In 2006, Sri Lanka's celebrity elephant, Raja, became sick after eating too many chocolates given to him during the Buddhist New Year's celebration.
Friday
April 3

It's that time of year - garage sales. Some years I hit a lot of sales and some years, none. I really like to look for old plates, bowls, pitchers, etc. Several years ago I found three plates like this for .10 each. We had a few of these when I was growing up. I've always liked them. When I first saw them I was a little unsure that they were the right pattern, but I was just sure enough that I went ahead and bought them. Then one day my brother saw them and asked if I'd been raiding Dad's cupboards.

Mostly we had a variety of plate designs when I was growing up. So there are several different patterns I look for. One of my three has been broken and I'd like to find some more.
When I was a kid we called one of the plates we had like this, the "spinny plate." There was something different about the base on this one particular plate and if you had it on a flat surface and put your finger on it just right, you could make it spin.

We also had one we called the "screechy plate." There was no finish left on it. I'm sure the reason it was kept was because it was still usable and my mother didn't believe in waste. It was a terrible plate. If you weren't careful your fork screeched on the plate. I hated to use it but it was worse to give it to my brothers. While we girls would carefully try to avoid the screech the boys wouldn't care. In fact they probably would make it screech on purpose just to annoy us. I wonder if it still exists. I'll have to check Dad's cupboards someday.

Talking about plates reminds me of setting the table when I lived at home. I don't know how it was decided who did what to set the table. Probably depended who Mom set eyes on first. When I set the table, if I was mad at anyone, and with six of us, there was quite often someone to be mad at, I would make sure that nothing in their place setting matched mine!! I told my siblings this a few years ago and they had a good laugh. Obviously no one but me had noticed.

Our plates weren't the only things mismatched, most of the silverware and glasses were too. There were maybe four to six of a certain item that were a set, but most things didn't have eight settings. Although we did have a "good" set of everything but didn't use it often.A lot of our glass glasses were jelly jars. The plastic glasses that came from boxes of Cheer were/are (they are still in use) yellow with little flecks all over them. Then we had a lot of juice size plastic glasses that came out of milk replacer for our bucket calves. I know there are still most of them in Dad's cupboard.