Toys

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September 2007

I loved playing with wooden blocks when I was a kid. We keep ours out in the living room so the kids can play with them often (and I can play with them when I put them away, often). We have a set of maybe 100 with a few odds and ends from my childhood and probably my father’s as well added to it. I think of all the blocks I remember having as a kid, now we are down to about 15. Surely we didn’t start out with 100! I described them to my husband, the tall rectangle green ones were dads and the round yellow ones were mothers. The short ones were children. He said, “you mean the ones with the hay bales,” and sure enough, the “boys” were green and hay bale shaped. That is why blocks are a great toy for the imagination, a different toy for each kid.

Speaking of toys that involve hundreds of parts, Sarah asked Santa for a Percy train last year, Percy is a companion of the famous Thomas the Tank Engine. Of course, a train must have a track, so we now have a wooden track too. This I keep in the living room so I can play with it on lonely evenings. I have to wait until the kids are in bed, because Tommy will come up and swipe his hands across your project and laugh his evil baby laugh as he knocks everything down. It takes a different mind set to build things which are sure to be knocked down before completion. An architect under these circumstances doesn’t spend time on elaborate details, but builds a utilitarian structure.

The best gift I remember getting as a child was a shoebox full of Barbie clothes made by my Aunt Gloria. I played with them, my step daughter Kari played with them, and now the Ladies play with them. I can’t be sure, but I think we still have nearly all of them. I keep the Barbies put up most of the time because I think my daughters are too young to play with dolls that look like that. Technically I think they will never be old enough to play with dolls that look like that. I prefer that they play with baby dolls. We do have some Barbies that stay out most of the time, like Ariel, Sarah’s hero. But every chance I get, I put the Barbies away until someone makes a request a few weeks later and I get a few out again for a couple of days.

We went to a wedding last summer, where my niece, Denise married Abdul. This was the first wedding my children remembered attending, and it made a huge impression on the Ladies. They found an older dark haired Barbie to be Denise (although Denise is actually blonde) and dressed her up in the wedding dress my aunt made. Poor Abdul (Ken) only had a velvet cape and a black cowboy hat to wear. It was a pretty drafty ensemble. I found a lady in on Ebay who makes beautiful Barbie and Ken formal clothes, so we invested in a tux. Unfortunately, Denise got an illness common in older Barbies, her neck broke, causing her head to fall off, so I had to find another brown haired Barbie. The New Denise is a Malibu Barbie complete with tattoo and bare feet.

Those Bratz dolls look skanky. I really don’t want any of those in my house. At least Barbie looks glamorous in a runway model sort of way, not just plain old slutty. I suppose if we get one as a gift, I will do my best to distract the Ladies until I could put it in our garage sale stash. Santa brought Lydia a soft doll with the name brand Groovy Girls, that looked kinda like a teenager, but a nice one, the kind you could be friends with. She even came with a change of clothes. We need to look into more of those.

Football

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September 2007

I am not much of a football fan, I didn’t grow up watching football at all. Dad, as far as I know has only watched one brand of pro sports…rodeo, and he doesn’t follow it. Mom likes football (she grew up in Texas after all), but never made much of an effort to teach me about it. I have learned to like watching football when I know the players. Seriously, I attended about one half of a game when I was in high school, in my defense, I lived 30 miles from school, and didn’t make an extra trip often. When I went to college at University of Wyoming I stayed in my room during the first home game (and most of them aren’t warm weather games). My friends drug me to the next game and they explained what was going on. After noticing a guy I had met in the common area of my dorm suited up and playing, I was hooked. We always sat on the 30, about 5 or 6 rows up.

After graduation I moved to a tiny town in Nebraska, and I went to nearly every home game as well as the nearby away games. The town was so small, several of the band members marched at half time wearing their football uniforms. They had an awesome team, often scoring 45 more points than their opponents, ending the game early. My husband made the mistake of proposing to me during half time of one of their games, on a romantic river bridge just outside of town, and after he was done I was itching to get back so I could finish watching the Broncos beat the Trojans.

