A family gathering and a new truck!

If you mention food, and lots of it, you will not have any problem getting the McDaniel clan to gather.  Taylor,  Ricky, and Tina, invited us all to a fish fry on Sunday afternoon.

Ricky invited Fabian and then made him do all the cooking.  I wonder if he would have been so eager to come had he known that bit of info.  Knowing Fabian, yes he would.  And besides, he is a good cook.  We had fried fish, homemade onion rings, french fries, hush puppies, boudain balls, homemade chocolate and lemon pies.

The younger bunch, sat around a table and caught up on all the gossip and all the "stuff" going on in each of their lives.  They also solved all the world problems.  Global warming is now a thing of the past.

                                                    Hostess, Taylor and her boyfriend here.

                               Scott and Michelle planning some strategy for corn hole.

Don't you just love Doug's hat!   Tim and his new girlfriend are admiring it.  Tina is just wondering who that dude is and who invited him!

                                  He was caught sampling the fish or maybe it was the onion rings.

                                                     A good selfie of Debbie and Bruce!

                                                                   And Scott and Karla!

           After eating they played a few rounds of Corn Hole.  The object of the game is to throw those little bags in the the hole.  If it lands on the board, you get a point, if it goes into the hole, you get 3!

Of course, if your opposing team gets a bag on the board, their bag cancels out yours.  With all the adding and subtracting, I never could keep up with the score.
We all had a very good time.  The weather was beautiful and it felt good to be outside.  We must do this again.
Today Doug bought himself a new truck.  We discussed whether or not to replace the HHR.  I hated to buy a new SUV and then pull it behind the motor home.  So we decided to keep the HHR.  It has been a great tow vehicle and even though she is showing some wear and tear, she still has a lot of life left in her.  But as a vehicle to do much traveling in, she is not very comfortable.  The HHR is strictly and drive around town kind of car.  We needed something that was useful and comfortable to travel in when we weren't traveling in the motorhome.

                                                              He looked at a Ford.

                                                          And he looked at a Chevy.

 But the GMC won out.  Notice that they all were white.  He does love a white vehicle.

                                                The interior is a chocolate brown and tan.
Later,

A couple of hubcaps, old well dipper, and great news from the eye doctor

 Saturday was such a beautiful day that we decided to take a ride to the very small town of Scott, AR.
This small town has only one thing that is it's claim to fame, the hubcap burger.  The picture is really not a good representation of this burger.  I forgot to take a picture before we cut it up, so you are only seeing 3/4 of this 17 oz. burger.  It is sitting on a very large platter.  I took the 1/4 slice and Doug had the task of eating the rest.  It was hard and it took him a while but he succeeded.

Hubcap#1

Then, of course, there was the home made onion rings!

This place started out in 1917 as an old mercantile store.  In 1984 they added some tables and started serving lunch to the local farmers.

                                  Here is the link www.cothams.com to read more about it.

,

It's a fun place to go if your in the area.  I recommend the chocolate fried pie. Yum

And this is an old water bucket, or well dipper or whatever you want to call it.  It dropped down into the well and you pulled it up and emptied into your bucket.  Weird looking isn't it?
                                                                        Hubcap #2
Now let's jump to today.  Doug had an appointment with the eye doctor for a new contact fitting.  This contact, also referred to as a "hubcap", is hard and very large.  It covers from white to white on the eye and is basically a new cornea.  Since Doug's eyes have a lot of scar tissue on them they cannot get good vision results.  With this new lens, they change the shape of his cornea and can then add a prescription to the lens and correct his vision.  When I say they change the shape of his cornea, I don't mean that like hard lenses, the contact squishes the cornea into a better shape.  This lens actually becomes the new cornea.  Have I explained it well enough?  Anyway, with this new lens they had Doug seeing 20/20 in his right eye and 20/40 in his left (the cornea transplant).  This is very exciting.  Doug has never been able to see 20/20 in his right eye and has only seen the large "E" with his left.  This is great news.  We can't wait to get them.  Today's appointment was a fitting.  Finding the right shape that gave Doug the best vision.  Now they will order the special made lens for him.  Did I tell you this lens cost $1250.00 each!  Yes, that is a lot of money but you can't put a price on good vision.  Better yet, good vision in BOTH eyes.  That is something he has never had.  We are ecstatic!  We will also take donations.  LOL
After reading over what I have written, it sounds like Doug is blind as a bat and can't see a thing.  Well, he kind of is in his left eye but his right he sees fairly well with a soft contact at 20/40.  Doug has had this vision problem since he was a small child.  He developed blood vessels that grew across his cornea and basically blinded him.  After much work and several doctors, they cleared the one eye but couldn't the other.  It looked like he had a huge white cataract on his eye.  Back in the 50's and 60's they had done all they could do and then he just kind of fell into the cracks and the last he had been told was that they just couldn't fix his bad eye without risk of loosing vision in both from infection.  Zoom forward to 2005 and Dr. Berry in Little Rock, said hey, I can fix this.  After several years of fighting infections and threats of loss of his eye, it is finally healthy enough to try this new Jupiter Scleral lens.
Later