Friday Five: Love!

RevKarla brings today's Friday Five to RevGalBlogPals:

Happy Valentine’s Day!  I know that some (a lot) of you are digging out from snow and ice and lack of electricity.  We feel for you, and love you!     Some of you have a love-hate relationship with Valentine’s Day.  ‘Nuff said.     I happen to enjoy Valentine’s Day in spite of having exactly one date ever on VD (before I was married).   I love celebrating Love!   So, all that is to say is that our Friday Five is to tell us about five random things that you love.

I could fill up each of the five loves with all my children, grandchildren, husband, and friends I love. Instead, I will try to branch out to other aspects of my life.

1. Cards and Mail: I love to buy and send cards. (I also love to receive them, which is sadly a rare event for me.) Whenever I visit somewhere new, I have to look at card shops, as there aren't many "different" cards offered in Corpus Christi for sale. This month, I am participating in A Month of Letters Challenge for the month of February.

Recipe Here

I love to send Valentines, maybe because of being a former elementary school teacher back in the days when it was possible to celebrate Valentines Day. Also because my grandmother always sent me beautiful, glittery Valentines as I grew up.

2. Baking: I love to bake, especially cookies. This week I made Valentine pumpkin bread which was surprisingly easy. I found the recipe on Pinterest. The pin showed chocolate cake with hearts (from a Sara Lee's pound cake), but I tried pumpkin bread for the Wisdom Class on Tuesday. It was a hit with everyone in the class and was so easy! I bet you could cut out different designs, like maybe a star or a tree.

3. Words With Friends: I love playing this game on my Ipad and Iphone. It is like Scrabble with a partner. I don't often win, because I play too quickly. My oldest son DC continually beats my by hundreds of points!

4. Soups: I love making big pots of soup, a rediscovered passion with our month of cold, cold weather (for TX!). I have made five different soups from my newest soup cookbook, The New England Soup Factory Cookbook, and each one has been judged by all as excellent. In fact, I have made their recipe for Vegetarian Muligatawny four different times already--twice for Chuck and me; for my family at Christmas; and for my family in Austin at AA's request (which greatly pleased me). I've been making such big pots of soup that I can share some with friends, too, while we have it for multiple days. I am grateful that Chuck likes soup.

5. Books: I love to read, look at, discuss books!  I even have a Pinterest board About Books with over 1,000 pins! I really love children's books, so it is a joy to find books for granddaughters Avery and Emma! It is exciting to find new ones, like Good Night, Construction Site which is so appropriate for these girls because their daddy supervises construction at apartment complexes almost every day. It is arriving for them tomorrow!

Internet Changes

In two days we will have a new internet provider. We are glad and hope it will be more consistently available. I am also excited that our home (landline) phone will have free long distance to the USA and Canada, which we have never had before.

Since I am also changing my regular email address, I am asking you friends to email me before the weekend, so I can send you the new email address! This way I won't miss hearing from any of you.

Apps that Occupy Me!

My adult children introduce time-consuming and fun apps for my Ipod (Iphone for most people, but not me) that I certainly enjoy. The one that is the most fun at connecting me with others (most recently, my friend Mary Jane in CA) is Words with Friends. It is like playing Scrabble with a friend.

The one that my oldest son DC and his wife AA told me about over Easter is more infuriating at times than Words with Friends, but it is an enjoyable way to play a pictionary-like game, which is called Draw Something.

And still, the only spiritual app that I use is Equanimity, which brings me into meditation/prayer with a chime and ends whatever time I choose with three bells. I've used it to start and end centering prayer groups, also. In fact, our group at Lebh Shomea sat in centering silence with the aid of the Equanimity app each night.

 This image shows the different screens possible to look at for this app.

And here, there is the place to use it online right now on the computer, even with suggestions about how to meditate.

internet dependence. . . . .

Our internet is going on again and off again, so we are unsure whether connection will continue or not. Supposedly, it was fixed with a new modem, but in the past two days the connection has been lost four different times for several hours each.

I'm glad I went to the library and got more mysteries by Daniel Silva. The Unlikely Spy was excellent and got me hooked on this author.

Tomorrow both CB and I show up for jury duty at 8 am. Which one of us will be there longest?

After that, we'll see if there's any internet connection. . . .

The internet is up again!

We have not had internet service for a few days now, and finally we were given a new modem today. We had been told that a technician would help us today any time between 8 am and 9 pm. Luckily, he came before dinner time.

Although, CB and I did not resort to this, this cartoon gave me some chuckles. (It might have been us if the air conditioning had stopped working though!)