Sarah Lynn's Nature's Splendor: Journal: Get-Togethers (and Cold Weather) Continue

Last Monday night after we got home from our family get-together, Hester sent a video of Oliver with the big bear we gave him, the one we got at that estate sale in Wood River.

He was coming along through their kitchen, singing and humming away, carrying his bear, then stopped to ask his Daddy, “Is kitties (they have two cats and a kitten) scared of a bay-er?”

Andrew, giving the matter a moment of thought, answered, “Well, kitties might be scared of a giant bear.”

Oliver seemed quite satisfied with this answer. I like to hear Andrew talking with the children -- his own, and his nieces and nephews. He carries on conversations with them quite as if they were adults -- and they love it.

Maria reported the next morning that Eva, too, was happy with her patchwork teddy bear, and had taken it to bed with her the night before.

I made a pot of coffee with Cameron’s French Roast coffee beans from Caleb and Maria, and later tried one of the Daelmans Stroopwafels they’d given us. I’d never heard of such a thing before.

They are thin round waffles with caramel filling, and are made to be placed over the top of a steaming hot cup of coffee. Leave it there for two minutes – and then enjoy. “Trust us, it’s worth the wait!” it says on the box, and indeed it was.

That morning, I heard the following reading from the police blotter on Nebraska Rural Radio: “A 17-year-old started his day in an orange mustang and ended it in an orange jumpsuit.” hee hee (He’d gotten himself in trouble for speeding, reckless driving, having no insurance, and no front plate.) Policemen can be funny.

Victoria sent a picture of the Norman Rockwell cup I’d given Willie, asking, “Is this Willie’s?”

“Yep, that’s his,” I answered. “I was running low on cute mugs for boys, and I thought he might not mind this one, even if the girl was whoopin’ the pants off those boys with her marble-playin’. 😏 I told him it was breakable, and when one of the little girls stopped to look at it, he told her seriously, ‘Be weeeeeelly ca’ful.’ I could see his thesaurus working right properly there!”

Victoria responded, “Willie is our Norman Rockwell boy, so this is perfect. 😁 ”

Hester then sent a video of Oliver and Keira having hot chocolate in their mugs, writing, “They are having a good day! 😆”

“It’s goooooOOOOOoooood,” said Oliver earnestly.

Keira nodded in her quick little way and agreed, “This is really good!”

Shortly thereafter, Victoria texted, “Arnold says thank you for Pooh and his new green outfit. 🥰” The baby was hugging his Winnie the Pooh and smiling into the camera.

She then sent an audio clip of Willie saying, “Thank you for peek-o-bear, thank you vader shirt, thank you bucket shirt! And pants. I love you, bye-bye!”

The bear has magnetic paws and eyes.

I asked Victoria, “What’s ‘vader shirt’?”

Turns out, Victoria had told him that was an excavator on his shirt. She, in turn, wondered why he called it a ‘bucket shirt’.

I laughed, “That’s because I told him it was a backhoe, and pointed out the bucket. But what do Grandmas know about such things?! Big Equipment makes me feel like Aunt B, of Children’s Bible Hour: ‘One pig is the same as another, to me.’”

Willie had our photo-card in his hand. I got enough of those to give one to each of the grandchildren except for the two babies. I was surprised at how pleased they all were.

That evening, Bobby and Hannah arrived, bearing a warm loaf of homemade bread fresh out of the oven and a jar of Bonne Maman Apricot Preserves, one of our very favorite brands of jams and jellies. Their two Australian shepherds, Chimera and Willow, were with them.

Larry was downstairs, so I texted him, “Bobby and Hannah are here with a loaf of bread for us!”

I heard him coming up the stairs. He opened the basement door – and was met by Chimera. “Hi, Bobby!” he said. “Where’s Hannah?”

Chimera immediately turned his head around and looked back at Bobby, just as Willow, who’s more timid than Chimera, carefully tiptoed forward to greet Larry.

