A day beyond expectations . . . as perfect as it gets in this life . . . and let me tell you, I'll take it. Thank you, Lord, for such a great blessing. Reconnected with my old boarding school campus and friends (twins) I hadn't seen in 327 months, which is 27 years and 3 months, but putting it in months seemed even more impressive. I like how those numbers worked out, 327 and 27-3.

I just can't write and do this day justice at the moment. It gave me a sense of utter peace, contentment and happiness. What a generous gift. Organic pop tart and hittin' the hay.

Overflowing KEM

Dust accumulates. When you clean it, you are really only redistributing it (hopefully out your door) because matter is neither created nor destroyed, right? Didn't I learn that in science class? I think it's the only thing I learned in science class. But this is why the dust comes back so fast, it's just a mere fact of life and I guess you can fight it or live with it. I gave up the fight long ago and now just call me Marjorie Stonicker, comfortable in my own dust.

Well, I can't really blog tonight because I have to get up in the morning and drive two hours to my old boarding school, Hampden DuBose Academy. It isn't a boarding school anymore, but a day school called Legacy. Anyway, there is a 75th Anniversary Celebration of ongoing Christian education which has remained steadfast to the original intent of the founders, and I'm going and hoping to see some old friends from only 29 years ago. I know the campus has changed a lot, so it's going to be creepy and eerie, almost all the old teachers are gone, there is a little gravesite there, too. Okay, let's focus on the living, KEM.

I was cleaning out some old music today and found old papers on colon cleansing and parasites and all kinds of good stuff. You cannot believe the brochure on colon cleansing, the amount of material, the tiny type on the long pages. I will be reading this for days. OR I could throw it out right now. Your pick.

Oh, the Tampa Bay Rays (from St. Petersburg) are 3 - 1. Well, I think I'll go check on Mystery Monkey, he's such a doll.

Okay, I checked on him, he has T-shirts for sale. Now there's a temptation.

KEM

A spring day in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida.

Go to my childhood home to let the little wee dog out. Buffy.

Walk dog (Jazzi)the nine blocks from my childhood home to the bay, admiring the old homes and shrubs along the way. Sit on a bench in the breeze and take in the sights. The sights were a family (three generations of girls) picnicking on the park, tourists pedaling a carriage down the sidewalk, pretty houses across the water. Walk back is HOT.

Go home and admire my own house, even though Marjorie Stonicker lives there.

Make raisin bran cereal muffins. As I was filling the last of the muffin cups, it hit me that I had completely forgotten to add the sugar to the batter, in spite of comparing two recipes and noting that one used sugar and the other molasses (I was leaning toward molasses since I have some). Well, all the muffins went in a brown paper bag with a note saying, Eat with honey or be sorry.

Ate three muffins with honey. Was not sorry.

Oh yes, and the house smelled like a bar-b-q again from firing up the oven to 400* for the muffins. Really, two days in a row making cooking mistakes. Bermuda is calling.

Laundry.

Go back to my childhood home to let the wee dog out again. Buffy.

Come home and am forced to take a nap, due to sheer heat exhaustion and killer smoke fumes.

Go visit my old-time Florida friends from church, like I do every Thursday evening, then on to choir practice. Receive free kumquats.

Come home and eat lots of free kumquats from someone's back yard, they are just delicious. Catch up on Mystery Monkey. He also enjoyed a sunny spring day in St. Petersburg, Floriday (I ALWAYS type my state with "y" on the end, totally inadvertently, so I'm just giving up and leaving it). I'm sure Mystery Monkey also enjoys free kumquats along with the free tangerines, grapefruit, etc.

More days should be like sunny spring days in St. Petersburg, Floriday. It gives one a sense of peace, a feeling that this kind of quiet gentle waterfront life beats the modern day running hither and yon 'til you're half crazed. At least for my Type, which is not Type A. Wonder what Type I am. I used to be Type A, but I changed.

Okay, that was a meek and mild blogette to go with my meek and mild day. Maybe I'll do it all again tomorrow, with a few improvements like adding molasses at the appropriate time to the batter, which would definitely give some color to the muffins. They turned out pale.

This day is going to finish up with a glass of chocolate milk. I want to take in a foster child, although most days I seem to need some kind of fostering myself. Maybe one day . . .

I realize I typed this up using all kinds of different tenses. My editor can worry about it.

