Not loving my advent calendar this year

This is the advent calendar that I made 28 years ago, when I was still doing such things. Each of the ornaments is hand stitched and appliqued. It took me forever to make this calendar. The kids loved to take turns putting the ornaments on the tree as they counted the days until Christmas. Sometimes, after someone had taken their turn, someone else would sneak the ornament back into the little pocket and then put it back on the tree just so they could have an extra turn! We always used to start from the bottom of the Christmas tree and work our way backwards so that we would know how many more days there were until Christmas. In recent years there has been some amount of debate among my kids about this practice. Some of them feel that we should start at the top of the tree so that the first ornament is placed on the first day of December, the second on the second, etc. My kids thrive on these kinds of important controversial issues. Whatever.
I've always enjoyed my handmade advent calendar and felt a little tingle of anticipation, along with the kids, as the tree became filled with ornaments, heralding the approach of Christmas day. I'm not really loving my calendar this year, however. You see, on the very day after Christmas, Brent and I will be leaving with Laura, Jordan and Lucy on a three day drive to Atlanta, Georgia where they will begin their new life. We're going to help them drive their 16 foot rental moving truck (towing one of their vehicles) and their mini-van and we're going to take them hundred of miles away from here, help them get settled in their new home and then come back here to our new life of empty nesting. I feel like I'm an accessory to some sort of crime! So each day, as a new ornament goes up on the advent calendar tree, my heart squeezes a little bit tighter knowing that we're one day closer to these beloved kids going away. One more long-distance relationship. Missing out on these kinds of day to day things:
Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake together . . .
watching Dumbo (for the sixty-ninth time) together . . .

making a puzzle together . . .
Maybe if I just pack the calendar away in a box and hide it in the closet, the day after Christmas won't come. "The Grinch Grandma who stole the day after Christmas" or something like that.
My heart is imploding.

Mission Impossible

This was my disgusting upright freezer today at about eleven o'clock A.M. I wasn't sure what was underneath those ice pillows.
Today, I was a woman with a mission. A "do it or die trying" mission. The mission, if I chose to accept it, was to defrost and clean my frost encrusted, fleabag of an upright freezer. I had defrosted it at the beginning of the summer (possibly the summer of 2010?) and just after I defrosted it someone got something out of it and didn't close it tightly (grrrrr), thus it frosted over very quickly again. The situation was very grim. With the holidays almost upon me, I realized that I had to clear out space in the freezer. Had. To. Be. Done. I made sure that my last will and testament was all in order in case I didn't make it out alive and then . . . I went in.

This was my freezer today at about three o'clock P.M. Oh yeah, now that's what I'm talkin' about!
There were frozen peaches underneath the ice pillows. I'm none the worse for the wear except for some minor frostbite on my fingers.

Truthfully, I don't mind the defrosting and cleaning part of a job like this. It's the sorting through all the stuff and deciding what to throw away and what to keep that I hate to do. When I throw away food, I feel so not worthy. Whatever. Mission accomplished. Til next time . . .

Children grow older . . . and I'm gettin' older too

Andrea's blessing day. Surrounded by Mike (10), Steve (8), Scott (5) and Laura (almost 4)

Family photo taken in 1992.
The original "five". Taken this past summer after Andrea returned from her mission.
The whole family . . . parents, kids, kids-in-law and grandkids. I'm looking at this photo as I'm typing this and I've got a big smile on my face, as well as a few tears running down my cheeks. I'm so sappy . . . I know!

You may recognize the title of this post as part of the lyrics of a song called "Landslide". It was originally written and performed by Stevie Nicks, lead singer for Fleetwood Mac (one of my favorites from yester-year) and then remade by the Dixie Chicks. I can remember watching Stevie Nicks perform in her kind of dreamy, ethereal style . . . twirling around on the stage and absolutely lost in the music. She liked to wear long, billowy chiffon skirts that kind of floated around her as she performed and she almost always sported some sort gypsy like shawl and layers of lace. I loved the look and still do. As a matter of fact, when I look at my own style of dress I'm wondering if I haven't subliminally been trying to duplicate her style, all these years! The only one of her trademarks that I'm disinclined to wear are her six inch platform boots! An accident waiting to happen, I always thought.
Anyway . . . the song "Landslide" could have multiple meanings but there's a passage in the song that has great meaning to me, at this stage of my life. If you'll indulge me . . .

. . . Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides, Can I handle the seasons of my life? I don't know.
Well I've been afraid of changing 'cause I've built my life around you. But time makes you older, children get older and I'm gettin' older too.

The lyrics seem pretty simple, even trite, without the beautifully expressive music to go with it but they seem to really sum up the feelings that I've been wrestling with for the last few years.
Sometimes, I think to myself "Come on Sandra . . . time to get over it!" but the truth is that it's really hard to break a thirty year habit, thirty years being the time span between Mike's birth and Annie's leaving for college. Thirty years of being very involved with the comings and goings and growings of my children. I was fortunate enough to be able to be a "stay-at-home mom" while I was raising my kids so that WAS my career. I worked hard at it and for the most part loved it. With some notable exceptions, I think I was pretty good at my job. Good enough, that my kids don't really NEED me anymore. Not really. They're grown with careers, lives, spouses and children of their own. They have the problems and challenges that can't be avoided while living in mortality but, all in all, they're living life well. So . . . shouldn't there have been a retirement party for me, complete with presentation of a gold watch and a big frosted sheet cake that says "Congratulations on your Retirement!"? Some sort of closure, something that tells me to move on. Career ended . . . on to the next phase? Oh my, the absolute angst of it all! Because the truth is that I haven't given up MY need for my kids to need me in the ways that they used to. And I have to . . . absolutely have to.
Mike and Erin and family and Steve and Kalli are settled in the Denver, Colorado area and having completed their schooling, are beginning their careers. It's unlikely that any of them will ever live near us in Utah again. Laura and Jordan have received a wonderful job offer in Atlanta, Georgia and after Jordan wraps up his master's of tax degree next month, they will be moving. They say it's just for a few years and that they'll come back to Utah. We'll see. Andrea is going to graduate with her undergraduate degree in speech pathology next spring and will be going, who knows where, to graduate school. Never mind graduate school . . . she will, I assume, marry and end up who knows where! West coast, east coast, Canada (heaven forbid), Australia (maybe I should just kill myself now). Sigh. Scott and Rachel, at this writing, are my one great hope of having children and grandchildren who live near by. They have begun their careers here in the Salt Lake area and purchased a home in Bountiful, just a few blocks away. But we all know that life turns on a dime.
I can just hear my mother now . . . "well you poor thing, who would just up and leave home at the age of seventeen to attend college in a different country and then marry a guy from there, have five children and live a thousand miles from their parents forever more?!" Point taken mom. And never would I want my kids to stop following their dreams because I'm not quite ready for them to be far away from me. I know that I just need to move to a different phase of the career that I started in. Move from manager to consultant, if you will. And only act as consultant when requested! No one wants unsolicited advice from parents or parents-in-law. Not really. Also, since I consider my kids to be some of my dearest friends, there will always be that. Friendships can grow and deepen and go on and on. I can do this (oh yes I can). Rambling . . . I am.
If you're still reading this, thanks for the indulgence. I feel better for having written it although I may go to my bedroom and cry for a little while later on. No time now . . . things to do. Til next time . . .

Green Tomatoes

Ahhh . . . summer produce. So much color and variety and freshness. My garden produced as well as it ever has, this year. Lots of tomatoes, great cucumbers, a variety of peppers and lots of herbs. By the end of the summer, however, the bumper crop starts to overwhelm me . . . I mean how many caprese salads and vegetable stir-fries can you eat, right? And you can only give so much of it away before your neighbors start to hide from you when you schlepp yet another grocery bag of produce over to their house. The problem is that I have a hard time tossing any of it out, including the bumper crop of green tomatoes. What to do with them all? I know that you can bring them in and wrap them in newspaper and let them slowly ripen but I had a yearning to know what to do with green tomatoes, besides frying them or wrapping them up to turn them red. So I did a google search for "recipes using green tomatoes". And you know what? There are a lot of them! The two that particularly caught my attention were recipes for green tomato salsa and apple and green tomato pie.

