I might be back.

Been thinking about this blog lately. Blame it on my advanced age. The damned pandemic. The ever present lump in my throat. The search for joy. So maybe I will dust it off. Rework the purpose. Start writing again. Stay tuned.

Adventures in Peggy's kitchen: banana bread

Not long ago, a friend told me she googled my blog. I wonder if a virtual cloud of dust rose up as I have not been very attentive to this site lately. Mostly because I can't decide what to do with it. So while I noodle the future of pp.com, here's a little foodie story:

My mom taught me to toss too-ripe bananas into the freezer when they languish and multiply until I guilt myself into baking banana bread. Saturday, I found seven brown frozen bananas and instructions that sounded delicious on FoodNetwork.com. 

I doubled this Paula Deen recipe so we would have two loaves when I finished...one for the freezer!

I pride myself on getting all my ingredients together before I start a cooking or baking project, prepping little dishes of wet and dry so I can whiz through the steps. The clean-up drives my husband crazy because he can't figure out why I need to measure.

And I always enjoy tweaking the instructions just a little...so I replaced one cup of sugar with stevia (the baking kind) and I used 2 1/2 cups of wheat flour and 1 1/2 cups of unbleached white flour. There was only a little blood from my knuckle suffered while zesting the orange so I left that in. My seven bananas were just a little shy of three cups so I chopped the orange pulp into little bits and added that to the mashed, thawing banana glop.

I even lined the bottom of my loaf pans with parchment paper! I was pleased when I put them in the oven and stayed so until I was cleaning up and noticed the carefully measured Greek yogurt still sitting on the counter. That was my replacement for the sour cream.

Argh! In a panic, I pulled the warm-but-not-set batter from the oven, dumped it from the carefully prepared pans, scraped the excess from the parchment paper and added the Greek yogurt. 

And then I poured myself a healthy glass of water since it was not yet noon, dammit.

The two loaves baked for a little more than an hour and did the condo ever smell good!

The next time, I'll be braver about the bits of orange and add more of that. And less blood!

Breaking news in my backyard.

Our evening meal of "Bang Bang Shrimp" and a veggie side consisting of summer squash, tomatoes, corn, onion and garlic had been prepped...all was ready for me to watch the final hour of The Masters when I grabbed my iPad to look at work email.

John Buckner on the assignment desk had just forwarded a tweet from the Fort Lauderdale Fire Department about a plane crash and the location was two miles south of where we live.

I yelled at John to join me and he became my driver.

Would that Periscope was already developed for Android! I have an iPad with it loaded but it was on the charger. My phone was too but it had 40% so I grabbed it and left the ability to live stream behind.

We got to the corner just east of the crash and police directed us away. The WSVN live truck arrived a minute behind me and we both wended our way through the Calvary Chapel parking lot in an effort to get a closer view.

John is a good navigator in this circumstance although I don't see a "Nightcrawler" existence in our future.

Liane Morejon, the Local 10 reporter arrived moments later and took over.

John and I went home and I made dinner.

Four people died in the crash and at the end of the day, that's what I'm thinking about tonight.

Veintiocho años!

The older we get, the faster the years go by.
It's once again time for my annual accounting of "the little things" that are really the glue that keeps John and me together.
This all started in 2009 when we lived in Baltimore and our anniversary sneaked up on me. I made the first list in lieu of a card.
So here we go:

1. I love that you keep insisting that I learn Spanish. It's probably not going to happen but you should keep nagging me. (
2. I love how you enjoy writing controversial things in the sand and then wait for a tourist to come by. And how irritated you get when nobody notices.
3. I love your silly selective memory. "Do I like this food? Have we seen that movie?"
4. Shopping with you at Kohl's can be a blast but please don't make me watch you try on seventeen pairs of jeans even though I love your butt.
5. I love our Sunday picnics at the beach and your scientific approach to planting the umbrella in the sand.
6. I love your slavish attention to our cars, every repair bill for the past decade carefully saved and filed in that ugly cabinet that I will never convince you to discard.
7. I love how much fun you have with brother-in-law Bob.
8. I love dreaming of a Murphy bed for our den so we can have even MORE COMPANY during the winter months.
9. I love that you impishly hide the United Methodist church cup that I like to drink from on Sunday mornings, as if that would stop my OCD for that particular habit.
10. I love how you actually enjoy being introduced as "the long suffering John Phillip."
11. I loved our New Year's Eve party--taping "2015" on the champagne flutes that we didn't get to use last year.
12. I love that we are both losing our hearing at the same time.
13. Subsequently, I love the hysterical laughing we do when we replay something we've missed on a TV show three times and STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S BEING SAID.
14. I love that you continue to feed my addiction to Crocs sandals. My comfortable shoe fetish!
    
15. I love it when you get a wild hair, take me on a whirlwind trip to somewhere and act silly.
16. I love how you love old things.
17. I love how you understand why an occasional visit to Whole Foods is therapeutic, even if we don't need anything.
18. Consequently, I love how you stare at the cost of olives and try to find the least expensive. Which I tell you will taste bad. So we buy the good ones.
19. I love how mad you got when the printer stopped working and when I got it fixed again, the first thing it spit out was the FTD flower order for our anniversary. 
20. I love going to garden shops and looking at plants with you even though our "farm" area is pretty small.
21. I love how this year, you finally have a chance to win it all in the NCAA pool we enter every year...and how frustrating it is that you used my name on the potential winning bracket.
    
