Corning Museum of Glass

The Gift Shop

Back in October, the husband and I went to Upstate New York to celebrate a belated 35th wedding anniversary trip.  We had a wonderful time.  There is just so much to see and do in Upstate New York!  But one of my favorite stops was on the way home.  We stopped at the Corning Museum of Glass and explored the history of glass and of glass blowing.  It was a fascinating trip!  This picture, below is a giant display of Pyrex dishes.  THAT is fascinating to look at and explore!

Not only did we learn the history of glass from the beginning of time, we learned the importance of modern engineering in making the glass that we use everyday.  Think about car windshields.  The engineering behind the glass that you can see through, that breaks but doesn't shatter is astounding.  As we were roaming through the studio, I wished that teenage me, who was desperately seeking a career had known about this.  I most likely would have looked into a career in this field.  But enough of that.

From the brains at the glass blowing studio!

For me, the highlight was the Glass Blowing Studio, where we got to watch the masters at work, as they talked us through the process of Blowing Glass.  It was fascinating to find out why things are done the way that they are done in a glass blowing studio.  We enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed through two separate shows, sitting relatively high up the first time, and then in the front row the second time!

Beautiful blown glass vases at the front of the studio.

Blown glass creation from the Master Glass Blower!
It's at the beginning!

All the Blues in the Sky by Renee Watson

Trigger Warning: Grief, Loss, Human Emotions

Newberry Award Winner, 2026

What an emotional roller coaster.  

Sage's 13th birthday party was supposed to be amazing.  A fabulous day with her best friend Angel was planned. Unfortunately, Angel was killed by a drunk driver on her way to Sage's house.

I love how Watson explores the overwhelming emotions of grief.  While each of us grieves in our own unique way, there are some things that are common among everyone who grieves.  As Sage explores how she can move on with her grief therapy group, we experience the roller coaster of emotions that flood her life without warning.

Suitable for anyone who is suffering the loss of a loved one, this book will help the reader made sense of the constant flood of conflicting emotions.  I was able to read the book in one sitting - which is a good thing.  I ended up on my own roller coaster of emotions, reliving my own grief journey.  I had a good cry, but it was so good to know that I am not alone in finding my way after a great loss.

I leave you with one of my favorite parts from the book:

"When I'm on a plan as a passenger and we're experiencing turbulence, I remind myself that airplanes are made to handle turbulence and pilots are trained on what to do when it happens. I remind myself that turbulence is uncomfortable but normal.  You just have to keep rising.

Ms. Barbara surprises me with a deep chuckle.

She says something under her breath. I don't think the other girls hear her, but I do. "As a matter of fact, life's turbulence is the same way."

The Reister's Daughter

 It's been cold.  Very cold.  So very cold in Maryland.  One cold Friday when I was off work, I stopped by The Reister's Daughter for a cup of coffee and a sandwich.  Located on Main Street in Reisterstown, this little coffee shop has become a community hub.  The building itself is considered to be a Historic Building, The Beckley House.  This building was built in 1779.  It is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Reisterstown.  Walking into the cafe, located on the first floor of the building, is walking into a juxtaposition of time and place.  

I had the best Egg Salad Sandwich I've had in a very long time.  And a Biscoff Latte.  I ran into a friend who lives in the area, and we sat and caught up for a while. We watched the kids leaving school and laughed a lot!

Drink Specials:

When I left, I stopped and picked up some Banana Pudding and a Vegan Red Velvet Bundt cake.  They were so very, very good. 

Red Velvet (vegan) Bundt Cake

Banana Pudding!

It was a perfect way to spend a very cold day!

Website for the Reister's Daughter: https://thereistersdaughter.com/

Transfer Slides to Digital

 We need to go back in time to delve into this story.

During the middle of the pandemic shut downs in 2020, I received a phone call from my step mother telling me that I needed to get my Dad's "stuff" out of her house.   Keep in mind, Dad passed away in 2008.  The last time I heard from her was at Dad's funeral.  She sold their house and disappeared off the face of the planet.  I had no idea where she was, and no idea how to get in touch with her.  Her cell phone was disconnected and anything I sent to her e-mail bounced back.