Don't green tomatoes look pretty when they're all sliced up! These ones were for my pie.
I added sliced apples to them, with a little lemon juice to prevent the apples from darkening. Then I added some tapioca, brown and white sugars, spices and of course . . .
butter (lots of butter!). Then I put on the top crust, vented it and baked it and it was a surprisingly delicious pie.
These are the green tomatoes that are ready to be chopped up in the Vita-mix for my green tomato salsa. I added a lot of chopped onion, hot peppers from my garden (I seeded them because I don't mind a little heat but I'd prefer not to strip my gears!) , spices, fresh garlic, lime juice, honey and then. . .
I processed the salsa for twenty minutes in my steam canner. It has a delicious and different flavor. Great on a pulled pork burrito or just scooped up into a tortilla chip. All the while I was listening to my Jay Unger and Molly Mason Pandora radio station . . . lots of fiddle music, old time waltzes and blue-grassy stuff. I LOVE Pandora. You can create any mood that you want to with your own personalized radio stations. I was going for the "farm-wife living off the land and wasting nothing" kind of a feeling. If you want actual recipes let me know. I'll be happy to share. Til next time . . .

A column post, worth reading

Leaving the Carillon wedding reception center for our honeymoon.
Earlier in the day . . . posing for pictures after the ceremony. Our photographer was a family friend and our photos aren't great. And it didn't help that I had my long hair cut, like, a week before our wedding. Who knows what I was thinking of!

I don't often endorse a particular newspaper column or column post, but I read one today that I think is worth the perusal. I've never even read this guy's column before . . . I was simply drawn to the title "A marriage that lasts only 72 days? I can relate to that". The column can be found here. ANY of you who have been married for more than 72 days (or maybe 90, 121, or 365 days) will be able relate to Joe Walker's column!
I got thinking back to the early days and months, even years, of my marriage. I mean lets face it, courtship and "falling in love" don't prepare you for marriage, any better than the garden of Eden prepared Adam and Eve for the lone and dreary world! Oh my . . . did I just use the words "lone" and "dreary" to describe early marriage? Let me explain.
Brent and I had a kind of unusual courtship, which I will not detail at this moment. We were apart for most of the summer, just before we got married, because Brent was in California selling the Illustrated Scriptures (which I had also been doing until we got engaged and I went home to get ready for our wedding). However, we were absolutely giddy with love and sugar coated thoughts of each other (well, at least I was . . . Brent's thoughts were probably happy ones of 26 years of celibacy finally coming to an end!). Whatever. We got married on August 17th, 1976 and went on a honeymoon to San Fransisco and then Lake Powell (with his brother and some of his friends . . . story for another post) and then we settled into married life in a basement apartment in Orem, Utah. I was a junior at BYU and Brent was in a doctoral program at BYU and he was teaching some classes. Our apartment was new but it was a typical basement apartment . . .it felt dark, less than roomy and kind of isolated. We were just barely into the semester when Brent dropped out of school to pursue some entrepreneurial stuff with his brother. These business pursuits often took him out of town, sometimes for as much as two weeks at a time. Sometimes I'd go spend some time with Brent's family but they lived in Brigham City (a two hour drive) and I was in school. I can still remember how alone and sad I felt, sometimes, in that basement apartment. I didn't have any close friends near by, there were no such things as DVD players, personal computers, facebook, cell phones or such. Most communication with my family in Canada was done by hand-written letters and the occassional expensive phone call. I can remember going outside and watching an ant hill in the un-landscaped front yard or watching the black widow spiders that had taken up residence outside our little windows in the windowsills. I named those spiders Myra and Lolita and I watched them by the hour from inside the apartment. Get it . . . I had BUGS for company! Sometimes I felt like the loneliness would swallow me whole. Even when Brent was home, he was occupied by lots of other things besides me. Imagine that. He didn't want to spend every waking hour just being with me. And I'm sure, just like Joe Walker, that there were days when I cried and found myself wondering what on earth I had done, and how I could get out of it! I mean, if I had been single at that point, at least I would be living with room-mates and enjoying something that resembled a social life! Sigh.
Now, of course you realize that I'm dwelling on the lonely and difficult times of my early marriage to make a point. ALL of us, who are married, are going to sometimes go through feelings of being lonely, sad, stuck, unappreciated, unloved, bored or even betrayed. Welcome to marriage in the lone and dreary world. But 35 years and many growing and wonderful experiences later, I realize that I would have missed out on so much had I "opted out" on day 72, or week 72 or even month 72! It's not been easy but I think Brent and I absolutely agree that it's been worth it.
I wish to note here that I'm not writing this in criticism of anyone who finds themselves having to suffer through a difficult separation or divorce. Sometimes there simply isn't another choice and my heart hurts for my friends and family members who have had to navigate those particular waters. I guess Joe Walker's description of his one particular night when he found himself wandering "what on earth have I done" just touched something deep inside of me. Touched me deeply enough to want to write about it.
One more thought about Joe Walker's column. Joe Walker says he's 56 years old. I looked at his picture on his column. Fifty-six? Is that what fifty-six looks like? I'm fifty-five! Holy crow! Moment of awakening to the cold, hard facts! I'm not really middle-aged anymore (not unless I'm planning to live until I'm 110 years old). I'm a grandmother with wrinkles and a flabby belly and mostly gray hair and a pronounced limp who qualifies for senior discounts from certain business establishments! But I guess all of that is for another post. Til next time . . .

