Paul & Mary's Daily Diary

Fact: Did you know that July is National Ice Cream Month?  It’s the perfect time to indulge in the sweet treat, though you’d need a huge appetite to master the most giant scoop ever, which weighed a belly-busting 3,010 pounds.  Created by Kemps Dairy in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, as part of their 100th anniversary, the scoop stood 5’6″ high, stretched 6’2″ wide, and was made of around 733 containers of ice cream.  What flavor, you ask?  Strawberry, which means that it was a pretty pink and looked as good as it surely tasted!

The rain is gone, for now.  It was pretty heavy a couple of times around 3:00 AM.

We were up and cleaning the house early because it was time for our house cleaners to come, and we wanted to be neat!  This logic sometimes fails me?

I used to get bummed out when it rained; then I realized that it’s God’s way of washing off hippies. Mary went outside to make sure the doggy toys were out of the path of the rain.

Dancing in the rain?

We heard the storm coming when the iPhone went off and warned us of approaching lightning.  The iPhone started smoking and it flashed bright lights.

We had rain on and off all morning.

Today, after the cleaners depart, we will work on the new Hope Chest!  It needs a slight amount of work, and we will clean it with Mary’s super-secret German wood wax.

A little elbow grease, and it looked like new.

The rain was pretty hard mid-morning, and Scout enjoyed chasing the thunder off.

The rains came

It was raining, and he was out barking the thunder away; we both got wet bringing him inside.  He is a funny dog.

We stayed under the patio but first, we retrieved Scouts’ toys from the yard.  Mary recovered Moosey, his favorite toy, from drowning.

Moosey is saved!

We both have readers, Mary has a Nook, and I have a Kindle.  We read under the patio for a good hour, just listening to the rain.  Reading one book is like eating one potato chip; we usually have two books, each going simultaneously.

The hope chest was treated with oil, and the oil was left to soak into the wood.  You can read about the history of the company that made the cedar chest here.

We were amazed to understand young women today have NO idea what a Hope Chest is; we tried about ten times asking girls under thirty if they knew, and nine out of ten drew a blank!

The chest looks fantastic after almost 100 years.

The clouds were beautiful all afternoon.  We made some zucchini bread.  We used the enormous overgrown zucchini, and half of it made six mini-loaves of bread.  How does the zucchini bread court his sweetheart?  With lots of flours.

While working in the kitchen, we watched TV movies.  The first one was underway when I came in, so I decided to take a nap.  We also studied some recipe books we recently procured.

It was called  How Do You Know.  When everything she’s ever known is suddenly taken from her, Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) begins a fling with Matty (Owen Wilson), a major league baseball player and self-centered ladies’ man.  Before their relationship takes off, Lisa meets up with George (Paul Rudd), a straight-arrow businessman facing his own serious issues with his father (Jack Nicholson) and the law.  Just when everything seems to be falling apart, it doesn’t.

The second movie we watched was Red River from 1988.  Red River was a remake of the John Wayne classic of 1948.  Produced in 1988, it was not as good as the original but quite entertaining.

The sky was mesmerizing, with the images changing every few seconds.  The upper winds were quite wild this afternoon.

The clouds had a silver lining.

The subset was magnificent.  My favorite color is sunset; the sun had just set when I snapped the photo looking west.  At some point, I stopped seeing the sunset as the end of the day but, instead, the beginning of the night!

Watching the sunset is illuminating.

It was 8:08 PM and 82 degrees when this picture was snapped.

We watched another movie while we were going to sleep.  I turned off the TV at 11:00 PM and read some more; reading is much better than TV.

Fact: Older Americans say having more time to spend with family is by far the best part about growing old.  Among those ages 65 and older, the two most common answers to an open-ended question on the benefits of aging were spending more time with family (28%) and spending time with grandchildren (25%).  The next most popular answer was financial security, cited by just 14% of respondents.

We stayed home today and puttered around the house.  Zachary, our grandson, came over for lunch now that he works only ten minutes away.  We told him to call and give us a few minutes’ notice, and we could whip up something.

Today we did burgers with a 15-bean soup thickened into a chili.  We did corn on the cob plus a salad from the garden and topped it off with homemade cornbread and coleslaw.

While ack was here, our window washer came by, and he spent about three hours doing all the windows; everyone looked brand new.

We watched three western movies and sat by the fire pit before crashing.

The Homesman is a 2014 Western historical drama film set in the 1850s Midwest and directed by Tommy Lee Jones. The screenplay by Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, and Wesley Oliver is based on the 1988 novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout. The film stars Jones and Hilary Swank and also features Meryl Streep, Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, Jesse Plemons, and James Spader.

The film was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and received a North American limited release on November 14, 2014, by Roadside Attractions. The Homesman has received mostly positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating average of 7.1/10.

The title refers to the task of taking immigrants back home, which was typically a man’s job.

Broken Trail is a 2006 Western television miniseries directed by Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church.[1] Written by Alan Geoffrion, who also wrote the novel,[2] the story is about an aging cowboy and his nephew who transport 500 horses from Oregon to Wyoming to sell them to the British Army. Along the way, their simple horse drive is complicated when they rescue five Chinese girls from a slave trader, saving them from a life of prostitution and indentured servitude. Compelled to do the right thing, they take the girls with them as they continue their perilous trek across the frontier, followed by a vicious gang of killers sent by the whorehouse madam who originally paid for the girls.

Broken Trail weaves together two historical events: the British buying horses in the American West in the late 19th century and Chinese women being transported from the West Coast to the interior to serve as prostitutes. The movie was filmed on location in Calgary, Alberta.

Bone Tomahawk is a 2015 horror Western cannibal film written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. It stars Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili Simmons, Evan Jonigkeit, David Arquette, and Sid Haig and was produced by Jack Heller and Dallas Sonnier. It had its world premiere at the Fantastic Fest on October 1, 2015  and was given a limited release on October 23, 2015, by RLJ Entertainment. The film is about a small-town sheriff (Russell) who leads a posse into a desolate region to rescue three people who were abducted by a cannibalistic Native American clan. The film earned critical acclaim, with praise for Zahler’s screenplay and direction and the performances of the ensemble cast.