“Oh, there she is!” said Larry. “Hi, Hannah.”

Willow whipped around and hurried back to Hannah, looking over her shoulder at Larry. 😆

Wednesday was the first day of January 2025. And Nebraska had an earthquake.

Granted, it was only 3.0 in magnitude, and was in the Sandhills at Duck Lake near Brownlee, Nebraska, population 15. Brownlee is in Cherry County, the largest county in Nebraska at 6,010 square miles – and yet the population of the entire county is only 5,492. An earthquake out there might cause one or two Black Angus cows to stop chewing their cuds momentarily, or a prairie dog to pause in his burrowing and call back down the tunnel, “You kids settle down, now! No jumping on the furniture!”

It was one of 49 earthquakes reported that day, but was among the strongest. There was a 3.2 magnitude quake in Oregon. This is late summer topography at the epicenter of the quake:

I continued hunting up photos for the digital frame I planned to give my sister. It takes a long time to go through all my pictures! Wondering how many there actually were, I clicked ‘Properties’ – and waited... and waited... while my laptop counted.

You wanna know how many? Of course you do! I have a total of 321,794 photos, adding up to 1.68 terabytes.

And a couple of months ago I found the lost bin of albums, about ten of them, I think, hiding in plain sight amongst some of Victoria’s bins in an upstairs under-the-eave cubbyhole; they still need to be scanned. If there are 200 pictures in each of those big albums, that’s another 2,000 pictures (rough guess).

This picture is from my very first roll of film in my very first camera, taken when I was 8 right after Christmas of 1968: my brother Loren’s first German shepherd, Bullet. Funny doggy would wade into a pile of snow and just sit there. 😄

The camera was a cute little red 126 that took skinny film of some sort. I got that camera, plus a little red leather jacket with big red-leather-covered buttons for Christmas that year. It was a good Christmas!

I sipped Winter Wonderland coffee from Christopher Bean as I looked through photos. It has vanilla, coconut, caramel, and white chocolate flavors in it. Good stuff.

I enjoy seeing all the old pictures as I’m going through them. I spent a couple of years scanning all the printed pictures in my 135+ albums. I’m so glad I did that. I have a lot of good photos to share with my sister and her family. For instance, this cute little great-niece of mine, Lynette, was only about 7 in this picture, taken at Christmas time, 2000. Now she has five adorable little ones of her own.

Some time after midnight, I began transferring 6,307 pictures from the external hard drive onto the 30 GB SD card for the digital frame. They were not compressed, and I thought they might need to be; but I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have to. I stopped the process in order to give the SD card a try in the frame – and looked at the clock. It was past 1:30 a.m. No wonder I couldn’t see straight!

I shut everything down and headed for the feathers. I would finish the project the next day.

Thursday morning, as usual, I listened to news on Nebraska Rural Radio while I showered, blow-dried, and curled my hair.

The news lady, speaking of several Good Samaritans who had stopped to help someone who’d had an accident, said, “Passerbys gave the person some much-appreciated assistance.”

‘Passerbys’?! Good grief. How about ‘passersby’?

The same person says ‘sister-in-laws’. “I went shopping with my sister-in-laws.”

So her relatives are a type of ‘law’, rather than a type of ‘sister’? And how many laws does it take to turn these women into relatives?

She also says ‘attorney generals’. So they are a bunch of generals, instead of a bunch of attorneys?

Our own governor, of all people, said right on call-in radio a couple of days ago, “You can be rest assured, blah blah blah.” (Well, he didn’t actually say the words ‘blah blah blah’; but I lost track after ‘be rest assured’.)

Aarrgghh. You can ‘rest assured’, and you can ‘be assured’; but you cannot ‘be rest assured’.

Does this sound right? – “He will be rest contented.” Of course not. He can either ‘rest contented’ or ‘be contented’, but he CANNOT ‘be rest contented’.

Such Kallikaks we have out here in the sticks.

