Love At First Sight: Gumbo Spoons
Vanity, vanity. When I was in university, along with our studies, we all picked out our china patterns and silver flatware. We were preparing for the rest of our lives, which meant getting married. My parents gave me six place settings when I graduated university and through the years, AdventureMan and I added settings. We used the sterling all the time, military people entertained more formally. We haunted French and German antique markets and flea markets, seeking obscure pieces we didn’t have, it was fun.
These days, not so much. I haven’t bought any silver for years. We do very little formal entertaining. My sister and her daughters have taken to using their good silver for every day. I haven’t reached that point – yet – but I am thinking about it.
In spite of the fact that we are not often using our silver flatware, at the recent Christ Church Antique Fair, a woman celebrated having found gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons? I have a lot of pieces, mostly French and German. I have asparagus servers, yes, really! I have pieces for all kinds of exotic foods, but no. No, I did not have gumbo spoons. I had never even heard of gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons are a little larger than soup spoons, wider, rounder, a little deeper.
As it turns out, they don’t even make gumbo spoons in my sterling, but they had some beautiful ones that will go with my everyday flatware; these had shells on the base of the handles. They are beautiful, and I can hardly wait to eat gumbo in such grand style. These will be well loved – and well used!
‘Putin’ On The Ritz in Moscow, LLOOOLLL
Oh Hayfa, this is one of the best flash-mobs ever! I wanted to be there!
I always thought Kuwait was ripe for a flash mob at the junction where the Fintas Expressway joined 6th Ring road. Never had the courage; even though you’d have to wait 6 – 9 light changes to get through. Figured the morality police would have me up on charges, LOL.
Best Best eveh!
Energy Use and My Friend Who Kept the Cats Warm
“I was scratching their heads and ears and noticed that they were nice and warm! I wondered how they were managing to keep so warm in the awful cold, but I was glad they found a nice warm place,” my friend said, when I asked her how her outdoor cats had fared in the bone-chilling cold we experienced in Pensacola last week.
“Then I got my Gulf Power bill, and Intlxpatr, it was over a thousand dollars!” she exclaimed, her eyes huge.
Her normal bill is probably around what I pay. Not nearly a thousand dollars, not even on the hottest month of summer when I have to keep the air on full blast 24/7 on just to survive.
“So I called the heating people,’ she continued, and they had to crawl under the house, imagine, in this weather. . . ”
I imagined.
“. . . And they discovered the cats had clawed a hole in one of my air ducts and had luxuriated, down there under the house, while my heater tried to heat up half of Pensacola!”
We laughed, but a thousand dollars . . . that knocks a hole in anyone’s budget. It was one of those laughing-because-if-you-don’t-laugh-you-will-cry kinds of laughs.
I am an energy nerd. It comes from growing up in Alaska, I am convinced, where I had neighbors who fished in the summers and had to get by all year on that income, plus what they might come by with odd jobs the rest of the year. My friends had a huge garden in their back yard, and a root cellar where things were stored. In the root cellar, they had a chalkboard, where every potato, every carrot, everything they had stored was listed, and numbers subtracted as they were used. They had to keep track, to be sure they would make it through the winter.
In Pensacola, Gulf Power has a really cool feature on their website. You set up an online account, and you can check on your daily energy usage. LOL, this is mine for January. It has huge ups and downs – mostly we don’t need to have the heat on, but when the temperatures go down and stay down – it shows. There are also a couple days when we used our oven, and that shows up, too, but not badly.
I remember living in Germany, where I didn’t have a dryer (or any space for one) and my landlady brought me my energy bill. We lived in a very small farming village, where they were also all very frugal, but she couldn’t believe my bill was so small. I just smiled; I could hear her dryer going every day, and dryers are also a huge source of energy usage. Anything that heats up – or cools down – is an energy eater.
On the website, you can also compare this year against previous years – and my bill this year is nearly a third higher than last year, but last year we did not have a three-day arctic freeze!
Getting Back More Than You Give
This is a daily meditation from Forward Day by Day, and I know what you are going to say – you are going to read this and say “but she only got back $10; she got exactly what she gave.”
You would be wrong. She also got the joy of giving sacrificially, giving all she had. She didn’t know she was going to get anything back. She got the feeling of doing the right thing.
You give more, you get more. There are so many things that money cannot buy, peaceful sleep, loving family, faraway friends who call you out of the blue because they are thinking of you . . . the Lord blesses a cheerful giver 🙂
FRIDAY, January 31
John 6:6. Jesus said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.
Sue’s young daughter barely got her offering in the collection plate in time. It was her entire allowance of $10. She’d given the money, she said, because she felt God called her to give all she had. But before the young girl could even take her seat, someone in the row behind gave her a folded $10 bill. Obedience had been rewarded.
Like Sue’s daughter, we are prompted to do things that might challenge our comfort zone. It could be the nudging to give more than we think we can afford, or to take on a task we are uncertain we can accomplish, or to provide a sacrificial act of grace or kindness for the sake of another. God often calls us to give beyond what we can see and reason, whether time, talent, or treasure. Perhaps then we can better see how much God can make of our little.
Jesus’ feeding of the multitude, told in the gospel we read today, did not depend on the disciples having enough food but on their willingness to bring what they had to him so he could increase it. As they served the food, the supplies grew until there was enough to satisfy the hungry crowd with leftovers. Our willingness to give always results in food that keeps on feeding.
