Pantry Envy

I go to a lot of beautiful houses to teach Mah jongg. And really they are all wonderful, but recently I taught at a house that had the most fabulous pantry I have ever seen. The house was lovely, but the Pantry was drool worthy.

It had places for appliances to live plugged in. It had the perfect storage for everything you would ever need in the kitchen. It also enabled them to not make the kitchen so large because you could store all the dry goods, and extra dishes and serving pieces out of the way.

I wasn’t able to stand there long and study it, but I knew it was impressive when a man in the class said to his wife, “Have you seen the pantry?”

If I were to build a house I would start the design with two things I don’t have, a killer pantry and a Christmas tree storage room off the room where I would want to display the tree. It would be my dream to open a secret door and roll out a 14 foot Christmas tree already decorated. I don’t care that I would have to wire the ornaments on to the tree the first time.

Sadly I have no place to create a dream pantry unless I tear out my kitchen, and turn it into a pantry and put my new kitchen in the breakfast room. There might be a way. I just have to win the lottery.

No One Was Dressed Up

Last night I finished teaching the cutest group of twenty-something’s. They learned quickly and were great listeners. One student came into class with a new haircut. I asked if she had gotten it all cut off and she said, “I wanted to be like you.” Her hair cut was similar to mine, but trust me this darling girl was not trying to look like me. It was just a very sweet answer.

They asked me all kinds of questions about myself that were sometimes a little off the Mah Jongg topic. Being me I told them some off topics things which led to more stories, like about previous jobs.

They wanted to know where I was teaching Mah Jongg next and I told them that today I was going to go the the Colonial Dames house in Downtown Raleigh. “Do they dress up there?”

I immediately understood that she was thinking they were like re-enactors, like in Williamsburg. “ No,” I said, disappointing them. They are just dressed in regular clothes. I thought it was such a fun thought of these women dressed in Colonial dresses learning Mah Jongg.

When one of the twenty-something’s texted me today about a future class I told her that I was at the colonial dames and no one was dressed up. She responded that her friend was going to be disappointed. I love twenty-something’s.

“Lady, February Never has 31 Days.”

I got a text while I was teaching tonight. Fraud Alert on my Amex. Turns out some bozo tried to spend $2,065 at some Pet Store. I clicked the button that said it was fraud.

When I got out of class Amex wanted me to call them. I did and sat on hold for 20 minutes. Amex fraud needs to improve their hold music. I never got any annoying voice during the entire 20 minutes telling me, “your cal is important to us, please stay on the line.”

I thought I might have gotten in some death loop and hung up and called back. Same horrible music, but only 18 minute hold. Got a rep who after talking to me two minutes the line went dead. Thankfully she called me back. I was not about to hold again.

In good fraud protection she said they wanted to change my number and send me a new card. Been there, done that. I knew this drill, even though I hate learning a new card number.

“When will my new card get here?”

“February 31.”

I just about lost it. “A month!”

She repeated the same date with a YES. Wait a minute. “Lady, February never has 31 days.”

The line was quiet for a minute.

“Oh, January 31.” Not a laugh, or I’m sorry.

Fraud protection is not a laughing matter.

My Favorite Actress, Megan Ketch is Coming to NC

One of my favorite parts of Church is catching up with my church friends. (Sorry clergy who get mad that we are talking before church starts, but if we can’t then I might as well watch church in my PJ’s at home.)

So today, catching up with Susan Ketch I learned that my favorite actress is coming back to North Carolina to perform. My favorite actress just happens to be Susan’s youngest daughter Megan. Megan was Carter’s longest Nanny and important member of our family.

Now that Megan lives in LA with her husband Max and their darling son I don’t get to see them much. Susan and Jim just returned from a visit to LA and had lots of cute news to report on Leo. The best news was that Megan will be in a Playmakers rep play called The Game April 10-28.

The first show I saw Megan in was one she wrote, directed and stared in at the Forest theatre in Chapel Hill called Alice all the Way, a take off in Alice in Wonderland. It was a fabulous comedy so I am thrilled for her return to Chapel Hill in a new comedy written by another UNC Alum Bekah Brunstetter.

I think about three year old Carter sitting in the forest Amphitheater watching Megan with me and now Carter is seven years older than Megan when she did that. We can’t wait for this performance and just to get to hug Megan!

Apparently I’m Safe

For years I gave blood regularly because I have O negative, the universal donor. Then we lived in London during the mad cow era. I was banned from giving blood for the fear that mad cow disease was laying dormant in me, waiting to make me crazy and anyone else who got my blood. After the spread of HIV in the early days from tainted blood transfusions I completely understood the better safe than sorry attitude.

