You Know You're Retired When

• You can go to a craft show early in the morning on a week day.
• Your "lunch" is the sample aisle at Sam's Club or Costco. Or your lunch and dinner is the special Holiday food sampling at Sam's Club.
• You do all your banking on Friday at the community bank because they have coffee and cookies.
• You are utterly fascinated by the machinery that picks up your garbage (ours is automated) and that picks up your leaves. And you can spend the ten minutes it takes to pick up your leaves staring blankly at the process.
• You can have lunch at any time - late even, especially if due to lunch in the sample aisle at Sam's.
• Dinner is even later because of the late lunch.
• Honey-do time is now spread over the entire week/month/year because DH is retired too!
• You plan your meals out at local eateries according to their daily specials.
• Laundry day is now any day. This is one of my favorites. I hated spending my day off catching up on cleaning and laundry.

Ups & Downs

DH and I have spent the last couple weeks trying to get pictures organized (and off the furniture in the guest room, and the floor, etc) and hung on the walls. All this in anticipation of our first over night guest, younger daughter from the frozen Great Lakes state.

Well, Tuesday night our bubble was burst when younger daughter called me to relate the details of the accident she had that evening. We are very grateful nobody was injured, but it kills her trip here for the week of Thanksgiving.

So, younger daughter, if you are reading here is the menu for next week:

Sunday - Vegetable Lasagna.

Monday - Sweet and sour meatballs. This is a huge favorite in our house.

Tuesday - not planned. Probably would have been some leftovers, or dinner out.

Wednesday - Pancake dinner - my kids and DH love my chocolate chip pancakes.

Thursday - Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes & green bean casserole. Shrimp cocktail appetizers. Dessert to be determined. Rumor has it that we might have DQ ice cream cake.

Friday - Turkey pot pie - homemade from leftovers from Thursday's dinner.

Saturday - To be determined.

I rarely cook that often, but since the whole family was gonna be around for a week, thought we'd get some nice family dinners out of it.

Maybe Christmas ...

Monday Stuff

The Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion perform vital functions for Veterans in this country. One service they perform is serving as color guards at veteran funerals.

All fine and good, but it disturbs me that they mark milestones and celebrate having served at 1000 funerals. OK, marking the milestone is fine, but pictures and newspaper articles about them celebrating having served at 1000 funerals, just strikes me as wrong.

Today, like so many other families, we gave up our land line, which DH insisted we have installed. Doesn't matter that almost no one calls us on that line, he had to have it. Since we were "bundling" with Charter (the worst service of any cable company) and our year deal ran out, we had to drop it. Most people call our cell phones anyway. Actually, the only person who called us on a regular basis was the ding-bat who thought she was calling her voice mail. What does that say about someone, that she doesn't even know her own number? I can't say I'll miss her two to three times a week wrong numbers trying to access her voice mail.

What's for Breakfast

This came from Middle-Aged-Woman over at Unmitigated.

What's your favorite breakfast? Depends. On a daily basis, it is two flavors of Post Trail mix cereal mixed together (Raisin walnut and Cranberry Vanilla), a half banana, and OJ with pulp. Oh and to go with it Southern Pecan coffee (decaf or regular) from Joe Muggs (Books-A-Million.)

If you were breakfast, what would you be? One of those IHOP coffee cake pancakes! Or the shortcake ones they had last year.

Egg Yolks: runny or solid? Only slightly runny with egg whites solid. Like my eggs over medium.

Bacon or sausage? Bacon, extra extra crisp. No limp bacon here.

Weekend breakfast: healthy or indulgent? Indulgent. At Panera, using their WIFI while DH reads the Sunday Paper. No place like it in this little burg.