Spring Break 2016

So since John is in school he gets this thing called spring break, which as a homeschooled student I never experienced. We took the opportunity to go on a sort of second honeymoon, since the first was a rather short part of a very busy time.

We reserved a very private State Park cabin which was adequately clean and furnished. The only fault to the cabin was that too many people had already slept on the bed before us. The park had a beautiful garden with man-made lake and waterfall, terraced gardens, massive flower bushes, and lots of walking paths. It was perfectly serene and very pretty.

We spent one day sightseeing in Natchidoches, LA. It's an old, old French town with beautiful homes and several historic sites. Sightseeing is exhausting, so we confined ourselves to see Ft. St. Jean Baptiste and the American Cemetery. We ate Southern fast food for lunch and Japanese for dinner, with a root beer float in between. John bought soap for our souvenir- he has a weakness for soap.

Ft. St. Jean Baptiste

The Fort was a small compound of wooden structures. It was rebuilt some forty years ago based entirely on written records, since no archeological evidence of the buildings remained. Fifty French solders were stationed there, and there were no battles during the existence of the Fort. Apparently they have reenactments just twice a year, April and December.

The American Cemetery was a very diverse mix of tombstones and styles. There were a few older stone and a few stones that looked almost home-made, which I've not seen before. There were more raised beds and more cast-iron gated plots than I usually see as well. The cemetery was pretty, but slightly unkempt. Overall it was interesting to observe how many subtle, historically-influenced cultural differences there were everywhere we went. The French influence was everywhere, with lots of fleur-de-lis patterns for decoration.

Home made?

One of several raised brick beds.

This tree had fallen and uprooted the stairs, but it's still alive.

Hodges Gardens State Park

There were several large hunks of petrified wood.

The Gardens had several layers and lots of little paths.

The Lower section.

The one and only selfie we took on the trip.

The entryway had big old trees with Spanish moss.

Texas Again

I just got back from another week-long visit to Texas, my last visit before the wedding. I know I need to be positive, so I won't mention the horrible mosquitoes, or road traffic, or mind-blowingly large Texas egos(not Him, obviously: just other people).

Him in Texas.

Me in Texas.

There were some differences from my last visit. Last time I visited, we were still "negotiating." This time we were "committed." (We were dating and now we're engaged. I like to use non-traditional wording).

Japan in Texas.

So everyone wants to know what we did the whole week. We got our pictures taken. We went ring shopping. We sat on the couch, a lot. In fact, mostly we just sat on the couch, and it was really nice.

What we drank in Texas.

We also ate lots of chocolate. I brought coconut chocolate, which wasn't much of a hit, and He ordered raspberry chocolate online. Apparently Amazon told Him that He was ordering six pieces of chocolate, which of course is not enough, so He upped it to twelve, and when I arrived there were twelve bags of Ghirardelli raspberry chocolate. Arranged in a heart shape. On my bed. Anyway, we ate six of the twelve bags of chocolate, shared between four people, in one week. Impressive appetite, if you ask me!

What Texas Is

I had a good, week-long visit down south and am now prepared to give a report on what Texas is. Texas is like the American Sahara. It's dry and generally flat and brown. Which is not, I guess, bad. Every place on earth has it's own kind of beauty.

Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth: A really neat place.

Texas does have some color: the state is randomly peppered with hot pink flower bushes. I really think that hot pink should be the Texas State Color. I can totally picture a hot pink state flag with bedazzled plastic rhinestones in the shape of an ostentatious cowboy boot.

Me in the doorway. Five whole feet of home-grown Nebraska.

The state of Texas has donut stores, and that is the way that they spell it, every mile; and by some great mystery, they are all run by Asians ladies. There must be something about the Texan mind that supports the necessity of buying an Asian-made donut at every mile marker.

Him in the doorway. 16 inches and 645 miles apart. How did we ever make it this far?

 

Texas also has traffic. Roads in the state of Texas are not constructed for the actual conveyance of persons, or at least not at any high speed. Construction, like sprinkles on a glazed donut, is all over but not at all done.

To end on a positive note, Texas has armadillos for roadkill. And that's kind of cool.

My Life this Summer

I got a new quilting book for my recommended reading list!

The Essential Quilter, by Barbara Chainey, 1993. I read a recommendation for this book on some other quilting website. It's a really cheap buy on Amazon! This is a great book for those beginning to quilt by hand because the whole book focuses entirely on hand-quilting, and describes the basic techniques in detail. It's an older book, but still with good pictures and relevant information. Especially considering the price, it's worth buying.