When cows were falling over in the fields in England during the early 90’s it was a scary sight. I gave up eating any ground meat in the UK, just in case. See, they thought that the grinding of beef from a sick cow was the way to spread mad cow to humans. The UK cleaned up the system that let sick cows get in the food chain and now it is probably the safest place to eat beef.

Sometime last year the American Red Cross stopped the ban of blood from people who had visited the UK in the late 80’s to late 90’s and suddenly my blood was desirable again. I donated at a church blood drive in the late fall and as soon as eight weeks after I started being bombarded with messages, “Please donate blood.” Phone calls, texts and emails came in with force. Just to stop the phone from ringing I gave blood again today and so did Russ in solidarity.

I think I am going to have to be proactive and sign up every eight weeks just so my name does not come up in the database to bother me. It’s not hard to give blood, especially since the donation center is five minutes from our house. I arrived at the time of my appointment and I was out exactly one hour later.

It appeared that every giving slot was full and they were pumping the people through. I hope that all these people giving will fill the supply back up after the big lull in donating during the holidays.

I am just happy that the likelihood that I have Mad Cow is so low. I would hate to lose my mind that way.

Making My Own Mah Jongg Aids

Today I learned that a class I am teaching soon has ballooned to twice as many students as I normally have in this class. It is a Mah Jongg strategy class so the students should be fairly good players. I have taught classes this big before and they are lots of fun, but I need bigger visual aids to make the class successful.

I have had an idea for a while for that I could use some big cards of Mah Jongg tiles to show students hands. I searched the internet to see if anything like this existed and could not find anything close.

I considered what it would take to photograph each tile and print them on card stock. My biggest problem with that is the card stock was not as stiff as I want for cards to be able to stand up against a white board. I decided I would paint the tile faces on water color paper and get exactly what I want.

Mah Jongg tiles can be very intricate so I started by painting the North, South and East winds, which are only red letters and Black Symbols. It helps that I only needed a kids water color set.

I love the way they turned out. It’s going to be a busy weekend of painting. I am not looking forward to doing Jokers. I might not copy my intricate Jokers Tiles, but just write Jokers diagonally across the card.

I envision lots of uses for these cards once I have them, but I am also going to have to come up with a traveling rack for holding them to display when I don’t have a white board.

Now I’m in search of strong magnets. The arts and crafts projects never end.

My Mom is the Youngest 86

Today is my Mom’s birthday. I think once you get past 80 they are all big birthdays. She is a cool young 86 and doesn’t look a day over 68.

She wanted a new quilt for her retirement bedroom that went with one of her paintings. Thankfully I got it done right on time for her birthday.

She is very appreciative of all the quilts I make her and this one was no different. It brightened up her room and she says it makes her very happy.

I’m so glad she loved it, and I love her. Happy 86!

My Daffodils Don’t Deny Climate Change

It’s January 20 and it’s 70°here in Durham NC. My daffodils are coming up and I’m wearing a summer dress to go teach.

To all you climate change deniers can you please keep my spring plants from coming up too early? Maybe those of you who hold tight to beliefs that are clearly wrong in the face of nonpartisan evidence can get Mother Nature to side with you and not screw up the growing season.

Daffodils are not a crop or consequential, but they are an harbinger of what we have done to the planet.

For those of you who have ice and snow right now and you use that as an example that global warming does not exist, that is just the wrong name. It is climate change! We have it and we need to do everything we can to slow it down. Not because of flowers, but because of growing food and having clean ground water.

Dash Cam Video Saved Me

For some reason my Facebook feed has been giving me a lot of videos of dash cams from trucks on highways. I am not sure why that has been happening, but I have watched them. The videos show stupid drivers doing lots of crazy things like changing lanes at high speed only to crash into a slower vehicle in the lane they changed into.

One video theme in my feed has been cars or trucks towing a trailer that gets out of control. I have never liked to drive anything that was pulling a trailer. I could never figure out how to back up and get the trailer to go in right direction. I have also seen trailers that were not secured correctly to the hitch and that is a $hit show about to happen.

The consequence of watching these videos is I look at other vehicles on the highway for potential dumb ass hazards and tonight I am glad. I was driving to Alamance County to teach Mah Jongg at their country club. It was an evening class so I was driving during rush hour. I noticed a U-Haul truck towing a car and the car seemed to move slightly more to the right and the left than the truck.

I decided I did not want to be behind them so I passed them and just as I got ahead a couple car lengths I looked in my rear view mirror and I noticed the trailer with the car on it was off to the side a lot and the truck was in the middle of the lane. I didn’t want to slow down to watch this turn into an accident so I sped up a little only to hear a crash. I was far enough away that I just kept going, but I saw an additional car too cozy with the U-Haul.

I am not sure if I would have moved away from that U-Haul in such a deliberate manner if my Feed and not been showing me all these dash cam crash videos. I know some people think social media is horrible, but in this case I am thankful.