Fast forward to 2020.  She called me and told me I needed to get my Dad's "stuff" (she used another word) or she was going to throw it out.  Keep in mind, there were still travel restrictions in much of the Mid-Atlantic at that time.  After much discussion, I arranged to pick up Dad's stuff the day after the travel ban was lifted at the Wal-Mart parking lot in State College, PA.  My oldest was a Grad Student at Penn State at that time.  He had been home with us for weeks by then.  He went with me - he had a Pennsylvania Driver's License.  Just in case if we were pulled over, we would be able to say that I was taking him home.

Anyway.  We drive up to State College.  One of the stranger trips I've ever taken up there.  The roads were weirdly empty, and the town itself seemed hollow somehow.

When the car pulled up, it was not my step-mother inside.  It was her niece.  She had a trunkful of Dad's stuff.  Old family photos and documents dating back to the Civil War.  His military records. And best of all, his slides.  Years of family history was on those slides.  

When the world reopened again, one of the libraries near me had added a Preservation Station. At this place, I could scan the slides and convert them to digital. All I had to do was make an appointment, bring my own USB Drive, and spend lots of time.

Last month, I finally found the time to convert the slides.  I found that I could convert about 1 carousel in 1 hour.  I had 20 carousels.  I signed up for Saturdays, Fridays, and hours after work.  Slowly but surely, I converted all of those slides to digital.  

I found a treasure trove of pictures!  Everything is now printed out, and I have a very large box of photos, waiting to be moved into a scrapbook. I'm headed off to a scrapbooking retreat in April, and my plan is to scrapbook that treasure trove at that time.  There are so many wonderful memories in those pictures.  I am looking forward to spending time with them all!

In the meantime, I give you this photo, of my dog Winnie back in the 1970's.  Winnie absolutely loved water, and she loved chasing water.  Turning on the sprinkler was always a great time.  I loved watching her chase after the water!

Random Pictures

A random sampling of the things that tickle me so much while I'm out and about that I have to take a picture of them so I can share them with other people!  If you know me in real life, you know it's just a matter of time before I break out my phone and say "Look what I saw the other day!"

I found these at Wal-Mart.

Cookie scented deodorant.

How could you possibly go wrong? 

 

 

 

So this year, I wrote my list of grievances of every bad thing from the last 2 years.

I took the list and burned it in the fireplace on New Year's Eve, effectively letting them go. 

I found these at Target!  Bridgerton drops later this month.

Obviously, I had to buy these in order to celebrate! 

Manga March Madness

I don't know if I've mentioned it lately, but I am a librarian in a public library.  Two years ago, I was assigned to go out to our local high school and meet once a week with the kids and talk about "something" for an hour after school.  Honestly, I was at a loss. My own kids last saw their teenage years over 10 years ago, and the world has been through immense change since I was a teenager. I do know that kids enjoy reading Manga (so do I) and that we were heading into that perfectly wonderful time of the year known as March Madness, where the NCAA looks to crown the championship college basketball team.  Brackets abound everywhere.  So, I decided to combine those two things and make a Manga March Madness for us to discuss.  Which heroes/anti-heroes were the best?  Who would reign supreme in a battle?  

We were to meet once a week, discuss the characters, and then vote on who the winners were each week to move on to the next bracket.  I picked my favorite characters, and then I polled my co-workers to find their favorite characters.  And then, I came up with this bracket. 

For over a month, we met in the media center after school and voted on who was the best of the characters.  The final four came down to Yor from Spy x Family, Tatsu from Adventures of a Househusband, Saitama from One Punch Man, and   I know, that's a wild group of characters, isn't it?  

So, I'm curious. If you were to build a bracket?  Who do you feel must be included?  

