BY BEA WESTERBERG

Month Number Two

Welcome to the shortest month of the year! February also includes the Valentine’s Day event and that can be good for eating out, flowers and candy. February still feels like a “winter” month but then it is followed by March, and that can be a combination of “winter” and “spring” weather. The lion and the lamb thing for March can be really mixed up.

The end of January was really WINTER and I had the frozen fingers to prove it. I have been filling my own gas tank for many years and 99.9 percent of the time have been paying by credit card inside the gas station. There was always something I really needed or maybe just wanted and that included milk for the home refrigerator or a nice hot chocolate to warm me up on a cold day. It appears that the bad people must have caused all the gas stations in town (Hastings) to require prepayment before you get a single drop of gas. It was a cool -11 degrees when I tried to get my credit card to work at a local gas station. It was just not working! I would take my gloves off to try to pull the credit card back out of the tiny slot. Repeat-Repeat-Repeat! I almost had to go inside and get a person to come out and remove the non-working credit card but I finally got it out and decided (with a few #%& unlady like words) to forget trying to get gas that day and drove off. I ended up with my hands tucked in my coat sleeves for half an hour at rug hooking before my hands warmed up enough to be usable. Other people had told me that also had been having credit card problems at this station.

I waited for a really warm day of 18 degrees and went to another gas station that had much better instructions for using the credit card and it worked on the first try! I did tell the check out staff that I was very thankful they had a good system in place that took my credit card on the first try.

The other big event of my life was cleaning out the main floor coat closet. The last time this event took place Husband Larry said it needed to be cleaned out and he did just that. He TOSSED EVERYTHING OUT OF THE CLOSET and said he did his part. I was left to deal with everything else. To say that made me a bit unhappy would be putting it very, very mildly. I had a mission to find a few objects and I knew that this time it was all me so I better get an attitude adjustment and get the job done. This turned into a bittersweet time as I making it a closet for myself. How we got all that stuff into that one area will forever be a mystery. A lot of decisions had to made on what I was going to keep, what was be to donated and what went to trash. It really was like a Christmas shopping trip because I discovered a number of things I did not know we even owned. The mice must have slipped those things in at some point. The good part is that it is the right season to take all the men’s coats, boots and gloves to Hastings Family Service. I am not sure of the hat collection. Does anyone need maybe about 50 baseball type caps for their collection? The first one I hear from gets them for free and maybe a plate of cookies from me.

Baking time is still a very good thing to do for at least a few more months. I read an interesting article on the room temperature eggs compared to just out of the refrigerator eggs when used for baking. If the recipe says “room temp” they really mean it be at room temp which is listed as 68 to 72 degrees. You can get in that range in about 10 minutes by putting the cold eggs in hot, not boiling water. The room temp eggs are almost always being added to butter and sugar that has been beaten together first. The sugar and butter make “bubbles” and the warm egg helps hold it all together. The cold egg crashes the “bubbles” and you get butter pieces and a watery like batter. This makes flatter cakes and cookies as an end result. Note: I still like flat cookies!