my new tenant

The Median Sib is a blog written by Carol, known to her family as Cabbie. As you might guess, Carol is the middle sibling in her family. She's got two older sisters and two younger as well as one older brother and one younger. It's a very balanced group.

Carol's been blogging since the middle of September this year. She's a reading specialist. She works with parents and kids to help them learn how to read, she's even started her own consulting business, CS Learning Consultants, to help attain that goal.

Carol has two kids, both adults and married, as well as two grandchildren. She's been divorced for a year and lives in the Nashville area of TN. Most of her posts concern her family, from her mother and siblings to her own children and grandchildren but she also posts about books for children, weight loss, and some politics.

Carol's got some things in common with me--an interest in cooking and the love of books, and we've even been to some of the same camping places. I love the area around Chattanooga for hiking and camping and I think the picture below is near there. However there are some political differences! Be warned, she's conservative! (not that there's anything wrong with that)

There's occasionally jokes:

TEACHER: Maria, go to the map and find North America.
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America?
CLASS: Maria.

TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell "crocodile?"
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L"
TEACHER: No, that's wrong.
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.


TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the ax in his hand.


TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher.

Carol's got a neat post back on October 16th about a camping trip she took. There's a few posts leading up to it about how she learned to operate a camping stove and setup a tent but the main post is on the 16th. While the trip didn't work out as hoped, it shows an increasing feeling of independance that I suspect was long in the making.

Just to show that Carol is made of stern stuff, a week later on the 23rd she repeated the experiment and this time it was a success. Her first camping trip all on her own, though she did have a visitor. Carol's camping continues to develop--on Dec 4th she even camped out in the cold and rain to get a feel for some property that her exhusband is buying. Pretty neat.

Here's excerpts from two of her posts that I liked, this first one concerns flying with her exhusband:

I've flown with PawPaw many times, and I never cease to be amazed at how things look from a few thousand feet in the air. First of all, on the ground it looked like a brilliantly clear day. At six thousand feet, the layer of haze and pollution is clearly there - definitely worse around Atlanta than more rural areas. The other thing that I'm amazed about is how orderly and beautiful everything is - like a giant crazy quilt of shapes and colors and patterns - constantly changing as we go.


And here's a post that Carol wrote on Tuesday, October 4th that looked good to me:

I wrote earlier about having hoppin' john with Italian sausage when I visited my camping friends over the weekend. Today I decided to tweak the recipe a bit - with good results. Here's my recipe:

Hoppin' John with Sausage
3 cans black-eyed peas
2 cans Ro-Tel tomatoes w/jalapenos
1 large can diced tomatoes
1 pound Italian or summer sausage (I bought the lower fat variety made from turkey)
approx. 1-2 cups cooked rice (more or less depending on your preference)

Slice the sausage into bite-sized pieces. Throw everything in a saucepan and simmer. That's it - an extremely simple meal. You can make smaller amounts, but I deliberately made a big batch so I'd have several packages to freeze for quick meals later. It is mildly spicy but absolutely delicious!