Dining room

Here's what the dining room looks like so far. It still needs some work, though.

Barbecue sauce

Wednesday's Food front will be all about barbecue sauces. I know most people here prefer Bridges barbecue (most like one a little more than the other, but it's a 50-50 split on which comes out on top).

While I like both of those places, my barbecue heart lies with The Pit, a dive that's close to downtown Hickory, but a little hard to find. It's not exactly on the beaten path, but I think that's part of what makes it special. I don't know if you can buy it as part of a sandwich or in a restaurant - we always buy a few pounds and freeze a bunch of it so mom can pull it out of the freezer when she needs dinner in a hurry. Stick it in the Crock Pot and let it go until you get home from work... The meat's always great, but I love The Pit's sauce. It's a scorcher. It takes about 1/2 a cup of sauce for about six sandwiches' worth of barbecue.

My other favorite sauce is for Cattlemen's barbecue... but that's a whole different animal... It's what I use when I make my own barbecue at home. I won't give away the rest of the recipe...

What are your favorite sauces?

Saturday afternoons - this one's for the boys

Although I don't get a lot of Saturday afternoons to do whatever, I did this Saturday... and it was fabulous.

I ran errands, started Christmas shopping, did some cleaning, finished painting inside the house (with the exception of a few doors) and made a trip to Lowe's, where I purchased some brushed nickel accessories for the house...

My other Saturday activity: baseball. I love watching it, but don't do it often, so I rarely know team stats, etc. Today I caught a few innings of the Yankees-Red Sox game. (For the record, I am a Yankees fan, but I'll root for whoever I like best at the moment if the Yanks aren't playing.) I don't know what innings I was watching, but I saw Jorge Posada get creamed by a Red Sox baserunner (who, incidentally, had once been a football player - and had the size to prove it). And then I saw the Red Sox lead go from two runs to like 5 in one inning, at which point I decided it really wasn't worth watching. The game was heading into blowout land. Final score: Yankees, 1; Red Sox 10. Needless to say, I was disappointed and went outside to mow.

Funky watermelons

My uncle sent me an e-mail with photos of the coolest watermelons I've ever seen - they're square! How weird is that? Evidently some farmers in Japan decided to get creative and grew the watermelons in glass boxes that shaped them as they grew. Pretty cool, huh?

Wondering why I haven't posted in a while?

Wondering why I haven't posted in a while?

I've been on vacation to the beach with my family.

Here's a photo from the waterpark (from their Web site) we played at during the afternoons. I'm definitely a fan of the lazy river (at the back of the photo).

I don't have many photos from the trip, though... my camera batteries died while I was there.

On a very good note, SPF 30 and cloudy skies kept me from getting sunburn. Yay!

New Web addiction

I've found a free Web-based Tetris game. This, dear readers, could be my downfall.

I've been a Tetris fan ever since my parents bought me an original Nintendo for Christmas in the third grade.

I've kept my system for one reason - that game.

Actually, Tetris is the reason why I'm a reasonably good page designer. It's all a matter of making the pieces fit. Of course, that's oversimplifying things a bit. But if you keep playing the game, eventually you get better. I'd like to think my work has gotten better during the past few years, and I know my Tetris game has improved - I've been to level 21.

Community garden

Julie Young is handing over the reins of the Seeds of Hope Community Garden to me. I'll be at tonight's PSN meeting to talk about it.

The flier didn't upload well, but send an e-mail to SeedsofHopeShelby@gmail.com of you're interested in learning more about it.

Closet memories

Lifestyles ran a story in Thursday's Spot about how our clothing sometimes holds special memories (and sometimes groans of horror). Everyone has had the moment when they went through their closet and remembered a special date because of a special outfit and I'll go so far as to say that we've all had one of those "What was I thinking?" moments.

Take a minute to share your own clothing memory in the comments section.

Here's mine.

My mother used to make Sunday dresses and other clothes for me and my sisters. They always matched, especially those worn for major holidays. Although I don't have any of those items anymore, every time I see us in those photos I ask my mother if it was fun to torture us. Evidently it was because there's a lot of them...

Typhoid Mary

I don't watch a lot of TV, but in an effort to procrastinate last night, I watched part of a show on etv (South Carolina's public broadcast station) about Typhoid Mary.

I'd always heard the term used to describe someone who made everyone else sick, but I'd never learned about her in school or really heard anything about her.

Turns out, Typhoid Mary was a real person - Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant to the U.S.

She was discovered as the cause of several typhoid outbreaks. She claimed she couldn't be transmitting the disease since she didn't have it. Well, part of that was true. She was the first "healthy carrier" of typhoid fever. The New York health department sent her to an island where they housed other infectious disease patients and essentially had her in solitary confinement.

She fought back and it's probable that William Hearst paid for her legal fees in her lawsuit against the city. She lost that suit, but was eventually released. Mallon was told to never work in the kitchen again because that's how she was spreading the disease. She worked as a laundress for a while, but eventually went back to cooking. She was caught after a number of doctors, nurses and patients got sick with typhoid fever. When officials investigated, they found her working in the kitchen.

So they locked her up on the island again. She ended up dying there of a stroke a number of years later, at which time she was working in the hospital on the island in the lab.

Forty-seven illnesses and three deaths were attributed to Mallon. She didn't infect the most people, nor was she the only healthy carrier who lied and went back to work in the food industry. She was, however, the most severely dealt with - because she was obstinate and fought with the health department and because she was an Irish woman immigrant. Prejudice played a role in her treatment.

The whole thing, however, made me think: Is it right to confine someone with an infectious disease because it's in the interest of the public good?

And now the next time someone's called a "Typhoid Mary" I'll know where it came from.

Cleveland County football

Football here is like nowhere else.

I grew up only a few counties away - my high school won probably three games in four years. I probably went to as many games. I didn't even attend homecoming most years - we always lost anyway.

So when I came to Cleveland County for college, I was surprised to see that people really got into it around here. I guess it's because it's a tradition that people can pass on from generation to generation. It's good to win, but even better to be closer to the people you're around. Football is one of the many common threads in the fabric of this community.

That's something you can be proud of.