Using my butter churn at the Fort

I gave notice at John Adams fabric shop, so I will be leaving there at the end of the month. Once the pressure is off to sell those nasty promo products, the job is so much more enjoyable. I'm going to miss the Old Manager, that tough old cookie, and my employee discount.

Getting up early for work.

At the costume shop right now I'm working through making non-essential items from fabric that builds up during the busy season. Easter bunny vests, bell-bottom pants, pioneer dresses, clown costumes, and butterfly wings are some of the things currently on the list. Once we get closer to October all those will get put on hold for costume repair and prep for Reformation Day.

Getting back late from work.

 It's been raining a lot, and it's been warm, and everything important in life is stuff I can't blog about right now. Change is afoot, and it's good and hard, and fun and difficult. I'm leaving this weekend for a ten day trip to to Texas. Adventure awaits. And very hot weather, but I'm trying not to think about that.

We went on Vacation

The title pretty much summarizes the post, so now you don't have to read it if you don't want to.

Over the holiday weekend pf July 4th we took a family vacation down South at the insistence of the more cultured graft of our immediate family, who found a cabin near a lake for the two married couples, all the originals, and a random additional person to stay for almost a week of relaxation. The lake was a little flooded, it rained a lot, and you had to rent a boat anyway, so we didn't do much with the water. We mostly just sat around and ate. And except for the extremely bowed couch bed that I got to sleep on, it was good. My poor back.

A bald bearded monkey and a bald beardless monkey

Everyone actually got to hold the baby, code name Monkey, and everyone is looking forward to the arrival of the next available baby, code name Banana.

Everyone got a much needed back-rub.

They played board games. I played one game. We read. We mourned the lack of internet. We ate, drank, and were, for the most part, merry. There was excess of Presbyterian beverages and all the best movies: Monsters Inc.- Mom laughs every time as if it's the first time she's seen it. Megamind- Revange, a dish best served cold. Wreck-it Ralph- a classic.

An Angel?

We ate a lot of food, and I think the Angel food cake was my favorite.

Ruins at Ha Ha Tonka

We didn't go out much; we went for a walk on the 4th, out to lunch one day, out for ice cream another. When we went for a walk we stopped at Ha Ha Tonka State Park(which means laughing waters, and which everyone loved saying). It was free and had paved walks(essential for hiking with the Monkey). One of the walks was along a drop-off above the river, where we saw the ruins of a stone house built in the 1920's, and burned in the 1940's. All a little bit shady, but makes for an interesting walk nowadays.

And that was our holiday!

A Rendezvous

I've been doing living history for six years, and Penny has been my reenacting buddy the entire time. We decided to take a quick history trip together up to central South Dakota for the 2015 High Plains Rendezvous. Now, this is not a rendezvous with destiny or anything like that: it's basically two weeks of tent camping with a bunch of wild people. We sometimes have HPRR members visit the Fort, and next year the Fort is actually hosting the 2016 Rendezvous. So we thought it might be a good time to get to know HPRR a little better.

Penny and I. New Green Dress Day. It was cold.

Most of the HPRR people I've seen have been the fur trading, Indian-like, pioneering sort of people, so that's what I was expecting. And for the most part those were common roles, but there was also a group of enthusiasts new to me: Primitive campers. Not necessarily based on any historical era, these people just enjoyed wearing simple clothing, using canvas tents, and cooking over a fire. In fact, I felt like the majority of the clothing worn there was wildly(I say again, wildly) inaccurate for any time in history. I can appreciate the joy of getting away and participating in that type of rustic atmosphere(though maybe not for two whole weeks) but now that I've seen it I think my preference would be for military living history.

All the tents were canvas with wood poles.

The majority of the campers were probably over fifty. There were some families and some older singles. One thing most of the campers had in common was that they were a fairly rough crowd. One evening I found myself watching a gambling scene straight out of a western saloon set. By the end of the weekend I was fairly fed up with profanity, vulgarity, and general poor taste. I felt the entire camp was in need of serious revival, or judgement(oh Lord! Bring the lighting!).

Old Teal Dress Day, cooking over the fire.

Before we left I finally got around to mending my faded old Regency dress. I'm not sure it will be decent much longer, but it's good enough for camping. On Wednesday I cooked lunch over the fire. I tried Scotch eggs, which is basically sausage wrapped around boiled eggs and then fried. I had about a fifty-percent success rate: half of them fell apart, and half of them turned out perfectly.