My Ad-less Blog is Un-American

I was contacted today by some business who noticed that I had a daily blog for over 13 years. He wanted to sell me stuff. First thing he wanted to sell me was Search Engine Optimization so that more people could find my blog. Second thing they wanted to sell me was advertising placements on my blog so that I could make money on my blog.

The presentation seemed backwards. He should have said advertising and then search engine optimization, but I was not going to tell him how to do his job.

When I said I wasn’t interested the man gasped as if I was crazy. “You are leaving a lot of money on the table.”

I explained that I did not write this blog to make money, although I am not opposed to making money. I just don’t want to annoy my friends with ads junking up my blog.

He promised me they would not be annoying. I brought up the issue that I don’t want to appear to endorse something I have no idea is advertising on my blog. He said they could tailor the ads to have something to do with my blog.

“What in the world could that be?” I asked. He asked me what my blog was about. Of course he never looked at my blog before he called to sell me anything.

I told him blog was about me. “Really?” He said in a shocked kind of way. “Are you someone?”

“Everyone is someone.” I explained.

See this is why I don’t want anyone getting into my blog other than me. I am not looking to specialize in one thing. I want to write everyday about whatever in the world I want to write about. I don’t want to sell anybody anything that I have personally seen and tried. And if I recommend something I am not making any money off it.

I don’t have affiliate links so you can buy things that I hawk. If I tell you about something good I discovered I might tell you how to find it and that is the end of my involvement. I will give links for my friends and family’s site if I know their stuff is good, but that is once in a blue moon.

This man who was trying so hard to put ads on my blog could not believe that I had kept it going for so many years without making money on it.

He did not understand that this blog is now my life’s history, so it is all just for me to be able to have a record of what was going on on any given day. The fact that I share it seemed pointless to him. He didn’t say so in so many words, but he certainly intonated.

I don’t really care how many people read this. I am not looking for more eyeballs, as he called them. This is for me and my friends and the people who become my friends by reading me. You either like it and get it or you don’t read it. This is not a competition and I am not going to make money off of you.

This guy thought I was unAmerican by not trying to make money. I think he was just pissed I was not willing for him to make money off of me. Next time, read my blog before you call to tell me how I could do it better. You might find out I am a waste of your time before you bother to call.

Memories Via Apple

If you have an iPhone or IPad and take a lot of photos you probably get these reminders of old photos when your device makes you a random slide show on some theme, location or date. Sometimes these little shows are welcome. Today I had one based on this date in 2005. Carter and her classmates of first grade were in a musical show at school. I don’t remember the exact show, but I can still tell you the names of all the kids in the photos. That slide show was sweet and welcome.

Sometimes I feel like my iPad is taunting me by showing me beach photos from years past when it is 25° here now. Or showing me photos of trips to Italy where I have not been in a few years and wish I could visit right now.

What I really don’t like is when I get a photo reminder of people I can’t seem to place. Sometimes I take random photos of people in places I am visiting and the people are just part of the atmosphere. Carter got particularly mad at me on a trip to Barcelona when I took photos of random dogs without the dogs’ permissions. I promised Carter I was not going to exploit the dogs, but I digress.

The reason I get upset about these random photo memories is I think I should know all the photos in my library. Why I feel I should know 100’s of thousands of photos is just because I normally have a good photo memory.

If a random photo is displayed and I don’t recognize it I can look at the info on the photo, date and place and look at other photos taken just before and after it and then I usually can place it. What I have finally started to do is to delete these unimportant photos. It is helpful since space is ultimately limited, but also that if not tied to me in some way, they will be unimportant to others in my family when I am gone.

It would take me years to label all my photos. If I started doing that I would mostly likely delete most of mine as time to label would not be worth most photos. But then I come across a photo that is unimportant to me, but perhaps would be nice for the subject to have.

So from now on when something pops up, before I delete it I might send it to someone. I may not tell you I am deleting you and now you can be the holder of your own photo, but at least I won’t just get rid of it all together.

I wish I time to make photo books of all my important photos. Perhaps when I retire again. For now I will look at the random iPad memories that are sent to me.

Almost Finished

Last summer my Mom asked me if I would make her a new quilt. Making a quilt for someone else is a big deal. The amount of time that goes into making a quilt is hard to calculate, but my quilts are very intricate so let’s just say it’s over 250 hours. For the record, my Mom already has three quilts I have made her in the last six years. So wanting another one is big.

Her reason for wanting a new quilt is she did a painting the she was going to hang over her bed and she wanted a quilt to go with it. When she showed me the painting I loved it instantly so I agreed to make her the quilt. My only rule is that I get to make all the decisions as it is my art.

