After staying at home for nearly 8 years waiting for Rick to decide to go somewhere with me, I have finally given up and have resigned myself to just staying at home and being content with it.
Rick goes to hang out everyday in McDonald's in the Winter and sits on the Sonic outdoor benches when it is warm. He visits with his brother and with other men who come join them. He's content with this and it never seems to bore him. I on the other hand have been extremely bored with this arrangement for several years, but there is nothing I can do about it. The only thing to do is to find my own way. To find a hobby, something that interests me, and something that I can do and enjoy doing it alone.
I do seem to have found contentment watching movies and TV programs on Netflix and Amazon Prime. It passes the time away and I don't have to think about anything but the story line in the movies and series that I watch. Sometimes I get so involved in a series that I watch it hour after hour non-stop for days at a time. I can't remember the last day that I have been outside to enjoy the beautiful world that I used to enjoy so much.
My whole life I was an outdoor gal. I hated being inside and spent my days outside enjoying nature and whatever the world had to offer me. I was so happy then. I had so much to do after I got off work. I never could understand then how anyone could ever be so bored when there was so much to do outside.
My father's influence......that's how it all started at a very young age. My grandfather also had a great deal to do with my love for the outdoors. My grandfather and grandmother in San Gabriel, California let me spend as much time as I wanted to running around in the back yard which was extremely large with all its fruit trees and other buildings. I remember climbing up all the trees and sitting up in the branches picking and eating fruit. We had fig trees, black & white figs, and all kinds of guavas, plums and I really enjoyed the large pomegranate tree next door with its large branches of fruit hanging over our fence. There were fruit trees and fruit bushes that I don't even know what the fruits were called. In the large Ramada (patio) with its orange colored floor there hung large green pear-shaped fruit over-head that I also loved to eat. The only fruit that I was NOT allowed to touch were the cactus apples. My grandfather would pick a large cactus apple and peel it for me and I would eat the juicy red sweet fruit inside. We also had raspberries and boysenberries. I guess this is where my love for fruit began.
My grandfather also built me a mound right behind the backdoor and next to the Ramada for me to play in. I had to be very careful playing in there because it was a cactus garden. My grandfather made me some small adobe houses for my lizards to live in. Grandpa would surprise me with lizards that he brought home in his metal lunch box from the Huntington Library where he worked as the head gardener of the cactus gardens. We would release the lizards into one of the two adobe houses. My grandfather must have also brought home little surprises for my dad when he was a boy, because my dad continued this with me by bringing me a surprise home in his metal lunchbox everyday from Nardons where he worked in Alhambra. Everyday he would hand me his lunch box before he went inside and tell me to look inside. It made me feel so special. I loved my daddy.
Daddy, after remarrying a woman with 4 kids of her own took all of us kids somewhere every weekend. Either to the beach or the mountains, or the desert. We would leave either on Friday or Saturday and we would come home on Sunday. I continued this with my own children when I grew up and got married. I found a cabin for sale on the Licking River in Robertson County Kentucky and I bought it with money I had saved. It was way out away from civilization and very secluded. My children spent a lot of time at the cabin by the river until they reached around 15 yrs old and then they lost interest. They wanted to be with their friends in town even tho we had allowed them to bring friends with them to the cabin by the river. I grew up with my children there and have many happy memories of our time there.
I'm a strong believer that the good memories that you make with your parents exploring nature, are passed down generation after generation, just ask my children. If parents don't do anything with their children, their children will probably not do anything with their children either. It doesn't matter what activities you do with your children, but the time you spend with them is all that matters. I just so happened to love the outdoors, but I also loved to cook and bake from scratch which I did not get to share with my daughters because of a fear their dad had for kitchen fires. That's one of my biggest regrets in life.
I don't cook much anymore because Rick insists on doing all the cooking himself. He has so many hangups that he won't eat anyone else's cooking. At first I fought it, but then I realized that if I wanted or craved something that I loved to fix, that I could fix it while he was gone to hang out at McDonald's or Sonic, that's my time to cook the things that I truly love. Some I share and some I don't, and if he finds them in the fridge, Rick is welcomed to eat try it. Since I don't have an oven I am limited to what I can bake, but I manage well around this little problem. It makes for some experimentation on how to bake something without an oven. It sometimes can be done over the cooktop, almost like camping and making biscuits. There is however one thing that I haven't figured out how to make without an oven and that is that good custard, like flan that Gigi Shattler taught me how to bake. I loved that so good that I made it almost everyday.
It is rainy and windy out today, but at least it's not cold. It reached 60 degrees F. and the sun was in and out for a little while this morning. My poor kitty Squeak has not come out of her house for the last 2 days. I think she must not be feeling well or maybe she just hates mud as much as we do. The snow all melted off yesterday here leaving so much mud that you don't dare go out and get off the sidewalk. And with today's rain, well, it just doesn't help the mud problem.
I can't believe that it is already 4:14 p.m. and that I haven't even watched one movie today. I better say goodbye and find a good movie or two to watch before Rick gets home. Bye.....
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