My exercise class is incredibly gregarious. They chatter away through class, meet before class to see what’s been happening over the past two days, go out for coffee on Monday morning after class and go to breakfast once a month to celebrate with those who have had birthdays.
For a long time it was our tradition to invite the class to have a breakfast potluck at our house in May. It was scheduled so that I could show off our iris, and maybe sneak in the chance to show off a new quilt or two.
Last year, my mother left our home to be cared for by a round-the-clock caregiver, and I was still busy helping them to get settled in May, and didn’t extend the offer to host the brunch. I’m pretty sure that everyone in class understood that I was otherwise occupied, and they were very kind about it. This year, I thought it might be time to resume the tradition. We have about forty-five people signed up for class and I believe that thirty-five of them, possibly a few more, will be here after class tomorrow.
Luckily, this is a pot luck meal. I set out a sign-up sheet, more to get a head count than to manage the meal. The people who sign up can see what is already listed in terms of what others are bringing, so it pays to be among the first to sign up. This year we have an interesting cross between breakfast and lunch. I plan to do breakfast items, while our exercise dragon lady is bringing a hot pasta dish. There will be fruit and muffins and ham and a range of other items.
My youngest sister is quite the cook, and I’ve borrowed her baked french toast casserole recipe, and one for an egg and sausage casserole. Another friend does a variation on the french toast casserole that has thinly sliced Granny Smith apples and dried cranberries mixed in with the brown sugar/cinnamon/butter mixture on the bottom of the pan, so I thought I’d do that, too. And, I decided to do the praline pull-apart bread. All but the egg casserole was assembled this evening, and Dear Husband cooked the sausage and onion for the eggs while I put together the french toast.
I plan to hop out of bed early tomorrow, dead-head the iris, and bake the bread. Then I’ll work on getting the tables set and beverages set up. One of my nieces has offered to help me serve, and she will be here early to help me finish setting the tables.
The only thing I forgot to do was to buy some flowers for the tables. I may cut some of the overwhelming population of daisies and put them in simple vases. That will give the iris a chance to stand out a bit more, and save me the trip to the store. I love it when a plan comes together.
I’m going to set the table with china. Why have it if you don’t use it? China, silverware and glasses will be most of the cleanup. I’ll have help putting tables back where they need to go, and our visitors are bringing folding chairs, so we won’t have to return chairs.
I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, but I better get to bed so that I have enough sleep to carry me through the day. With luck, I’ll have some pictures of the iris to share with you. I hope you’re enjoying spring as much as I am!

We are a great family for making lists. My-Sister-The-Nurse makes hers orally, but I prefer to write mine down. I rarely leave the house without a list of errands, and usually that list is in the order in which they are to be done. I believe in saving gas and spending as little time as possible on errands, so I pare my list down so that I am not criss-crossing the entire suburban Chicago area.
The particular list that I want to write about has not yet been committed to paper. It’s been developing over the past five or ten years, and we’ve only just begun to acknowledge that it’s a list-in-the works.
Dear Husband and I have seen the last of our fifties, alas. We tend to laugh about all the problems attendant with aging because the alternatives are just too grim. One of the things we have noticed is that there are a number of places to eat that we visit less frequently. We have finally had to accept that there are some things that bother us too much to risk eating them.
Of course, we also have the lost of memory that seems to come with aging, so occasionally we will give it the old college try, only to be reminded just why it was that we have avoided some things.
Kentucky Fried Chicken started the list. MORE than ten years ago, I realized that my family was less interested in KFC than I was, and I kept trying to get a taste of it now and then. But, as much as I love extra-crispy, the fat, and the breading just don’t sit well. About every two years I’ll try a couple of pieces of chicken, and remember immediately that it’s supposed to be on THE LIST!
Gyros were the next to fall. In DeKalb, Illinois, (and in Sycamore) there is a shop called “Tom and Jerry’s Gyros King.” It’s right on the edge of the campus of Northern Illinois University. We would make a trip out to Farm and Fleet to shop for tools, and stop for gyros for lunch. They taste SO GOOD, and are SO HARD on older bodies. Alas, poor gyros, we knew ye well…
I’ve noticed that we order pizza much less often. Rather than once every two weeks, it might be once every six to eight weeks now, and I tend to try to find other options before I resort to placing the pizza call.
