stash-busting update

Mostly, I've been organizing my stash and gearing up to garden so I don't have much exciting to share. I've had the girls going through their clothes and getting rid of stuff that is too small. It really bugs me to throw away perfectly good and cute tights so I took a cue from Ruffles and Stuff and have been making over all of K's tights I think I've made something like eight pairs of socks. Thankfully, this girl likes funky knee-highs.

Someone wanted to see my catgoyle and unicorn so here they are:

And while I am sharing odd statuary - here is Tim's Feast on Fools figurine. 

I've also so played around with silverware jewelry. I've shared a couple of the pieces already but I figured I would do it proper now.

All the silverware pieces were combined with pieces from my junk costume jewelry stash (my junk jewelry stash is ridiculously huge but while sorting it, I found some real silver pieces and I found a great pair of earrings that look hand-made and which I think are silver too).

Stash Bust

• 8 pairs of fun knee highs - complete stash bust
• 4 silverware and costume jewelry necklaces (one (the last one) of which I wear regularly and which can be seen in my hair-coloring post) - complete stash bust
• I've also made around a dozen napkins (including a set of Christmas napkins)

in which I admit what a collosal Geek I am

I'm the face behind the mask

On Thursday evening, I found a post on Facebook by the host of Drive Thru History, Dave Stotts. He shared a free geography game called GeoGuessr. I played a round with the girls that night before they went to bed.

I played several more rounds that evening and then Tim and I watched an episode of Grimm. After Grimm, when I was getting ready for bed, Tim found Galaxy Quest on t.v. It has been years since I've seen that movie. I stayed up until 1:15 laughing so hard I had tears rolling down my cheeks and I nearly peed in my pants.

Tim and a bevy of girls, myself included

Last night we played another game with the girls. How do you play the game? Jeffrey Matulef creates a fun scenario for the game in his review of it. He writes:

You've been kidnapped. Knocked out and set in a trunk to wake up in a dimly lit underground bunker. You somehow break free from your captors and stumble outside. Taking a look around, you realise you could be anywhere. You scour the landscape for clues: the language of the street signs, the flora, the architecture. Where in the world could you be?!

However, he then confesses that it really isn't the scenario for the game but it could be. Actually, the game is more basic than that. It has five rounds per game. You are randomly plopped down somewhere on earth and your job is to explore the area and figure out where in the world you are.

confused yet?

When we played it with the girls the closest we came to the mark was about 2 kilometers for a location in Hong Kong.

After the girls went to bed and the dogs were taken out for the last time and I had a shower, Tim and I played another game. From 9 to 12 we located five marks. The furtherest we were off by was about a 1000 km. I guessed a location in Northern Italy and it was actually downtown Palermo in Sicily. The closest we got to a mark was a tourist area in Wales. We were 0.001 km off the mark. In other words, we were a meter from the mark.

It helps to recognize alphabets (if you know what Hebrew and Cyrillic look like, it is much easier to narrow down your area). Knowing dialectic words helps. Noticing that a lot of local signage referred to Skye helped narrow down our location in Scotland (we were 2 km off on that one). Words like brumby (and all white lines on a road) confirm that you are looking for a place in Australia. A sign with two languages and one of them has odd words with lots of c's, y's, w's, and p's, and a noticeable dearth of vowels pins down Wales. I also recognized Norse (I think I've read too much background on Tolkein). 

If you are familiar with an area, you might even guess it out right. One round dropped us in the Colorado Rockies, a place my family vacationed in often when I was a child. The location was 11 Mile Reservoir, a place we camped at on one of our first vacations to the Rockies (to be honest I knew without a doubt it was an area of the Rockies I was familiar with but I had to see the sign for the reservoir to realize I had actually been there).

It was weird, when we explored the dirt road I could smell the dust and I could smell the conifers (but then again, when I see photos of dead  animals I smell and taste a metallic smell - maybe that has to do with going with Dad when he sold his trap-line pelts and entering the barn where the man kept all the game before doing whatever he was going to do with it (I can still clearly see all of it) but I digress).