I refilled the bird feeders. I’d been lax about doing that for a few days, and all but the nyjer-seed feeders were plumb empty. Within minutes, little birds were already chowing down.

Looking back at my photo albums and my list of quilts from 2024, I am quite surprised to see that I made eleven quilts last year, plus a bunch of decorative pillows and a fabric book, and did the quilting for three friends’ quilts. The Winnie-the-Pooh quilt I made for Arnold was fairly simple, as the fabric was preprinted; but I did put a fancy edge on it.

This gives me hope that I can get the remaining nine grandchildren’s quilts done for next Christmas – ten, if we consider that I need to make Violet a better quilt than I made her in 2023. I already have her sister Carolyn’s ‘better’ quilt done. I plan to make her a ‘vintage’ (not real vintage; they just look vintage) handkerchief quilt with fancy ladies and butterflies made from the handkerchiefs, which I’ve already purchased. Once I’ve done that, I will need to make Willie a better quilt, too. And then Arnold, of course.

You see how it goes.

For breakfast I had a thick slice of Hannah’s homemade bread, toasted just a bit, and buttered; then I put orange marmalade on a third of it, lemon honey on another third, and apricot preserves on the last third. Mmmmm, that was yummy.

This is what to do when various people give you different kinds of jellies and honeys and you want to try them all at once, but are only eating one slice of toast. 😉

I went back to working on the digital picture frame. Having loaded just a few folders of uncompressed pictures on the SD card, I stuck it in the frame, turned it on – and discovered that the battery (one of those flat 2025 disc batteries) in the remote was dead. I found a new battery (astonishing, right?), put it in the remote, clicked ‘SD Card’, and there were the folders. I clicked open a folder and clicked on a picture. An uncompressed picture.

And there it was, pretty as could be! Yaaaay! I promptly set to transferring all 6,126 uncompressed photos (15.7 GB) to the card from the external hard drive, adding to the 14,092 compressed pictures (7.25 GB) – scenery from our own vacations – that I’d left on the card, thinking Lura Kay might enjoy those, too. I originally put those pictures on it for Loren. I deleted 72 of the original 244 folders and was unhappy about doing that, since it had, after all, been a lot of work, and there are a whole lot of pretty pictures in that collection. So I stopped until I could know how many gigabytes I would need for the pictures of Lura Kay’s family.

Turns out there was plenty of room on the card. I left about 7 free gigabytes so her family can add pictures to the card if they wish. Or they can stick in their own cards, or drives with USB or USB-C connectors.

The pictures start with her own children when they were small, and continue right up to her great-grandchildren.

That afternoon, Victoria sent pictures of the children enjoying applesauce she had made from the bag of Fuji apples I’d given her after our family get-together.

“I added maple syrup and cinnamon, and Chinese 5-spice,” she told me.

This reminded me of my Grandma Swiney’s delicious homemade applesauce. She’d serve it warm with bread fresh out of the oven, and home-churned butter.

She’d give me a bowl on a plate with the buttered bread, and I’d walk into her back yard with all the tall trees, weaving my way through the flowers and bushes on little brick pathways to the old iron bench between the lilac bushes, where I’d sit and dip the bread into the applesauce, eating it slowly. There were always dozens of birds singing in the trees. Wild violets grew between the bricks, and there were butterflies everywhere.

I was so amazed years later when we drove by her house, and around behind to see the yard and garden — and it was quite small! I had thought it was huge, like a wooded park.

All that talk about applesauce made me hungry for apples. I got a Fuji apple out of the refrigerator, peeled, cored, and quartered it, and took a bite.

Mmmmm... those are good apples. (crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch)

That evening, I met Lura Kay’s daughter-in-law Christine at Brookestone Acres nursing home, where Lura Kay is recovering from the broken hip.

We met Robert coming down the hall on his way to get Lura Kay an ice cream cone, hoping that would cheer her up – “Ice cream cheers everybody up, doesn’t it?” he asked – because she was in tears, wanting to go home. She seemed all right by the time Christine and I got to her room. Robert’s wife Margaret was there, too.

