I’ve been tagged by Shannon at Peters Cross Station. For a long time I have been enjoying her posts. She and her life- partner are wonderful mothers to a beautiful adopted daughter and I love to drop in and admire this amazing family.
I did this meme for a number of reasons. First, she is one of my favorite bloggers. Second, I take a special pride in being the oldest blogger that she knows. Of course, I always try to emulate the folks I admire, so I had just taken on her anti-meme attitude when she changed moods midstream and now I am running to catch up with this new outlook. I must admit it has been an enjoyable challenge to complete this meme that she composed. The directions are to list your life in one sentence per year.
Shannon is 36 and her list is impressive, but short in comparison to mine. I am 70 years old and many of my years blur together. So as an Elder, I will skip some years and emphasize others. Darn it, it is my list.

1936 - I was born in a Northern Minnesota town in the middle of a blizzard
1937-38 Lived in Wayzata, Minnesota
1939 Moved with my family to Minneapolis
1941 Started kindergarten at Incarnation School
1942 Touch and go with Rheumatic Fever
1943-47 Resumed school and was an average Catholic girl student.
1948 Entered 7th grade same school just a new building.
1950 - 1954 Attended Holy Angels Academy.
1955 Married High School Sweetheart.
1956 First Son was born
1957 Second son was born
1958 Divorced and Worked for Northwest Airlines
1959 Became a welfare mother.
1960 Freshman University of Minnesota (Received The Laverne Noyes Scholarship) In those days, Aid to Dependent Children frowned on mothers outside of the home, so I kept my college attendance a secret.
1962 Joined the Civil Rights Movement (SNCC)
1964 Severely injured in a motorcycle accident. ADC found out about going to school and were going to drop me, but I was within a semester of graduating, so they let me continue.
1964 Graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Education
1964-65 Taught 4th Grade at Morris Park Elementary School
1966 Lived in Frankfurt Germany for a year
1967 -1968 Came back to the states and live in Michigan. Taught in Livonia at the Adams Elementary School.
1968-1972Moved to Southern California and taught in a very free, very communal area in Topanga Canyon.
1972 Moved to the Desert and started teaching. What a cultural shock to find myself amidst the most conservative of conservatives.
1973 Along with close friends formed the first National Organization for Women chapter in our area.
1976 Married John and acquired a stepson, also named John
1980 My son John Vincent graduated from College
1981 My son Bill dies at the age of 23.
1983 My mother passed away.
1984 Humane Education Teacher of the Year Award from the National Humane Association. I was the runner-up, but at that time the only West Coast winner ever..
1986John and I bought a beautiful week-end place in Independence, California.
1989 My father passes away.
1990 Moved to a new elementary school and was diagnosed with Breast Cancer.
1990 Mastectomy
1997 My husband passed away very unexpectedly
1998 I continued teaching.
1999 Sold the Independence property and bought a house close to school and friends.
1999 Breast Reconstruction (Best thing I ever did as a survivor.)
2000 Adopted my daughter Kristi legally. It was an adult adoption and a dream come true. Kristi had been a daughter to me for many years. Met the wonderful widower that I would marry a year later.
2001 Retired from teaching and married Bob.
2002 Become a pseudo Grandmother to a beautiful child. and a mother to her mother. What could be better than another daughter.
2001 to 2005 Wonderful cruises, exciting tours, and RV travels.
2006 Celebrated my 70th birthday with a party of 70 friends and family. One for every year of my life.

Now I am not going to tag anyone because I don’t want to get in the way of creative juices, but I challenge one and all to try this meme. Ah come on, It will be fun!

A few months ago while perusing the Commissary for new and exciting food, I discovered a rack of Meals Ready-to-Eat. What a great item to add to the Earthquake or other disaster foods that I have been storing in containers in the sunroom. So over a period of time, I bought three or four at a time to stow away for whatever possible natural or man-made catastrophe comes our way.

Bob begin to wonder what they tasted like and I thought, “What happens if we face a period of time with just MRE’s to eat and find out they are unbearable?.” So with that thought in mind, we decided to share one for lunch. It was beef stew, a chocolate malt drink, peanut butter and crackers, and a chocolate health bar.