The view from our Cabin, the one second it was sunny.

Because Penny is too old and I'm too soft, we rented a nearby cabin(it was adorable, and very clean) instead of tent camping. We were glad we did, too, because it was grey and rainy and usually near 60F for most of the four days. The Rendezvous site was just a few miles away on private property. It was gorgeous: the road into the site led down a hill into several acres of woods with a creek running through the middle of the site. It was all very well-kept. And I never got a single tick.

Tent decor: He told us it was an Alligator Turtle shell, from 1949.

There were various vendors selling various goods; one blacksmith and one kitchen. Someone told us that at this rendezvous there were over 200 campsites, and that the highest number they'd seen was at a rendezvous with over 1000 campsites. I bought a cup(I'm soooooo susceptible to pottery; I love pottery) and a woven belt- that was embracing my wild side, after being around all those savages. Plus it was only $2.

A Printing block from the early 19th Century

One lady brought her stamps and let us try stamping fabric. Some of her blocks dated back to 1850, if not earlier.

That's what I stamped, while being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

On our last morning a very kind gentleman showed me how to shoot his blackpowder rifle and pistol I say he showed me, because I didn't do much except pull the trigger.

Mr. Oklahoma let me shoot his blackpowder rifle and pistol.

 The rifle was(I felt) extremely heavy. If I was actually trying to defend myself with that rifle, I'd be in trouble because I don't think I could have held it steady. The pistol was fun and surprisingly loud.

I didn't aim at anything. I just shot.

We also met a nice man from Canada who helped carry our bags down the hill. He was extremely talkative and we learned in a very short time that he only had nine toes, he'd been reenacting forever, he knew just how to bake biscuits in a dutch oven, and his wife had recently died.

A needed commodity at Rendezvous, I'm sure.

 We also met the grave digger. He was slightly morbid but friendly. There was almost always someone shooting at the range. There were specific times for rifles, pistols, shooting at a mark or shooting clays. There was also tomahawk ans knife throwing most days, but that was mostly little boys who did a terrible job of it. When it wasn't raining, there was live music in the evening. Musicians would either gather together to play, or just sit at their respective tents and all play different things at the same time.

Moonshine, for the first time ever. At least it was the good quality stuff.

Overall spending time at the Rendezvous was an interesting experience. Both our cabin site and the rendezvous sites were just beautiful, rolling prairie with woods and lakes. I'm glad to be home, though.

A Short Trip Down South

Shoal Creek Living History Park: A nice place to walk near Kansas City. It's an interesting conglomeration of buildings dating from 1820 to 1900. We stopped here to stretch our legs during the drive down.

So this past week I took a very short trip with some church friends down to Oklahoma. The long title of this post could be "Three fairly quiet people drive fourteen hours in a tiny rattletrap car and stuff several thousand mailings all in four days."

Becky in the warehouse where we worked. No, she's not smoking; I think that's a pen.

We were volunteering for this organization; our church has supported them for years, and they make use of volunteers year-round. Volunteer work, especially when you're only doing it for such a short time, is usually monotonous. And it was monotonous: we wrote several hundred postcards(my hand, ouch), stuffed several thousand letters, and packaged hundreds of newsletters. The facility was great, though, and the housing was amazing.

After work hours, however, there is almost absolutely nothing to do in Bartlesville. We ate Chinese, walked around downtown(such as it was) visited Braum's(which was a disgustingly dirty place), and stopped by the old train depot.

The depot was neat: the building wasn't open, but the old steam engine was just so huge it had to be interesting, even though none of us understood how it would have worked. Mrs. S rang the bell.

The weather was perfect. One evening we walked around the outside of the Frank Phillips mansion. Frank Phillips was the founder of Phillips 66. He built this enormous house during the depression, had one kid, and adopted two more.

Bartlesville has garishly decorated Bison all over the town. I fail to see how this improves the community. The trip back went fine, I'm glad to be back, and now it's back to work.

Famous Fairfield Weekend

Last week was amazingly stressful with work leading up to Pagan blood-fest day(Halloween totally needs to get squashed by Reformation day celebrations) and everyone wanting a hideous costume, and also because I had a difficult Etsy transaction that led to a Paypal case and a custom order bring returned. So that happened last week, and then I went on a welcome road-trip weekend vacation with Silent Man, Mr G, and the Glamorous French Librarian.

