Books!

Back when I was a kid, my mother had some books. 

Well, she had a lot of books, but three in particular she'd kept from her own childhood.  I loved reading those books over and over again.  Alas, I'm pretty sure they got ruined in Hurricane Ike -- like so many of my childhood memories.  

From time to time over the years, I'd thought about trying to find them on a used book seller site, but the problem with that was I couldn't remember the titles of two of them.  I could remember the third, but when I searched, I kept getting something else than the book I'd remembered.  

One of the books was about a family who decided to move out of the city and build themselves a new house out in the woods.  I kept thinking the title was something about the little house in the forest or something along those lines, but when I'd search, I would get the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, Little House In The Big Woods.  

The second book was about a little boy named Corky who entered his chicken Beulah into a pet show and she won when she laid an egg.  Alas, this was another one I couldn't remember the title to.   So there I was on Ebay looking for the book about the new house, when suddenly it came to me. 

Corky's Pet Parade!

It seemed so obvious, I'm a bit embarrassed that I couldn't remember that.  But no matter.  As soon as I had the title, I did a quick search and the book was mine!

I kept on trying to find variations of the title of the book about the little house, when out of the blue, eBay's autofill feature found it for me.  A quick perusal of the offerings, and the second book was finally mine, too!

All right!  I now had two of my favorite childhood books on the way to me.  That brings us to the third one.  As it happens, this was the only one I could remember the title to.  It was Clover.

The book was about a boy who befriends a wild rabbit, but when I typed Clover into the search bars on both eBay and Amazon, I kept getting totally different books.  I did a general google search, and even went to the Library of Congress website to search.  No luck.  

I was beginning to think I'd imagined the whole thing in some sort of Mandela effect, so as a last ditch effort, I put out a call to the internet.  Well, to Facebook.  I posted, explaining my dilemma and wonder of wonders, within 10 minutes someone had found the book and within 10 more minutes, it was in my shopping cart -- soon to be on the way to me. 

Full disclosure, I've had them for several weeks now but haven't blogged about them until now because I'd intended to record myself reading at least one of the books, but never got around to it.  Maybe someday I'll do that. 

On a similar note, my diabetic cookbook arrived today. 

I've glanced through it, but haven't really gotten a chance to really look at the recipes.  I was hoping to find a few I could make ahead of time, then freeze for those days when I don't feel like cooking.  Which is most days.  One thing, though, it is in large print, which my over 50 eyes appreciate.  

And remember the shepherd's hooks I ordered?  They arrived yesterday, but I'd already taken my shower and didn't want to get out and get all sweaty again, so I didn't put them out until this afternoon.  I'd originally just pushed them into the ground, but felt that wasn't stable enough, so I tried a different tack.

I dug a small hole about 6" deep, then shoved the spikes down into the bottom of that.   That wasn't easy, either.  The lack of rain these last few weeks has turned the ground hard as a rock.  I had to pour some water into the hole just to get the dirt soft enough to shove the spikes into it, and even then, I had to get my hammer out and tap them down a bit. 

It was a daunting task, but in the end I persevered and got 'er done. 

I had to kind of put it out in the middle of nowhere, and hopefully it's far away from both trees and fences that the squirrels can't jump onto it. 

I'm going to grease the pole with shortening, too, so they can't climb it 

And finally, I took the hot pink hat with sparkles to my coworker, and she loved it.  Now, it's back to working on my sock weight hat.  I'll have pictures later.  Right now, this post is quite long enough, thank you very much.