Architecture can be a clue too. Roman arches on a raised stone aquaduct narrows your search. I've found that there is a certain look to most of the homes in Australia. Crenellations - make you start thinking about where castles were to be found. Oh look narrow cobblestone streets with wrought iron balconies on second story apartments and red geraniums and a scooter passing by! Suddenly you are on the track of Italy.

I've noticed that rural areas with red dirt often find you in South Africa. All white lines on the road mean you are most likely in Australia. Knowing the colors of national flags can help (they blurred the maple leaf on the Canadian flag - which reminds me they blur all license plates and a lot of the signage).  Even looking at the types of machinery and vehicles is a clue. The shape of a license plate can rule out the U.S. A predominance of certain colors has also helped me narrow my direction.

While we were playing this with the girls, Charis reveled in the deductive reasoning necessary to figure out your location. She likes deductive reasoning and critical thinking activities.

Unfortunately, activities like this put my brain into hyperdrive and make it hard for me to go to sleep. So after we finished, I decided to read awhile before going to bed.

I decided to finish one of the books on my Kindle, Deliver Us from Me-ville, by David Zimmerman (very worth reading if you want to be convicted of your pride and need for humility). Now I only have eight books going (of my own, you don't want to know all the books I am reading to the girls):

Walking With Bilbo: Sarah Arthur
Main Street: Sinclair Lewis
A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes
Designed for Devotion: Dianne Neal Matthews
The Help: Kathrynn Stockett
10 Books that Screwed Up the World and Five others that Didn't Help: Benjamin Wiker
10 Books that Every Conservative Must Read {Plus Four not to Miss and One Imposter): Benjamin Wiker


To clarify,  I am not Hobbesinian or a fan of Rousseau. However, I am a firm believer in going to the source. I am actually rereading the 10 Books that Screwed Up the World and trying to read the books that Wiker reviews in his fascinating and enlightening book (Hence: Rousseau and Hobbes). I am weird that way (so far I've finished The Prince by Machiavelli and Descarte's Discourse on Method).

So what is with Hugo? I recently finished his novel Toilers of the Sea which is nearly as good as Les Miserables but doesn't have the redemptive element which causes it to fall short.

Last night when I went to bed, I told Tim that I thought the reason I dyed my hair blue was to prove I wasn't as boring as I sounded. He told me that it didn't work. :(

me at 9 mos and my maternal great-grand parents

If you look closely in the photo montage above my grandparents you can see my Mom and her three brothers all in a row. See the horse and buggy in the lower-right? The lowest four pictures that are pinned in a tight row, to the left of the horse photo are those of my Mom and her brothers. She is in the white nurses uniform and then you see Harvey, Melvin, and Daryl. I think this would have been just a little bit before Harvey was killed in a harvesting accident.

When I was young, I was fascinated by those photos and the little house made of river stones and rocks that Grandpa Ponstein had made. He always made giant sugar cookies and would tease us that our shoes were his and put them on his big toe.

Grandma had this little picket fence with holly hocks that I always remember and there johnny-jump-ups sprinkling the buffalo grass in her yard. There was a little willow tree and giant mulberry and black walnut trees. They lived in a tiny, tidy house with porch on two sides of the house at the end of a little dirt trail at the edge of Long Island.

When Mom and Dad first got into raising sheep they bought some ewes from Robert Bowman (one special ewe was Sugar) and they lived in the barn at Grandpa and Grandma Ponstein's.

spring, spring, spring !

My magnolia is blooming!! Yeah - leaves are coming on the trees, the grass is green. Some people have seen their first mosquito.

I had my hair colored!

Another piece of silverware jewelry.

Raptor Release, Shibas, and Jewelry

This weekend, we went to a Raptor Release. Of course, we enjoyed the other events at the release too. I always love seeing these little fellows. I am not sure if I've ever shared my story about an American Kestrel from my childhood. I shared it on FB with a friend so I will cut and paste it for you.

When I was young, around Junior High age, Dustin and I would feed the sheep in the evening if Mom and Dad needed us to. It was snowing heavily one evening, and we saw a bird in the alfalfa stack. When we investigated, we discovered a male kestrel and a western meadowlark (which is roughly the same sized as this bird). Apparently, there had been a battle and when the meadowlark expired, it had died with its talons around the 'ankles' of the kestrel. We brought it into the house and fed it bits of meat and tried to find out what to do for it/with it. After several days of trying to find help, we set it free (we didn't know whether it was injured or not - it seemed healthy but we weren't sure). Sadly, we found a male kestrel body in the spring. As a result, I have always had a particular fondness for these beautiful, little raptors.