About ten days ago, when Frankie was visiting with us, I gave her the option of rainbow trout cooked at home, or takeout Chinese for dinner. She opted for the Chinese. First let me say that we all enjoyed the meal. We have been patrons of this particular place for at least twenty years and I look forward to our occasional Chinese take out nights. But, having said that, we ALL suffered, some more than others. I don’t know if it was some particular ingredient, or whether the cook is using more oil, but we all spent an uncomfortable night. I’m very sad to say that the day of ordering five items for dinner is a thing of the past. We’ll have to try ordering just one entree and an appetizer and see how we do. If that doesn’t work, Chinese will have to go on the list.
My absolute favorite place to eat for the past ten years or so has been Pappadeaux, a Cajun restaurant that is part of the Pappas Brother’s group. We are fortunate to have two of them in the Chicago area, and we used to try to eat there a couple of times a year. Dear Husband took me there for Mother’s Day, for a very early lunch. Ohhhhhhhhh, was it good! Unfortunately, although I brought home half my meal, I was practically comatose for the afternoon. Have you ever seen a copy of the “Bubba Gump Cookbook?” Each recipe starts with “Ya take a pound of butter…” I think Pappadeaux’s recipes must read like that.
We just can’t deal with that amount of butter in our meals these days. We have pared down the fats and have been working on smaller serving sizes. Soon meals will be more about sustenance and less about entertainment. So I guess that means it’s formal. The list is in print. Damn!

Eighteen years ago, in the middle of a bitterly cold winter, we discovered that a black cat had taken up residence on the seat of the lawn mower in our unheated garage. When I discovered him, I turned to Dear Husband and said, “He’s going to freeze. We have to let him in the house.” Dear Husband has never been a lover of cats, and his solution to the problem was to put a small space heater in the garage.
The winter worsened that weekend, and to keep the pipes in the loft bathroom from freezing, Dear Husband needed to use the space heater that was keeping the cat company. I looked at DH, and said, “He’ll freeze.”
Dear Husband, knowing what his life would be like if the cat died in the garage, opened the door to the basement, and accepted the changes that were to come in his life. He did, however, declare that our bedroom would be a “pet-free” zone.
My step-daughter named the cat “Edward Scissorhands,” after a recently released Johnny Depp movie, in honor of the set of lethal claws the cat wielded whenever he felt threatened. His name was temporarily changed to “Edwina Scissorhands,” when the vet incorrectly determined his sex, but we changed vets and from then on we simply called the cat “Ed.”
Ed manipulated everyone. We could not persuade him to be an indoor cat. He quickly learned how to ring Elegante Mother’s chimes, climbing onto her stereo system and playing golf with her pewter miniatures when she didn’t respond to his request to go out.
Somehow, Ed trained our dog, Defer, to bark when it was time for us to open the door and let Ed back into the house. In return, Ed would take his time walking into the foyer so that Defer could sniff him to see where Ed had been. They had an amazing relationship, and Ed was always top cat (or dog, as the case may be).
When Ed was fifteen years old our vet told us that Ed was suffering from a thyroid problem. The vet is one of those very pragmatic people and she rarely recommends heroic efforts where they are not a good choice. I trust her judgment, so when she told me that Ed’s condition could be cured with radiation, we gave it a great deal of thought. It was expensive. It meant that he would have to be away from us for a week. We would have to collect his litter and waste for six months because it couldn’t go directly into the landfill without setting off radiation alarms! I finally decided that we’d do it. I felt that if we would have one more year with Ed, it was worth it.
The treatment was successful. Ed had a lot to say about the spa we sent him to, but he came back in good health, ready to take up his position as the head of the house. Shortly after that, we began to notice that his black fur was shot through with silver, and the vet commented each time she saw him over the increasing gray.