Floriday KEM (Mike actually has a relative named Floriday, but probably spelled differently.)

My house smells like a bar-b-q. This is because I made Pioneer Woman's Chicken Pot Pie and it overflowed in the oven BIG TIME. Smoke was POURING out of the oven. The house was a perfect den of smoke. My stepson was over for dinner. Last night he and his dad went to the Rays opening game where they (the Rays) set off smoke machines before the game started. The point of that? Everyone wants to know, but when I watched the game on TV, I was thinking, Is it raining in the dome (impossible)? Or is my TV set getting grainy (please, no)? This is because, I learned later, the haze of smoke never left the dome, it had nowhere to go. The players' eyes were stinging and everything. Hmm, next idea for celebrating opening game?

So, last night was good practice for Nick and Mike because, whoa, we had thick gray haze of smoke everywhere, and to think I've been wondering how my house could get any dirtier. Also, our smoke detector is OBVIOUSLY not working.

The pot pie was good. It better be. It was also a lot easier than my other pot pie recipe and almost as good. PW says her crust is the ultimate, but really, my crust from the newspaper is better, it has butter and sour cream. PW'S recipe called for shortening. Of course, I ruined my solid shortening. How do you do that, you may ask? Well, years ago I learned the tip from a great cook in our church. You all know it, put water in a measuring cup and then add your Crisco, much easier to measure that way. Fine. Except my organic palm shortening is non-hydrogenated. Whatever hydrogenated does to Crisco, well, it must keep it from MELTING in water. My mechanically pressed organic palm oil kind of gave up the ghost in the water. So, my pie dough texture ended up all freaky. Therefore, I must give PW'S crust recipe another chance before I pass my final judgment.

My other set back was Chop Wizard didn't want to chop up the carrots on the fine grate. About threw my back out of whack slamming down the Chop W lid. You know what, maybe calling this a day is the way to go.

It hit me today that I am a Marjorie Stonicker kind of housekeeper. Maybe I should start a house cleaning service -- Marjorie Stonicker Cleans Up Your Act. Maybe then I would be forced to clean up my own act.

Oh, please say a prayer for Mike's friend, he had a sore throat for a month that turned out to be a throat tumor (cancer). Had surgery today, bless his heart. He asked us to take 30 seconds a day to pray for him, I thought that was very touching. He and his wife introduced Mike and me, so they are special to us, really really nice friends.

5 Alarm Fire KEM

Was hearing good old stories today. My grandmother was friends with the Stonickers. They all lived in Charleston, West Virginia. Mrs. Stonicker lay in bed most of the day. When she finally got up she would get dressed and go downtown for a chocolate soda. Then she's sit on a straight-back chair in the back of her husband's pharmacy. This was her daily routine, her life. She was the original Mover and Shaker. Yikes. Oh, she would make her bed, we think.

She didn't worry about cooking. Every night her husband would ask, What's for dinner? Every night she would drawl, A bah-NAH-na. Every night he would declare, I'm tired of eating bananas for dinner!

I don't know, when I heard that it sent me cleanly over the edge.

Their little daughter Marjorie lived on choclate ice cream in the drug store, her teeth turned into little black stubs. She visited my grandmother A LOT. Of course, poor little Marjorie Stonicker grew up to be the kind of housekeeper who kept her ketchup and mustard in the bathtub.

Oh, and Mrs. Stonicker would say, Mr. Stonicker is so little I have to shake the bed sheets to find him; why, he's smaller than a flea's toenail. People, that's small.

Mrs. Stonicker's sister dated a man named Muddy Grubbs. They dated every night close to forever. The woman would pick Muddy up each evening and bring him to her house for dinner. Muddy had it made. (Unless, of course, she was a one recipe woman and her repertoire consisted exclusively of serving bahNAHnas for dinner, like her sister.) They never married, of course (I'm beginning to sound like Mr. Ed). I don't know who would have gotten the shorter end of that matrimony stick, Muddy suffering bahNAHna dinners 365 days a year, and that, dear friends, only the beginning, or the bride getting stuck with the name Mrs. Muddy Grubbs . . . permanently.

Sweet Tulsa said she wants the house for sale in Driftwood, if I could kindly lend her a piddly $750,000.

I hope I don't forget to watch First Love Second Chance tomorrow night.