I finished the top of the quilt in November, but my long arm quilter Tina, who does the actually quilting, was tied up with Christmas present quilts so mine got a January finish slot.

I just got it back from her yesterday and I love the finished product. Tina is a fantastic quilting artist and I give her lots of latitude to come up with designs that add to the piecing I have done.

I am happy it is a cold weekend because I have been stuck inside making the binding for the quilt and sewing it on by hand. I can’t show you the whole finished product until I give it to my Mom because I want it to be a surprise, but I am thrilled with how it turned out.

My mother turns 86 on Thursday. I can’t wait to give it to her. I am going to tell her that she is going to have to wait until her 91 birthday before I make her another quilt. Four quilts should be enough for one tiny little woman.

Siamese Mah Jongg

I had a great week with 70 different students in four different classes. There is nothing better to do in January than learn to play Mah Jongg. (Sorry if you want to learn the next available opening dates are March, but realistically May.)

Once you know how to play Mah Jongg with four people the next best thing is to learn to play Siamese Mah Jongg with two people.

My beyond Beginner class this week wanted me to write down the rules for them so I promised them a blog post.

Siamese Mah Jongg uses the NMJL card and each player gets two racks in front of them. The purpose of the game is to make two mah jonggs, one on rack before your opponent does.

You do not build the wall and there is not Charleston in Siamese. Sitting across from each other you mosh the tiles between you and decide who will be East. East takes 28 tiles and the other player takes 27.

You may arrange your tiles any way you like on your two racks. The goal is to make two different winning hands so pick your hands carefully so that you are not competing with yourself.

East starts by discarding. The opponent then either calls the discarded tile or picks a new tile from the mess of tiles between you. Then that player discards, naming the tile like normal.

You may call tiles to make an exposure just like in regular mah jongg, but you must put exposures that go with one hand on one rack and the the other hand on the second rack. You may not move exposures back and forth between racks. You may also exchange jokers in exposures until you call mah jongg on that hand.

Once mah jongg has been called for a hand those jokers are now frozen and no one may exchange them. So it is to your advantage not to call mah jongg on a hand you just make by picking from the mess. If you have to call a discard to make mah jongg so be it.

There is only a winner when one person has two mah jonggs.

Enjoy the game no matter how many people you have to play with.

Thanks be for Table Four

Some days when I am teaching two classes a day I eat lunch alone because I just don’t have much time. When I do I really enjoy eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. Come on, I know you do too. It’s not like I am purposely trying to listen, but with tables close together and people talking loudly I just can’t help it.

This week the one day I ate alone I was situated between two tables who were discussing two different Bible studies. Lord, those were the least interesting conversations to be stuck between. I already knew the scriptures they were discussing and had my own point of view about them. Sometimes I wonder how people who “study” the Bible can miss the main idea to take care of the people who have the least.

Thankfully for the last two days I had lunch dates with some of my favorite people. Most of them came to class this week so I had double fun with them in class and at lunch. There were no Bible verses discussed at lunch, but a lot of fellowship was had along with great laughs.

Thanks to the girls at table four. I adore spending time with you. You make my job the best job on earth.

What A Deal — Limited Time!

One of my sister Janet’s lines of scarves and Pashminas were featured on the Tamron Hall show today. The deal is you can buy them for 40% just for a week. They are the coziest scarves and I adore them.

Click on this link if you want to look more closely at them and to purchase. https://shoptamfam.40boxes.com/collections/youzey

The solid color ones are double sided in two colors. If you want to feel what they feel like call me and come by my house.

They make excellent gifts to have on hand.

Top Ten Reasons I Like Being a Mah Jongg Teacher

10. Getting to make young and not necessarily young new friends

9. Sharing the love of the game

8. Having a captive audience for my jokes

7. Having people actually laugh at my jokes

6. Traveling to New places

5. Traveling to old places again and again because I keep getting asked back

4. Seeing the light bulb go off as people get to be better players

3. Creating new communities of people having fun

2. Watching people getting younger as they get to be better players

1. Hanging out with friends like these

Life is Not Zero Sum Game

I am tiring of reading posts where people who have so much think that giving people who have very little hurts the people with so much. Life is not one pie, where if you take a giant slice that leaves only a little slice for me. Zero sum is a pie.

But let’s look at things slightly differently. If you make pies to sell and there are only 10 people out of 100 who can buy your pies because they are the only people who have enough money to buy pie then your earnings are limited.

If you helped educate some of the 90 who can’t afford pie so they could get a better paying job then after a little bit of time of the number of people who could afford to buy your pies increases, which gives you the opportunity for more money.

If after time the population went from 10% who could buy pie to 99% you would be better off as a pie baker and the pie buyers would be better off because now they could have pie too.