Right now I am watching my nephew quarterback Idaho playing USC. He is a smart articulate young man. It is fun to see him get so much TV time. I wish I could see him make a touchdown. He has made some great plays, and the announcers even pointed out that even though Idaho was not matched athletically against USC, they were “sort of” out playing them. That was before half time though. It has been really confusing since the Idaho players have duplicate numbers, there are two 10s and several other numbers as well.

I am not a Nebraska football fan. I certainly don’t cheer against them, unless they play Wyoming of course, but most of the time I could care less. I have been to several games, and everyone is excited, and it is fun, but you have to sit so far from the game, it takes all the fun out of the live experience, no 30 yard line 5 rows up here. And I don’t know anyone on the team. I do respect my husband’s need to scream advice and insults at the refs during games. I try to keep the kids out of the way and keep enough background noise that their ears don’t turn blue.

Now when I watch football, it is usually only the Superbowl, and I always cheer for the underdog. I guess I am in my element here watching Idaho and USC. Well, Nathan is out, I sure hope they score though. I would like to see them with at least 10 points. Idaho has done well on sacks and interceptions too. Whoo hoo, they scored! They only showed the Idaho fans once, and I didn’t see my step-dad or step-brother. That sure wasn’t equal treatment.

I wish I had a team around here to follow live. I don’t know any high school boys, I guess all my friends have little kids. My husband keeps telling me that Tommy will be a football player, but he is only one.

(2023 note: Thomas did play football, but sports were not where he shined after all, and our local high school football team is one of the worst in the state, so I don’t watch them much either.)

The Deadbeat Gardner

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September 2007

I tackled the garden last Friday. I would call my husband a deadbeat gardener, that is the nicest thing I called him as I pulled out 6’ tall weeds and piled them in a pile roughly the size and shape of a Volkswagon Beetle. Each spring we have the same conversation, I say, “let’s just do a little garden this summer, some tomatoes, maybe a zucchini.” To this my husband replies, “Huh” very loudly which means he doesn’t agree. A few years ago I had him put in a hydrant at the end of the garden so he couldn’t stretch it one more rototiller width each year, he has to stop at the hydrant or it would be pretty obvious. His mom raised 11 children on her garden produce and he seems to think I could do likewise. This right here is one reason I am not Amish.

As I am pregnant and still unaccustomed to the humidity and heat of central Nebraska summers after nine years, I told him it was up to him this year. He gamely planted three rows of potatoes (the cheapest and most reliable produce item to buy in a store) because we had some getting a little leggy around the house. He planted tomatoes, beans, watermelon, cantaloupe, beets, zucchini, and cucumbers. At least that is all I unearthed, he might have planted carrots too. Of course the cukes are all yellow chicken bombs by this time, and since he got the garden in late, the beans seem to be just coming on. It is just too doggone hot for me to be crawling around out in the garden picking beans during Tommy’s naptime (after lunch), and the mosquitoes are horrid after bedtime, so we haven’t had any.

He started the summer rototilling between the rows, but that ended when July started.  He had a pressing fencing project to complete, and a grain bin to take down, and a friend who needed help doing something and so on. It is not like he languishes on the couch watching TV or anything, but he hasn’t been gardening either.

My jungle expedition revealed a trazillion ripe grape tomatoes and lots of green tomatoes which are going to be ready soon. And the beans. We also seem to have one intrepid beet. I jostled the vines around enough to cause problems with both the cantaloupe and watermelon, two and one respectively, all small. We ate so many zucchini and cucumbers earlier this year that our skin looked like we were developing some sort of photosynthesis mechanism. Our green skin has faded though, and fall approaches. My pantry has one lonely quart of tomatoes awaiting its fate.

I ran out of canned tomatoes a few years ago, so I went to the store. Did you have any idea there were so many different kinds of canned tomatoes? Diced, whole, stewed, then you hit the value added market, diced with onions, basil, green peppers, and so on. I just go to the pantry and get a quart of tomatoes, two if I am making soup. What do you even use all this other stuff for? I am hoping the weather and the family cooperate so I can put some tomatoes up this year. I love to look at rows of home canned stuff on my shelf, and when I have the time and energy, I don’t even mind putting it up, but I don’t plan to survive on my garden produce.

