I mean, seriously. Those lashes are out of control.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Chucktown, Here We Come!
Well, I've scored the best babysitting gig ever. My brother and SIL are going to his college reunion, so me and the Little Guy flew back to Charleston to watch the kiddos while they are away.
This aunt is pretty dang excited to be with all her kiddos.
I've gotta be honest with you though- (prepare yourself cause this is gonna be a real shocker) flying with a toddler is just not as fun as flying without one.
I know I can't complain, because flying with a toddler is WAY easier than flying with two toddlers. Or a toddler and a couple other littles. Or, (insert a wince here) a toddler and a baby.
This is how we entertained ourselves:
Yup. That's about all the fun I can muster up at 6am.
Fortunately, that's about all the fun my man can handle at 6am.
Yeah- we share DNA.
Friday, August 23, 2013
The Blizzard of '48 as told by Grandma B
I've gotten such a great response regarding my earlier post with my Grandma B's article that I've decided to share with you guys a few more of her poems. The following one is one of my favorites. It tells the true story of how the family survived a particularly harsh blizzard one winter. I grew up hearing about this particular evening- my grandfather's courage to brave the storm probably saved my father's (a baby at the time) life.
The Blizzard of '48
Listen my dears, and we'll relate
A story of the blizzard of 'forty-eight,
'Twas on a dark night of November eighteen,
The wind started blowing with a fury sharp and keen.
Old man Winter opened his doors up North,
A raging blizzard from the Arctic came forth.
The stove started smoking, bringing tears to our eyes,
Suddenly an explosion - fire - screaming cries!
We turn off the stove, water puts the fire out;
"Don't turn it on again!" the children plead and shout.
So quickly into bed we tucked the precious Seven,
Prayers for health and safety arose to heaven.
Clear through the night the blizzard swept the land
With Misery and Death it stalked hand in hand.
We thought that by morning surely all would be well,
But still it came on with all the fury of hell!
In a dark, cold house these babes must not stay;
We must go for help before 'tis day.
But the car was hemmed in by drifts so tall,
No horses, no sled, no - nothing at all.
Some way we must pierce that impenetrable snow
To seek aid from friends in the valley below.
So out alone in the storm went our Dad,
While into warm clothing the children I clad.
Stamping feet, clapping hands to keep warm as we had learned,
We wrapped the babes in blankets - waited the belated return.
At last the rescuers came, with their faces stern and red
Led to our house only by the light lines overhead.
To take the kiddies out they surely did hate,
Heart hung heavy with responsibility great.
Each person was tied to a long strong rope,
We faced the perilous journey with determination and hope.
Daddy led the way, carrying fat Darold,
Mama came next hanging on to little Gerald.
Then followed the four boys enjoying the squall,
Guess it's a good thing they are roughnecks after all.
Mr. Packard, the flyer, brought up the rear,
Secure in his arms was baby Jon dear.
Thus plunging and struggling through drifts to our knees,
Ever fighting onward, not stopping lest we freeze.
Breathless, most exhausted we reached safety at last,
Glad the daring trip was a thing of the past.
The Packards were wonderful, of their all did they share,
Their kindness, cheerful giving, hospitality was beyond compare.
We worked and slept together in that tiny 4-room cottage,
To tell how we did it would take one more page.
We became well acquainted which was quite all right.
Until the kids got restless, and then began to fight.
Saturday eve Daddy got us with horses and wagon
Back home, sweet home, our spirits no longer laggin'.
Well these are the highlights of how we dodged Fate,
In that horrible blizzard of the year 'forty-eight.
If you can piece it together and read between the lines,
You'll have the full story and that will be fine.
Dorothy A Beckenhauer
The Blizzard of '48
Listen my dears, and we'll relate
A story of the blizzard of 'forty-eight,
'Twas on a dark night of November eighteen,
The wind started blowing with a fury sharp and keen.
Old man Winter opened his doors up North,
A raging blizzard from the Arctic came forth.
The stove started smoking, bringing tears to our eyes,
Suddenly an explosion - fire - screaming cries!
We turn off the stove, water puts the fire out;
"Don't turn it on again!" the children plead and shout.
So quickly into bed we tucked the precious Seven,
Prayers for health and safety arose to heaven.
Clear through the night the blizzard swept the land
With Misery and Death it stalked hand in hand.
We thought that by morning surely all would be well,
But still it came on with all the fury of hell!
In a dark, cold house these babes must not stay;
We must go for help before 'tis day.
But the car was hemmed in by drifts so tall,
No horses, no sled, no - nothing at all.
Some way we must pierce that impenetrable snow
To seek aid from friends in the valley below.
