Contrary to popular belief (and you know who you are, ladies)
I have not been abducted by the Aliens of the 2012 Apocalypse, sold into white
slavery, or joined the Church of Scientology. Truth is, 2012 was a year of ups
and downs and downright middles (mostly middles, which is fine by me.) It seems
the Good Lord had indeed worked in mysterious ways to help me lose 15 pounds
and get my lazy fanny off my chesterfield sofa and out into the Big Wide World.
Here’s a recap of my roller coaster of a year.
January
The New Year started off with a bang, literally. My
microwave blew up while I was cooking a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s Churro
Flavor Gourmet Big Bag® popcorn. Turns out all the Churro Flavored Big Bags® were
recalled due to a factory malfunction as too many kernels were accidentally
added to the bags, a fact I wish I would have read on the Google Food &
Drug News tab before I set down to
watch The Real House Cats of Beverly Hills
on Animal Planet that fateful day in January. Since then, I have switched to
Weight Watcher’s Butterless Blast® Single Serving Popcorn. It tastes a bit like
packing peanuts spritzed with corn oil but it’s only 11 calories a serving and
it has yet to break my new Emerson Round-A-Bout® 700 Watt microwave in canary
(which looks great on the counter next to my Aunt Jemima cookie jar, don’t you
think?)
By the way, I have officially re-boycotted Sears since they wouldn’t
refund my first replacement microwave oven (the lousy Kenmore PowR Spark® 2800
Watt Microwave and Convection Combo) after it died 1 day after my 30-day
warranty expired. I advise y’all do the same.
February
February was a very wet and cold month. I caught a cold and
had post nasal drip for almost 2 weeks. I tried every over-the-counter product
and then every home remedy I could find on the internet to get rid of that durn
stuff. Here are some tips from me to you the next time you catch a cold that hangs
on:
• a Neti pot works better at watering a bonsai than draining
your sinus
• you can pay $14 at Walgreens for TheraFlu Severely Vicious
Cold & Cough Hot Tea® or just make a cup of Lipton’s chamomile and add a
tablespoon of chili powder for about 49 cents
• Bum Boosa® Eco-Friendly Bamboo Sourced tissues are rough
on a tender nose
• sniffing a pinch of crushed red pepper will definitely
make you sneeze (about 100 times in 1 minute!) but won’t necessarily clear your
sinuses and will do absolutely nothing for your sweaty feet
• let the coffee cool completely before doing the Dr. Oz Coffee
Enema Cleanse from the October issue of Oprah’s O Magazine.
March
Once I recovered from my cold, I decided that the water
weight I’d lost from blowing my nose was slowly creeping back onto my hips, so
I decided to join Swerves Fitness For
Olderly Ladies. They opened up a Swerves
in the strip mall on Druilla St., in the same stall that the Candle-erius House
of Wax and Gifts used to be (before it melted in that brutal heat wave last
summer.) I wasn’t sure I’d like “working out” at a gym but the inside of Swerves looks more like a Georgia
O’Keefe painting than a high school locker room (and smells like fresh baked
vanilla cookies thanks to the Candle-erius disaster.) Sooner than later I was sweating’ to and
with the oldies, and I had dropped 7 pounds! Now I can say I’m addicted
to both the elliptical machine and Dr. Oz, whose program is strangely always
playing on the TVs no matter what time I do my workouts.
April
In April I got a two-dollar bill in change from the stamp
machine at Piggy Wiggly. It was a slow month.
May
I lost another 5 pounds in May, but sadly not from my
workouts. Seems I got a touch of food poisoning from a spoiled funnel cake (or
roasted turkey leg…I’m still not sure which) I ate at the Beaver County
Strawberry Festival. For 2 excruciatingly long days my body was like a water
hose cut at both ends.
June
Bought my tickets and paid my down-payment for my Bingo
Retreat in September (see September).
July
July was god-awful hot in Texas, one of the worst on record.
