morrowlife

Here are Shannon and Mia enjoying a moment together. She was just insanely in love with that little girl. Mia brought Shannon so much happiness; I’m so grateful she came into our lives and so grateful Shannon got to be a part of her first seven years. Great Art courtesy of Katie’s camera (probably), taken in our family room in Lardville by Katie (probably), and part of my famous Shannon series.

That picture just makes me cry, both for happiness at what was and for sadness at what is being missed.

Mark was a bit less of an enthusiast on that day:

Mia seemed to be enjoying it, anyway. Mark loved Mia then and loves her now, but I guess he must have had other plans that afternoon. His picture was taken a minute and a half before Shannon’s.

Interesting day today. I received an email this morning for the life insurance investigator telling me that St. Rose refused to release Shannon’s medical records without a court order. They gave me an address and phone number for my local court, so I went over there after gym time to fill out the court order (of which there were several sheets), wait while the nice lady got a judge to sign it, wait a long time to file it with the court clerk, take it over to the hospital, and give it to the records people there. In my opinion, they’re completely unreasonable to refuse to comply with the law without a court order, but that’s what they do. St. Rose Dominican Hospital needs to be publicly shamed for wasting so many people’s time and money just to make their lawyers happy.

That little activity took most of the day, so I went home afterward and baked a couple loaves of bread. White Amish bread, to be precise. Turns out I need a lot more experience in bread making. I don’t think I let the yeast grow quite enough at the very beginning before I started adding other ingredients. It never made up the difference during the few times it was supposed to be rising. The finished product looks okay and tastes marginally okay, if a bit yeasty, but it’s a bit too thick. I’ll try again later in the week and see if I can improve on the results. I’ve committed to bringing bread to Melanie’s house on Sunday afternoon, so I need to get at least a bit better at it before then. Besides taking a bit of time, the concept is pretty straightforward, so I’m pretty sure I can master it. Oh, I don’t know how old my yeast is either. There’s a lot of it in a plastic container in the fridge. I guess I need to find out how long it stays good under those circumstances. I also need to know whether I need to bring the yeast to room temperature before mixing it with the warm sugar water.

Do any of my Loyal Readers know more than I do about making bread? A little help, please!

Mark and I had breakfast food for dinner. I had some bacon I wanted to cook, so I did that while the bread was baking. When it was done, I fried some eggs in the bacon grease. So we had bacon, eggs, and cottage cheese with peaches for dinner. Mark also had the last of the Costco apple streusel muffins. It was a pretty tasty dinner.

In the evening, Mark and I jacuzzified. Then I watched an episode of the wonderful old [amazon asin=B0011FLGYM&text=Burns and Allen] TV show and retired upstairs to write this.

I dreamed of Shannon last night. All I can remember is a moment of the dream. Shannon put Mark to bed in his crib. The trouble was that Mark was about seven years old, so it was a bit of a tight fit. But it seemed perfectly normal in the dream. Shannon looked at him sadly. Then I woke up. This is one dream I choose not to interpret. My Loyal Readers can do that for themselves. I’m just grateful I had it, even if my heart broke again just a little.

Ken and I didn’t work on the truck on Saturday. We got distracted by a project to get Melanie’s computer connected to their network. We got a network cable installed and working, but the computer still won’t recognize the network, even after we replaced the ethernet card. Our next step is to try reinstalling the operating system. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what else to try. We’ll try again to get to the truck next Saturday. There’s plenty of time.

And that’s it for tonight. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: photography-enthusiast eagle!

See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2014 at 11:04 pm and is filed under shannon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.