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.

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.

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Little White High-Top Shoes

In the Ted Kooser column in the Sunday paper was an insightful verse on Parenting.  Kooser,  a Nebraskan, was the U.S. poet laureate from 2004-2006.  He included a poem about parenthood, and about letting go of children, by Chana Bloch, who lives in Berkeley, CA.

Through a Glass


On the crown of his head
where the fontanelle pulsed
between spongy bones,
a bald spot is forming, globed and sleek 
as a monk's tonsure.


I was the earliest pinch of civilization,
the one who laced him 
into shoe leather
when he stumbled into walking upright.
"Shoes are unfair to children," he'd 
grouse


Through a pane of glass
that shivers when the wind kicks up
I watch my son walk away.


He's out the door, up the street,
around
a couple of corners by now.
I'm in for life.
He trips; my hand flies out;


I yank it back.

Face to Face on Facebook

Starting a day with a good laugh is invigorating.  I found this on a 3rd cousin's Facebook page.  Maybe she is a first cousin three times removed.

Familial genetics are such a mystery.  I had babies that looked so similar that I could have taken this one home by mistake.

Excellent photo perhaps by a parent of this baby.

Magical

I have waited nearly all summer for "House."  The plan was to watch it from seven to eight and then go sauna and swim.  The program turned out like all the others.  Way too much intimacy for us, be it a hallucination or not.  The off button is an easy out.

After 10 or 15 minutes of 130 degree steam heat, just the thought of the pool was inviting.  The warm pool seemed cool enough and getting used to 88 degrees was a very quick adjustment.  If that were not enough, the moon was full and in the city lights only a couple of stars, or more likely planets, were visible.  No amount of planning could have made the evening more delightful.

Sauna

Perhaps I have come full circle.  My childhood was filled with visits to neighborhood sauna nights.  This summer He Who Must Be Obeyed has worked on making a sauna off of our back porch.  The Sauna stove with rocks has a Finnish name and works wonderfully.  We have sauna-ed three times now and plan another sauna this evening; to be cooled off in the heated pool.  I don't think that is even fair.  The childhood sauna never had the cold lake nor the snowbank cool-off.  It was completed with a steamy toweling off and getting dressed with all the neighborhood women talking in Finnish.  They could talk breathing in and breathing out.  It made for a lovely lullaby for a child who slept on the way home to my grandparent's sheep ranch.

My mother and I met relatives in Finland in the sauna.  Their summer cabin was on an island with a sauna connected to their boat launch.  The wooden floating dock must have been 70 feet to the end.  After a session in the steam, we all walked to the end of the bouncing dock for a dive into the cold Finland lake...about three times.    It was a no clothes, no towel, no swim suit event.  All women, grandma, mother, daughter, sister, wife, and small child welcoming the visitors from America with a sauna, we got new birch switches, we were scrubbed, rinsed, and given siima, a strange delicious mildly fermented lemon and raisin drink and finally taken to the cabin to the coffee table to meet the men.  How could one not feel like family!

My life has been full of these "Marcus Borg" thin places.  Those holy places where God is so close you can smell his presence.

Yard, Jungle, or What?

Sometimes it is hard to tell.

Is it a weed?  Is it a flower?

Whatever, it is a joy.

Cricket Cage

When the job moved us to Omaha in 1968 or 69, one of our little sons made a cricket cage and brought a Black Hills cricket with us in the car.  Both the cage and the singing cricket were really quite charming.  I don't know how we made it with no AC, five children, a big German Shepherd, and the cricket of course.

A few years ago I found a wire screened and plastic bug cage at a garage sale for my visiting grandchildren.  For a few summers it was filled with fire-flies but now as the grandchildren grew out of the bug stage, their grandmother has gone back into it.  The last time I was alone a few days a Praying Mantis found its way into the house and I put a door stop on it and waited until He Who Must Be Obeyed came home to save me from its prying eyes and long reaching front legs.

Last night a very loud cricket with an operatic voice sang in the living-room.  I thought I let it outside but no, as soon as I got back in bed, it began its loud song again, for a mate, I suppose.  If it tries to sing me to sleep tonight I am going to cage it and let it sing its heart out.  My only fear is that I will break its legs in my desperate attempt to get it in my cricket cage.

All of this does not sound very dignified for a grandmother.

A Bird in the Hand

Not only did I have a bird in my hand, I had it in a bug cage while it recovered from hitting our glass storm door.  I found the little yellow bellied wren on its back on the cement with a menacing cardinal watching it from atop the bird feeder.  I should have taken a photo of it.  It was so beautiful and small.  I gave it a few minutes to recover and freed it in the back yard.  It is a rare opportunity to have a bird in the hand.

As long as I can recall, I have had an affinity for a furry or feathered bundle with a beating heart.  Our morning started out with this pink nosed and toed pear eater.  After I got a picture of him, he went off to the humane society to be released a thousand feet/yards from his capture address.  It sounds like a revolving door to me, but maybe he will avoid this unpleasant experience.  I can't say I much liked his looks, but the flies did.

 Mouth open and showing teeth, it drooled.  So very unpleasant and unappealing.

I Knew it All Along!

" Finland declared best country in the world

Finns are delighted that a panel assembled by Newsweek magazine has decreed Finland the best country in the world, The Times of London reports.

The panel of economists and social policy experts measured countries according to quality of life, education, health, economic competitiveness and the political environment. Finland came first ahead of Switzerland and Sweden. The US and UK ranked 11th and 14th.

Aki Riihilahti, a player for the national football team, told The Times he thought Finns were "actually quite exceptional". Finnish handshakes were among the best in the world, he added."

           I love all things Finnish.  Well, except the alcohol problems.  One of my wishes is to relearn the language before I can no longer talk.  Imagine that, too old to talk.  

Isabella and Clio

KELO in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ran a story on a friend's granddaughter who found her dog at the play "Annie" in Sioux City.  I heard it from Isabella's grandmother yesterday.  Isabella is the oldest of the four little girls.  This is a photo of a beautiful happy mother who literally has her hands full.  Click the link KELO for the video news.