2021, Family, Kids, Nature, News, Uncategorized, Weather

Good Gifts

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Our daughter’s best friend since childhood currently lives in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area where she  attends  North Texas State University for graduate study in vocal performance.  She has a beautiful soprano voice and we are very proud of her.  She is like a second daughter to us. She has sent frequent updates on the storm.  As a North Dakota native, she is probably better accustomed to managing the cold and the bad roads than most folks in Texas right now.  She lost electricity/heat  off and on the past several days, and Wednesday night her apartment complex lost all water due to a busted water main. She got to the grocery store for provisions yesterday.

I was gratified to learn that she kept warm when the heat was off  by wrapping up in a down comforter we gave her for a high school graduation present nine years ago. It was a real good one with a high fill power. I was happy to know she still had it and that it came in handy. How clever of her to take it with her to a place where you never imagine needing that kind of warmth. I hope all the things I give as gifts are so useful.

What have been some of the most useful gifts you have given or received? Any advice for Texans right now?

21 thoughts on “Good Gifts”

  1. Several years ago my friend and neighbor, Rita, gave me a set of measuring cups for Solstice. I remember thinking as I opened them that I am the last person who needs more measuring cups. Even when I realized they were off sizes (2/3 cup, 3/4 cup and 1 1/2 cup), my first thought was that nobody needed to be so fussy as to need off-sized measuring cups. But over the years I have grown to love them and a couple of years ago I sent Rita another thank you note telling her how much I’ve enjoyed using them over the years.

    Advice for Texans? Be careful and hang in there.

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  2. useful gifts?
    “ pot will get you through with no money better than money will get you through times with no pot “ fabulous furry freak brothers 1971

    yes we used to give joints for the birthday boy

    money is handy…

    i love my i pad til i lose it every year…

    i have art from my friend whose birthday it is today
    i love art

    i have pocket knives hats wooden boxes carved beautifully
    all just stuff but great stuff

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  3. My daughter went to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. It “never” snows there, but then it did, and Molly was amused to learn she had skills not known to the many kids from California and Hawaii. Lacking real shoes, those students wore wool socks with their Birkebeiners. Worse, they didn’t know they should refrain from athletic, long strides while walking. Molly wanted to sit on a bench and enjoy the humor of all those kids slipping, windmilling and falling on the icy sidewalks.

    Baby steps, Texans. Take baby steps, and you’ll get there.

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      1. That snowstorm my daughter experienced fell in the presidency of the second George Bush, or “Shrub” as Anne Richards liked to say. Students made a big snow sculpture of the UPS president slaying a dragon with Bush’s face.

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  5. I was tickled to get a new vegetable peeler for Christmas. My family says I am hard to buy for, and our son was surprised when he took me to a cook ware store over Christmas and asked me what I wanted, and all I wanted was a new peeler.

    Daughter has decided for some reason that I will receive tomten related gifts for Christmas, hence the vampire tomten on my office desk. I hope she realizes that she will inherit them all one day.

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  6. Recently I received a gift of four handmade face masks. I gave my friend the fabric. She returned it in the form of face masks. I like the fabric because I chose it and she has amazing talent with a sewing machine. I now have four new stylish face masks!

    I tend to make gifts. Years of having little money made me look for creative, low cost ways of giving. For Valentines Day I crocheted a bunch of little red hearts and scattered them to those around me and just left them in places for people to find. I had to take my friend to Rochester for her first vaccine on Valentine’s Day. She got three of those little hearts, wrapped together with little pink silk roses and pink satin ribbon, attached to a chocolate candy bar. She also got a ride to Rochester on the coldest day of the year.

    I’ve had the experience of giving people my things if they really like something. I’ve given all kinds of things: clothing, kitchen stuff, knick-knacks, furniture. I mean, I do this within reason. There are obviously a few things I wouldn’t just give away. As I grow older, the realization that these things are only things and my relationships with people are, hopefully, more lasting.

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    1. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my mask story before. When pandemic was just starting out YA bought some masks online that I liked a lot. They had the nose bridge which helps me a lot and they were very pretty fauna and flora designs. When we decided we were going to actually travel in August, I asked her where she had gotten those because I wanted to get more. I had three and I wanted to get three more. She said she couldn’t remember where she got them. So I spent probably two hours searching all over the Internet and eventually found and ordered three more. Then my birthday came around and one of the gifts that YA gave me was three more. The “I don’t know where they came from” was a ruse. So now I have nine of them. They’re great and they’re washable.

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  8. Advice to Texans: you might want to make sure your state government and all its departments can handle the basics PLUS the disasters that seem to hit your state on a regular basis–hurricanes, inferno-level heat, now record cold–BEFORE you start caterwauling about seceding from the Union. 😦

    I understand this cold is unprecedented but come on folks, don’t huge swaths of the state lose power when a hurricane blasts through too?

    Chris in Owatonna

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  10. Gifts you make by hand are always special. I like to give gifts that enhance the life of the giftee, maybe doing something for them that would be too troublesome for them to do on their own.

    When we bought our pink bungalow in Mac-Groveland, my mother gave us a new Hotpoint stove. It was great. After two decades of use, the stove top was scratched and missing chunks of enamel finish. Cleaning alone could not make it look good, and my wife frequently complained. I learned it was possible to order a replacement top, so that became a Christmas gift she never expected but truly loved.

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    2. In a household where you reportedly did the lion’s share of the cooking, I can’t help but wonder why a new stovetop was a Christmas gift to your wife? What am I missing here?

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  11. I remember when I first met Husband’s sister Rose, she was preparing gifts for her large family, and since she had little money, she gave out coupons for things like ” A Weekend of Freedom” where she would take a sister’s kids for the weekend… ! Sister was a single mom at the time and I’ll be she never forgot that.

    I love being taken out to eat at someplace special, which is a gift my sister and I give each other frequently instead of buying stuff for each other.

    Texas – you might want to join the national electric grid (am I saying that right?) instead of winging it on your own, or at least keep your solitary one up to date. For those poor people, I did see this on FB:
    https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10158842727726166&set=pcb.10158842728126166

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    1. It interests me that Texas is getting such mixed responses to its weather disaster. Some folks are sympathetic, but some apparently think Texas deserves this crisis because of arrogance and poor planning.

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  13. I have a nice pasta pot I got rom my sister as a housewarming gift over thirty years ago. Like VS with the measuring cups, I thought at first it was a bit redundant since I had a three quart saucepan I had always used to cook pasta. However, the pasta pot has drainage holes near the top on one side, and a lid that you twist so that the drainage holes can be open or blocked. Before I had this pot, I always drained the pasta in a colander. Now, no colander necessary. I didn’t know how much I would like that.

    I also have three cloth masks that my younger niece made for me.

    My advice to Texans…next time, turn the water off before the pipes freeze and burst.

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