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

 This book, written by Kim Michele Richardson, is a masterpiece.  There are so many levels to this book, so many stories within stories, within stories that it took me a while to process it all.  I need to put it all down on paper.  There are just so many parts to this story that need to be explored. I'm going to attempt to pull all of my thoughts together here... bear with me.  Just know, I loved this book.  It's a worthwhile read. My thoughts are below the trigger warnings.

  

Trigger Warnings: Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment, Racism, Prejudice, Domestic Violence and Abuse, Child Death, Violence, Murder, Medical Experimentation, Trauma, Starvation, Poverty.

Summary:

 Cussy Mary, or Bluet, is the last of her kind.  She is one of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky.  Her skin has been blue since birth. There is no known cure for this.  However, the Blue Fugates found themselves ostracized from general society as fear, spread through stories, traveled through the mountains. Bluet has found a job as a Pack Horse Librarian, and travels through the hollers surrounding Troublesome Creek in order to take books to families who would have no reading material otherwise.  As the reader travels through the countryside in the depths of the Depression, the reader sees how truly desperate things were for the poor and hungry during that time.  

So, here are the levels of the story as I saw them:

On the first level, this is the story about the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky.  During the Great Depression, the WPA sent these librarians out into the hills on horseback to deliver books the residents of the coves and hollers of Eastern Kentucky.  With minimal printed materials available, the pack horse librarians were a life line for these families, bringing books, news, and word about what was going on in town.  The routes were downright dangerous.  More than one Pack Horse Librarian died in the line of service.

On the second level, this is the story of the Blue Fugates of Eastern Kentucky.  The story of who they were as people, and the ostracized lives that they led.  Why were they ostracized?  Because they were blue.  "Colored".  Along with all of the connotations that word brought with it in the 1930's.  It's a stark look at racism.

Coal Miners.  There were many coal miners in Eastern Kentucky in the Depression.  It was a good job, if you could get it.  It was also a hard job. My grandfather was a coal miner in the pits in Indiana during the Great Depression.  I've always heard stories about how hard the work was, but I don't think that the depth of horrors of that job hit me until I was reading the story of Cussy's father.

Lastly, it is a stark look at the Great Depression.  The outright starvation that took so many lives. Again, I'd heard stories.  My parents were little in the Great Depression.  One grandfather had a steady job in the coal mines.  The other worked for the WPA.  I've heard stories about how tight money was and how hard food was to come by.  My grandfather who worked for the WPA would bring home a large sack of beans from the government every once in a while, and that bag of beans fed the entire family until the next bag came home.  Granny would stretch those beans in any way that she could. 

During the course of reading this book, I did a lot of research about the Troublesome Creek area.  To this day, it is still a very poor county.  According to citydata.com, 50% of the residents of Hindman live below the poverty level and the average median income is just a little over $23,000.  That data  is from 2023. In the southeastern part of Kentucky, known as Appalachia, where this story is set, there are multiple missions set up by multiple mainline Christian Denominations, attempting to help ease the poverty in the area through education and job skills training.  

The Blue Fugates of Kentucky were a very real people.  They descended from one man - Martin Fugate - who had immigrated from France.  He was white. He married a white girl who had been born and raised in Kentucky.  Four of their seven children were blue.  How wild is it that they both carried that same recessive gene?  (Information from the author's notes in the back of the book.)   I did dive deep into research on the Blue Fugates. They were a very shy and quiet people who kept to themselves.  Understandable.

 

Oatmeal Cookies

Just before the holidays, I picked up those little packets of Instant Oatmeal on clearance.  More oatmeal than I really should have when the expiration date was quickly closing in. (Honestly, some were past their expiration date.) So, I decided to see if I could make oatmeal cookies out of them. I mean, I bought my favorite flavor of oatmeal - apple cinnamon.  How can you go wrong with Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Cookies?

My first batch was good.  Not great.  I used a 1:1 correspondence of packets to the amount of oatmeal that the recipe called for.  This turned out to be overwhelming.  Each packet of instant oatmeal contains about 1/3 cup of oatmeal, plus a TBSP of sugar.  I use the Quaker Oatmeal Cookie recipe.  Following that recipe, and using a 1:1 correspondence for Oatmeal Packets, plus creaming the 1-1/4 cups of sugar that the recipe calls for, that added about an extra 3/4 of a cup of sugar.  Which is way too much sugar.  It was like biting into a sugar cube.  