Helping the 90% did not mean that the 10%, who could have pie at the beginning could not have pie, but helping the 90% not only helped them, but it helped the pie baker and the flour Miller, and the apple farmer and the box maker and the sugar importer because now the pie maker was able to sell more pies.

It works conversely too. If there are only 10% who can afford pies there is a chance that the pie maker can’t earn enough to bother selling pies and might go out of business so none of the 10% will have pie.

Henry Ford understood that if he paid his employees a good wage they could afford to buy his cars.

At first Ford could have kept wages low, but then he would have sold fewer cars in the long run and selling more cars over a longer period of time earned him more money. The more people who drive Fords the better an advertisement it was for Ford.

Investing in making all people better helps everyone. The people that make and sell things have a market to make more. The people who had nothing to start get to have something, which is what people need to get started having more.

Having well educated, people who have opportunities helps a whole community. Having a good community makes a place more valuable.

Having a community where there are very few people who have enough and a lot of people with nothing makes the value of the community as a whole go down and it is hard to turn around. So investing in your community is not a hardship, but an opportunity to make it better for yourself and everyone else.

Someone having less does not give you more So why would you not want everyone to have more?

Create For Yourself

After months of Basketweave it’s nice to be creative. I finished chair seat number two yesterday. In 2023 I made two chair seats our of the most boring stitch of basketweave. It is tiring to stitch, but the strongest stitch with great coverage for a chair.

Today I had the opportunity to stitch a small nutcracker ornament that is mostly white. Being one color means that I could change up the stitches in the different sections to add interest to the little canvas.

Getting a chance to be creative is what I love most about needlepointing. The chair seats are creative in that I designed them myself, but the stitching is rote. Stitching an ornament that someone else has painted means that choosing the fibers and stitches in my chance to put my mark on them.

Everyone should have a creative outlet. Be it flower arranging, cooking or painting doing something creative is good for your brain as well as your soul.

Save the Date?

When I get a message from someone asking me if I am free on a particular date I always give my answer the same way. First if I am not free, that is an easy answer. If I am free, I tell them so,with the caveat that I am free right this minute. If the inquirer wants to invite me or book me for something right that moment then I can respond.

Most times I get an inquiry about when I might be free in the future and I give a bunch of dates. I always say that I can not guarantee that I will still be free on those dates say next week or next month. This seems like a reasonable answer.

I had someone this week wanting to schedule a class. She needed to find three days. I gave her perhaps twenty dates to chose from with my caveat. She replied that she had so many people to coordinate and asked if I would hold all 20 dates just for her for a month. She acted surprised when I said I could not do that.

I explained that there are lots of other people inquiring about dates. Nothing is set in stone until a class is scheduled, holding 20 days with the idea that only 3 are going to be booked means I am potentially not scheduling something on the 17 other days. And even 3 might never be booked.

This person still did not quite understand. I went further, and told her she was welcome to pay for all 20 dates and only use 3. She said that was crazy. I agreed, but in essence that is what she was asking me to do for her.

Most people I deal with understand that if they want a certain date they need to book fast. Please be understanding if I told you a date was free two months ago and you called today to book that date it is most likely already gone.

Can’t Wait for April

If you play Mah Jongg you know that April 1 is our big day. It is the start of the new Mah Jongg year. Every year I get the new card and I analyze it and play it like crazy to discover the good, the bad and the evil of the new card. Then I create a 60+ page power point to teach everyone what the secrets, strategies and foibles of the new card are.

April has me all over teaching new card orientation classes which gives my students and big leg up on learning how to win with the new card.

As of right now I have a Day of Classes at Carolina Country Club April 10 for their members. I am teaching a class in Durham open to anyone, a class at Kinston Country Club April 18 and one at Benvenue Country Club in Rocky Mount April 24. I am happy to add more New Card classes in other locations, but they need to be scheduled soon as I am booking other classes for April right now.

To sign up for the Durham Class please contact me. That class is going to be held at Westminster Presbyterian Fellowship Hall on April 9.

Don’t let your friends learn all the tips and beat you. If you have questions feel free to contact me.

Art Take Me Away

Some days you just need to escape from the real world. Tired of politics, trials and the weather I went today to the Nasher Art Museum to listen to Ruth Cacavale talk about art in two different exhibits.

The first was an exhibit that the Nasher created using AI technology. It was an experiment to see if ChatGPT could be a curator. The assignment was to first suggest some themes for art exhibits. From the suggestions the Nasher chose Utopian and Dystopian Visions. From there ChatGBT was tasked with combing through over 14,000 in the Nasher collection to find works to fit the theme. Then Chat wrote didactics, normally the job of the curator, to describe the works beyond the information contained in the label.

The works chosen were not all perfect for the theme and the descriptions written by the computer were definitely questionable. Real human curators wrote rebuttal didactics.

