Cheryl Beckham

Tomorrow is the beginning of another school year for my 12 year old daughter, I am finding it hard to believe that she is now a 7th grader and is in middle school, and what ever happened to calling it Junior High School anyway.

Seeing that she lives with her Dad and he leaves for work earlier than her bus arrives, I volunteered to pick her up and drive her to school for the first few days, until she feels a bit more sure of herself, being a new school and all. She is such a shy one and she is very nervous about the whole thing, I wish I could go with her and make sure everyone is nice to her, I’m sure their are millions of mothers (and fathers) who feel the same way. Kids can be so incredibly cruel and I just hate thinking of anyone being mean and/or nasty towards her in any way. This is one wonderful little girl and is full of such goodness and humanity, she has the soul of an old Native American woman and deserves nothing but the best!

It’s late, I just got off of the phone with her, making sure she has everything that she needs and has it all ready to go for in the morning. Seems that they had to make a run to the store today to get her a new alarm clock and now she is all set to go. Hope she sleeps well.

I actually got up on water skis and managed to hang on for a good 5 minutes or so, this has been a long time a coming. I went for a week end visit at my brother’s summer beach house, where he has all of his water toys at hand and we had ourselves a blast this time around, and the weather was perfect the whole time for a change.

I have always enjoyed water sports, swimming, boating, rafting, fishing, tubing, but have never been able to get myself up and out of the water each time that I have attempted to water ski, so this came as a big surprise and helped end the summer on a high note! And one of my nieces got the whole thing on video to be shown, I’m sure, during one of the family holiday season get togethers that will be here soon, ugh…

All most all of the houses on my street have some sort of vegetable garden growing in their side and back yards, I do believe that I am the only one that doesn’t have much of anything growing in my yard, besides some crab grass and a few trees and some bushes here and there. I’ve never been one to get into the landscaping aspect of my land, but I do enjoy seeing all of the nice landscaping jobs that people have been piling a lot of their time and money on, all across the neighborhoods.

This afternoon, I answered the backdoor, to find a neighborhood kid with a basket of home grown vegetables that his parents had asked him to deliver to me. It seems that they have an over abundance of their produce and are nice enough to bring over to share with me. I like neighbors like that, not really used to being friendly with neighbors, never stayed any where long enough to get to know anybody and the ones that seem to approach me, in most cases, are the whacked out, messed up, druggie kind of neighbor, the kind that you would want to avoid, not get friendly with, that is for sure.

I do the majority of my grocery shopping at our local Food Lion, they seem to have the cheapest prices for the items that I buy regularaly. There is a few things that I can’t seem to get Food Lion to carry for me, so once in a while I will need to make a side trip to either Martins (owned by Giant and very expensive) or go to Wal-Mart, ugh, I’m not a big Wal-Mart fan and dread having to go there.

I have seen for the past month or so that Food Lion has a huge bin over flowing with brand new books at a discounted price and as much as I love to read, it takes a huge discount for me to purchase any book. I get most of my reading material from places that give them away or go to the used book store to find my bargains. The price of a brand new book is totally outrageous, I can’t even remember the last time I bought a book at full retail price.

But back to Food Lion’s book offering, today I had to make a mid week grocery run and I noticed that the book bin was almost empty, and they had a sign stating that the remaining books were being sold for 75% off of the already discounted price. With that being said, I stopped and took a look to see what was left over and was glad to find two new hard covered books that needed to come home with me and only paid $1.50 for each one, and I’m pleased with my purchase and will go back again on Friday and take another look see.

A customer of mine brought me some fresh crab meat (2 pounds of it) at work last night, along with a sample of and a recipe for the most amazing tasting crab cakes that I have had the pleasure of cooking tasting.

I’m looking forward to trying out the recipe tonight and testing it out on a few friends that I have invited over to play cards with tonight. I’m sure that they will all be surprised that I actually cooked something for our night of card playing, usually the best that they get around here is chips and dip, maybe a few fresh veggies or fruit, but never any type of home cooking.

I am gladly passing this recipe on to you to try if and when you get your hands on some delicious crab meat.

• 1 Tbl. Mayo
• 1 Tbl. Mustard
• 1 Egg
• 1/2 Cup Bread Crumbs
• 1/2 Tbl. Worcestershire Sauce
• 1 small Onion (finely diced)
• 1 Pound of Fresh Crab Meat

This one is real simple, combine all the ingrediants, salt and pepper to taste and fry the made up patties in hot oil.