WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR MOTHER’S WEDDING?

My friend, Becky told about her mother’s wedding on her blog and challenged us to write about our mother’s wedding. A few years before my father passed away I asked him to compile his memoirs. He presented me with two full cassette tapes which I transcribed. I later made him a scrapbook from the story with pictures. The story needs to be told as he wrote it:

”I enrolled in a welding school. In welding school there was this girl learning to weld. She looked great wearing bib overalls and a bandana on her head and welding goggles on her forehead. I didn’t know it then but she was to be your mother.  It wasn’t long before I started making passes at her.  I thought what was a girl doing at welding school?  One day she asked me to take her home as her ride was sick that day That was the break I needed. . I found out she was from Georgia and her name was Eleanor Todd. I asked her for a date.  She refused. and somehow I got her wristwatch and wouldn’t give it back until I got a date.  She said yes. “
    “Eleanor and I would visit places like the Empire State Building. We’d go to Coney Island, which was an amusement park. We went to Jones’ Beach which was a famous beach on Long Island. In the spring of 1944 we made up our minds to go to Georgia. We didn’t have any jobs in sight.  One wouldn’t do that today. “
    “ We decided to go to Georgia and we also decided to get married. Ed Metcalf’s brother who was a doctor gave us the blood test at no charge. We then got our marriage license. We wanted to get married in DuBois but found out that with our New York blood test we had to get married in New York state. We left New York and was on our way to DuBois.  We almost missed getting married. We stopped at Port Jervis, New York which was on the border of new York and Pennsylvania. Reverend Hill, a minister, married us. I still remember the red velvet suit she was wearing. It looked great. On the way we stopped in Kane and spent our honeymoon night. “

SHUFFLE OFF TO BUFFALO

Off we go..today I took a quick trip (well it’s never a quick trip) to Buffalo to take my friend Linda to meet her plane. She is venturing to a friend’s in Virginia Beach for a week. My pals Lisa and Joan rode along with me. It’s an hour and half one way. We had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. I had my favorite..Thai chicken wraps.






I always thought that was a great diet choice until I read this:

Calories

If you thought you were being smart by skipping an appetizer and choosing the Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps as your entree, you will be disappointed to learn that one plate with six wraps has 1,536 calories, roughly half a day's worth for the average non-dieting man, or about three-quarters the daily allotment for a non-dieting woman. If you also had drinks and dessert, you pretty much consumed or exceeded your daily allotment of calories in one meal.

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Protein

A plate of Cheesecake Factory Thai Lettuce Wraps contains 96gm of protein. The average individual needs about .8gm per kilogram of body weight, which is pounds divided by 2.2. If you use this formula, a 150 pound adult needs about 54gm of protein daily. So you would have more than satisfied you protein needs if you consumed the whole plateful.

Carbohydrates

You may have thought you were keeping it low-carb by passing up the pasta and choosing the Lettuce Wraps instead. But your plate of wraps packs 114gm of carbohydrate, making up 30 percent of the total calories. Roughly 60 percent of your total daily calories should come from carbohydrates, so if you didn't eat anything else that day, you were well below your total daily requirement.

Fat

The not-so-bad news is that a plate of Cheesecake Factory Lettuce Wraps contains only 6gm of fat, albeit saturated fat. That translates to 54 calories, or about 4 percent of your meal's total calories. Fat should make up less than 10 percent of your total daily calories, so you're good there.

But who cares? I only get that treat a few times a year and I’ve survived before without a weight gain so I think I’ll be all right this time. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

Playing around with PhotoScape

I used Photoshop a lot with my pictures but was still sad that Google will no longer have Picnik, a free imaging program, on the web. I have used Picnik to create some great results in the past and will be sad to see it go. There is outrage all over the internet about it’s passing away. Today I went back to Photoscape to create the following pictures.

Cute couple

Awww….aren’t they sweet? Dan and Gretchen at Penn State.

Uh-OH

Yesterday I edited two of my posts and now they are the only two posts I can see on my blog. The other ones are there if you click on “older posts” at the bottom of the page. Sorry about that. I don’t know what to do to make it like it was before. I’ll just keep posting and hope that it corrects itself. I have been reading all over the blogosphere that Blogger is updating and that is resulting in mega problems.
   Today the Literary Club volunteered at the American CAncer Society. After a morning of work we enjoyed  lunch at Beefeaters. The rain has washed away all the snow and the temperature hovers at 33 degrees. It’s still cold but it seems funny how warm the winter has been this year. last year we had freezing snow and a buildup of ice on the roofs. This year we have only plowed the driveway a few times. This is a picture of the deep snow last year at this time.
 
   

Things I learn on Pinterest

I saw this on Pinterest and thought it was a good idea. Whoever wrote this sure knows what they are talking about. I can't wait to try it this summer.

Am I the only person who hasn't heard of "cooler corn"? As an obsessive food nerd, you'd expect that I would have at least heard of it, but over the weekend I was blind-sided by the simple genius of this method for cooking loads of corn on the cob perfectly. I was hepped to it while visiting my family in Maine . Short story: We like corn on the cob. And with eight adults at the table, that means a couple of dozen ears. We would have used the lobster pot to cook them all, but the lobster pot was busy steaming lobster. Then my sister, a capable Maine cook with years of camping experience, says "let's do cooler corn!" Before I can ask "what the hell is cooler corn?" a Coleman cooler appears from the garage, is wiped clean, then filled with the shucked ears. Next, two kettles-full of boiling water are poured over the corn and the top closed. Then nothing. When we sat down to dinner 30 minutes later and opened it, the corn was perfectly cooked. My mind was blown. And I'm told that the corn will remain at the perfect level of doneness for a couple of hours. Turns out, Cooler Corn is pretty well known among the outdoorsy set but for those of us who avoid tents as much as possible, it's perfect for large barbecues and way less of mess than grilling. In fact, I may

I thought this was hilarious!

Current new goal:


Cute idea for Valentine’s day—use Dove chocolates.



Sweet Baby Ray’s Crockpot chicken

4-6 pieces boneless skinless chicken breasts (i threw them in frozen... even easier!)
1 bottle BBQ sauce (sweet baby ray's all the way!)
1/4 c vinegar
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/4 c brown sugar
1/2 - 1 tsp. garlic powder
mix BBQ sauce with all ingredients listed under it. place chicken in crockpot. pour sauce over it and cook on LOW for 4-6 hours. you pretty much don't even have to stir it... how easy is that!?

Celebrating Birthdays, Bradford Style

Today my friends and I celebrated Yrsa’s birthday. We have a little tradition of taking the birthday girl out to lunch and today we went to the Beef and Barrel restaurant in Olean, NY a town about 1/2 hour away. After a nice lunch we did some shopping at the mall and visited Big Lots and Walmart. I used my gift certificate from Penney’s that Don gave me for Christmas to buy an exercise outfit. Maybe that will give me incentive to go to the Y more often. This week I only made it one day. I forgot to take a picture today so here is an old one of the four of us.