I got the digital frame out of the box and set it up, showing the rest of the family how it works (it’s a Chinese knockoff, and came with no instructions whatsoever). I set it to draw randomly from a folder of pictures I took at our church picnic at Christine’s property back in July.

Here’s Lura Kay on her tricycle at about age 2.

Lura Kay didn’t seem particularly interested in the picture frame; but that was partly because Robert had returned with the ice cream cone. She enjoyed the ice cream, though she fretted because she had one, and none of the rest of us did, and she wondered if she should let the us all get a lick before she started on it, and then mentioned periodically how rude she was being, eating in front of us.

We all said we had just eaten, were clear full, and didn’t want any ice cream; so she continued eating her cone, with waning reluctance.

My mother, though she didn’t have dementia, used to be like that: she’d have a small dish of food in front of her sometimes when I’d walk into the house, several kids in tow – and Mama would immediately start asking if the kids needed a bit of whatever she was eating.

I’d laugh and tell her, “Mama, if each of the kids got even one bite, there wouldn’t be anything left for you!” So she’d laugh, too, and eat.

Come to think of it, Loren was the same. I’d sometimes sit with him in the dining room at Prairie Meadows, and he’d be trying to divide the food on his plate into two portions, one for him, one for me. (We won’t talk about the times he thought some of my family who were staying with him before he went to the nursing home were ‘eating all my food!’ – even though they themselves had actually brought him the food. heh)

Siggghhhh... Dementia is not nice. I’m so thankful we have a better life to look forward to after this one.

Here’s another of the pictures I put on the photo frame – Lura Kay helping me as I learned to walk. It was September of 1961, so I was 11 months. Lura Kay would’ve been 21.

I actually learned to walk when I was 10 months, but nobody let me go it alone on cement.

Friday, I spent most of the day working on Levi’s quilt.

That evening, I made garlic cheddar biscuits using a box mix from Bass Pro Shops. They were supposed to have shredded Parmesan cheese in them, but the only kind of shredded cheese I had was mild cheddar. There’s a real possibility that we liked those biscuits better with cheddar than Parmesan.

We had Campbell’s chicken pot pie soup with the biscuits, bananas and ice cream for dessert, and cherry pomegranate iced tea to drink.

After supper, I headed back upstairs to my quilting studio to make a couple more pine tree blocks.

That evening, I had a little chat with Levi.

“I called Mama earlier,” he said. “I told her, ‘I just called to say that I misplaced my phone, and thought you could call it.’”

“That’s sorta like looking for your glasses when they’re smack-dab on the front o’ yer mug,” I told him.

He told another story: “I once took a picture of Aaron’s phone on a table; then later when he was gone, I sent him the picture and said, ‘You forgot your phone!’ He came back home to get it.”

And still the pranking little brother lives on! 🤣😂

Saturday, we went to Omaha to meet our son and daughter-in-law Joseph and Jocelyn, and their children Justin and Juliana, at the Durham Museum. Before leaving Columbus, though, we stopped at a friend’s house to pick up some potato/ham soup, chocolate cake, and enchiladas he had made for us. Larry ate his soup while he was driving. 😬😧

(Fortunately, he finished before we got to the main highway.)

Here’s a picture Joseph took of Jocelyn, me, Justin, and Juliana in the Durham. The little man in the background is crying because all the presents are gone from under the tree. (Well, maybe he’s just looking to see if there’s a good, sturdy base under there, or if the thing is in danger of tumbling over onto his hapless pate.)

The official 2024 Durham Museum Christmas tree started its journey from a location near 144^th Street and West Maple Road and traveled to its new home at 10^th and Leavenworth Streets in mid-November.

A Union Pacific crew started the process of harvesting at 8 a.m. Monday morning, November 18^th. They endured downpours while cutting, loading, and hauling the 40-foot tree.