My Home and Native Land

Time for a trip to the great, white north. Actually, the more accurate description of where we are is the great, green southwest . . . the lower mainland of British Columbia, Canada. I'm enjoying some time with Scott, Rachel and Adelaide and my Canadian family.
At the airport . . . look closely and you'll see that Scott tagged Adelaide's binky, just in case we misplaced her.

First time for our little Adde-baby on an airplane. She was a champ . . . slept the entire way!

Made it through customs . . . happy to have arrived!

Navigating through the Vancouver International airport. I nominate this photo for the "husband of the year" award!

Great Grandma Ursaki with Adelaide. Everytime Adelaide looks at my mom she breaks out in the biggest smile. It's really precious.

This little girl LOVES to hike. Scott and Rach schlep her around in this baby-backpack all the time. She's all bundled up for a walk through the rain forest behind my parents' home (in the rain).

With me mum and dad and their front porch.

Hiking in the rain forest. It's so beautiful in there . . . ferns, dogwoods, Hemlock trees, Douglas Firs . . .

Cedars, little streams . . .

little "bear cubs" . . . actually, there are black bears in this forest. They wander out of the forest, occasionally, into my parents' back yard. What they leave behind has to be removed with a large shovel!

A little peek at Mundy Lake . . . my friends used to cut school sometimes and come here for a swim . . . not me.

Celebrating Rach's birthday at Eleni's Greek restaurant in Mission (where my brother and sister and families live).

Mom with Jessica, Matteo and Rachel (my brother's daughter, Rachel, that is). At my sister's place for cupcakes (gluten free!) and ice cream. Adelaide was entranced with the birthday candles.

Happy Birthday to you!!

Dave and Erin holding the pups, Adelaide and Zoey.

A commonly seen threesome . . . Scott, Adelaide and the laptop.

My entire family (of origin). Dad, Mom, me, Mike and Elaine. One of these days we're gong to come to blows, Mike, over this whole "screwing up photos" thing!

Okay, big sister . . . I'll be good but I don't have to like it!

Why I love the fall

My love of autumn started a long time ago with a mom who adored the fall and everything about it. We grew some pretty awesome pumpkins in our garden in Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada.
I LOVE Gardner village in the fall and this year I loved taking Lucy to see the witches and feed the ducks. I get to hang with Lucy on BYU home game days.
Our annual leaf peeping drive through the Alpine Loop. We usually take a pot of chili and a pan of brownies and have a fall picnic supper along the way.
This was taken at Cascade Springs. Lucy had such a good time.
More photos from Cascade Springs.

Scott and Rach weren't able to go leaf peeping with us this year but I did get this shot of them with Adelaide on the first official day of fall at a wedding reception that was held, partly, in our back yard. Adelaide's smile is just priceless.
Scott and Rach do a lot of hiking and they take Adelaide with them in a backpack designed to carry little ones. After one such hike, they came over to our house and this is how they had her bundled up against the cold. Hilarious!
So, I can't rightly say that I love this aspect of the fall, but every year we get one or two tarantulas in our yard or garage. Apparently they're on the look-out for a mate. We found this one in our garage a couple of days ago.
I love my vegetable garden in the fall. Lucy and I spent some time together, tonight, just wandering around and seeing what was still growing.
We harvested all of our Jack-Be-Little pumpkins,
picked a few cherry tomatoes,
admired the lone sunflower plant that was turning golden in the sunset,
checked out a huge bumble bee that was gathering pollen from my yellow snapdragons,
picked a few peppers and played in the dirt,
made a nice colorful arrangement of produce in a big silver bowl,
and finished up our garden wanderings in the grape arbor. This is one of Lucy's favorite things to do . . . sit in the porch swing in the arbor and eat big bunches of grapes. We haven't been able to do it as much this past month because the wasps keep chasing us away!
Early fall produce. Love the colors. Love fall. Til next time . . .