So out alone in the storm went our Dad,
While into warm clothing the children I clad.
Stamping feet, clapping hands to keep warm as we had learned,
We wrapped the babes in blankets - waited the belated return.
At last the rescuers came, with their faces stern and red
Led to our house only by the light lines overhead.
To take the kiddies out they surely did hate,
Heart hung heavy with responsibility great.
Each person was tied to a long strong rope,
We faced the perilous journey with determination and hope.
Daddy led the way, carrying fat Darold,
Mama came next hanging on to little Gerald.
Then followed the four boys enjoying the squall,
Guess it's a good thing they are roughnecks after all.
Mr. Packard, the flyer, brought up the rear,
Secure in his arms was baby Jon dear.
Thus plunging and struggling through drifts to our knees,
Ever fighting onward, not stopping lest we freeze.
Breathless, most exhausted we reached safety at last,
Glad the daring trip was a thing of the past.
The Packards were wonderful, of their all did they share,
Their kindness, cheerful giving, hospitality was beyond compare.
We worked and slept together in that tiny 4-room cottage,
To tell how we did it would take one more page.
We became well acquainted which was quite all right.
Until the kids got restless, and then began to fight.
Saturday eve Daddy got us with horses and wagon
Back home, sweet home, our spirits no longer laggin'.
Well these are the highlights of how we dodged Fate,
In that horrible blizzard of the year 'forty-eight.
If you can piece it together and read between the lines,
You'll have the full story and that will be fine.
Dorothy A Beckenhauer
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Grandma B on Hard Times
I've recently been sorting through some of my parent's "treasures" and came across this article that my paternal Grandmother wrote for a local paper. They were running a special edition called Hard Times, and it was full of various submitted stores. According to her notes, this won 1st place, though there is no mention of what the contest was for or if it held a prize (but I'm guess that is the $43.83 that she alludes to in the first paragraph). I thought it was an amazing story and wanted to pass it along.
Values of Life Learned During Depression
February 24, 1983
Digging up old memories of hard times is not exactly my favorite pastime. But sine we learned to be penny pinchers in the depression days of the '30s, I've decided to come out of hiding and make a stab at that $43.83. What a fortune that would have been in that day!
I started teaching school in Wayne County District 1 at $80 a month. As the depression took a deeper bite, I taught the next three years at $50 a month and paid $16 a month for room and board. Because I could not afford a car, I stayed at a home a mile from school and walked, having to build a fire after arriving. Kerosene was poured on cobs to start a fire, then wood and coal added. Feet were stomped and hands clapped till the room warmed up. Sometimes the kids had to sit around the stove for the first classes so their feel would warm up. The old pump in the yard had to be primed to get water for drinking and washing. My boarding house room was entirely without heat. Many a night, I went to bed with a soapstone, a heated iron or a hot water bottle and weighted under a half dozen quilts and blankets.
In 1935, when the depression was nearing rock bottom, I married a high school classmate who was working at McNatt's hardware store for $50. Our wedding was a very simple ceremony performed in my mother's living room with a single bouquet of roses picked from her garden as decorations. Only family and a few friends were present. The cost of the wedding, including my white sheet length dress, was less than $20. Big church wedding were seldom heard of in those days. Gifts were few and very practical.
The next year we moved to a farm northeast of Wayne just in time to experience the dust storms of '36 and '37. The reddish brown clouds blotted out the sun, the ruthless hot winds burned the crops, seared the ground, ad lapped up streams of water. Many livestock died from lack of food and water or from clogged nostrils that caused them to suffocate. It wasn't uncommon for people to die of dust pneumonia. Drifts of dirt covered fences and crept up the eaves of houses. Trains were sometimes stopped because of drifts of dirt on the tracks.
The ensuing drought left us with little or no crops and very little garden stuff for food. We ate lots of beans, cornbread and mush and oatmeal. I think the children's favorite was homemade bread and peanut butter. Of course, on the farm we raised our own chickens, hogs, and cattle so we had our own meat supply. In the winter, we moved into town with my mother and my husband was able to find work which kept us over til the next spring and another drought year.
As though the black blizzards were not enough to harass us, we had great herds of jack rabbits invade Nebraska as they fled barren lands of South Dakota and Wyoming. Over 200 cars of poison bran were ordered to save the precious crops from extinction. Another hazard was the grasshoppers. They appeared in black buzzing clouds. They would sweep in on a field and reduce it to nothing by night. If you hung a washing on a line, you had to watch carefully because grasshoppers tended to land on wet articles and start chewing.