The tradition dates back to the 1930s. An Omaha family – Mark and Joanie Maszk – continued it this Christmas by donating a tree they planted in 1994 – 30 years ago. The Durham, having received several offers, scouted Omaha for the best tree, and chose theirs. Mangelsen’s Department Store decorated the tree with ornaments and lights.

This description of the Great Hall is from the Durham website:

Step into the Suzanne and Walter Scott Great Hall and admire the beautifully restored art deco architecture of Union Station’s main waiting room. Measuring 160 feet by 72 feet, it is spanned by a 60-foot-high ceiling. The Hall features a ceiling of sculptured plaster, with painted gold and silver leaf trim, ten cathedral-like plate glass windows, a patterned terrazzo floor, columnettes of blue Belgian marble, and a wainscoting of black Belgian marble. Six immense chandeliers, 13 feet tall, five feet in diameter, and suspended 20 feet from the ceiling, light the Great Hall.

There are life-like figures throughout the museum. They are made to look like bronze, but are actually made of clay and are hollow. The sculptures were crafted by Midwest native and Omaha artist, John Lajba. Each sculpture portrays one of many stories from individuals who passed through Omaha’s Union Station. Here are a few lines I found about the sculpture of the little girl, called ‘Anticipation’, sitting on a bench near the Christmas tree:

“The girl is excited. And maybe a little nervous. She’s dressed in her Sunday best, waiting for her chance to meet Santa Claus. She’s brought a gift for him, wrapped in red ribbon.”

Huh? Well, that’s backwards, and doesn’t make a lick o’ sense. If they’re gonna go with a made-up story, they could at least get the details right. Sigghhhhh...

Here's one of the train engines.

After exploring the museum, we went to La Mesa Mexican Restaurant for supper. It snowed a little as we drove to the restaurant.

There were very few people in the café, and nobody in the pretty waiting room where people either pick up preordered food or wait for a table to come available when the place is busy; so Larry asked the manager if it would be all right if we brought in presents for our family to open in there, and he, after inquiring as to whether or not we would be picking up after ourselves (duh), gave consent.

Juliana opened her box first. When she pulled back the tissue paper, she spotted one of the smaller Chihuahuas (I had it folded so they would show), and she immediately started grinning, glancing up at me as she pulled it from the box.

This of course let Justin know that his present, in a similarly-sized box, was probably a quilt, too. When he got his box open and saw the airplanes, he grinned and said, “Airplanes!” – and named a few.

When Larry and Joseph started folding up the quilts, Joseph, quick as a wink and with hardly a second thought, started putting them into triangular shapes, as he was taught to fold a flag in the Army. 😄

Joseph, our 5^th child, was in the war in Iraq. He was in an armored vehicle that went over a mine that exploded. Two of the four in the vehicle were killed. Joseph had both eardrums broken; the other man had a broken arm, I think.

He can hear fairly well, amazingly enough. When he was very small, he had several ear infections, and, once, a ruptured ear drum. He couldn’t hear very well. We had tubes put in his ears when he was three – and he immediately could hear better and had better balance. He wasn’t supposed to do ‘too much’ that day – but the silly little boy learned to ride his bike without training wheels, that very day (while I thought he was safely ensconced on the couch amidst his toys and books).

It took a little while for his eardrums to heal after the explosion in Iraq. He is a little hard of hearing, but you really wouldn’t know it.

When we left Omaha around 7:00 p.m., the snowplows were out, putting down de-icer. It was 14° and very windy, but not slick yet. Right after passing Fremont, sleet began pelting the windshield.

We got home at about 8:30 p.m. It was 13° with a windchill of -13°, and the wind was blowing steadily at 13 mph, with higher gusts. (Or maybe the weatherman had no other working numbers on his keyboard than 1 and 3.)

There was half an inch of snow on the ground, but the snow had stopped. It was predicted to start up again at about 2:00 a.m. The low was expected to be 9° – and the forecast overnight called for ‘light rain and snow’. Now, I ask you, how on earth can it rain, when it’s only 13°, on its way down to 9°??

