Author: rvingwithapurpose

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Today was another beautiful winter day in north Alabama. We have bad weather coming so we really enjoyed today. A lightweight jacket was all you needed today. Looks like we may make it out of Alabama next week without having to winterize Fred. However, we will be sure to take the RV antifreeze with us. We never leave home without it during the winter, even though we hope to be far enough south to not have to worry about freezing up.

This morning we went into Oneonta to take care of banking business. We have, we think, completed the business for Juno’s estate and closed that bank account. Strange feeling.

This afternoon we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and use this day to reorganize all the tools, clean out the truck and repack Fred’s bays. After ten weeks of work in Lumberton, we really needed to take care of this task. Now maybe we can find things once again, at least for the first week of the next project.

We got lots of walking in today too, over 16,500 steps today and 6.5 miles. Now if we can just continue to form good habits.

After making scratch cream soups (chicken, celery and mushroom) with Debra, we decided to try making split-pea soup today. It is an Instant Pot recipe and we really like it. We have been using Alessi brand of mix and doctoring it a little. We decided that it was just too salty and used this recipe to duplicate the Alessi but less salty. Split-pea is certainly not a pretty soup but our adjusted recipe is really good. Another keeper.

Hope everyone has a good week. Strange. Keep having to stop and think about what day it is. Sure seemed like Monday.

Christmas Day, Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Today was cloudy and cool all day. But it was a very good day because it was Christmas Day. We started the day with gifts and remembering our gift of salvation, and then we had our Blueberry Baked French Toast that we started last night. This was a new recipe and we decided it was a keeper. We might make a few little changes but it was very good. You really can’t go wrong when you use enough blueberries.

After breakfast went to the nursing home to spend the rest of the morning with Helen and Jean. They seemed to enjoy the visit, so we are glad we could spend part of the day with them. We would have loved to have gotten them out of the facility but neither one is really able to do that anymore.

We got a good deal of exercise today, walking. We are trying to get back to 5-6 miles/day. Haven’t been doing that lately and can tell. After some walking, we prepared our traditional Christmas meal of steamed snow crab legs. They were so good! We don’t do this often so it was treat. Otherwise it was a quiet afternoon with some more exercise and movies.

Hope you made some good memories with your families while celebrating the birth of Jesus.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Today was a beautiful December day. Definitely jackets required, but nice. We really enjoyed the sunshine. Just makes you feel better. We get these really nice Christmas Eve days fairly often in north Alabama but they are always appreciated. We remember those Christmas Eves and Christmas Days with highs in the teens.

This morning was spent doing more accounting, shredding paper, and mundane stuff like that. Anyone who has done accounting in the past knows that the first of the year you are always behind and we have been working to avoid some of the January long days/nights of work. Wednesday we will be closing one bank account and within another week hopefully another. That will decrease next year’s work a little. Two accounts we won’t have to deal with and balance each month. We are slowly making progress. But today we remembered we still have to prepare one more tax return for both our Moms. Yuk!

After taking some mail to the post office, we decided to hike out to the star to see if we could rappel down to some of the bulbs that can only reached by rope. It was such a nice afternoon for a hike. We were able to replace a few bulbs and Donna just sent us a text saying that she noticed the difference when driving by tonight. She and Barry did most of the work this year. Glad we could contribute a little. We sure need to find some younger people to take over the star. We would be glad to continue to help financially and when in town do some work but we are getting a little too old to be rappelling down the mountain. We are praying God will send someone.

This evening we prepared our Christmas Blueberry Baked French Toast to be ready for breakfast in the morning. It needs to soak overnight. Now we are relaxing and doing a few NOMADS emails. We hope everyone is ready for the celebration of our Lord’s birth tomorrow. In the midst of all the excitement, food, and family, please remember to keep Him the center of your celebration. It will make for a much better day.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

We woke up to another gray, damp day. But it rapidly improved since we met Barry and Donna at Huddle House for breakfast before church. Okay, the weather didn’t really improve that much but getting together with them always brightens us up.

After breakfast we attended a wonderful, uplifting and funny service at Lester Memorial UMC. Pastor Harvey started a thought-provoking Christmas message using pictures of his grandson acting as the angel in the nativity. It was hilarious. If you have a few minutes click here to check it out at the church’s Youtube channel.

The rest of the day was spent working on books and taxes and installing a new kitchen faucet at Aunt Helen’s house.