191 Nepali Laborers Died in Qatar in 2013
From Agence France, a report that 191 Nepali laborers died in Qatar in ONE year:
Nearly 200 Nepali migrant workers died in Qatar last year, many of them from heart failure, officials said Monday, figures that highlight the grim plight of labourers in the Gulf nation.
Tens of thousands of impoverished Nepalis head every year to Qatar, where a construction boom is gathering pace as it prepares to host the 2022 football World Cup.
The Nepal embassy in Doha said it registered 191 deaths last year compared with 169 the year before, with a foreign ministry official describing many of the deaths as “unnatural”.
“In the year 2013, a total of 191 Nepali migrant workers died in Qatar,” Harikanta Paudel, a senior embassy official, told AFP by telephone.
“The highest number of deaths occurred in July when 32 workers died,” Paudel said.
Qatar is under mounting pressure over poor conditions for migrant labourers, particularly during the blisteringly hot summer, in the gas-rich nation’s booming construction industry.
A Kathmandu-based foreign ministry official told AFP that a third of the deaths recorded were due to “unnatural” heart failure.
“Young and healthy men in their twenties and thirties have died… it is unnatural,” said official Subhanga Parajuli.
“Cardiac arrest is followed by traffic accidents as another main cause of death. The third cause of death is injuries during work,” Parajuli said.
An Amnesty International report released last November said migrant workers in Qatar endured a series of abuses including “non-payment of wages, harsh and dangerous working conditions, and shocking standards of accommodation”.
The rights group said its researchers overheard one construction firm manager use the term “animals” to describe migrant workers, while a labourer told the watchdog that “Nepalis are treated like cattle”.
Qatari authorities last October said allegations of abuse of labourers working on World Cup facilities were exaggerated but insisted they took such claims seriously.
More than one million Nepali migrant workers toil in the Gulf region and Southeast Asia. Qatar alone hosts around 400,000 Nepalis as part of its two-million strong migrant workforce.
Ms. Rebecca L. Morgan Wants to Make Sure I Get My 10.5M
What do you want to bet that those fees are whoppers? 🙂
From: MS REBECCA L.MORGAN service@un.com
From: Ms.Rebecca L.Morgan
Att:Dear Friend .
This is to inform you that I came to Nigeria yesterday from USA,after series of complains from the FBI and other Security agencies from Asia, Europe,Oceania, Antarctica,South America and the United States of America respectively,against the Federal Government of Nigeria and the British Government for the rate of scam activities going on in these two nations.
I have met with President GoodLuck of Nigeria who claimed that he has been trying his best to make sure you receive your fund into your account through their reserve account in USA.
Right now,as directed by our secretary general Mr. Ban Ki-Moon,We are working in collaborations with the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) and have decided to waive away all your clearance fees/Charges and authorize the Government of Nigeria to effect the payment of your compensation of an amount of $10.5M approved by both the British/United States government and the UN into your account without any delay.The only fee you are required to pay in other to confirm your fund in your account is COURT NOTARIZATION FEE to the UN.
Sincerely,you are a lucky person because I have just discovered that some top Nigerian’s/African’s and British Government Officials are interested in your fund and they are working in collaboration with One Mr.Ben S.Bernanke,FAKE FBI and others from USA to frustrate you and thereafter divert your fund into their personal account.
I have a very limited time to stay in Nigeria here so I would like you to urgently respond to this message with your full name, full address,direct phone number so that I can advise you on how best to confirm your fund in your account within the next 72 hours.
Sincerely yours,
Ms.Rebecca L.Morgan
United Nations Under-Secretary
General for Internal Oversight.
God Bless Gulf Power Emergency Crews!
“You guys OK?” our son queried.
“Have power? Have internet?” he followed up.
Yes. Yes, thanks be to God and by the grace of the Gulf Power Emergency Crews who must have cleared that broken branch of the line, or restrung the line that fell from the weight of the ice – or whatever caused the outage.
Can’t binge watch True Detective with no cable 😦 We lost electricity around 10:30 last night. It fluttered, it re-gridded, fluttered, re-gridded, they have all these work-arounds now so that it’s been a couple years since we actually lost power, but when it went down, it took everything, even the street lights. It was DARK. We got out our little hand-cranked radio/lights from LLBean that we use for hurricane emergencies, to take a look outside.
It looked like snow, but it was frozen ice. The road was a sheet of ice. No cars; for the most part there are a few people out there, but most of Pensacola is wisely staying inside. This is NOT driving weather.
It is supposed to warm later today; it has been 23°F for about 4 hours now. Our son’s internet is still down.
Last night AdventureMan made the best seafood soup EVER. It was from the January Southern Living, Gulf Seafood Stew, served with Johnny cakes and a dipping sauce – it was THE BEST.
We haven’t suffered. When the lights went out, when the heat went off, we went to bed. I didn’t even hear the electricity come back on, very early this morning, but AdventureMan did, and together we blessed those brave, hard workers who have to go out into this blistering cold and fix the lines so that the rest of us can be safe and warm in our homes.
Pensacola Ice Storm
Timing is everything. I had wait to get these photos until enough ice had formed to make it interesting, but before I lost what little light we had with the clouds, rain, sleet and now freezing rain.
If you are the praying kind, I ask your prayers for the homeless, those without heat, those who still have to make it home (so far the roads are OK but the bridges may start icing soon) and for these poor helpless birds seeking shelter on a night which will show them no pity.
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