22. I love discovering new places with you on weekends.
23. I love how you look at the back of greeting cards to see how much I spent.
24. I love how much you enjoy talking to our kids on the phone.
25. I love how you have embraced my current Fitbit obsession even though it means I don't want to go on as many bike rides as I used to.
26. I love how you let me buy kitchen gadgets galore whether we need them or not. C'mon, that egg steamer is awesome!
27. I love how you compare every dog you see to Dottie and none of them compare.
28. I love falling asleep, holding hands.

Thanks for another great year, honey!

The $700 bag of candy.

It's all gone now.
This is the bag of candy that I stopped to get at the BJ's on Powerline and Commercial.
A bad person grabbed my purse from the front seat of my car while my back was turned. (Stupid me, I didn't lock it for the thirty seconds it took to return a cart to the cart corral.)

In my purse?
My beloved iPad, a cell phone that was less than six months old, prescription sunglasses and less than $5.00 in cash.

Replacing it cost $700.

I'll never be so careless again.

That Smell

Last weekend, John and I enjoyed a three-day weekend on the West Coast. Friday night on Fort Myers Beach (fabulous sunsets, groovy Key West vibe) and Saturday night with our good friend Lynda King who lives on Sanibel Island when she isn't buying and selling TV stations.

We had such a good time! We talked about how restful it is and how much we enjoyed ourselves all the way home.

Fast forward. Friday morning when I got into my car to head to work, I noticed an odor. The Ford 500 has a door drainage problem and sometimes, when it rains hard, the back doors fill up and make a noticeable slooshing sound when I turn a corner or step on the brake. If I don't drain them regularly, the car can smell a bit musty.

Ten hours later, at the end of the work day, the stink was noticeably stronger and even though it was dark and I was tired, I opened both back doors and lifted the little rubber flap at the bottom to let the water out. And then I drove home. The smell abated some during my 30 minute commute but now I think I just got used to it.

On Friday nights I have other things on my mind and so I forgot about it until Saturday morning as we were going out for our bike ride. John wanted to check it but I didn't bring my keys with me and generally, we take his car for errands, etc and so the Ford remained sealed up until Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, John remembered and took his set of keys to my car so that when we finished the bike ride, he could check it out.

He said he almost dropped to his knees when he opened the car door, the stench was so bad. Initially, he thought it had something to do with my slightly damp carpet (damn Ford doors) but then he followed his nose to the back of the car.

A noxious cloud of putrid headed for the heavens as soon as he opened the trunk.

The culprit? Two forgotten Publix shopping bags full of shells gathered on Sanibel. Seven days of warm, damp closed conditions combined with rotting pieces of marine mollusk inside the forgotten exoskeletons created a vile funk that permeated the area.

Another few days and our neighbors would have surely called police, confident that we had a body in the trunk.

A quart of Febreze, some fresh air and a little time cured our problem...and our forgetfulness! 

Long lost weekend

Ten years ago...from NyTimes magazine.

Loving life in South Florida.

Inappropriate? You tell me.

After the Royals took Game Two from the Orioles at Camden Yards, I heard one of the broadcasters close out the post-game by saying "We are watching something special here, folks."

It has been such a magical post-season and the statement was uttered in a poignant way so I tweeted it.

And almost immediately, a former co-worker from WMAR, tweeted me back.

Honestly, for a second I was taken aback. It's no secret that I got fired from KSHB. And it's also no secret that I'm a Twins fan. I have enjoyed the Royals winning ways -- and although I did spend a year in Baltimore and some fun evenings at Camden Yards, I'm a Midwestern girl and decidedly in favor of the Royals winning it all.

My response:

Was that wrong?
Was my former co-worker being predictably snarky?
Should I have just left it alone?

Maybe so.

Surprise Bluegrass

We spent Sunday afternoon at MacArthur State Park. And happened upon this delightful scene.

My Sunday nirvana

Exploring where we live with John.

This is MacArthur State Park in Palm Beach County.

How to tell better TV stories by watching commercials

You can't watch a post-season baseball game without seeing this commercial a gazillion times.

Storytelling lessons from Budweiser puppy commercial | Poynter.

John and I loved this sketch. Miss The Frightened Family? Me too!

End of the 6th inning.

Big game this weekend.

It's official. Writing is good for you.

Check it out:  You don't have to be a serious novelist or constantly reflecting on your life's most traumatic moments to get these great benefits. Even blogging or journaling is enough to see results. One study found that blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to the effect from running or listening to music.

Great story about competitive TV markets

Local TV’s Battle Royal | Broadcasting & Cable



I've been lucky enough to work in some of these markets.

KTVA reporter quits on-air, reveals herself as owner of Alaska Cannabis ...

My colleague and former co-worker Kevin Finch weighed in.

Dolphins game. Shenanigans.