What Does An Engineer Do?

Our Christmas was filled with lovely peace.  We were graced by company on Christmas Eve, a grandson and his girlfriend, shared our lunch and stayed to visit.  

A sweet daughter-in-law spent a night with us before flying to her home north of Seattle on Monday morning.  It was wonderful to have her to ourselves for a while.  She is a talented home schooler, sending her youngest son off to start Engineering classes at 15 and now at 17 has some chemistry, calculus,  and physics courses behind him.

It will seem much too soon to be taking our tree down Saturday and putting various table decorations away.  We expect a cold snow storm to arrive tonight so He Who Must Be Obeyed took the lights off of the bushes and White Spruce trees yesterday.

The Ace Hardware Sack and the Drill Do Not Even Seem Out of Place On Our Workhorse of a Table.

Holden Village Prayer Service

The last Holy Cross Advent service was a blessed 'thin place."   Marcus Borg writes that a thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened; he explains, it is one of those places where the veil between the visible world of our ordinary experience and the sacred presence of God momentarily lifts. Actually, it is a term from Celtic Christianity.


Our Pastors Jim and Jan have led us through the Holden Village Evening Prayer Service, most of it sung, Evening Hymn, Evening Thanksgiving , "Let my prayer rise up like incense before you..." and The Magnificat.    Last night Pastor Jim gave the homily on the words "Have no Fear."  It appears in the Bible 17 times, he told us, and those words were spoken by angles and by Jesus. Have no fear, he concluded.  It is such a comfort.  


  No humbug here, only Christmas.

Christmas or Bah Humbug?

In Puritans at Play (1995), Bruce Colin Daniels writes "Christmas occupied a special place in the ideological religious warfare of Reformation Europe." Most Anabaptists, Quakers, Congregational and Presbyterian Puritans, he observes, regarded the day as an abomination while Anglicans, Lutherans, the Dutch Reformed and other denominations celebrated the day as did Roman Catholics. When the Church of England promoted the Feast of the Nativity as a major religious holiday, the Puritans attacked it as "residual Papist idolatry".<sup>[1]

William Bradford's life was one sad event after another.  It is no wonder that he out did Scrooge in his observance of Christmas.  When the Mayflower, after 64 days at sea, anchored in present-day Province-town Harbor, Bradford volunteered to explore a suitable site for settlement. His getting caught in a deer trap made by Native Americans, nearly hauled him upside down. When he got back to the ship with the exploration group, he discovered that his wife had flung herself overboard the Mayflower and drowned.  By December 23, 1620 the group began building the colony's first house. Of the 150 Pilgrims, 100 of them died in an epidemic of sickness. 

Perhaps we enlightened folks have commercialized Christmas to the point that I can see the reason that Bradford frowned on Christmas.  I don't think we have to go to war among ourselves over it. Saint Paul agonized over the Corinthians;  he no doubt would have gotten on Facebook today to set the people straight.  (All I know I read on Wikipedia</sup>

Ice Candles

These two ice candles are the beginning of my freezing project.  They look so out of place on planter trays and should be lining the driveway out front.  Two more are in the making.

Don't miss upcoming solstice lunar eclipse on December 20 or 21 | Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky

Don't miss upcoming solstice lunar eclipse on December 20 or 21 | Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky

For the beauty of the Earth, for the beauty of the skies...

The Santa Barbara Independent Just the Hackers You Need

The Santa Barbara Independent Just the Hackers You Need

A grandson sent this to me this evening. He is one of the remarkable "hacker-smackers" of the future; and the future is now.

Bittersweet at Christmas Time

A few years ago He Who Must Be Obeyed came home from his brother's greenhouse, Elyria Gardens, with several bittersweet vines.  Last winter the snow was so deep for so long that the cotton tails ate the stems down to the dirt.  I thought they were goners, but no they came back. The vine on the back fence outdid itself with blooms and berries. It bloomed well into November.
Our native ones are orange and after a frost they burst open and look like flowers.  These are round and red and so colorful.  It is heartwarming to find such beauty out my bedroom window.  If you click on the picture it will enlarge and you can see the berries better.

Pears Galore

Summer's Bounty:  60 Quarts Done, More to Do

I married a man that can can.  It is amazing to watch him fill the three large kettles with freshly peeled and sliced pears. He is almost fanatical about sterilizing the jars, lids and funnels. I am not much help until it is time to wash up. He uses an apple peeler that he purchased at the hardware store.  

This year the pears were so sweet that only a fourth cup of sugar was added to a large kettle.  It is nice to know where one's food comes from, what is in it, and how sterile it is.  A dish of canned pears with cottage cheese and a few walnuts is oh, so good.

Bed Bugs

We shopped at a discount store this morning.  I found a wonderful winter blue cotton sweater with snowflakes across the front.  Land's End.  Good stuff.  But...I wasn't taking any chances on bedbugs so I threw it into the dryer with a load of dark clothes.

My friend and helper, Tutu, told me that one of her clients had bedbugs and she couldn't go there for three weeks.  Imagine that.  They brought them home from a motel on a trip.  She said that the exterminators had to heat the house up so hot and so long that it killed all the houseplants...and the bedbugs. One might think it would peel the paint off the walls.

My Mumu had all the legs of her beds in cans of kerosene before DDT came along.  The cowboys in the 1800's and early 1900's had more experiences with bedbugs than they could stand.  Did you ever hear of the bull pens at the hotels in the shipping towns?  Early day motels got the blame.

So today I get the poem about bedbugs from the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Simply Magazines

In the olden days when I was up to my knees in babies, five of my own and a newborn I cared for during the school year, my escape was to put at least half of them down for a nap and I would open a magazine and wish for things I would never have.  Some escape that was; but I thought it was at the time.  Sometimes a catalog would creep into my escape.  Fredrick's of Hollywood about killed our mail man as he would stumble over the obstacles in his way as he delivered mail door to door.

But back to my point which is that I discovered Google's magazine site.  It looks marvelous.  I simplified my life a few years ago by letting all of my magazine subscriptions expire except for two, my Lutheran Women Today and the South Dakota Magazine.  But here at the Google site, I can read at my leisure, don't have to save them up for a few years and then recycle them, and I have so many to choose from.  Actually that news came from Tip Hero: Your Guide to Saving Money.

Speaking of simplifying my life, I picked up round, square, oblong, small, large and assorted crocheted doilies from under every thing on the flat surfaces in my house.  I think I heard somewhere that this was the modern way, so I am trying it for a while.  I can't throw them away, of course, I might have to put them under everything again in the future.  When a person amuses themselves by these means it points obviously to a person that needs to get a life.