All our cooking was done on a stove using cobs, wood, and coal for fuel. Cobs were often picked up from the hog lot, wood from the grove and coal was used when we could afford it. Kerosene and gas lamps had to be cleaned and kept in operation for lights at night. A candle and a box of matches were emergency equipment.
With no running water in the house, water had to be carried in at least twice a day from the windmill. One of our blessed conveniences was an ld pump just outside the kitchen door where I could pump a tub of soft water in which I could rinse diapers. They were then boiled in a wash boiler of water on the fired up kitchen stove. This was quite a process when we had four little boys under three years old, including twins. If washings were small, it wasn't uncommon to use the tub and washboard. All washings were dried on outdoor lines of course. The long underwear froze like stiff soldiers on the line. At night, if still frozen, they had to be marched into "drying barracks" so we often had a regiment lined up around the pot-bellied stove to dry out.
We had no refrigeration of any kind in the house. All perishables had to be loaded on a tray, taken outside, and precariously carried down steps into a deep cave which also served as a storm shelter. It was most inconvenient when the baby was demanding milk right now.
Printed feed sacks and flour sacks were a popular source of material to make dresses, blouses, and aprons. Underclothes were often fashioned from white flour sacks. I even bleached out hog feed sacks and sewed them together to make sheets for our children. Some lasted 17 years. Straw mattresses were used on the kids' beds. They had to be restuffed often with straw from the barn to keep them bouncy. A dime would buy a number of things such as baby underwear, a loaf of bread, or a dozen eggs. We could buy skim milk from the creamery for one cent.
Clothes from the children were almost all homemade from adult clothing given to us or perhaps an occasional new piece of material. It wasn't uncommon to cut cardboard fittings at night for the boy's shoes so that they could last a little longer. With no TV at the time, home entertainment consisted of listening to the radio, playing games, and going to visit friends or grandparents. Some of the boys' favorite toys were cardboard boxes, old wheels, and pieces of wood from which they would invent their own playthings.
We cannot leave a story about hard times without mention of the outdoor "privy." Trips out there in the cold mornings of winter often meant sweeping the snow or frost from the seat before you could sit comfortably. That building created the least nostalgia of anything I can think of from those "good ol' days."
Our home furnishings were simple and our possessions were few. I guess today we would be considered as the poor poor but I never once thought of it that way then. We were so rich in love and caring for one another that if flooded our lives with contentment.
I don't think anyone ever lived through those hard times without it leaving indelible marks on their memory and definite effects on how they spend and save money today. It was an enriching experience that taught us what some of the real priorities and values of life should be.
--Dorothy Beckenhauer
Values of Life Learned During Depression
February 24, 1983
Digging up old memories of hard times is not exactly my favorite pastime. But sine we learned to be penny pinchers in the depression days of the '30s, I've decided to come out of hiding and make a stab at that $43.83. What a fortune that would have been in that day!
I started teaching school in Wayne County District 1 at $80 a month. As the depression took a deeper bite, I taught the next three years at $50 a month and paid $16 a month for room and board. Because I could not afford a car, I stayed at a home a mile from school and walked, having to build a fire after arriving. Kerosene was poured on cobs to start a fire, then wood and coal added. Feet were stomped and hands clapped till the room warmed up. Sometimes the kids had to sit around the stove for the first classes so their feel would warm up. The old pump in the yard had to be primed to get water for drinking and washing. My boarding house room was entirely without heat. Many a night, I went to bed with a soapstone, a heated iron or a hot water bottle and weighted under a half dozen quilts and blankets.
In 1935, when the depression was nearing rock bottom, I married a high school classmate who was working at McNatt's hardware store for $50. Our wedding was a very simple ceremony performed in my mother's living room with a single bouquet of roses picked from her garden as decorations. Only family and a few friends were present. The cost of the wedding, including my white sheet length dress, was less than $20. Big church wedding were seldom heard of in those days. Gifts were few and very practical.
The next year we moved to a farm northeast of Wayne just in time to experience the dust storms of '36 and '37. The reddish brown clouds blotted out the sun, the ruthless hot winds burned the crops, seared the ground, ad lapped up streams of water. Many livestock died from lack of food and water or from clogged nostrils that caused them to suffocate. It wasn't uncommon for people to die of dust pneumonia. Drifts of dirt covered fences and crept up the eaves of houses. Trains were sometimes stopped because of drifts of dirt on the tracks.
The ensuing drought left us with little or no crops and very little garden stuff for food. We ate lots of beans, cornbread and mush and oatmeal. I think the children's favorite was homemade bread and peanut butter. Of course, on the farm we raised our own chickens, hogs, and cattle so we had our own meat supply. In the winter, we moved into town with my mother and my husband was able to find work which kept us over til the next spring and another drought year.
