. Thousands of quilts are made each year by members of the church nationwide, which are distributed to folks in need around the world.

The family, who are very self-sufficient at growing, storing, and preserving their own food, recommended that each person have a backpack containing 72 hours worth of survival items like water, packets of food, a tent, a flashlight, etc., and that homes have a three-month supply of food in case of a natural disaster like an earthquake.

After the program, the family treated us to big slices of homemade bread, slathered with homemade butter and apple-mint jelly. We didn't get back home until after 12 p.m., when we added noodles to a pot of chicken broth for lunch. With the soup, we had more of Sis's homemade bread.

This afternoon, we watched two musical movies. The first was "Hairspray," which I'd received in the mail today, along with three other DVDs. Hubbie, Mother, and I saw this feature recently as an outdoor movie at the college, but Sis hadn't seen it.

The second feature we watched was "Grease," which I'd recorded on the DVR. Hubbie had never seen this movie, though the rest of us had. I've seen it several times, as has Sis. Both movies feature John Travolta, but in vastly different roles and at different ages. He was very young in "Grease," and quite mature in "Hairspray." In "Grease," he played a cool, black-leather-jacket clad 1950s teen, and in Hairspray, he played a woman.

After a supper of leftovers, Sis went home, and Hubbie and I watched a couple of more movies, including "Charlie Wilson's War," starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. This R-rated movie is about a playboy congressman, who teams up with an anti-communist woman with a talent for raising funds, to pull off a covert operation...based on a true incident.

The other movie we watched was "Don't Say a Word," an R-rated movie starring Michael Douglas. Men steal a jewel, then ten years later break into a psychiatrist's home and kidnap his child. The wife has a broken leg and is incapacitated in her bed. She is spied upon and threatened not to try to phone for help. The psychiatrist is treating a young woman with a secret. It takes a while for the movie to reveal how all these plot elements interconnect.