I rather prefer the appearance of juvenile bald eagles over the looks of adult bald eagles.

K is our bird lover and expert. She correctly identified some less widely known species of raptors much to the surprise of the raptor center experts who were teaching the crowd.

K was equally excited to see the police horse. :) Birds, horses, animals she is our nature girl. 

I don't think I have any readers who live close enough to adopt this fellow but if I didn't have two Shibas already I would adopt this guy.

His name is Beamer and he is the nine-year-old lifelong pet of an owner who recently passed away and he sounds like just about the sweetest dog ever.

When we were at the Raptor Release, one of my recent jewelry endeavors caught the attention of a woman who asked if I would work with some stuff she kept from when her daughter was little. I am not ready/willing to take a commission.

a quick finish - with lots of pictures

I thought I ought to finish the photos from my trip to Kansas for Grandma's funeral. I don't know how many of you are familiar with rural life but these are irrigation pipes. They are to replace pipes lost in a tornado a year ago.

These are pipes twisted around trees after the tornado. The tornado struck these pipes and the home you will see below about 2 miles from the home where I grew up.

Mom and I looked at the topped and twisted trees in the path of destruction and it looked like the tornado came down a draw that would have led to where our home used to stand.

The home below is of our old neighbor Bob Dole (not the politician). Bob didn't know what happened, it was his good fortune to be in a nursing home. His nephew Dicky didn't tell him. Dicky's place was hit hard too. He lived a mile or so further down the creek.

Bob's house. His house was damaged but not demolished like the barn. The barn was gone.

There was one place where a woman and her two children heard the typical noise of a tornado; the sound of a train coming hard and fast. They hid (I cannot recall if it was under a table or in the basement). They were just in time. The whole place was gone when they came out.

Dicky showed up at Grandma's funeral. It was good to see him. I smiled to myself when I first saw him. His hair has gone white and he looks a great deal like I remember Bob looking when I was young. 

Bob was what many would refer to as an eccentric. He had a vast collection of curated junk, which you will see shortly when I cross the highway and show you photos of what remains of the barn. 

Notice the chimney. I couldn't help wondering at how it was removed and laid in the angle of the roof. I wouldn't want to be there when it finally slipped. 

Barn swallow nest on the porch. 

You all know I like photographing abandoned places and Bob's was a landmark of my childhood so you will forgive the huge number of photographs. 

Crossing the road towards Bob's barn. The creek is where most of the irrigation pipe at the beginning ended up. When I was young, Bob had a pair of old draft horses that roamed the creek and came to the barn for food and petting.

Look at all the bikes in one corner of the foundation of the barn!!  I know that to most of us it is junk - but I can't help thinking he curated it and collected it carefully.

Bob had a collection of old tractors. My understanding is that some of them were redeposited in the creek by the tornado.

Among the curiosities I noticed in the rubble was old horse tack. It was probably from the days when the draft horses were actually used as work animals.

Exercise bike anyone? Or would an old windshield be of use to you?
 

This marker was several blocks from the house we lived at in Long Island, KS when I was very small. I think it is the only house of the three I lived in when we lived in the Valley that still stands. This marker commemorates one of the last Indian battles in Kansas. You can read about it here.

This is the Harlan County Dam on the Republican River. I know it doesn't look like much. I remember when I was a child, thinking that there was so much water in it. Growing up in Kansas/Nebraska, a person did not see big bodies of water. So perhaps my imagination and inexperience made it seem like more than there really was.

Apparently, there is still a lot of good fishing there. We stayed at a Super8 in Alma, NE that was right next to the dam and apparently it can get very busy for them when fishing season is open.

Thanks for patiently putting up with these photos. I will try to share some stuff I've been working on soon.

In case, any of you are interested. It snowed again yesterday. It is drippy and cold today with possibilities of more 'wintry mix.'

We are going to a Raptor Release. I may or may not take pictures.

Have a great weekend.