Favorite Carol / Favorite Church

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long ago

Although the lyrics were written as a poem by English poet Christina Rossettibefore 1872, it was published posthumously in Rossetti's Poetic Works in 1904 and became a Christmas carol after it appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906 with a setting by Holst.

LibriVox

The subtitle to LibriVox is "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain."  What a treasure trove for me.  I suppose the laptop might be a little awkward to drag around the house as I find  a blanket, a pillow, and a cozy corner to listen to a story; or read one myself.  Almost as good as Kindle, but one will not find the newly published titles here.

What a nifty perk on the Internet, just for the taking, free audiobooks. This evening I browsed around and found a some random samples.  If you haven't heard a child's voice lately, "Twas the Night Before Christmas" read by a father and a child is charming.

Angus Heritage Honored

Hugh and Eleanor Ingalls

American Angus Association^® inducts six Angus enthusiasts into the Angus Heritage Foundation.

"A registered Angus owner since he was 12, Hugh Ingalls has been a strong advocate of the breed. From his first heifer calf, which his father, Lawrence, transferred to him in 1942, he has built a cow herd that won the 1983 American Angus Association-Centennial Angus Herd Award.

Ingalls’ grandfather purchased an Angus bull in 1895 with the registration certificate number 19975 and a hand-written pedigree, giving this herd the distinction of being the oldest Angus herd in South Dakota. 

He is the only recipient of both the “Stockman of the Year” award and the “Hall of Fame Silver Spur Award” from the Black Hills Stock Show. Ingalls is known as “a true stockman” who has unselfishly volunteered to promote the cattle industry and the Angus breed."

     What a blessing these two are to the cattle industry and to our family.  We honor their life long diligence and work. Hugh is a cowboy's cowboy and Eleanor is a ranch wife's roll-model. Beside that, they are kind and lovable.  Good looking also, I might add.

Lie to Me

I became so single minded that I thought about nothing else than getting my "Aunt Liz" work re-edited and printed; the task kept me from nearly everything that normal folks do.  Now the book is in boxes in the living room and I am happy to have it finished, imperfect as it is.

It still eats up a lot of computer memory as it is full of old photos. I have saved pieces of it under the strangest titles so it is taking some time to get it all deleted.  It ended up nearly 150 full pages in three sections, both making tables of contents and pagination were much more time consuming than writing the book.

When one takes so terribly long to finish a book project it courts problems.  I used two computers, three MS operating systems, and as many MS Word programs.  I was not about to let those things get me down even if it was a constant steep learning curve.  My Aunt Elizabeth was a kind and amazing woman.  I pray I have done her justice.

I certainly have a goodly number of things to be thankful for as we think about Thanksgiving coming up so soon. A kind reader called me on the phone to see if I was o.k. because I had been so absent from here .  A note to him: your photo in the South Dakota Magazine on page 83 is one of my favorites and I used it last year as my 'wallpaper' or whatever it is called for a long time.  I am thankful for you readers, very thankful.

The article "My Father the Painter" is still featured in the on line past issues.  Speaking of my dad, a son gave me an enlarged photo of him in his blacksmith shop behind his anvil.  I am going to have it framed and take it to the Harding County Museum in Buffalo, SD next time I get there.  The photo is a little close to my raw emotions and a tear blurs my sight when I think of him teaching me to weld when I was a high school girl. He was such a kind, quiet, unassuming man.

This is beginning to sound a little like "Dear Diary" so I am going to stop right here and do some other normal thing.  I do not intend to use this as a diary.  Up to now, though, I have not told an untruth here that I can think of.  I have been filling this up since 2004.

 There are times I wish I could write a novel and fill it up with a pack of lies.  That would be a change from history and biography.