The mayor of Beanville, home of the state’s tallest thermometer, said on TV
that the mercury gushed out of the top of the broken thermometer like a geyser
on the hottest day. As for myself, I was sweating like a fat bird in a bin-bag
at a barn dance at the Holy Condolences Church Independence Day Picnic and Bake
Sale Benefit (polyester does not breathe.) It was so scorching that my own contribution of Virgin Mary Miracle
Meringues melted flat before they sold out. I have decided to share my
recipe with you if you were one of the unfortunate many who missed out on trying
this delectable treat. Beatrice Barrett swears you can see the face of the Virgin Mary in them if you squint real hard with your good eye.
Virgin Mary Miracle
Meringues
(2 Weight Watcher Points)
From the Kitchen of Betty Sanchez
3 egg whites
1 packet Sweet N Low
½ t vanilla
pinch of salt
¼ t cream of tartar
1. Before
you start anything preheat your oven to 225.
2. Put
your egg whites in a bowl and beat AT LEAST 5 minutes until they are stiff. The
longer you beat, the better. After
the egg whites are stiff, add the cream of tartar WHILE YOU ARE BEATING THE EGG
WHITES. Add it SLOWLY, just a teensy bit at a time.
3. Beat
for another minute or so and then add the Sweet N Low, SLOWLY, and WHILE STILL
BEATING.
4. Repeat
with the vanilla and salt. Plop blobs onto a ungreased cookie sheet.
5. Bake
for 45 minutes to an hour. I still haven’t figured out the exact timing. If you
go too short, then the inside tastes kind of raw and you can feel it dissolving
on your tongue. If it goes too long, then it crumbles practically on contact
and you end up choking from the dryness. At 45 minutes, the tops start to get a
little brown. At this point I stay near the oven to make sure they don’t’ burn.
I think I turned the oven off after 55 minutes.
6. Turn
off the oven but leave the cookies in there. Some recipes I seen said you can
leave them in there with the door shut overnight, but I get impatient and
hungry so I only leave them in there for about 20 minutes.
August
In August I went to Sacramento with my dear grandson Jeremy
who lives in Los Angeles, or, more accurately, the Valley (as his college friend Leonard repeatedly reminded me in a sweet but firm manner). I met up with
Jeremy and Leonard at LAX and was shuttled to their charmingly renovated
bungalow in Valley Glade, which is “Studio City adjacent”, as Leonard says.
Turns out that many of the neighborhoods in the Valley are adjacent to
someplace ritzier, but I thought the boys’ house was the nicest on the whole
street! They had recently added a gazebo to the side yard and it was nice to
set outside in the California partial sun and sip on Caipirinha cocktails while
listening to Ella Fitzgerald on their wireless speakers. The next day we piled
into Leonard’s Cadillac convertible and headed north to Sacramento. Ten hours
later, which Leonard said was normally a 5-hour drive if it weren’t for the
blasted construction on the 5, we arrived at the home of Jose Gonzales (fellow
Texan and onetime news anchor of the UHF station KRUD, Channel 23 in Abilene,
in the early 80s) and his friend from college, Carl. Those boys were so sweet
to this little old lady from East Texas and had exquisite taste in decor,
antique furniture and home renovations. Jose and Carl took us on a side trip
for tastings in the Sacramento Wine Country and I tried red wine for the first
time. At the di Arie Vineyard, I found the Zinfandels a bit too “complex” and
lacking the “heady citrus notes” of my green apple wine from Costco but Jeremy
said I had matured my palette just by swirling it around my tongue before
spitting it out into the bucket on the counter.
