Well, it's been a bit of a rough week. That's why you haven't seen me here.

Our basement is all but done. Doors need to be hung and a last coat of paint to touch up. Our ensuite still needs its vanity and closets, but that's it. That WAS it, until we had a sewage back-up this week. Now we are back to no bathrooms at all, chipped up tiles, and a few more months before the repairs covered by insurance get done. Le sigh.

Needless to say that tackling the mess and hassle - all while Hubby was off driving fast cars on a boys trip to Alabama - was enough to keep me from much in the way of creativity. And because of the added mess downstairs I decided I needed to tackle some of the disorder upstairs and completely reorganize the living room. That necessitated emptying our entertainment unit, thus finding these papers tucked away.

It was months, if not more than a year ago, that I grabbed this bundle of newspaper clippings from my Mom's place. Recipes, short stories, and little ideas that she'd clipped from a Saskatchewan newspaper in the first years of her marriage in the early 60s. Taking a break from cleaning yesterday I sipped my tea, admired her very careful trimming of the articles, and flipped through the paper.

Did you know that they used canned pineapple A LOT back then? Or that you could make frankfurter tetrazzini as a great fast supper when you've got curling to get to? And that there is something in the world called sweet pickled bacon?!?!

I kept a few of the clippings, like the Christmas baking one or some that just seemed too weird that they begged for recipe testing. Then there was the one advertising a house just like mine, for a mortgage of $50 a month! Bet they didn't have sewage problems in 1963.