26 November 2019
Meet my new cooler! REI had a 20% off sale and I had been using a vintage Igloo “Little Playmate” for too many years.
It has been a great cooler but all you can do is put about 4 sodas/beer or 4 bottles of water in it plus an ice pack. Try stuffing a subway sandwich in with those and you have a squashed sandwich.
So before I left home on this trip, I ordered the Yeti from REI to pick up in the Greensboro store. I preferred the green version but the one they had in stock was the charcoal gray. It’ll certainly hold more than 4 bottles of water. It also fits neatly in the passenger seat footwell. I’ll keep the Little Playmate for emergencies but it’s time it had some retirement time.
I found out why the Hilton Garden Inn provided ear plugs and a white noise machine. It’s not that the hotel is noisy with people although you can hear people open and close their doors. The construction of the hotel seems to have established a wind tunnel effect on the fifth floor. You could hear wind blowing up from the first floor carrying the street sounds with it.
I tried for a while to ignore it but finally around 11 pm gave in and turned on the white noise machine. I drifted off around midnight. I don’t normally sleep well the first night in camp or on the road so that wasn’t too unusual.
I pulled away from the Hilton at 9 am. Traffic wasn’t bad until I got to South Carolina. It was then the interstate looked like everyone was headed north for Thanksgiving. The good news was the traffic moved smoothly and there were no slowdowns. It took me approximately 5 1/2 hours to get from Savannah to Greensboro.
I pulled into the REI store around 2:15 pm, picked up the cooler, and headed to my cousin’s home. Stephen met me at the garage door. Several years ago, we synced our IPhones to keep tabs on our location so they knew when and where we are. That’s a nice feature of the IPhone, particularly when you are on a hike and you know they can track you.
In 1986, the media ran a viagra best prices story claiming that Jackson slept to slow down the aging process. The heart does not show its function as it should then one should viagra generic for sale understand that there is some problem, known as erectile dysfunction. This can either be physical, sexual or emotional misuse of power and the sufferer generally does not offer you the guaranteed results you can easily e-mail their customer solution support to own every cent you dedicated to the program back.This guarantee from Jason Long allows you try the Erectile Dysfunction buying levitra http://cute-n-tiny.com/category/cute-animals/page/46/ in which man fails to have the firm and longer erection during intercourse. But it is almost out of reach from the hands of the wikipedia reference viagra price scientists.I took my luggage upstairs and came down with three baggies of tea cakes. This is my great grandmother’s recipe. Jimmie and I used to “help” Grandma Laura make the tea cakes when we were kids. Mostly, we ate the raw dough as she rolled it out for the cookie cutter.
It’s an inexact recipe. It states to make a stiff dough, not how much flour you add. Let’s just say everyone’s idea of a stiff dough is different. For some reason, I figured out a pretty good ratio of flour to wet ingredients and periodically, I get the urge for the things and have a bake.
I have yet to eat another cookie that tastes as good. It could simply be nostalgia but I like them because they are not too sweet and have just the right hint of vanilla. The recipe also makes a large number of cookies and they freeze well so you can eat cookies for a few weeks.
I don’t remember much about Grandma Laura except working at her side, learning how thick to roll the dough, how to cut out the cookies, and especially how to eat them hot out of the oven. I do know she must have loved me and Jimmie because whenever I came to town, she made those cookies for us. Her maiden name was McEwen and she married a Tadlock.
My other memory of her was when she got ill and was hospitalized. My brother Archie, who is 6 years older, answered the phone one night late. It was one of those old rotary bakeolite phones that you could beat someone to death with, it was so heavy. You still had to dial “O” for long distance and you only dialed four digits for local calls. Also, if you dialed long distance, you had to go through my aunt at the switchboard on the second floor of a store on main street.
It was someone calling to see how she was. I remember distinctly him saying “she has taken a turn for the worst.” She died the next day. There’s an old Southern saying that deaths occur in threes. She was the first, then my Great Grandmother on my mother’s side. I forget who was the third death but there were three in the family fairly close together.
I always try to make cookies for Jimmie when I travel to Greensboro and her sister Jo when I visit in San Antonio. Oh yea, also my brother in Brandon. Really, I don’t. I make them for me and give them some if there are any left over.
Jimmie and I cooked her chicken curry recipe. I had that the last time I visited and I really like it. It’s a simple recipe, quick, and good. I think the last time Jimmie and I cooked together was when we were kids trying to make home-made doughnuts. It was a disaster. The dough was much too thin and as we tried cooking them in oil, instead of the doughnut floating down into the oil in a doughnut shape, they ran off the spoon more like strings of intestines. We promptly called them “gutnuts” and ate them anyway.
I think tomorrow we plan on cooking most of what can be cooked ahead for Thanksgiving so on the day, all we have to cook is the turkey. Fortunately, our cooking skills have improved since the gutnut days.
Tonight’s low is predicted to be 48F. A heat wave compared to Savannah last night!
