Monday, August 27, 2007

Week-end Wanderings

It has been a pretty busy week-end. It started on Friday evening when Shonda called, on her way home, from her new job, said she had had a scare when she was the only person in the office, and someone came in told them there was a tornado warning and neither of them new where to go, they finally found the rest of the staff.

Brian, Shonda’s boy friend, called in from his way home from Muskegon said there were houses with the roofs torn of in Charlotte. I called Jenn, to find out they were OK but Arthur’s cousins were not as lucky. Check out his blog at http://www.arthurandjenn.com/?page=1, As he says thank God no one was hurt.

The storm and rain stopped in time for the Football, game. We took Anna-Lena and a neighbor girl. Neither one of them were familiar with the game. It was not very exciting. The first have wasn’t too bad, 14-14., In the third quarter it was like Springport couldn’t figure out what was happening. Vandercook made a touch down in the third but after that there wasn’t much happening until late in the fourth quarter when Srpingport got the ball back and Shane Trudell made a couple of good runs. Oh for those of you who might recognize them. There is a Negus on the Vandercook football team. There were Neguses on the team when I was going to school, must be grand kids huh?

I did find out that there are probably 3 guys who have "eyes" for Anna already and school hasn't even started.

Saturday we did boring house stuff. Laundry, groceries, etc. Anna needed some things for cross country and we bought a replacement mini blind to replace a broken one, and a pay as you go cell phone so Anna has it for emergencies.

Buying that phone was annoying, I knew what I wanted, but had to have a clerk unlock the phone, Anna and Charlie were with me, someone asked a question and the clerk who had not much of an idea what he was talking about tried to sell me smoothing I didn’t want, and created a whole lot of unnecessary confusion with 4 us trying to decide. Geeze I hate that.

Got home the shade was not wide enough, and we couldn’t activate the phone (they are only open during regular Monday-Friday business hours. I have to take the blinds back today and activate the phone today too. Not a big deal, just seems like everything goes haywire at once.

Anna went to watch a member of the equestrian team take her horse to jumping lessons, the coach from the Eaton Rapids team said she really should be on the Springport team, but we don’t have horse that is trained for shows and competition. When Charlie talked to the Springport Coach last spring, she indicated that they don’t want “kids or horses that aren’t trained.” A neighbor offered one of his horses. Anna rode it but it isn’t trained for that kind of riding. We finally made a contact with someone who knew someone else that might be willing to help. Charlie and Anna talked to her last night, she has a couple of horses that may work. Now they have to see if they have “room” on the Springport team.

We attended a Lansing Lugnuts game on Sunday, a beautiful day. This was supposed to be a library employee/family outing, but there were only 6 of us total, (2 employees) Anna and her friend had never seen a baseball game, so the first few innings were spent explaining the game to them. The game was a little slow during innings 4-8 when with a seven run lead, the lugnuts almost lost the game to the loons but managed to pull of a win by 1 run. http://www.lansinglugnuts.com/press_box/press_release_archive/8_26_07.html )

One young man (no more than 6 years old) who was standing in the front row almost caught a foul ball, but missed, because it hit him in the head and bounced off to a the kids in the next seat. He went to dad, crying with a big head ache. The head ache seemed to stop when his friend gave him the ball, later he really made out when one of the players walked out and gave him a bat apparently to help him recover from the pain.

We all had an opportunity to do the chicken dance and the hokey pokey. Yeah ;-)

The weather was beautiful and we had great seats, row 11, and right at first base. a good time was had by all (see the pictures)

Like I said a busy week-end- I’ll keep you posted.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Welcome to Michigan USA

Well, we picked up our new foreign exchange student from the Airport in Detroit, on Friday morning. The plane was right on time. Anna-Lena is the one on the right, Charlie is in the middle, and Lesley is a girl from the high school we took along so Anna-Lena would be able to make a friend early.

We took her to Cabala’s to show her around, it has been several years since I had been there and it was the original one in Nebraska., I had forgotten how really big it is.

She and Charlie started out riding on Saturday afternoon, but weren’t gone very long before they ran into an hornets nest, the ones who build nests in the ground. The horses went crazy, Anna-Lena jumped off her horse, tore off her sweatshirt, and headed for the house. She was stung about a dozen times. Luckily no major adverse reactions. Charlie went back to get his horse and said her shirt was covered with the bees. When he looked later, he surmised that the horses has stepped right on the nest and pretty much tore it up.

We had invited a few kids over to meet her on Saturday night. We were going to have a bonfire but couldn’t because of the burning ban.

Ok Plan B do hotdogs on the grill, while the kids hung out in the yard.

It poured rain.

Ok Plan C – move the grill to the carport, - and we made roasted marshmallows, for s’mores over the propane flame.

On Saturday Charlie took her to Katie’s house, another horse person, she came home all excited about watching the equestrian competition today.

Shonda Starts a new semester at JCC today. She will be working regular hours and not weekends, and makes more money. Yeah!



Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Cucumber Canoes

Something came up last week at a meeting, that nobody else had heard of, I (we) must have had a strange childhood.

A friend said that she must have missed a cucumber when she was picking them from her garden the other day because she found a really really big, one when she was picking them.

I said when I was a kid; we used to take those, cut them in half lengthwise, and hollow them out and float them in the tub, as canoes, for toys.

Nobody else had heard of that, they thought it was one of the funniest things they had ever heard.

Ok, so does anybody else remember any of that?

That makes me think of:

-playing in the yard and making houses in the corn crib, or under the picnic table.

-homemade pies, sprinkling sugar on the dough trimmings and baking it. Yum.

-It also makes me think of picking and cleaning peas, green beans, strawberries pitting cherries, and cutting corn of the cob -Yuck.

But- Eating fresh jam and jelly Yum.

-going barefoot all summer and being able to walk in the gravel without it hurting by July.

OK, your turn what does that make you remember? Make a comment.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Family History and other stuff

Ok, I told myself when I started this that I WOULD write something at least once a week; I have found that sometimes that is not easy to do. Who wants to read about me doing the laundry and going to the grocery store?

I was away from work for 2 weeks, I had to take some vacation or loose it. We didn’t do anything in particular just hung around home and took it easy. I did work on some genealogy and found some extensions of existing branches and some new branches.

I put some family history pictures on flickr a couple of weeks ago. Last week I got a call from someone up by Clare who has been working on the Crosthwaite branch for several years. Her great grandfather was my great grandmother’s brother, so we are third cousins.

There is a feature on Ancestry.com that will show you famous people to whom you may be related. So I found out that my mother was probably not related to anyone famous, but my dad was related to five of the original Mayflower passengers, President, Chester Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, several authors including Laura Ingalls Wilder, Robert Louis Stevenson, a couple of Canadian prime ministers among others. I am not sure this link will work but you can try it.

http://trees.ancestry.com/RelationFinder/relate.aspx?pid=-1754542736&tid=3270021&pt=1

I went back to work this week and had a few things to catch up on, and the millage vote for the library expansion was on Tuesday. We are all disappointed that it did not pass. It has been rather subdued at the library this week. We need to look at the reasons and decide where to go from here.

As training coordinator I am always looking for ways to keep the library staff informed and up to date on new technology and library trends. I found this a couple of weeks ago and thought that some of you might find it useful too, especially if you have some websites that are frequently updated. And in case you do not know what an RSS feed is. This explains it very well, in a very few minutes and it’s easy to understand. http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Happy Trails