Jeremy Herndon

My wife and I decided to stay home for New Year’s Eve and just relax at home. We had a really nice dinner – beef stroganoff; one of my favorites! A nice bottle of wine, some home made bread. Relax by the fireplace and put on some mood music, dance a couple of slow dances.

The ringing phone blew those plans apart – my sister-in-law called us, in a panic. Her daughter had borrowed her car and hit a deer on the way home. The car is undriveable. She was calling me to ask me to go out with my truck and find the daughter and take care of the situation as best as I could. Since the accident was closer to my place than to hers it was hard to say no.

So my wife and I bundled up and hopped in the truck, off in search of the wrecked car. Sure enough, the front end was bashed up pretty good. We called for a tow truck and drove our niece back home. Thankfully she wasn’t injured herself – the deer was a large six point buck! Too bad for the deer, it didn’t survive the crash.

So the new year is off to a bad start – a car wreck on New Year’s Eve! Well, maybe that’s just a bad ending to the decade and we hope that this new year will be an improvement….

We went to my sister’s house yesterday for the big family gift exchange and dinner. We like to rotate from house to house to have the big family holiday parties. I can remember when I was younger I really dreaded going to the family parties, but now that I’m older I cherish them. Those folks who have musical instruments play them for our enjoyment and the younger kids dance to the music. We play games and fill up on a lot of great food. This year my sister went above and beyond and had a friend dress up as Santa to pass out the gifts! The kids were thrilled!

I hope everyone out there had a nice and peaceful day and had lots of good food!

Do you have a favorite flavor of ice cream?  I’m not sure that I do.  I really like a variety of flavors.  Lately my favorite is a pecan caramel praline flavor by Bryers.  The grocery store that I shop at doesn’t always carry that flavor, so when I find it I often buy several cartons of it.  I have never quite figured out why the price of ice cream fluctuates so much – it is almost as volatile as gasoline!  One week it will be almost $6 for the carton, then a few weeks later it will be less than half that price!  I find it very aggravating – when it is really expensive I won’t buy it.  I wonder if everyone shops that way and that is perhaps the reason why every couple of weeks the price drops!

A couple of months ago I decided to buy a couple of tomato plants.  I’ve never grown tomatoes before, and I didn’t know what to expect.  I planted beefsteak tomatoes, and they are ripening at a good comfortable pace so that we are not overwhelmed with fresh tomatoes.  I never expected fresh tomatoes picked out of our garden and eaten the same day would have so much great flavor!  My wife is surprised that I’m eating them because whenever we go to a restaurant and get a salad I order it without tomatoes, proclaiming that I don’t like tomatoes!  Well, now I’ve decided that I like them a lot, but it will be hard for a restaurant to come up with tomatoes that taste as good as what I’ve got growing right outside my door!

On the way home I noticed a wagon and young boy sitting under an umbrella at the side of the road. In the wagon were piles of fresh corn on the cob, cantalopes, and tomatoes. I pulled over and took a look. they seemed fresh and plump and reasonably priced, so I bought a few of each. I like supporting a local farmer and I like fresh vegetables, so it was a good thing all around.