As with so many things computer related, the work it produces is only as good as the data base it gets its information from. Even with perfect data it still is only regurgitating information it has scrubbed from other sources. The reliability of those sources is often questionable.

It was an interesting exercise. I think we are still going to need humans when it comes to art.

The other exhibit we looked at was Love and Anarchy. It was much better art than the AI exhibit, in my opinion, and was much more interesting to talk about as art, something the Ruth is great at leading groups to do.

The bottom line is that while looking and talking about art I did not think one bit about the unsavory things going on in the world today. For this reason I continue to think that art is important.

Bad Weather Chicken Sausage, Bean and Kale Soup

Last night as I was driving home from Raleigh around 9:30 I came upon an unmanned road block on Hope Valley Road alerting me that the road was closed. It wasn’t lit and it was just over a hill so I am happy I was not going very fast. We had terrible weather yesterday and I was just happy I was able to turn around and go back home via Garrett rd. Russ was in flight on his way home from NYC so I texted him about the road block.

Yesterday’s cold and rainy day got me in a soup kind of mood. There was no time for cooking yesterday, but today I had a bit of time and thought Russ might like me to actually go to the store and cook something fresh for him. It worked out well to make a soup in advance as I had an evening meeting.

My original idea was a white bean, sausage and kale soup. At Trader Joe’s I found some fresh chicken sausages and thought they would be a healthy option. The only issue was they did not have many spices in them. So I amped up the spices in the soup to mirror the ones I might find in pork sausage.

1 lb of chicken sausage, taken out of the casing

2 T. Olive oil

1 large sweet onion, chopped

4 cloves of garlic mashed

2 carrots, chopped

4 Yukon gold potatoes about the sized of duck eggs, diced 1/2 inch

2T. Smoked paprika

2 t.ground Fennel

1 t. Ground sage

1 t. Thyme

1t. Garlic powder

1t. Onion powder

1 t. Cayenne pepper

1 Bay leaf

Black pepper

3 T. Knorr chicken bullion powder

6.cups of water

2 cans drained great northern beans

12 cups of chopped de-stemmed kale

3 T. Corn starch

3/4 c. cream

Put the olive oil in stock pot, add sausage, onion and garlic and cook on medium heat stirring often for five minutes. Add the carrots and potatoes and all the spices and stir. Add the chicken bullion powder and water and bring to a boil and reduce to simmer. Cook for fifteen minutes.

Add the beans and the kale cook another fifteen minutes. Put four tablespoons of the liquid from the pot in a cup and add the corn starch to that, stir making a slurry. Add back to the soup pot and stir. This will thicken the soup slightly.

Add the cream and just heat through. Taste for spices and add anything needed.

User Error

In my rush to get back to stitching last night I did not check to see if my blog posted after I wrote and published it. Thankfully so many friends texted me this morning to see if I was still alive since there is no chance I would not post a blog.

Well, I am alive. I don’t know what technical problem took place, perhaps the blogging gods deemed yesterday’s blog too boring to be worthy of internet space.

I have had a busy day with Garden club this morning, then lunch and Mexican Train game at a friends. I am home now keeping Shay calm during this storm. Tonight I am teaching in Raleigh so I hope the storm is past by the time I head out.

Please stay safe everyone. Know that if I don’t post a blog it is most likely a technical glitch on my part and I am still here.

Thanks for the well wishes.

Needlepoint By the Numbers

I am currently working on my second seat of my game table chairs. Each seat cover is 23 inches by 25 inches big. In needlepoint terms, that is massive.

I finished my first seat in August. I set a goal to finish the second one by New Years and missed my goal. I am now frantically stitching to try and finish as I am sick of just doing basket weave.

I calculated that this canvas has a stitched fire lid of 575 square inches. As I am doing it on 13 count canvas there are 169 stitches in each inch. Making the total number of individual stitches I must make at 97,175.

According to my measurements I have 31.5 square inches left to go or 5,323 stitches, all in white, technically a color called vapor, that looks white to you. I’m in the last 5% and that is the hardest part.

So no more time spent blogging. It’s back to stitching.

Note Tuesday Morning:

For some reason this did not post last night. Thanks to all the friends who checked on me this morning to see if I was still alive

Work at What You Love

Christmas is my time of year. There is nothing I love more than decorating and entertaining at Christmas. Consequently I do the bulk of all my party throwing at Christmas. Why not? My house is at its best, it is festive and so bright it looks clean. After Christmas I also take a week to recover.

Well all that is behind me now. It’s back to work. No Sunday scaries for me when you love what you do. Also no Sunday scaries when you work on Sunday.

Today was my first class of the calendar year. It was lovely that it was a small group of bright young women. Easing into it, but I fear I will be paying for taking so much time off.