My vacuum story ended up smelling like a rose. I went back the next day and said, Hello, the old hepa filter made the new vacuum cleaner smell like rancid burned up smoke, good 'n charred. The nice young girl power vacuumed my hepa filter and said it wouldn't hurt anything as it was an EXHAUST filter, filtering air blowing out from the motor, not sucking bad baby air into the motor. Whew. And the black soot was really from this black felt filter between the hepa filter and the vents. You don't say.

Then I said, That's good, and I can't stand the floor "brush" that scrapes and scratches across the tile like a teacher's fingernails across the chalkboard. No, thank you. The girl totally agreed and traded it out for a lovely soft, quiet bristle brush, like my old beloved vac, way easier to maneuver, too. Then, to be nice, I bought a longish attachment brush that will do baseboards and just cover more area quicker, like when vacuuming the sofa. Don't you just love gettin' an education in vacuums?

But that's not all. She let me bring Jazzi in the store. (Jazzi disappeared into back rooms while I was talking.) So we started talking dog. The bottom line is that Bill-Jac dog food cured her dog of the itch instantly and once and for all. This is BIG. Of course, now I have a 10 pound bag of Science food from the vet, bought two days before this Bill-Jac revelation. I have to use that up, but you'd better bet your bottom dollar that I'm giving Bill-Jac a whirl next. Poor Jazzi, she's so utterly smothered in pollen and rolls around and thrashes on the floor.

The other day a beautiful colored car passed me on the road. I said to myself, I have to catch up to that car and see what dashing color it is, it appeared to be some new exquisite shade of deep green. At the stoplight I pulled up next to it and it was an exquisite shade of green all right. The car was black and it was dusted with pollen. The black coming through the yellow-green pollen made it look like some funky dark green. Listen, I need my eyes checked.

Midnight, 9 hours 'til the next monkey stuff. He signs all his Facebook posts with Zoom-Zoom or Swing-Swing. Cute little monkey. I'll bet he'd love a bahNAHna for dinner every night. Yum-Yum.

KEM owns a new purse, it's extremely loud, Shout-Shout.

Went on a monkey hunt this morning. Saw the tangerine tree and all the peels scattered around on the ground. Talked to a lady who heard the monkey go thump, thump, thump on her roof. She grabbed her camera and went outside. When she looked up at the roof, this little face was peering over the edge. Then he jumped into a small tree that really couldn't support his weight, but he managed to lower himself on supple branches. Thankfully, it wasn't the bend and snap.

So, of course, when you're looking for a monkey you are not going to find a monkey. You have to just go about your daily business and not think about it. Then you might see a monkey. As I left my friend I told her to call me at any monkey sighting. She called but did not leave a message, so now I'm curious. This lady knows a lot about animals, has a home in the wilds of Colorado. She declares this monkey is brilliant. We all know this.

Also, many months ago I told you about this charming kind of French chalet house in Driftwood. I got to see inside a few weeks ago (while sipping lemonade) and it did not disappoint. It's a one-of-a-kind property on the water, the first port in St. Petersburg. Well, the owners had hinted that they might be ready to down-size and sure enough, the house is now for sale. If you want to move and have a cool one million dollars hanging around, I will be happy to introduce you to these lovely people. I do believe Sweet Tulsa has been wanting to move to Florida. If you act now, the price is a few peanut shells of $849,000, worth every penny. If no one springs, it will be listed with a Realtor for a lot more

Going to bed at 9:16 PM didn't work out so hot. Think I fell asleep around 2:30. Why, oh, why???

I have to tell you a story about how our little neighbor growing up got mad because my sister and I couldn't come out to play. She executed clever revenge by . . . maybe I had better seek her permission before spilling the beans. She's all ready said she'll never live it down (as I tell the story at any and all opportunities that present themselves), so I hope she cooperates. It's a CLASSIC.

You know, I'm afraid I have a sleep disorder. Rats.

No REM for KEM

Pardon me while I rock my world and go to bed by 9 PM.

Today at church my friend told me the Mystery Monkey is swinging on vines in her trees and doing things on her roof. Maybe tomorrow when I go help her I shall see for myself. That would give me a puffed head as I would be one of a handful of MM'S tens of thousands of fans who has actually seen him. Famous.

This week my goal is to make every kind of doc appt. available. That should keep me busy.

Jazzi knows how to pick out her new gross yummy dog food from the old stuff, since I'm mixing the two to transition to the new diet. More on this tomorr.

Hope your day was full of joy.

Love and Peace,
KEM