Gulf Coast Living

Our humidity during the summertime can range anywhere from a mild 60% to wrapped in a wet sticky blanket at 100%, 

We can spend two weeks preparing for a storm that could wipe us off the planet and live without basic necessities for weeks. 

But not very many other places in this country will you wear these

and a wool coat to work on Monday and 

these with a pair of shorts and tank tops on Saturday. 

The best of both worlds!

Shiloh

Neil Diamond is the absolute best singer, hands down. And Shiloh?
Well he is just absolutely the best dog ever.
He's calm and quiet, if this dog barks, you might want to get up and go see what's up.
He only barks when there is something, or someone in the yard. Whether you are standing right there or not, he has decided that his job is to let you know someone is around.
Once he knows you are paying attention, he stops. He figures you got it.
He is my 8 year old full blooded German Shepherd.

 

I had a little ShitZu named Burplees (I know, long story) for 13 years. When he passed away, I realized I didn't have any pictures of him over the years. Just a few here and there crowded in between some of the kids. 

So Shiloh has become one of my most photographed animals. (besides the chickens). He even has his own photo album at home, right there beside all the kids and grandkids albums. 

Being a herding dog, it is hilarious when we take him to the island to go fishing with all five of the grandbrats. He doesn't know what to do when you have Daddy way out in the water, three kids playing in the surf, 2 digging in the sand, and me sitting in my chair at water's edge.

It really wears the poor fella out when we go. He will swim out, tap Dad on the butt with his nose and turn around and come back, rub his wet head in my lap then go sniff each and every one of the grandbrats, then it's back to Daddy again. LOL poor guy. By the time we leave, I don't even have to leash him to get him back to the truck, he straightlines right to the tailgate.
 

You can tell that age is starting to get to him, he limps a little now and then and has just about totally given up the ball which he was so obsessed with playing fetch we would have to take it from him and hide it so he would get some rest. Now? he just holds it in his mouth and sometimes, not very often, let Dad throw it, but he rarely ever brings it back anymore. Just takes it to his spot and lays down with it. 

I am going to start him on an aspirin a day soon to help with the old creeks and pops and joints. He is quite used to getting medicine, he's been on Benadryl every summer since he was about two. 

 He really is a great dog, so I thought I would introduce him.

He's so handsome! I love that turd!

 

 A few weeks ago we were burning a fire in our chimenia when I noticed the wood looked allot like Shiloh. So of course I took pictures!

I call it Shiloh On Fire LOL

BAH HUMBUG

 I'm feeling a little scroogish today!

 

Between the stores putting out the Christmas decorations before Halloween, the TV commercials pushing early Christmas buying and a few radio stations already going to Christmas music all day long, I AM OVER IT!

I remember when my kids were little, I loved Christmas, even when we hardly had any money to buy them anything, we still managed to have great Christmas mornings and happy faces all day. They didn't care if I spent a dollar or a hundred. They enjoyed everything about Christmas. The lights, the music, the family.

Now it's buy as much as you can and make sure everyone gets the same amount spent on them and if you do give out handmade gifts, it better come with a gift card attached. 

I hate, hate, hate Christmas time.
It was bad enough when we couldn't even get past Thanksgiving before the Christmas stuff went up at the stores, but this year we didn't even get through Halloween before they started putting up and pumping down our throats, "You can buy more  if you start now" "Layaway now, in October, for Christmas"  Ugggghhhh! Stop it!

I guess this year, because it has started so early, it has pissed me off more than normal. I feel like I am being forced to outdo last year, to make it better, buy more, make it bigger. 




Yes, I could say, "You know what, we aren't falling into this hyped up bullshit this year" then I have 6 sad little faces looking at me like "WTF MiMi"

I guess my bad attitude could have a little bit to do with the fact I no longer have those little smiling faces to wake up to on Christmas morning. No little thunder feet running to my room whispering "should we wake them up?" It's mainly just Me and DH now and though it's a great day with him, it's not near as fun as it used to be until later in the day when we get together with all the family and friends. 

I miss those Christmas mornings.

