St. Luke Living Center correspondent
Many of our regular bakers joined Father Hien Friday morning in the chapel for Mass. We were joined by Brook and Ryan Bradford in the kitchen while we made molasses cookies. These 8- and 10-year-old boys were part of the dough ball maker and smasher crew. While the baked cookies didn’t live-up to expectations, perhaps they deserve another chance with a little ingredient tweaking.
A nice size group joined Lois Winter and Bill Schimpf for bingo in the afternoon. We enjoyed the fresh banana bread Lois brought. Did you know 75 years ago, gasoline was 10 cents per gallon, Guy Lombardo’s “The Last Roundup” was a hit and the New York Giants won the World Series in five games from the Washington Senators? Lois does and now we do because she researched her birth year and shared a little pamphlet of fun information with us.
Gene Vinduska, a very popular Saturday morning guest, gave an especially long performance this week. Every other week seems too long in between.
Retired United Methodist Church Minister, Bob Priest, was our Sunday afternoon guest. Pastor and Shirley Bowers, also retired, was our pianist. We’ve noticed many retired folks are very busy.
Marie Navrat was here to play cards with our pitch players, after lunch Monday who may have cut the games short due to the day’s next activity.
Five of our residents have October birthdays and we held a collective party Monday afternoon to celebrate the milestones. Veva Navrat, Ruby Vinduska, Happy Slifer, and Olinda Meier have reached their milestones and Edmund Kroupa will reach his next week. Irma Benda helped serve ice cream and a variety of cookies and crackers, plus coffee and iced tea to the honored ones as well as the other residents and guests.
Mental muscle was the “official” name of our activity Tuesday morning, but it involved more than that. Thinking back to yesteryear, we gave vibrancy to pictures depicting Halloween scenes, using colored pencils, crayons, and magic markers. The artistry is displayed in our large dining room.
After three mini book reviews, book clubbers chose to begin reading “Marley, a Dog like No Other” by John Gragan. It’s a special adaptation of his best seller, “Marley and Me.”
The lunch bunch climbed aboard our white “mini-bus” last Wednesday morning to eat lunch at Tampa café. The food was very good, the accommodations super, the scarecrows in Ramona were fun to see, and the drive past Hajek farms into Lost Springs was especially nice for Mildred.
Eugene Enos and daughter, Khristi Wright, spent Thursday morning with a large group of residents and some guests doing a grown-up “show and tell.” Gene spends many hours creating wonderful woodcuts. We are familiar with some of his products, but now have a better understanding of how he does it. Khristi showed us a quilt she is helping a friend make.
Rosemary Garrard and Evelyn Bredemeier brought a delicious apple cake, some candy corn, and hundreds of leaves in shades of brown, red, gold, green, and orange that blew in that afternoon through an open west door. The women showed us how to wax the leaves, many still in clusters on the stem, and left them for our use and enjoyment. Coffee and cake were served and leftover dessert was ours. A win-win event.