The Garden

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August 2007

My husband grew up in a house with not enough. For a growing boy, there was never enough food. He tells about fighting with his brothers for potato peelings in the sink. I think also there was not enough of a lot of other important things as well. This upbringing has affected how he reacts when he has the opportunity for free food.

Last year when our neighbor told us her raspberries were ripe, he drove over to pick some. He brought home several batches and I cooked them and froze them for making jelly later, which was what he wanted. This week I spent all day and half of a night preserving what ended up being 9 half gallon containers of raspberries. That made me 24 half pints of black raspberry jelly and 30 half pints of red raspberry jelly. This is probably three times what I put up last time I made jelly. The good news is that I have lots of freezer space now, although the jelly shelf is stuffed full, and my husband found another half gallon in the shop freezer. As Scarlet says, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Now raspberry season is upon us again and he has been tempted to pick more. Keep in mind that we have five half pints of jelly left over from 2005, when I last made it. I am hoping we can enjoy some fresh raspberries and forget preserving them this year. I hate to say this, but we really don’t eat jelly very often, although it makes a good gift. Fortunately a late frost kinda put a kink in the fruit production around here, and the crop was slim pickings indeed.

He is like that with our garden as well. I love fresh vegetables as much as the next person, but I don’t see eating tomatoes for every meal July 15th through October 10th. I also don’t see the need to preserve every single tomato and bean the garden produces. Enough is enough, I am not feeding 11 children like his mother was. Unfortunately he doesn’t see it that way. I have six cucumbers staring at me from across the room right now. I actually cut up three others for the chickens. We will probably get another six in the next two days. What does he expect me to do with them? There are only so many ways to eat cucumbers.

My kids don’t eat them on purpose, so I have to be sneaky. I found I can make tuna salad and add them for crunch. I probably need to look up a gazpacho recipe, but other than a salad here and there, what is a person to do? Ah, pickles. I make lousy homemade pickles. Apparently my mother-in-law makes wonderful refrigerator pickles. Great, now I have to live up to that. I imagine that is what my husband has in mind, although we eat pickles about as often as we eat jelly and refrigerator pickles probably don’t make great gifts, as they need to be refrigerated.

It has been a couple of weeks since anyone has ventured into the garden, so maybe the cukes bit the dust. I just hope the tomatoes are in good shape for canning, since I am about down to my last quart. My husband was kinda hoping I would grate some zucchini and freeze it for cakes and such. God planned well when he made the bugs that get into zucchini plants, they are great while they last, but they only last so long.

It’s All Relative

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August 2007

I have an ancestor, Anne Hutchinson, who was quite infamous in her day, and she should be still, but I hadn’t heard of her until Mom told me to read a book called American Jezebel, by Eve LaPlante. As I finished the book, I wondered from which of her children I was descended. She had 15, and only four reproduced that I know of. Turns out, the Presidents Bush and Franklin Roosevelt are all descended from Edward. I was lucky enough to draw the interesting child, the one who was captured by Indians and held captive for several years, Susanna.

I found out on some (reliable?) conspiracy website which of the children the presidents were related to, and the guy had traced the lineage all the way to Charlemagne, Ptolemy and Caesar and so on. It seems a little speculative. He had something going about how all the world’s leaders are all related to each other through this line. It seems that Edward Hutchinson’s wife, Catherine was of that line, so the tendency toward world domination is not in my “bloodline.” (Phew)

Then I read an article in Smithsonian magazine, by Richard Conniff. He is kind of anti-genealogy because he thinks people are hoping that the genetics of famous ancestors will affect them. I had never thought about that, but was mostly interested to see what kind of people I came from. Turns out my Dad’s side weren’t very exciting, at least as far back as he has researched. They were broke when they immigrated from England after the Civil War. Mom’s side goes back to the Mayflower, and most Mayflower descendants are related to each other, because there weren’t many people to choose from in marriage.

Conniff pointed out that 10% of people have “misassigned” paternity, or looking at 10 generations, one daddy snuck into the family tree. I guess that seems possible. I am sure that many rulers expected “favors” from their subjects, not to mention your basic indiscretions. He maintains that:

“ no family lineage is a single thread. It’s more like a broad fan of a thousand, or a million threads coming together from all over the world to weave the fragile patch of material representing the generations of family immediately around us.

