10-11-1962
The other recipe is from Mrs. Elmer Rankin who brought us a very good apple cake with cream to use over it. She said she got the recipe from Mrs. Dowty, and guess what she calls it Apple Pan 'Dowty'!
I wasn't sure she could do it and neither was she. But by mid-morning, she was elbow deep in rags and soap and water and window cleaner, and had the whole dining room in an uproar.
When I got through, the corner was in an unnatural state of tidiness, which would please Nancy if she could be here, but I expect it to be back to normal in a day or two. And I was so busy supervising Becky and getting lunch that I didn't get to see the home run that cleared the bases for the Giants and won the game for them.
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10-18-1962
"To do what?" I asked, nosing in on the tail end of a conversation. Mary turned toward me.
"It was this pecan pie, see," she explained. "When it was done baking, there were all the pecans on top, then the crust; and all the filling was underneath the crust in the bottom of the pie plate."
I stared. "How on earth did you do that?"
"A lot of people ask me that," replied Mary thoughtfully. "But, of course, a special cook doesn't tell all her secrets," she added solemnly.
"I'll bet you don't even know," said Clara Scoles across the table. "You give Mary a recipe," she said to the world, "and it never turns out the way its supposed to. You'd never recognize it as the same recipe."
"Well," said Mary, sadly, "as I said it takes a special kind of cook a good cook "
"Never mind," I told her comfortingly, "perhaps women who give you recipes just leave out a secret ingredient."
"Or the optional," she said.
"The optional?" I said, baffled.
"Yes," said Mary, "There was this woman who gave someone a recipe but said just not to worry about the 'optional.' She never used it because she never had any in the house!"
Those two wretched men sat there and ate coffee cake until half of it was gone.
"Well," said my husband finally, "I could eat another piece but just to show my will power " and he got up from the table.
"I've got will power too," said Bill, "just enough to lift another piece from the pan to my plate."
"What's going on here?" I asked as I came into the dining room to find Holly flat on her stomach, carefully doing a picture of her Daddy, while Jan sat by, clutching a sheaf of similar sheets of paper.
"Sssh," said Jan, "Don't disturb her. I have to have some drawings by pre-school children for my art course."
Jan is one who spent a hectic week end with us, and when she tottered out the door Sunday evening, we told her to come again.
"I will," she promised, "When I feel up to it!"
A strike is a pitched ball right over home plate. A spare is the extra tire in the trunk of the car. A split is an exercise that I'm too old and stiff to do. The only thing I know about bowling is that a gutter ball is a ball that goes down the gutter and does not knock down any of those what-do-you-call-ems at the end of the lane.
This may be a blow to Bill, who believes that the grandest sport known to man (and woman and child) is bowling.
I saw my first football game of the season last week, the reserves on Monday evening, and sat in the car on the side lines, comfortable and befuddled, as the boys scrambled back and forth across the field.
They have half backs and quarter backs and full backs and I can't tell one from the other, and I'm not even sure which kind Dale is. But I kept my eye on him and noted something very disturbing.
Nearly every time, after he larruped across the field back of the line during signals, a penalty would be called on Manson for backfield in motion. He was the only one I could see in motion, so I sat there feeling terribly guilty, and wishing there was some way I could warn him of the trouble he was causing.
Finally, though, I drummed up courage to ask my husband about it, and it was all right. It seems that whatever Dale is he can sprint around back there, legally. And that's how much I know about football.
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10-25-1962
He bellows up the stairs, "What are you doing up there?" and I don't dare tell him I'm picking up dirty clothes and throwing them down the laundry chute, because the obvious answer to that is "Why didn't you have the children do it?"
And the answer to that is which I never dare use, "Whoever heard of a youngster who looked under the bed for socks, or under the bathtub for wash clothes?"
Saturday, though, was bad. I had told Becky that if she dusted all the furniture well, I would do the dust mopping, because she has a tendency to mop wildly without getting in corners or under chairs. And before I got to it, my husband came home and I didn't dare do it, so the dust mopping didn't get done at all!
Resting is the kind of thing I do best, of course, and I don't know why, exactly, it's so hard to do. It's just that if you're out of washcloths, it's easier to go down and put them in the washing machine than it is to lie and worry about it or ask someone else to do it, I guess.
Then Dale got busy with storm windows and was mighty indignant when I went huffing and puffing out to him with instructions to wash the outside of the house windows before he installed them. That's what he intended to do, or so he told me.
So now, our windows shine and the venetian blinds shine, and we will thank visitors to confine their inspections to these areas not to the cobwebby corners and smudged walls.