To warm the beef stew, Bob added water to an outer pouch that had magnesium dust, salt, and and a little iron dust in a thin, flexible pad about the size of a playing card. The water activated the heater. Within seconds, the flameless heater reached the boiling point and was bubbling and steaming. He then put the steaming pouch into a heavy cardboard container and stacked one side against a small juice tumbler. ( The directions were to lean it against a rock which is something not found in my kitchen.)

To fix the chocolate malt drink, I added cold water to the ingredients in a small plastic bag. I added the water, shook it for a minute and opened it to find most of the powder was still in the bottom of the bag. I stirred it up and finally poured the lumpy liquid into two glasses.

Bob opened the crackers and I kneaded the package that had the peanut butter in it. He opened the health bar and split it in two for our dessert. All of this left the kitchen in more of a mess than either of us ever thought we could make in the preparation of one small meal.

The MRE was surprisingly good. The Beef Stew was on a par to Dinty Moore’s and the malt, in spite of the lumps , was tasty. Peanut Butter and crackers? What can I say? They tasted like the average peanut butter and the average crackers. (The parrots thought they were wonderful and gladly took them off our hands.) The health bar was made with Dark Chocolate and Bob thought it was delicious. I am not a fan of dark chocolate, so I spread the rest of the peanut butter on mine and that cut the heavy chocolate flavor considerably.

Our experiment showed us these meals will be quite adequate in time of disaster. We are also considering taking a couple along on those trips where we don’t feel like going out for dinner. We could fix MRE’s in our motel room. Hopefully, a little less messy than in this first experience !

Our meal left me thinking about the young men and women who eat these in the field in places like Afghanistan and Iraq . It is one thing to eat them in a messy kitchen and another to eat them when facing gunfire, blowing sand, and the debilitating heat of a dessert day. May our troops remain safe and return home soon. Meanwhile, I will continue to pack a few MRE’s away for emergencies.

I just came from seeing Brokeback Mountain. It is a film well-worth seeing and the sad reality of it tugged at my heart strings. Amazing what prejudice, misunderstanding, and dishonesty can do to bring about heart ache for so many people. In this case for the men themselves who truly loved each other and for the families they created in order to keep up a pretense of what society contends is “normal’.

The wonderful thing about this movie is that it is neither pro or anti gay. Conclusions about the main characters choices are up to the individual watching the film. My definition of a good movie is one that I am still thinking about four hours later. I have a feeling I will be mulling this one over in my mind for many days to come.

First, a special thanks to John, Kym, and Linda for taking all the photos.

Did I say I could cut the number of photos to 20? Impossible! Too many good photos and too many wonderful memories to even try to get close to that number. I did cut the 97 down to half and I am pretty proud of that. I have lightened and brightened, cropped and titled until I think my eyes are going to bug out completely.

To view the album click on Newest Album on the right side of my blog. When the album comes up, find slide show in the left hand column on your screen. Click on that and adjust the number of seconds for viewing photos. Enlarge the photo to about 1024 x 1024. (That is what works best on my screen.) Enjoy!

I am busy working on the Party Album and enjoying looking at all the photos. So I thought I would post this very funny story that came in an e-mail today.

As a young minister, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a grave-side service for a homeless man, with no family or friends, who had died while traveling through the area. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost; and being a typical man I did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the crew, eating lunch, but the hearse was nowhere in sight. I apologized to the workers for my tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave, where I saw the vault lid already in place. I assured the workers I would not hold them long but this was the proper thing to do.

The workers gathered around, still eating their lunch. I poured out my heart and soul. As I preached, the workers began to say “Amen,”"Praise the Lord,” and “Glory.” I preached, and I preached, like I’d never preached before: from Genesis all the way to Revelation
.
I closed the lengthy service with a prayer and walked to my car. I felt I had done my duty for the homeless man and that the crew would leave with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication, in spite of my tardiness.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, “I ain’t never seen anything like this before…. and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years.”