 

SCRATCHES (my rather lengthy ghost story)

Since the first day we moved into our trailer there have always been weird things happening. Sounds, breezes, smells, voices, just all manner of weird but harmless things.
About a week after we moved in, I was at the kitchen sink which had a window over it that looked out on the back yard, washing dishes, I glanced out the window and saw a woman in an old outfit hanging by her neck in a tree that stands out there. It was a quick glance up and when I looked again I didn't see anything. 
So as humans are prone to do, I wrote it off as "I didn't see that. My mind is playing tricks on me." and "It was just a quick glance, you didn't see what you think you saw"
That was almost 20 years ago now. And that seems to be what will now be called 'the beginning'

I grew up in a haunted house. Genuinely haunted. 
Typewriters going in the middle of the night with actual print on the paper the next morning. My Dad, after the first night of hearing the typewriter going, put a piece of paper in it the next night before he went to bed and sure enough the next morning it had been typed on. Sorry, nothing as awesome as WE ARE HERE or anything like that, just a bunch of letters and symbols in no particular order. Which I am sure some fanatic somewhere could obsess over and come up with it meaning something.  But trust me, it was just a random bunch of letters and numbers and symbols.
My parents saw our ghost one night, actually many nights, but the first night is always the story that got told.




My parents had and armoire in their room that stood about 6 foot tall. One night when they were lying in bed a man (neither one of them knew how they knew it was a man) stepped out from behind it. Or as my dad would say, more or less unfolded from behind it as he stood over 7 foot tall. With lumberjack clothes on and a black cloak, he just stood there at the foot of their bed. Just standing there.  My Dad, thinking someone had gotten into our house dove out of bed and grabbed nothing but air. And he was gone. 
Over the years we lived in that old house we grew quite accustomed to seeing him. My whole family, my parents, me, my sisters. 
There was never anything threatening about the man so we never were afraid of him popping up and showing himself. Tho we never saw a face.
He seemed to be a benevolent spirit until the day my Dad moved to another state for a job and we stayed home packing everything up. Things started getting very tense in the house. The man no longer 'visited' us. The typewriter went berzerk one final night then was silent. And the last time we saw the man? I woke up to him standing over my little sister's bed holding, what to me, looked like a huge cast iron skillet over her head. 
I grabbed my sister and we ran screaming to my Mom's room where we stayed every night until we moved out.
Even though I had grown up with one, as I grew older I became more skeptical.  If ghosts were real, why is there, after all these centuries, no physical proof? Is there some kind of instruction sheet you get when you pass that tells you to never leave behind any proof that there is such a thing? And as far as what happened in our little house in the woods? A simple form of mild mass hysteria? Can't you convince yourself that you did see, did hear what you think you did as long as everyone else is seeing and hearing it too?
Sit by yourself in a dark room and start thinking about something scary, all the sudden you are hyper aware, you hear noises, see flashes, something brushes past you. 
The mind is a powerful thing. 
So the more years that passed since our last sighting of 'the man' the more I stopped believing in ghosts and spirits. Demons? Yes! I will always believe in those whether real or perceived. 
Then we bought this trailer. After the initial incident, there really wasn't that much more that happened. Just little things here and there that could be brushed aside. Missing items that were not where you looked for them ten times, then the eleventh there they were. Sounds that could be explained away. Glimpses, but always out of the corner of your eye. 

Then we had the trailer removed and built a house in the exact same spot. 
Not long after we had moved back in, my DH was having a very bad bout of snoring. As I always did when it got too much for me, I grabbed my pillow and headed to the living room to sleep on the love seat. Since it was something I did often, my DH would come in if he woke up and touch me and try and get me to come back to bed. So when I felt his hand on my face I turned toward him, but there was no one there. I know I felt it. My cheek was warm from the touch. That night he was woken up by his wife curled up in a ball hugging as close to him as I could get!

About a week later, DH had gotten up and was cooking breakfast for all the grandbrats and left me asleep in our room. I heard his phone ringing and woke up enough to think, I wonder why he changed his ringtone? I fell right back to sleep after it stopped, (yes DH had kept me up most of the night with the snoring) then it started ringing again. The Nokia ringtone we all know from back in the day. Once again I wondered who he had set that ringtone for and was he ever going to answer that stupid phone? By now I was awake and laying there debating whether or not to just go ahead and get up when it started again. I rolled over to his side of the bed to grab his phone, (I was going to march into the kitchen with it and grumpily demand he not leave it in the room while I was trying to sleep) but the phone wasn't there. That's when I realized the the ringing was coming from our bathroom, and more specifically, my husbands closet. 