I went on a Bingo Retreat in Veracruz Mexico. I know what
you’re saying, “Why on earth would anyone want to spend all their time indoors
playing bingo surrounded by lush tropical rainforests and picturesque coastal
lagoons in the birthplace of Kahlúa?” Well, I have to tell you there was no
shortage of mudslides being drunk at the pre-paid dinners and daytrip lunches
along the coastal towns and ancient ruins we visited every day. I saw more
ornate Catholic churches than I have toes, and playing R-A-T-S (a shorter form
of Bingo) at the apex of the El Tajin pyramid was nothing short of a religious
experience! While I was calling numbers during the Lightning Round under a
clear blue sky, a bolt of real lightning shot down from the Heavens and struck
Edith Jean Haddock on the top of her head. Luckily she was wearing her rubber
Croc clogs with the Dr. Scholl’s All-Weather Comfort Insole and escaped
(relatively) unharmed. Bingo turned out not
to be the main attraction of the retreat and I must say I’m more than thrilled
to have stepped out of my comfort zone and into the well-worn shoes of the
native Mexicans who so graciously opened their hearts and doors (especially
after the lightning blast singed off most of Edith Jean’s already thinning
hair) to us “strangers from the north”. A mere eleven days before, I had left
Texas with a bag full of daubers and bingo balls, and I returned home with a
gaggle of new lady friends, a pocketbook full of memories, a better grasp of
the Spanish language and a sharpened Tex-Mex accent. So “Muchas gracias mis
nuevos amigos! Muchas indeed!” It was the trip of a lifetime and I can’t wait
to go on the next retreat, wherever the Bingo Gods might take me.
October
In late October I gained 2 pounds, which I blame on the
Possum Hill Outlet Mall. This year the mall hosted a Safe-Tease Halloween Fun-stival so kids could trick-or-treat
without the fear of getting a razorblade-laced apple or poisoned Pixie Stix
from a stranger. The result of this debacle was 250 kids getting pink eye from their
Haunted Gallows Spook House and me eating the entire M&M/Mars 2-pounder
Candy Assortment® while waiting for no-show trick-or-treaters on Halloween
night.
November
Normally for Thanksgiving I don a hair net (actually, it
takes 2 to completely cover my classic beehive hairdo) and dish out fish sticks
and tartar sauce for the less fortunate at the Lord Gimme Shelter shelter,
which is an annex of the Righteous Presbyterian church on Wandering Jew Drive
and Seventh Avenue. But somehow I always find it a test of my patience as a
god-fearing Christian to reserve judgment on the hordes of homeless and
over-grown families that shuffle down the food line demanding an extra jalapeno
cornbread muffin or a double-helping of Nilla Wafer banana pudding only to
leave it on their plate after they’ve eaten all the marshmallow topping off
their candied yams. Well this year I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with my fellow
Christian neighbors who know which side their bread is buttered on, literally,
at a progressive dinner party. First course was eggnog and cheese crackers at
the Simpson’s house, then on to a full on Thanksgiving potluck (complete with
green bean casserole by Yours Truly) at Liza’s house and then mudslides and
pie, pie and more pie at my ranch style tract, which I had decorated early for
Christmas. This year I picked “Santa” as my theme and had covered my brand new
7-foot pre-lit Flip-A-Tree® in 500 Santa head ornaments with real reindeer fur
beards. It is a sight to behold, isn't it? We had so much food left over from the potluck
that my Christian sensibilities took hold and I wrapped up the half-ham and
gave it to Ernest, 2-doors down who, although not homeless, is less fortunate
because he’s a heathen.
December
I split my time most of December between planning my annual
Birthday/Christmas party and stocking up for the Apocalypse. Being a Christmas
baby is a double-edged sword, as anybody who is born on or near a holiday is
painfully aware. And if it’s a gift-giving holiday (like Christmas) it’s
particularly tough since we tend to get 1 combination present instead of 2
separate gifts (like everybody else in the world) and a store-bought birthday
cake in the shape of a manger or menorah. But Momma always said I was the best
Christmas present she ever got (besides cataract surgery and a toilet installed
inside the house.) I like to remember Momma in December as I wrap up Christmas
gifts for the grandkids with the funnies or paper decorated with pointy party
hats, balloons, and “Happy Birthday!” plastered across it. Momma was a pistol
and I like to think I got my moxie from her side of the family tree! Well my
party was another big success with everyone having such a great time that the
last stragglers were still hanging in there well past 9pm.
I’ve got loads of
pictures and 3-second movie clips on my Samsung flip phone of all my wonderful
friends and family and memories to last a lifetime. And, thanks to the
Apocalypse That Never Came, I’ve also got a gas mask, 250 cans of evaporated
milk, a gross of D batteries, and enough tuna fish to kill a small army from
mercury poisoning.
God Bless You and Yours in 2013!
And as always ladies, eyes down.
Betty
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