The demand for Mah Jongg Classes is over whelming. On December 26 alone I booked three different classes. Right now my first openings are in March and those are going fast.

Summer is also booking up. Before I know it I will be booking fall before I even get to Easter. I am not complaining, just worried about disappointing people who are clamoring to learn to play. At least I know that I will be taking time off for Maine and Christmas.

I am already planning next year’s parties. I need to do that now while I have a moment to think about it. Full speed ahead on the tiles.

January 6, Still the Saddest Day

I went back and read my blog on the days around January 6, 2021. Below is a copy of my post on January 4, 2021. I am no prophet. What I wrote about two days before January 6 was public knowledge to anyone watching main stream news, NOT FOX.

I watched January 6 play out on live TV because I knew this could happen, based on the news leading up. The fact that the national guard was not already there standing by is one of the things that shocked me. This was all anticipated. Why else would there have been so many reporters waiting. I watched ABC new and saw Martha Raddatz being threatened as insurrectionists destroyed news equipment on their way to breaking into the capital and assaulting Capital Police.

We must never forget what took place on that day. Pay attention to the signs of someone trying to end democracy. It was all said in public. Stand up and stop that from ever happening gain.

Stop Supporting Temper Tantrums

First Published January 4, 2021

I know many of you hate when I write political posts. Stop reading now. Don’t complain to me about what I write about, for I have warned you this might make you mad. But I am mad and sick and tired of the toddler in the White House and worse yet the sheep who keep enabling him.

I truly believe that the psychological make up of 45 is one that can not accept reality if it is not of his liking. As a bully he has been use to changing reality. Unfortunately for him, he can not change the reality of a fully vetted election. This appears to have pushed him to the edge and he is on the verge of a full blown psychotic break. None of that is new. He is who he is and it will be up to his family to live with him in that state.

What I really object to is the people who surround him who continue to coddle him in his delusions. The phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State was not surprising to me, but the fact that there were two Republican lawyers and Mark Meadows in the rooms allowing that to happen makes them complicit in 45’s felony to encourage election fraud.

Then there are the legislators who are willing to stand with 45 in questioning the certification of the electoral college votes. What reality are these people living in. So far none of the Pennsylvania Republican Congress people who were elected at the same time are saying that their elections was fraudulent even though they are saying that 45’s was on the same ballot.

The emperor has no clothes and not only are these people not saying he doesn’t, they are stripping down naked and joining the crazy parade.

I understand that people are upset when their candidate loses, but that is what happens in democracy. Someone wins and someone loses. You don’t get to intimidate people, or gather with weapons and threaten people if you don’t like the outcome. Or at least that is the way America was supposed to run.

45 encouraging people to protest with potential harm on January 6th is the worst crime of all. That is tantamount to starting a civil war and I pray it does not happen.

The news reports that upwards of 80% of 45’s supporters believe that the election was stolen from him. Why? Because 45 tells them that without one bit of evidence. Talk about sheep. It is time that we speak out and support Biden and democracy and overwhelm the sheep with truth. No fraud took place. Biden won far and square and no amount of temper tantrums from the spoiled current office holder will change that. Stop enabling that brat because it is bad for America.

Disappointed Weather People

When you live in North Carolina weather is mostly moderate, except if we get a hurricane. It has been almost two years since we have had any measurable snow in our town. That alone is not too unusual. Snow is just not that common. We are much more likely to get an ice storm.

When the national news is all about a big winter storm crossing the whole country heading to the northeast, our local news desperately wanted in on the story. Tonight the local news was overly weather heavy, with no actual story at all. We are predicted to get a half inch of rain.

What did the news do? Send a reporter out to a dark street to talk about what to do if you live on the downhill side of a hill and get water runoff on your yard. This poor dolt of reporter knew this was a non-story story and had a terrible time trying to make one out of it. It didn’t help that the camera person kept panning across the black of a neighborhood we couldn’t see, yet alone know if it was on a hill.

I know that weather is what local news is all about, but if there is no story don’t try and make one up. Good luck everyone, it’s going to rain a little tomorrow and be in the forties. It’s January, that’s not a story.

It’s Time to Order your 2024 Mah Jongg Card

The National Mah Jongg League is the mothership of the American Mah Jongg world. They are an amorphous secretive organization, but they are the best show in town when it comes to Mah Jongg. Every year they create a new Mah Jongg card and we all wait patiently to see if they have done a good job or not.

All my students know my feeling about their editing and lack of modernization, but it is the game we love so we roll with it when it comes to what hands they dictate to us.

The new card starts being played on April 1. The window to order the new card does not open for people who want to order their own cards until January 1. So now is your chance to go head and order the new card. Don’t wait until closer to April 1 because you are not likely to receive your card in a timely manner then. I know people who have ordered on April 1 in years past and did not get their new card until the middle of May.

