Sunday, March 20, 2005

It has been a very nice weekend. I can't say that I got much accomplished, but that's okay. Tom and friends' band practice was at our house again yesterday. I sincerely hope the neighbors enjoyed it. And I mean that sincerely. (Cheshire cat grin here).

Tom and Billy have gone to visit Steve at Washington Hospital Center this afternoon. Maybe we can finally get the right story about how he is doing this time! Having information go through several people is like the old game of telephone, and by the time the message gets to the last person, it's NOTHING like it was when it started out!

I was reading the book about the Kansas pioneer women and it told about how they used to build "soddies", or houses out of sod, because there were no trees to make lumber with. This is what it says:

"Harnessing the strength of several yoke of oxen, they used a special grasshopper plow or sod cutter to slice strips of sod from the earth. A sharp spade was then used to chop the strips into individual bricks. Weighing a full fifty pounds apiece, these blocks generally measured one foot wide, two feet long and four inches thick. In general, the typical sod cabin was constructed by stacking the sod bricks, one layer after another, around the perimeter of the site. Laid with grass side down, the blocks were normally placed side by side to form walls two feet thick. In all, it took nearly one full acre of prairie turf to provide enough bricks for the average one room soddy, which usually measured sixteen by twenty feet and weighed nearly ninety tons."

I found this fascinating. (It doesn't take much, you know!)

I watched yet another movie last night - but this one doesn't count toward my slovenly-bon-bon-eating-housewife tally. I watched this one with Jerry, so instead it counts as spending-time-with-hubby. We watched Wyatt Earp on the History Channel. I must confess that when he said he wanted to watch it, I figured it would be a really good time to do laundry, clean the cabinets, shampoo the cats, detail the vehicles.....you get the picture. Instead, I found myself watching it, and when Jerry fell asleep before the ending, I kept watching it because it was a good movie! It was also a long movie - four hours!

Just now while I was typing this, Tom called to let me know that they were leaving the hospital and were on their way home. Steve must be doing well. Tom said that they saw on a hospital map that there was a Blimpie's in the hospital. Steve is allowed to have anything to eat and Tom and Billy were hungry, so they decided to go there and bring Steve something. Tom said they wandered around for a long time and couldn't find the Blimpie's so they stopped at the cafeteria and asked two security guards they saw there. When they were asked how to get to the Blimpie's, Tom said the guards said that they didn't know there was one, and if they had, they surely wouldn't be eating in the cafeteria! I wonder if they were new?!

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