Note: After we sampled that batch, I took the rest into work, where Tyler proceeded to demolish all of them in less than 4 hours, saying that someone had finally managed to make oatmeal cookies edible.  Let's be honest.  They weren't oatmeal cookies, they were sugar held together with a little bit of oatmeal and some flour.

Since then, I've been experimenting.  I feel like creaming the shortening and sugar together are an imperative step in the cookie making process.  And the oatmeal packets have a lot of white sugar in them.  So, I began experimenting with the amount of white sugar that I added to be creamed, and changed the proportion of oatmeal packets to regular oatmeal.  

After much taste testing, here is my final version, based upon the Quaker Oatmeal recipe:

Apple Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups shortening, softened (We use shortening because of family dairy allergies)

¾ cup brown sugar

¼ cup granulated sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 ½ cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

2 cups dry oats

3 packets of instant oatmeal, your flavor of choice

Directions:

Heat oven to 375*

Cream together sugars and shortening until creamy.

Add egg and vanilla, beat well.

Add all ingredients except oats, mix well.

Add oats in all their forms, mix well.

Drop by rounded TBSP onto ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake for 8-10 minutes.

Let cool on cookie sheet for a couple of minutes, then move to a wire rack.

Store tightly covered.

Spy x Family

Sometime during the pandemic, I discovered how much I love graphic novels and manga.  To me, it's an entirely new genre of books, and there is a lot of ground to cover in this area.  There is a wealth of material in this age group, and since I had never read any of it, I had an astounding array of reading materiel to see me though a very uncertain time.

I find that I love graphic novels and manga for several reasons:  

1) I love the art.  

2) The visual storytelling is phenomenal.  I enjoy that the art in and of itself allows me to visualize stories in a way that I never would have before.

3) The stories are unique and fresh.  I don't find expected storylines.  They are all wonderfully unexpected!

4) I find that I really enjoy the challenge of reading Manga, which reads from right to left - or backwards of what we consider standard in the United States.

One of my favorites is Spy x Family.  (Query: do you pronounce the x or not when saying the name of the title?)

In this beautiful story, super spy Loid Forger discovers that his next mission requires him to have a family in order to execute the mission.  

Loid goes to an orphanage and adopts a young girl named Anya.  It turns out that Anya is a telepath.

And then Loid needs to find a wife, so he marries the beautiful Yor.  Yor is secretly a highly paid and very successful assassin.

This little family then adopts a dog.  A dog that can see the future. And can communicate with Anya telepathically.

With Anya as the only person who knows everyone's secrets, she works hard to ensure that her family is safe.  She works to keep Yor out of trouble, and maneuvers situations to Loids' advantage.  The dog works in conjunction with Anya to keep everyone in the family safe. 

The adventures this family has are fantastic.  I love that the author does their best to keep Anya as childlike and safe as possible, considering that she is a telepath and knows everyone's secrets.  But, all Anya really wants is a family.  And everything that she does is to keep her family safe.

It's wild.  It's fun.  And it is unpredictable.  I really enjoy this series!  Just a note - in our library, this is shelved in the Adult Manga collection.  So while the characters are adorable, some of the situations in which the characters find themselves lean towards an adult audience.

Right now, Spy x Family continues through Volume 15.  The anime version is also out (through season 3) and there is one full length movie to date.

Puppy Yoga

Have you heard of the trend to have Yoga classes with animals?  While I have never ventured out for Goat Yoga, our gym did sponsor a Puppy Yoga class in conjunction with one of our local animal rescues.  Let's be very honest.  I did very little yoga over the course of that hour.  I did do a lot of snuggling with puppies, and laughing when I was watching them play!  How about you?  Have you ever been to a yoga class with animals?  What was your experience?