Larry went off to fix something on a coworker’s pickup, and came home sounding quite a lot the worse for wear.

Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m., it was 10°, with a windchill of -21°. Brrrrrr. Larry stayed home from church, as his cold had gotten a lot worse. I decided to go alone, as my eyes were behaving well enough that I thought I could drive the seven miles to town okay.

Several of the kids offered to drive me home after church.

Teddy said, “Ethan, Emma, or Lyle could drive you.”

I asked, “Are you sure it won’t be more scary to have them driving than to have me driving with my eyes shut?” hee hee

I thought I’d be all right, and I was, mostly. There was just one time when my eyes went shut and stayed shut just a little too long. Ugh, I don’t like that, when I’m driving. Fortunately, the road was straight, there were no other cars around, and I was able to wrench my eyes open again.

I’m a good driver – when my eyes are open! Aarrgghh.

I stayed home with Larry last night, safe and sound. If we’re both staying home, I send notes to the kids, so they don’t worry about us when they see we’re not at church. Accordingly, I wrote as follows:

“I’m going to stay home with Daddy, so I don’t have to worry about my eyes going shut while I drive smack-dab in front of a semi. (Not that I want my eyes open while I drive smack-dab in front of a semi, either, come to think of it.) Anyway, we’ll watch the service online. So don’t worry when you don’t see us.”

Roads to our south and west are totally ice-covered, and many have been shut down. There were wrecks all over the place.

This old farmhouse is drafty and cold. I had on three sweaters, leggings, thick slipper-socks, a denim skirt, and a soft chenille scarf Hannah crocheted, wrapped three times around my neck. And I had ice cream for dessert. 😆

The stuff was soft serve in a tall Styrofoam cup that Larry filled at a truck stop somewhere. It had vanilla on top, chocolate swirl next, a bit of caramel, and at the bottom, maple. He must’ve been having fun playing with the levers on the dispensers. 😄

Breakfast this morning was an English sourdough muffin (another item in the box of food Caleb and Maria gave us for Christmas), toasted, with orange marmalade jelly on one side and wild huckleberry jelly on the other. Mmmm...

It’s 13°, but feels like 14°. A backwards windchill. 😆 There’s a bright sun out there!

I filled the bird feeders, and within minutes, the American goldfinches were on the feeders with black-oil sunflower seeds and a little female Downy woodpecker was on the berry-nut suet blocks.

Now there are several goldfinches and one female house finch on the nyjer-seed feeder. The little house finch is so busy warding everyone else away from ‘her’ perch, she barely has time to eat! Every once in a while a blue jay or two come screeching in, and the little songbirds vamoose.

I cleaned the bathroom, blow-dried my hair and put a few curls in it, and started a load of clothes in the washer.

A red-bellied woodpecker just arrived at the feeders. They’re so pretty!

It’s amazing how such a tiny animal as a bird can stay warm right down through below-zero temperatures, isn’t it? Here’s a really good article about it from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, complete with excellent photos: How Do Birds Keep Warm

Here I am in a cozy sweater from Caleb and Maria. I sent the picture to Maria, saying it was a “Hi from Grandma” – little Eva and Maisie like getting pictures on the phone.

I just pulled this apple out of the bag we brought home from our family gathering last week, and laughed right out loud. Some small person with small teeth must’ve thought the apple looked good – and discovered that it was more work than it was worth, trying to eat the thing.

Too bad I didn’t notice, so I could’ve offered said little person some peeled slices of apple!

Well, I washed and peeled this apple, and it was as good as new. Fujis are my favorite apples.

Bottom of Form

This evening I cooked another chunk from that huge roast that our friend (son-in-law Bobby’s father) gave us for Christmas. I used my Instant Pot; it makes the meat so tender and easy to chew.

I’m still doing laundry... and there goes the little tune on the washing machine! Time to put clothes in the dryer and start another load in the washer.

Tomorrow I’ll work on Levi’s quilt.

,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,