Two years ago, I knew there was something wrong, so after Christmas, I took Ed to see the vet and she ran a series of tests. Ed was developing kidney disease. I thought he’d be gone in a couple of months. He chose not to go out, and became the indoor cat we’d hoped for. All through winter he preferred to be where it was warm. Occasionally he would go to the door and demand to be let out, but when the blast of frigid air hit him, he’d shake his right front paw and back away. When it finally warmed up, his visits outside were shorter. He was becoming a cat who loved his luxuries, and his nap sites followed the sun as it moved from the east to the west side of the house throughout the day.
Ed’s personality never changed. He still expected to be the family member in charge, but he became more social these past two years. He would join us as we gathered for dinner, wanting to check out what was on our plates. Then, he’d sit with me as I worked at the computer, and at 8:00, we’d adjourn to the rocker and he would sit above me, or on my lap, or nose to nose with me.
In the morning, when I came out of the bedroom, Ed would be waiting on the table in the foyer, ready for me to scoop him up and carry him to the kitchen where I’d give him the first can of cat food for the day. He had a schedule, and he expected me to keep to it.
Tuesday, it was unusually warm. Our Spring has arrived about two weeks early. Ed wanted to go out, so about four o’clock in the afternoon, I opened the door for him, thinking he would be back in time for dinner. I called him, and looked for him for the next twenty four hours, but Ed ghosted out of our lives in the same way he came into them…..on his own terms.
He was a great cat, and I really miss him.

Where does the time go? I had a lovely weekend with my youngest sis. Frankie came up to attend a jewelry party hosted by one of our nieces on Friday night. I hate to admit it, but I usually don’t care for the parties where you are expected to go and buy something, but this was a lot of fun.
We’ve had a stormy weekend, with some serious thunderstorms moving through, but we managed to miss most of them while we were out and about. We visited Elegante Mother, and then had lunch with My-Sister-The-Nurse. We picked up some summer weight slacks for EM, and spent a little time chatting before heading home.
Frankie and I spent another hour on the quilt we started a year ago (Yeah, Cop Car….the one that was supposed to be done in ONE DAY….HAH!) We’re down to the borders now, so the rest will go fast the next time we can sew together. Frankie wrote down what she intends to do for the next three borders and the binding and backing so we won’t have to guess at it next time.
We sent Frankie off at 7:30 this morning so that she could have an hour or two with her hubby before he had to go off to work. I hate letting her go, but I wanted her to have a safe drive and a good day. As she was getting ready to go down the driveway, she rolled down her window and instructed me to save our grapevine for her this fall! Maybe I should have told her that she could have it if she would make me a grapevine Christmas tree next year! lol
It’s been a great weekend!

I attend exercise three mornings a week (well, I’m supposed to go three mornings a week), and the woman who leads us is taking courses to certify as a yoga instructor. When she needs to be away for the occasional class, she invites me to fill in for her.
I spent some time working on “cheat sheets” for the class. I can’t remember the moves and call them without reminders, so I use poster board and write out the moves. We tape them to the top of the mirrors in the dance studio, and I stand in the center of the front row.
I bit off more than I can chew this time. I wanted to try to create the same exercises we have been doing for the past two or three weeks. That meant that I would have to call four new cardio exercises! FOUR!! And, of course, I didn’t leave myself adequate time to rehearse. I got a LOT of exercise in this past week, trying to learn to call those routines.
Things were going well Friday morning. I managed to get us through about twenty minutes of exercise, and we were coming up to the last two cardio songs and a cool down. We had almost finished the third cardio when I stopped in place. Of course, they all did, too. I’d been calling the moves for cardio four to the music for cardio three!
Duh! I just can’t believe my ears didn’t realize what I was doing. And, do you know, not ONE of the class told me something was wrong! I was going to skip the last cardio and go on to the cool down and stretching, but they liked the song and were willing to repeat all the moves.
Clearly, I’ll need to practice a LOT before I sub again in two weeks. I’m lucky the class is filled with such nice people. We got our exercise in, and that was what mattered, but I’m truly embarrassed!