Dishing up the FUN!

I wanna give a big shout out to my man, Darrin, over at Dad’s Dish Retro Blog! This guy is just plain funny! His little sub-title on his blog says it all: “Stuck in the past and living my life… no matter how much it embarrasses the kids”. He and I are a kindred spirit when it comes to all of this fun ‘70s stuff.

One of my favorite posts of his a bit ago was when he ran down with a list of some of his favorite catch phrases that were solidified in pop culture. Reading through the list he wrote, along with all those added by others, really sends you down memory lane. TV shows, movies, commercials, etc. – they all gave us some of the greatest one-liners.

He was also kind enough to just write a review of my book – he even recommended it! You gotta check out his blog, it’s a great time! Click the link on the right of my page under My Blog List.

And the ‘70s thought I have to throw out for you all to ponder today: what’s your favorite TV sitcom from the ‘70s? No dramas, variety shows or afternoon shows allowed (we’ll save those for another day). My vote – try to keep it just one or two – would have to be Mork and Mindy. The brilliance of the young Robin Williams, his goofiness really revealed for the first time, and cute Pam Dawber all made for a great show!

And – catch phrase + sitcom = Nanoo-Nanoo!

Whoops!

Oh, brother...!

I accidentally deleted my Blog List when I was checking my blog last night. If your Blog was listed and I deleted, please, please send me a note! I went through all my posts and if you'd commented, I was able to get you back on - and I remembered a couple - but I really didn't mean to take anyone off... I really love checking on all of your posts all the time and would hate to lose anyone due to my ineptness!

I guess I should have titled this post "Confessions of a clumsy blogger!" Anyway - you can email me direct at darryll.sherman@gmail.com, or just post here.

Thanks, and have a great day!

Life is Happening...

I lived in one house my entire life until I left for college at 22. It was all good - I wasn't a lazy out-of-work slob, or a mama's boy, or even a free-loading playboy. I had a great job, great friends and really, a great life.

At college I lived in a dorm and then an apartment, got married in my 3rd year and lived in a little trailer outside of our small college town for 10 years. We moved to our current home 15 years ago, and my children were only 4 and 5 when we moved in to our current house.

And I'm 50 now. Our son is disabled and as he has grown, it has become very evident to us that we need a home that better helps us serve and minister to his needs.

I share all this to relay the news that in the last 2 weeks, we have sold our home and need to be out in 2 weeks, are currently looking for temporary housing, and are shopping for land and designing a new home - nothing extravagant - but something that will work well for our situation.

So - I won't have a lot of spare time to blog about my '70s memories for a little while. I will certainly throw out the occasional thoughts when time allows, but it will be a bit thin probably until mid-February or so. I have endeavored to blog at least every 3 or 4 days since starting my blog, and it bugs me when bloggers just fade out, so I just want to get it out there that while I may be on a little hiatus, I am not out of the picture. I will be back full force reliving those '70s with you soon!

Happy blogging, and long live the '70s!

01-02-10 - New Year's Eve

Wow – life can get crazy in a hurry. I had “left notice” that I would be out of it – electronically speaking – for a bit as I was on vacation and was planning on spending more time relaxing and hanging with family than blogging. Well – as soon as we got back in town, we had a major offer on our house that we’ve had on the market for about 6 months. If things happen as fast as they are threatening to, we may have to find a place to rent and meet with a builder within the next couple of days.

So – I’ll be doing my best to start blogging again, but it may be sporadic here and there, but I’ll still do my part to continue to reminisce about the ‘70s.

I thought I’d share about how we used to spend New Year’s Eve growing up. Growing up in a family of four kids, we liked spending time together and hung out doing family-type things all the time. We combined some of our favorite things on New Year’s Eve. Mom and Dad would go out to dinner and a show and we would get the house to ourselves.

Of utmost importance was listening to the Casey Kasem year-end countdown. I think that it started around 6pm and, of course, ended at midnight. We all had our guesses as to what the number one song was going to be and ended up with bragging rights for the year if we were right.