And here’s the curious thing about this ancestral fan: it doesn’t follow the simple mathematical rule of doubling with each generation back in time. If it did, we would have between 4 billion and 17 billion ancestors at the time of Charlemagne, in A.D. 800, when there were only a few hundred million people alive on the earth. Instead, because of intermarriage the same ancestors start turning up in any lineage over and over.”

The author then goes on to explain that Edward III, king of England in the 1300s appears 2,000 times in Prince Charles’ line. Kinda sounds like line breeding to me. Conniff said, (unrelated to the Windsor line), that scientists researched “overlapping ancestry in both … paternal and maternal lines, [and] they concluded that everyone on earth today shares a common ancestor who lived just 2,000 to 3,500 years ago.” And from there on back, we are pretty much all related. Well, that is a relief. Can you imagine trying to research serfs who had no last name? I certainly had no aspirations that I was related to royalty, and here I find out I am probably related to Julius Caesar.

My Hero: Gro Rollag

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August 2007

I found the epitaph I want on my gravestone. It is from a book by David Laskin, called The Children’s Blizzard. He was describing a woman, Gro Rollag, who immigrated to America from Norway in 1873, “According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because ‘she preferred reading to housework.’” Wow, that was like looking into a mirror. It is even better than the Erasmus quote, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

Here is an exact Me-quote from this week, “Go look on the couch for some panties, just move the clothes around, and if some fall on the floor, that’s ok.” I think part of the reason my house is usually trashed, is because I am interested in doing things.

Visiting a friend recently, I noticed her house was really picked up considering she has two pre-schoolers and a full time job. However, her only hobby is drinking beer on the deck. There is nothing wrong with that, but it really doesn’t make much of a mess, even if you do it every day for two hours. Try scrap booking for two hours a day on the dining room table, then picking up after yourself, or piecing a quilt, or sitting at the computer, writing. My opinion is that people with clean houses aren’t often very interesting.

I like to cook, and most of our meals are from scratch, even mac and cheese. The Schwan’s man actually dropped us because we weren’t buying enough from him. I like to read, I am currently in the middle of three books, and any number of magazines, I like to write, I am currently in the middle of six essays, and am doing reconnaissance for an attempt on a serious article about an ancestor of mine. I belong to two book groups. I scrap book, but not at home usually.

I fall into that category of people who have a hard time getting things done, because of perfectionism. Yes, my books are organized by the Dewey decimal system. Seriously, and the fiction is alphabetical by author. I think when the time comes to get a part time job, I will apply at the local library, and put the above information on my resume. I still just toss my children’s books at the shelf. So far.

I am a sucker for containers. I think to myself that if I get enough containers and systems going, I could conquer the world, or at least clean off the peninsula in my kitchen. I have to admit, my dirty laundry system is working pretty well, my four-year-old actually will sort her clothes into the different tubs I have set out, without me asking. She doesn’t always do it the way I do, but I can usually see her logic. My clean laundry system still needs some tweaking, maybe I just need one of those sectional couches.

My only other defense is that the TV stays off most all day in my house. We watch PBS over breakfast and lunch, and otherwise the TV collects dust. This goes a long way in explaining why my house is always trashed; my kids are actually doing things all day.

This is what I did during naptime today.

My Kid Eats Sand

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August 2007

Some people would say my mothering is too lax . Probably they would be right. I was at a play date today and another mom told me that Leo was eating sand from the playground. Tommy is not walking yet, but he is nearly one, and is impossible to hold when he has the opportunity to get down and explore. I tossed a glance over my shoulder and said that sand was probably not as healthy as cat food, but the yuck factor was lower. She laughed and I left it at that. My toddler soon ate his fill and moved on. Leo has recently developed a taste for Purina Cat Chow and has learned to let himself out the screen door while my back is turned, to get his own snacks. This is why the cat food is now on the picnic table, another yuck.

My laxness may have something to do with the fact that Tommy is kid number three, and therefore by definition bullet proof. You know the first one is fragile like china, the second is more like Melmac, and the third, well he has to protect himself at a young age so I would call him Kevlar. I don’t yet know the properties of the fourth child, but I am hoping for Teflon. If I am in luck number four will be just as easy to clean.