As though the black blizzards were not enough to harass us, we had great herds of jack rabbits invade Nebraska as they fled barren lands of South Dakota and Wyoming. Over 200 cars of poison bran were ordered to save the precious crops from extinction. Another hazard was the grasshoppers. They appeared in black buzzing clouds. They would sweep in on a field and reduce it to nothing by night. If you hung a washing on a line, you had to watch carefully because grasshoppers tended to land on wet articles and start chewing.
All our cooking was done on a stove using cobs, wood, and coal for fuel. Cobs were often picked up from the hog lot, wood from the grove and coal was used when we could afford it. Kerosene and gas lamps had to be cleaned and kept in operation for lights at night. A candle and a box of matches were emergency equipment.
With no running water in the house, water had to be carried in at least twice a day from the windmill. One of our blessed conveniences was an ld pump just outside the kitchen door where I could pump a tub of soft water in which I could rinse diapers. They were then boiled in a wash boiler of water on the fired up kitchen stove. This was quite a process when we had four little boys under three years old, including twins. If washings were small, it wasn't uncommon to use the tub and washboard. All washings were dried on outdoor lines of course. The long underwear froze like stiff soldiers on the line. At night, if still frozen, they had to be marched into "drying barracks" so we often had a regiment lined up around the pot-bellied stove to dry out.
We had no refrigeration of any kind in the house. All perishables had to be loaded on a tray, taken outside, and precariously carried down steps into a deep cave which also served as a storm shelter. It was most inconvenient when the baby was demanding milk right now.
Printed feed sacks and flour sacks were a popular source of material to make dresses, blouses, and aprons. Underclothes were often fashioned from white flour sacks. I even bleached out hog feed sacks and sewed them together to make sheets for our children. Some lasted 17 years. Straw mattresses were used on the kids' beds. They had to be restuffed often with straw from the barn to keep them bouncy. A dime would buy a number of things such as baby underwear, a loaf of bread, or a dozen eggs. We could buy skim milk from the creamery for one cent.
Clothes from the children were almost all homemade from adult clothing given to us or perhaps an occasional new piece of material. It wasn't uncommon to cut cardboard fittings at night for the boy's shoes so that they could last a little longer. With no TV at the time, home entertainment consisted of listening to the radio, playing games, and going to visit friends or grandparents. Some of the boys' favorite toys were cardboard boxes, old wheels, and pieces of wood from which they would invent their own playthings.
We cannot leave a story about hard times without mention of the outdoor "privy." Trips out there in the cold mornings of winter often meant sweeping the snow or frost from the seat before you could sit comfortably. That building created the least nostalgia of anything I can think of from those "good ol' days."
Our home furnishings were simple and our possessions were few. I guess today we would be considered as the poor poor but I never once thought of it that way then. We were so rich in love and caring for one another that if flooded our lives with contentment.
I don't think anyone ever lived through those hard times without it leaving indelible marks on their memory and definite effects on how they spend and save money today. It was an enriching experience that taught us what some of the real priorities and values of life should be.
--Dorothy Beckenhauer
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Official Travel Advisory for those heading to Scandinavia.
For all you men out there who dearly desire to frolic naked through the waves of the Baltic Sea: I might recommend finding a new location. Or hobby. Or maybe a therapist.
Apparently the Pacu, a fish native to Brazil, has somehow found its way into Scandinavian waters. Why all the hullabaloo you ask? Well, according to a local expert, the fish's "mouth is not so big, so it normally eats nuts, fruit, and small fish, but human testicles are just a natural target. It's not normal to get your testicles bitten off, of course, but it can happen, especially now in Sweden."
So consider yourself warned men of the world.
Besides, I hear they've been looking to expand their skinny dipper societies in the Bering and East Siberian Sea.
And as horrific as it sounds, I would keep your pants on in Papua New Guinea, because apparently two locals lost not just their balls, but also their lives at the teeth of these fish.
Now there's a way to go.
Wanna here more? Check it out:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/13/211628062/beware-the-pacu-experts-tell-european-men-who-skinny-dip
http://metro.co.uk/2011/12/29/testicle-eating-fish-that-killed-two-men-in-papua-new-guinea-caught-by-british-angler-269174/
Apparently the Pacu, a fish native to Brazil, has somehow found its way into Scandinavian waters. Why all the hullabaloo you ask? Well, according to a local expert, the fish's "mouth is not so big, so it normally eats nuts, fruit, and small fish, but human testicles are just a natural target. It's not normal to get your testicles bitten off, of course, but it can happen, especially now in Sweden."