We combined this with what we came to call the “3 P’s of New Year’s Eve” Pizza, Pop and Puzzles. We had a great recipe for homemade pizza and we’d make up a few of them. Pop was essential and with a lot less to choose from back then, it was either Coke, 7-Up or Root Beer.

And puzzles… that’s where we really had fun.

If you are a REAL puzzle worker, you know that there are people who know how to work puzzles, and there are those who don’t. WE know how to work puzzles: We turn all the pieces over before we start; we build the entire edge before anything else; we LOOK at the puzzle to figure out where pieces go and only pick up pieces that we put in. It’s a lot different than the way a lot of others work puzzles, but it makes all the difference if you’re a REAL puzzle worker.

While this sounds pretty tame, or maybe even lame, it was a lot of fun for us kids. The fun ending to the night was, of course, having bottle rocket fights with the neighbors, all in good fun, of course.

Christmas Memories - The Day

I am on vacation. I am spending Christmas wih my family and with my wife's family. This is how we spend Christmas. A few days and up through Christmas Eve with my family, and Christmas Day and a few days after with my wife's family, only 60 miles away from each other. We leave the confines of home and our little corner of the world to visit family and spend time in the areas we grew up and had our early Christmas's.

I have realized that as much as I love keeping up this blog, I do enjoy vacationing and am not much for using a laptop. I'm writing on one now, but I probably won't do another entry until next Tuesday. So - I pray that you all have a very Merry Christmas celebrating the birth of Christ, and that you have wonderful times of visiting with and enjoying your families!

Christmas Memories - The Snow

I am an old fashioned kind of guy. My ultimate Christmas dream would be that the whole family arrives for the days festivities and then the snow starts – or really starts to come down.

We have a huge stockpile of wood in the living room and the fire is roaring. There’s talking, laughing and maybe even singing at the piano. There’d be a lot of hot chocolate, cookies, great food and lots of treats.

There’d be a mandatory pick-up game of snow-football, or at least a huge snowball fight, with a time of warming up in front of the roaring fire with the whole family.

I guess that all I’m saying is that it doesn’t seem like Christmas without snow. Where I grew up there was a definite lack of snow. I probably remember only a half a dozen that had any measurable snow at all. The Seattle area is great for a lot of reasons, but having lots of snow is not one of those things. I now live in Eastern Washington and we have a lot of snow here… definitely more white Christmas’s than not – and we get some good cold single digit weather, too. Really makes it feel like Christmas! Here's some pics from my place last Christmas

So – as Christmas is fast approaching, do you get to have a white one? Or –did you have some great white Christmas’s growing up?

Christmas Memories - The Food!

Where would a discussion of Christmas be without bringing up the food?

There’s so. much. food. When I was young, we had a bunch of family… including Grandmothers, aunts, uncles cousins, etc… there was about 20 of us that gathered every year. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve so my mom drew the line at dinner, and we would actually go out for dinner. Before you think that we were rich, I need to let you know that we would go to the Royal Fork – which was a family buffet restaurant. Everyone could eat whatever they wanted for the same low price. This was especially helpful when we started having a fair amount of teens in the mix.

So – we’d go out and pig out and then come home to a huge layout of Christmas treats. Tons of sweets, different salads, sausages, little dogs in bbq sauce, candy, rolls, pies, cookies, etc, etc, etc.

There are a few dishes that were always the standouts. My mom’s fudge is still – to date – the best fudge I’ve ever tasted, homemade or store bought. Smooth as silk, never grainy and so chocolatey! And – my mom’s shortbread was also the best I’ve ever tasted. There were so many incredible things there – and many of them we only got once a year – so we HAD to eat at least some of everything.

We’d spend the next few hours just snacking and snacking and snacking. As always, we started opening Christmas presents at midnight – that’s right – midnight. And each person opened their present’s one at a time. We wouldn’t finish until like 3am. We’ve changed this in the last few years so now we finish up by midnight.

But – we’d spend the next few days eating all the great leftovers What great Christmas food/treat tradition memories do you have?