I read Parent’s magazine, which mostly I like, but a recent issue stressed that the parent should be in the same room in which the children are playing at all times. Presumably this will keep them safe, from each other as well as environmental hazards. I have three kids and five rooms in which they may play. Short of cloning myself, (why on earth would I want more than one of me?) I can see that my kids will have to find ways to be safe on their own. I can child-proof my house, but they will learn to be better citizens if I am not supervising their every move. I wish those editors would get a dose of reality. How do these people cook anything? They are probably the same people who made it nearly impossible to buy soft soap that isn’t anti-bacterial.

How much supervision can anyone provide while trying to do other things as well? Part of the job of being a stay at home mom (or even a working parent) is keeping the laundry washed (and folded if possible) and enough clean dishes around to be able to serve at least one meal. I can’t be there when they get older and go to school, and they need to have a working set of social skills long before that.

I belong to MOPS, Mothers of Preschoolers, and I like their magazine because it doesn’t have articles on being the perfect mother. It has articles that say “well, I did a better job parenting today than I did yesterday, but who knows about tomorrow?” The last issue had an article about dealing with a poopy potty trainer in public. I can relate to real life.

Kids in the Library

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March 7, 2023

My son excitedly told me about a friend of his (I will call him Alex) who built a game website. He uses the site to host a couple of games he designed and some other games he found online. I know Alex; he used to come into the library to play Roblox with his brother. The two would spend hours giggling and chatting with each other and playing games on the computer. They don’t come in very often any more, and I miss them.

Kids go through stages at the library. They often start off by attending storytime on Wednesday mornings with a caregiver. They learn about the different topics that are covered in storytime but also how to interact with people who aren’t their family and how to share toys. This is besides the many other benefits of storytime including, but not limited to, an awareness of words and rhythm and colors and music. Miss Kira rotates a variety of toys in the play area which parents are welcome to use for play dates or just a different (and free) place to take the kids on a cold Saturday morning.

Each spring every second grade class in Gering comes to the library on a field trip. We call it the See Me In the Library Event or SMILE. We give the kids a tour of the library and their first library card. Then comes the chaotic part, where we help them each find two books to check out. Some of them are overwhelmed with finding exactly the right book while others are familiar with the library and they head right to their favorite section. Second graders are all over the place with their reading. Some look for a short book with lots of pictures while others are reaching for fat books like Harry Potter. If you want to see the future of our community, this is a great time to come to the library, unless you want to read, because it isn’t very quiet.

The next stage is Lego Club. This crowd is usually aged 8-12 (give or take a year or two). They rush in after early-out Wednesdays and mill around the desk asking “is it 3:00 yet?” -when Myra lets them into the community room where they scramble to build everything from swords to space ships. This is another opportunity to learn about sharing and how to behave in public, because this is often the first time kids are in the library without a parent or teacher supervising them. 

Then comes the Roblox stage. These kids range from grade school into middle school. Roblox is an online computer game hosting site. The site uses a simple programming language so it is easy for a beginner to code their own game and upload it so other Roblox users can play it. You can find role playing games, fun games like “Work at a Pizza Place,” tycoon games where the goal is to keep increasing your wealth. Roblox hosts thousands of kinds of games and just as wide of a variety of quality, since some are designed by beginners and others are made by professionals.

Once kids hit middle school they often come to the library to socialize after school. Our new teen area (sponsored by our local McDonald’s) has comfy seating and places to charge phones. After years of not having anywhere to hang out in the library, teens are finding their way to the new space.

High school students sometimes come in to research papers, apply for jobs on the computers and often just to check for new manga comics in their favorite series.

Each stage of library users include readers and gamers and kids who just want somewhere safe and warm to hang out while waiting for their parents to get them after work. 

Back to the Roblox gamers, Alex’s website gets 34,000 hits a day. Yes, that comma is in the right place. This kid has a future in game design, if he can make the technology part of it work. Apparently Alex’s family doesn’t own a computer, but his parents have unlimited cell data and he uses a hotspot to run the gaming site on his school-issued Chromebook. Not having access to technology can severely limit people’s opportunities, but libraries can level the playing field. I suspect I will be seeing more of Alex this summer after school gets out and he has to turn his Chromebook back in. 