The NMJL sent out the yearly bulletin in December, (It used to be October) and the most anticipated pages in it are the questions and answers. This year they had a question about taking tiles when playing three handed. The answer was written incorrectly causing a great stir amount Mah Jongg experts around the country. The league was contacted and said, “Yes they made a mistake.”

The correct answer to this question when playing with 3 people is that each player takes four tiles until everyone has 12. Then East take one tile, the next player takes one and the third player takes one giving everyone 13 tiles. East then takes one more tile as their fourteenth. The reason East has to wait until everyone else has taken their 13th tiles is the tile which East gets as their 14th tile is on the bottom of the stack.

I will be teaching New Card Orientation classes in April. I will be at the Carolina Country Club on April 10, morning, afternoon and evening sessions & Kinston April 17-19. I am scheduling a session in Durham and will keep you posted as other cities schedule their Class. If you are interested in the new card class please contact me. It is a lecture class with slides where I teach you what’s new on the card, new patterns and hands, best strategies for the new card, easiest hands and the pit falls. It is a great short cut for getting up to speed with the new card.

Happy Playing.

Your Best Companion

Russ listened to a Bloomberg article about the business side of the Barbie movie and it finally peeked his interest in watching the movie. He wasn’t interested enough this summer when Carter flew home just so she and I could go to see it together, but Bloomberg was enough.

So while I was at a church meeting tonight Russ and Shay started watching Barbie. Apparently Shay was most interested in it. Girls and pink you know. Russ stayed with it because Shay liked it so much. Boys and their dogs you know.

Speaking of which, it could be boys and their cats. My friend Warren lost one of his four cats, Stan yesterday. Stan was only five, but had a terminal illness. Warren the tender hearted took great care of Stan for months as he was his favorite cat. Sadly the day came where Stan was ready to cross that rainbow bridge and it almost did Warren in. I knew something bad had happened when I got four missed calls from him with no message.

Losing a pet is the saddest day. No one brings you a casserole or sends you flowers. You are left alone at home without your beloved one.

When my friend Lynn had a sick dog years ago and I talked to her about what she might have to do she said, “I’m not ready to let her go.” My response was, “You are never ready to let them go, but sometimes we must.”

Cherish your pets every day. They means so much to us, but to them we are their whole world. I know that Russ is Shay’s whole world. If I had wanted her to watch Barbie with me I am not sure her attention would have been as rapt. She’s a daddy’s girl.

No matter what I can guarantee your pet is your best companion, with a few crazy dog exceptions, (you know who you are.) Give them a big hug tonight and say a prayer for those who are missing their pets.

The Godfather of Non-Profit Leadership

In 2011 I received word that a man I had never met was going to pay to send me to Harvard for a course on Governing for Non-profit excellence. I was thrilled, but could not imagine what a huge impact he would have on non-profits in the triangle for more than a decade.

Chuck ReCorr was a stock broker who used his own fortune to send over 140 non-profit leaders to Harvard. His vision to create a well trained body of leaders who would then get to know each other and work together was bold.

He convened these leaders under the banner of the Harvard 100, since his goal had been to send 100 people, but he blew that goal out of the water. I have personally been the beneficiary of his generosity, brilliance and ingenuity.

One highlight has been working with other Harvard 100 Alums, Danny Rosin, Staci Barfield and Phil Kowalczyk in the leadership of Harvard 100. We were all tapped by Chuck and none of could possibly say no. Chuck has retired from his 50 year career at Merrill Lynch, but his dream of improving the leadership in the non-profit world in the triangle continues. If you are a non-profit leader and are interested in being invited into our collective please let me know. I am aging out and want to pass the opportunity to connect and learn on to the next generation.

A Man With A Big Stick

There is nothing sexier than watching my husband wield a big stick, with a feather duster on the end, whisk away cobwebs. He found those cobwebs while up on a giant ladder removing the fan blades from the ceiling fans to clean them. This man really knows how to woo me.

While others might still be recovering from a New Years Eve bash, mine was ensuring we start the new year off in the cleanest way possible. All the while Shay kept her eye on him supervising his every move as she does daily, be he at work on his computer, on a zoom or doing the dishes.

I declare that 2024 is the year I am most appreciative of my husband Russ. No complaining from him as I needlepointed most of the day as I have missed my self-imposed deadline to finish this chair seat by January 1. I am doing my best to finish it as fast as possible and then maybe I can do something nice for him. No matter what it is it will not beat a big stick with a feather duster on it.

PS. I read what new laws were enacted in NC today and one is a ban on a pornography. This is a test to see how widely they are enforcing that law. This of course is not pornography, but a true story about cleaning.