Sunday, July 17

Today, Hubbie's granddaughter gave birth to a little girl...welcome to the world, new great-granddaughter!

We were up around 7:30 this morning, but I skipped my exercises. Mother came over while I was getting ready for the day and put a pork roast with carrots and onions into the slow cooker.

We spent the rest of the morning reading the Sunday newspaper and otherwise goofing off.

The roast, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and individual cups of applesauce, was very good. Mother made several comments about the potatoes, which were yellow meat reds. We bought them at the WDCS yesterday, because they were the only variety of red potatoes available. They tasted like the white variety, but I guess Mother just didn't like the looks of them. They have a buttery yellow look that is probably supposed to be appealing. I didn't find them offensive, but Mother just couldn't get used to them.

Following lunch, I made a batch of peppermint chocolate bark, using crushed peppermint disks atop layers of white and chocolate morsels. Mother helped with the project. After the candy cooled in the fridge for an hour or so, I broke it into pieces, and we chose three of the prettiest ones to enter in the fair. Of course, we sampled some of it, too. The rest went to the freezer.

After that, Mother went home to fetch a pretty jar, so she could layer spices, varieties of beans, and macaroni, for a soup mixture. She added a couple of bay leaves, and then I used a rubber stamp to make a Christmas tag, and I added a red plaid ribbon to the neck of the jar. This is a nice entry for the Christmas corner of the fair.

Then I spent quite a while filling out tags for our entries....and there were a lot of them, counting all the plants, veggies, individual flowers, etc. We can take the potted plants to the fair tomorrow afternoon, along with Mother's and my place settings. But the rest of the crafts, and canned goods will go Tuesday morning, after we enter our exhibit numbers on the tags. We can't get those numbers until tomorrow evening, so our job tomorrow night will be to make sure every tag has a number so that after judging, we can get paid for our wins.

We'll spend a lot of time Tuesday doing various fair-related tasks for Wednesday. I'll bake a coffee cake, make a floral arrangement, and put together a vegetable basket arrangement. Hubbie will gather flowers for individual bud vases, as well as a bunch for me to use in an arrangement. Mother will tag all the baked goods and candies.

Re: vegetable basket: this is a new category at the fair, where the entrant must make a pleasing basket arrangement from five or more varieties of vegetables. That presented a challenge to us, since our garden is small, with not a lot to choose from. So I've decided to use the one patti pan squash that Hubbie picked yesterday, two or three yellow squash, the one jalapeno pepper that's on the vine, two or three small bell peppers, some grape tomatoes, and a couple of regular tomatoes.

As for the coffee cake, I'll probably need to bake it at Mother's house, since we're convinced the oven on our stove isn't working properly. Hubbie will see about getting the oven fixed, but it would be too much to hope for that it can be done tomorrow. I figure an element will need to be ordered.

Mother went home around 4 p.m., Hubbie went out to mow part of the yard, and I played on my computer. Later, we had a cereal supper, and then watched TV.

A movie we saw was the 2008, "I Sell the Dead," starring Ron Perlman, and Dominic Monaghan. This PG 14 film is a horror/comedy. A lovable 18th Century grave robber (Monaghan) about to meet the hangman, reflects on his life of crime to a priest (Perlman). The robber and his cohort (who has already gone to the guillotine) kept running into vampires, zombies, and aliens in their bumbling efforts to dig up and sell bodies.

The second movie we watched was the 2010, PG feature, "Chasing 3000," starring Ray Liotta. Inspired by a true story, two brothers in the early 70s, travel across the country to see the baseball player Roberto Clemente get his 3000th hit. One of the brothers is confined to a wheelchair. We like sports-related movies, and this is a pretty good one...and much more uplifting than the previous film.