Silent Man posing in Pella, where we stopped for Church and lunch on the way home.

It's been four years since we attended the Famous Fairfield ECD Workshop, and it was just time to go again. Every year the mighty dance group in the small  town of Fairfeild hosts an ECD weekend with some of the best callers and the absolute best ECD band in the country. We danced Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon, and then had a formal dance Saturday evening. It was a lot of dancing and not a whole lot of sleep, but fun.

Glamorous French Librarian, also in Pella, the only place I remembered to take pictures.

Like a lot of Iowa towns Fairfield has a town square with shops around it, and one of the shops on the Fairfeild square is a Ladies' Auxiliary Thrift store. We stopped there last time, and it's a cute store with good prices, so we stopped there again this weekend.

The Marchioness and the Glamorous French Librarian(GFL for short) in Pella a very nice looking town.

I bought three patterns(.20 each!), two zippers(.20 each!), and I paid three dollars for a book called "Quilting" by Averil Colby, published in 1971. I already love the book because it's mostly about the quilting I enjoy, wholecloth quilting in the old style. The book and chapters on tools, filler, and patterns, then goes through the centuries in order, starting with a chapter on 16th century quilts and going through 20th century quilts. Great pictures, though all black-and-white, and lots of pattern detail from old quilts.

Averil Colby was born in Yorkshire 1900. Averil is apparently a legend among quilters. She worked with old fabrics in traditional ways, and I find her life story interesting.  Read a bit about Averil HERE.

Iowa: Clarinda and Red Oak

This weekend I took a short road trip with the G family over to Clarinda, IA. Clarinda is a small town where their claim to fame is that Glenn Miller was born there back in 1904. It's also where my Grandfather was born in 1917, into a good, Scots-Presbyterian family. Every spring Clarinda has a Glenn Miller Festival where the best Big Bands come and play. There's also a Glenn Miller museum, which costs $6 per person, so we skipped it.

The Nodaway Museum on the edge of Clarinda is really neat. Besides several rather decrepit outbuildings, it's two big museum buildings put together, and a basement besides, just full of Prairie history. There's a quilt room with racks of impressive antique quilts, and a genealogy center. Donations are requested, but there is no set entrance fee. The museum is staffed by elderly volunteers, who were so friendly that we could hardly leave!

It was sunny, 91F and amazingly humid, so our trip largely ended up being us sitting in the air-conditioned car, looking at the various small towns out the window. We spent a fair amount of time in the extremely agricultural and obscure town of Red Oak. Who knew that Red Oak, IA had so many amazing houses? We drove through street block after street block of gorgeous late-Victorian mansions. The Gs, always on the lookout for morbid haunted houses, loved it.

The End of all Things

Monday was Memorial Day and our last day in Virginia. We the drove the two hours from CW out to Mt. Vernon and visited that famous estate.

 George Washington's Mansion. Once again, it was hot, we were tired, and it was crowded, but it was still worth the trip. I think that it's pretty clear George Washington was Providence-sent for America's well being.

The gardens were beautiful. There was also a huge museum with several theaters and interesting displays. We even got to see Geo. Washington's famed dentures.

There were a few costumed interpreters at the farm, but otherwise there were hired actors. We "met" Martha Washington.

Tuesday we drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains on our way to Presbytery. It was a long, winding drive with lots of trees and while it was beautiful, I for one am glad to be back in the non-forested midwest. Trees smother people, and whoever said that we need to save the trees was misinformed. Anyway, the most culturally interesting moment of the day came when we stopped just off the latest scenic route(Mom again: We spent an hour on the back roads) and bought local barbecue for lunch.

 We were at Presbytery from Tuesday night through Saturday morning. It wasn't a particularly large camp, which was nice for the parents of small children. And there were lots of small children. Children outnumbered adults seven to one, and when combined together they made a chaotic swarm of screaming miscreants, so it's good we were isolated. The camp was rustic; so rustic that tent camping would have been an improvement. I'll just let you imagine how bad that was.

 Not being a sporting person, I sat in on most of the Presbytery meetings and got a lot of quilting done. I was, however, shanghaied into a canoeing voyage that meant paddling for six miles of river(ohhhh my back) and we saw a whole bunch of cute turtles that looked really good to eat. My fearless skipper and I managed to navigate turbulent waters and our vessel only got turned backwards twice.

So Presbytery is done, vacation is over, and we'll be home by Monday. I'm looking forward to it!