Cheryl Beckham

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.

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.

Years ago I must have expressed out loud in front of someone, somewhere, something about the cuteness of a frog lawn ornament, that had caught my eye, for some reason. I didn’t even buy the frog, but some how that was to be the start of the many, many frogs that have now seemingly taken over my house and lawn. Word got out and frogs are a constant, but welcomed gesture from folks, as a gift, a token, a present, a tip (after all, I am a bar tender, and we receive quite a variety of tips now and then) from virtually everywhere from all types of people that I have/had a relationship with over the years. I must have a frog made out of any and every type of material that is known to man, in all kinds of sizes, and stances.

For Christmas I was given a frog aquarium kit, which requires a check to be sent in with the order for the frogs to come in the mail, or I could go down to one of the many pet stores that have popped up all over the place in the past few years. I’m sure at least one will have baby frogs for sale, it seems like the more humane way to receive new members of the family. But going to the pet stores, any of them like PetCo, Puppy Palace, and Petsmart always leaves me with me wallet emptied out and my heart broken from not being able to take home more of the critters that are all there, just waiting for a home, and knowing that their chances of being purchased and treated adequately highly reduces most of their survival rates.

One of the places that I try not to go in to are the A.S.P.C.A. and Animal Shelters, I have never left one yet with out crying like a baby and feeling like a piece of scum, and dirty. Not something that I enjoy or look forward to doing, ever.

Google recently bought out a company whose services seem pretty impressive, so much so that I wanted to share what I have learned about it.

Grand Central is a company that will give you a “phone number for life.” That is only one part of it all. Part of the service includes the ability to ring multiple phones at the same time. You can put up to five number into the system and when you get a call it will ring all of them and transfer the call to the first number that answers it. You can even have an address book where you can define groups of people (friends, family, work, other). You can set preferences about which phones ring for which groups. So I can set it that friends and family ring my home phone, but work and others (anybody not in your address book is in the others category) don’t. It has a call recording feature (a message is announced to both parties); voice mails are retrievable by phone or online; you can set up a temporary number to forward calls to in addition to the configured 5 via phone or online; you can set ring back and voice mail messages specific to each group.

All and all it really looks to be a really nice service and is by invite only, but free. I understand that they have stated that there will always be a free version, but it appears that someday they will start charging for some of their premium features.

Now my question is, how does one go about getting an invite, looks like I have some researching to do now!