Grandpa Reg and the Library

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March 14, 2023

It’s the general understanding in my family that my Great Grandpa Reg’s schooling ended after second grade. When he was a child, his father needed him on the ranch, and as a result, working took priority over his education. As an adult, he was busy making a living. He lived 30 miles from Scottsbluff and didn’t make it to town very often. 

Somewhere along the line Grandpa Reg took up reading for pleasure. He liked reading westerns and was buying paperbacks from the store. In the 1950s or early 1960s he mentioned to my dad, his grandson, that he was running out of westerns to buy. Dad asked him, “Have you ever been to the library?” Grandpa Reg said, “No, I haven’t.” So Dad took him to the library to see if they have any westerns. Grandpa Reg signed up for a card and started checking out books. As he made his way through the large western section, he found he couldn’t remember what he had read. He started penciling his initials in the inside corner of the cover to keep track.

I did some research and found that western author Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) published around 100 books. Most of which I’ve read. Zane Grey (1872-1939) published 85 books. Grey’s book “Riders of the Purple Sage” is on my to-read list for this year. You can see how a person might lose track of what they’d read, just between these two authors.

Grandpa isn’t the only one to mark in books. When I was a patron at the Mullen, Nebraska library, I found lots of western books with tiny penciled-in brands on the front and back covers. Note: librarians are not fond of this particular method of keeping track of your reading. Nowadays, patrons can use sortable spreadsheets and word documents to record which books they’ve read. There are also several websites like Goodreads.com and Storygraph.com designed for this purpose. Readers can use them to record which books they have read, which books they want to read and what they think of the books they’ve read. Spiral notebooks are also readily available if you aren’t computer savvy. If you absolutely must write your initials in library books, (and remember, we prefer you don’t) please use a pencil.

Reading trends change, and mysteries have taken over the shelves that once bulged with westerns. Some mystery authors write about the west though, and that is almost as good as a Louis L’Amour book. If Grandpa Reg came into the library today, I could recommend several authors. I would start with Craig Johnson, C.J. Box, Margaret Coel, William Kent Krueger, Tony and Anne Hillerman, C.M. Wendelboe, Paul Doiron, and Keith McCafferty.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many westerns being written these days. Gering Library has western titles by Jeff Guinn, William W. Johnstone, Lauran Paine, C.M.Curtis, Johnny D. Boggs, Loren D. Estelman, Kevin McCarthy, J.D. Arnold and John Nesbitt among others. Most of these authors are in their 70s (or have passed away), and their writing style is not always as family friendly as westerns once were.

Grandpa Reg was born in 1887 and died in 1972, so we didn’t overlap much. When I worked at the Scottsbluff Library from 2010-2015 there were still some hardback Zane Grey novels that had been published in the mid-1960s. If you were to open them up, sure enough, you could find RP penciled in the front covers.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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March 21, 2023

“Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi caught my eye because several other libraries had requested it from us. This book has been translated from Japanese and is a total of 272 small pages. It got good reviews and the author has gone on to write two sequels. As I finished the book, I could see several little plotlines that could be explored further.

There is a tiny cafe in Japan where you can go back in time- for just as long as it takes for your coffee to get cold. You can’t change anything that happens, but it offers the coffee drinker a chance to make peace with their regrets. This process involves several rules and hurdles that make it impractical for many people to actually complete the process. 

I overheard a patron saying they had a hard time with the unfamiliar names, so when I started reading I made notes for each character. There are only nine characters in the book, so it isn’t much of a problem to do this, but I can see how the unfamiliar names could be confusing.

The translation is well done, I feel the culture of the book has been well preserved. Kira called this a slice-of-life book. It doesn’t have a lot of plot or character development, but you get to see a tiny window of how each of the characters tackle their regrets. For such a small book parts of it were really repetitive, but the author uses beautiful language:

“Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.” 

“Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a literary novel that makes you consider regrets you might have and how a short conversation could change things. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in Japanese culture, or a chance to explore the connections people make in their day to day lives.