So consider yourself warned men of the world.
Besides, I hear they've been looking to expand their skinny dipper societies in the Bering and East Siberian Sea.
And as horrific as it sounds, I would keep your pants on in Papua New Guinea, because apparently two locals lost not just their balls, but also their lives at the teeth of these fish.
Now there's a way to go.
Wanna here more? Check it out:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/13/211628062/beware-the-pacu-experts-tell-european-men-who-skinny-dip
http://metro.co.uk/2011/12/29/testicle-eating-fish-that-killed-two-men-in-papua-new-guinea-caught-by-british-angler-269174/
Friday, August 9, 2013
Tractor Show
A couple of weekends ago we headed out to a local tractor show.
It was a lot cooler than it sounds, I can assure you.
Basically they had all this old farm equipment from yesteryear
and demonstrations of how all of it worked.
They also had a bunch of fun things that you can touch. I love it when they let you touch stuff.
I came away with one major impression: I am so, so, so very thankful that I was not born in a time when I had to hand scrub all of my clothes and mill my own flour while my husband smiths our tools and grows our food.
I just love me some modern convieniences.
When Family Bible Study Goes Wrong
Reason #542 Why you should probably wait until your kids are a little older before you teach them about Song of Solomon.
Doing Corn
An old roommate of mine, Heidi, lives here in Lincoln with her husband and one year old son. One of the many, many interesting things about Heidi is that she was raised on a farm. I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about life on a farm- my dad was also raised on one- so when Heidi invited me to "do corn" at her parent's home I jumped at the opportunity (though I was undeniably relieved that she hadn't asked me to come "do chickens").
After driving over three miles on a dirt road through corn fields we finally arrived at the main house. There we found various family members, neighbors, and friends who had set aside their entire day to cut, boil, husk, core, and bag corn. Some were on their third day doing it.
In one day we bagged 56 gallons of sweet corn. Not too shabby if you ask me.
Here are a few of my take aways from the experience:
1. Farming is hard. I've always known this of course, my dad is the guy who worked multiple jobs while helping out on the farm and going to school (to which he actually did walk three miles) and just being a kid. I know that you start at sunrise and don't finish until the job is finished, which during planting and harvest isn't until the season is over. I know that vacations are few and far between because your life is tied to a land and animals that need tending. But actually experiencing the smallest tidbit of what farm life is really like was really humbling. Those of us from the "big cities" really can't understand what it is like to have your entire livelihood dependent upon weather patterns. We forget that each glass of milk or bite of bread is the result of hundreds of hours of sweat inducing, back breaking work.
2. I love the sense of community that I experienced. Of all the people that were working that day, I was the only newbie. Every year friends, neighbors and family members get together and work on corn- for free. It was a lot of fun too. Young and old all put work into the project, and everyone worked alongside each other. We laughed and talked and told stories. It was great.
3. They gave it all away. Heidi's family used their own land, planted and organically grew the crop, and then freely let everyone take as much as they wanted. When I asked Heidi about it, she was surprised that I was surprised. "That's just what you do," she replied. Well then. I guess I have a few things to learn about generosity.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Festival of the Undead
Let me be clear: I've never seen The Walking Dead, Zombieland, or World War Z. I couldn't tell you the names of any Zombie books or comics or characters or whatever there is, but when I heard that that Lincoln was hosting a Zombie Walk, I just had to check it out. It is because I have this thing about watching people do crazy stuff. It probably stems from my childhood: I had a brother who liked to give our mother heart attacks. Rather, I had a brother who liked to do crazy things that would give our mother heart attacks. Now I have a bit of a compulsion for seeing the unexpected.
I first heard about Zombie walks a year ago while we were in Pittsburgh, but we missed the event and I've been curious about them ever since.
I'm not really sure what I expected when we first walked into the conference center that was hosting the event, but, I'm a little ashamed to say, I was a little nervous when we first arrived. The lights were dimmed inside the building and there were some very "well endowed" scantly clad women doing what I think was their interpretation of a zombie belly dance on a stage. The low lights certainly gave off an eerie effect and it put all three of us- myself, my mom, and G a bit nonplussed My 16 month year old was the only one in the group who appeared non disturbed.
But then they invited everyone outside to participate in a costume contest and in the daylight I realized that we were surrounded by everyday people who were just there to have a fun time playing an adult version of make believe.
Though there might have been a few that were a little too "into it."
The grand finale of the event was a two mile long Zombie Walk through the streets of Lincoln culminating in a battle where the "resistance" shot their nerf guns at zombies until they were eventually overrun.
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