The Rhine River, Kauffmans, GF Double Chocolate Cookies, and a Brother in the Marshfield Hospital

       And yes, I know the title is too long, but too bad! It has to be that long to get it all in.
       Shall we start in Marshfield or over in Germany?
       I am TRYING to write a/the story of when my mother's people came to America back in the 18th century.  Today I've been on the Rhine telling, (okay maybe I do too much telling and not enough showing, I have never said I could actually write right), about sick babies and distraught women, and second-guessing husbands.  Not much has changed, has it?  Well, yes it has. Travel has changed. Hygiene and ship cleaning have changed. Ships have changed. The reasons for cruising up the Rhine have changed.  But people haven't changed so much. So I am trying to tell you all about why a family would leave home and country to find a new life in a new world at the great cost of even losing their babies to illness.
   
      After eating all those holiday cookies and candies, we were ready for honest meat and taters and no deserts for a few days.  Especially after getting on the scales. Never mind.  But today I decided to make GF (gluten free) cookies again. This time I made double chocolate cookies. The first two pans were not done enough and while the second two pans were in baking I had to go pick Frances up from her teaching job, so I put the timer on and had Brad lift those out of the oven when done. The second batch was picture perfect with beautifully cracked surfaces.  Only thing, they were crunchy done. Oh well.  Frances won't eat GF cookies. Too much beany taste for her. Brad says they're the best. So there you have it, a good cross section of opinion at our house about GF cooking.

        All the while we were baking and on the Rhine, my brother Eric is waiting in the Marshfield hospital for a doctor to come and tell him what can be wrong with him.  Last week they told him he had a something the size of a baseball on his lung, most likely fungus. Meds and pain killers for that.  Last night he had an attack of some sort, full of pain, at which they finally decided to throw nitroglycerin. That finally helped. Today they did more ex-rays and another CT scan and then left him to wait all day in his room for word/diagnosis/anything. Evening and dark are here and we still haven't heard. Odd!

       We cleaned the church today. What a good thing. We vacuumed up a lot of little things, mostly paper, I guess.  And cleaned two scuzzy restrooms.  And picked up illions of toys in the nursery.  While I clean I can't stop seeing where there ought to be church appropriate wall hangings.  And certainly, we could have rid of that tablecloth in the entry and use trivets for the hot casserole dishes instead? Please?  But nobody else sees it like that, so I quietly allow the beauty of that lovely oak table to be hidden. It's not a hill to die on. There seem to be fewer and fewer hills to die on. Peace and tranquility are more important than a LOT of things that don't really matter after all.  Are those last two sentences redundant?

         And where is winter? The snow was melty today. Chinook weather. The laundry dried on the lines outside without once freezing and clacking together like chunks of wood. Sunshine, too. Beautiful January weather, unless you have snowmobiles to rent out to rich tourists.