Jeremy Herndon

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!

My wife has signed up for some ballet classes that start in a couple of weeks.  She used to take ballet when she was a young child growing up.  She’s been going crazy the last couple of days trying to find a local place that sells Capezio Dance Supplies because she wants to buy a Capezio leotard to wear to class.  She hasn’t had to buy a leotard ever before because her parents used to buy them for her.  After all, she was just a little girl!  So she’s been looking around and can’t find adult size leotards anywhere in town!  So it looks like she is going to have to buy them off of the Internet and hope they fit her.

My sister-in-law recently decided that she wants to learn how to shoot a gun. She has had one for several years but never learned how to do anything with it at all. A few weeks ago some new neighbors moved into the house next door to her and she is afraid of them; she thinks that now is a good time to learn how to shoot! So she’s going to come over to my house this afternoon and I’m going to take her to the shooting range and teach her how to use her gun.

I can remember when I was a kid my mother showed us how to make candles, using wax, chopped ice cubes, and milk cartons.  It was so fascinating, stirring the melting wax, pouring it over the ice that we had poured into the milk cartons.  What was really cool was peeling the milk cartons off after the wax had cooled and seeing the really neat designs that the ice had left in the candles!  That is just one of the fond memories I have of my childhood; doing fun things like that with my mother.  She is such a crafty lady!

Recently my mother decided to try her hand at the cottage-industry candle making business. She wants to make soy candles and sell them at craft fairs. She loves to make candles, and she figures that it would be a great way to make a little bit of pocket money while doing something she loves to do! She told me that she found a great website called jarstore.com where she can buy wholesale Libby jars for her new candle-making business. Libby jars are her favorite jars.  She has asked her best friend Carol to come over and help her at the craft fairs; they can sit together at the tables and visit with each other in between customers.  I told her that if that’s what she wants to do, then she should go for it!

I have a very old floor lamp that I was given by a dear aunt. She tells me that she bought it over thirty years ago. I love it dearly, but it has finally given up the ghost. The socket died, and I decided it was appropriate to rewire the entire thing because the plug was the old fashioned kind that just was not as safe as the newer ones. So I went to the hardware store and bought what I needed to rewire the lamp. It took a couple of hours to take it all apart and rewire it, but I did it myself and it turned out fine. I had called an electrician and asked him how much he would charge to re-wire it and he had told me it would cost over $100! The rewiring supplies cost me less than $20, so I’m thrilled that I saved $80 by re-wiring it myself! And I’m thrilled that I kept the lamp from going to the junkyard, so I did my part to save the environment today!