The ringing was coming from a box that had an old phone in it that he had put up in case anything happened to his new phone. I snatched it down and took it to the kitchen and handed it to him and told him someone was trying to call him, he really should take the sim card out of that phone then marched my grumpy butt back to the bathroom. 
When I came back out, he had the phone out of the box and he told me "honey, neither the sim card nor the battery are in this phone" 

I told him how it had been ringing off and on for the last half hour, and it rang the last time as I was headed out the bedroom door with it. 
We threw the phone away and the Nokia ringtone quickly became named "that creepy ringtone" at my house. I can't stand to hear it. Sorry Nokia

A few weeks after that, I was on the phone with my youngest son who had called me early in the morning while he was at school, I'm sure to see if I would come get him out for some supposed stomach ache or something, and as we said Goodbye, I heard a woman's voice saying "Laura" like you do when you have a bad phone connection..."Laura"
First of all, I do not use my first name at all. Only a few immediate family members call me that. And it sounded like my Mother, I kept saying "ma'am" "ma'am" "can you not hear me?" I thought the lines had gotten crossed in between my son hanging up and my Mom trying to call me. But my phone was disconnected. I figured, ok, it could happen lines mixing up if the timing were perfect between the incoming call and the disconnection of the first call.
So I called my Mom, and woke her up. I explained to her what happened and she thought maybe it had been my Grandmother who had died years before. 
I still hate being on the phone after someone hangs up now. I just don't want to hear it again.
I play with my ghost radar but I try not invite any unwanted attention to me or my house. I guess I still believe more than I thought. 
So I ignore the little things, like items still disappearing and reappearing where you left them, but not for a couple of days. Smells I can't find where they are coming from. All those little things you can explain away. 
Until this morning.
This morning when we woke up, DH has 4 scratches on his hip. He said they were burning. We checked his nails thinking he had done it with a hangnail in his sleep, no hangnails, we checked the sheets to make sure there was nothing in them and no pajamas so it couldn't have been that. 
When I looked at them they look like four perfect kitten scratches from his hip bone to the top of his thigh. 
Now, Houston, we might have a problem..............
 
 
 

When it's cold and I'm lazy

Something happened while we slept last night. 
The rain moved in and the temperature dropped, a lot! Brrrr baby! It's cold outside!
As usual when the cold weather finally does find it's way down here to the Gulf Coast, I start thinking about cooking heavier meals. 
Meals we don't normally eat in the summertime because it is just too damned hot to fill up on heavy food. 
Summer time is for salads and veggies and steaks on the grill. 
Oh wait, steaks on the grill are a year round thing.....skip that last part.
Winter is for chicken and dumplings and chili and mashed potatoes and thick hardy soups. 

This morning I decided I wanted something we haven't had since early last winter. 
My lazy BBQ chicken.
Yes that's actually what I call it because it takes absolutely no effort whatsoever. 
 
 

At the moment Sweet Baby Ray's is the sauce of choice because it was on sale a few months ago at the grocery. So I stocked up and quickly named it "the favorite" so everyone wouldn't wonder why I have so much of it.

I don't mind all this cold weather really. I just don't like the cold and wet weather. 
When I used to live in Virginia Beach it would drop down below 60 degrees and it would be chilly but comfortable. You didn't need much more than a long sleeved t-shirt and you were fine. 
Down here on the Gulf Coast our winters are cold and wet. The air is always damp, I'm surprised when it freezes that stuff doesn't just freeze right there, stuck in mid air. So when we get cold? It's to the bone.  But I do love pulling out my sweaters.  No not the funky Christmas sweaters with the horridly huge picture of Santa on it. Just regular everyday long sleeved shirts and sweaters. I love 'em.  They hide all kinds of imperfections! ;0)

Taking Back the Blog

Almost a year since my last post on here! Wow!
Well that is about to change.


I just started to get back into my blogging and I have really started to enjoy it, especially once I decided I didn't give a flying flip who saw it and who doesn't.

I have a blog where I try to be nice, not cuss and keep my feet off the furniture.

But this blog? This one is where everything else is going.
My opinions (promise you're not going to like most of them)
My pictures and thoughts and recipes and just basic gossip and conversation with myself.

This is where I am going to blow off some steam so you might just want to take a step back as a precaution.
Here, if I want to drop the *f* bomb, I will. See watch

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FUCK!

BOOM!

So if you are the artsy, sensitive type you might want to stick to a different type of blog.