News Flash

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words so - 

 Nesting Box #1 with golf ball in tact

 Nesting Box #2 with golf ball tucked in the corner

Nesting Box #3 with golf ball just sitting there

 Nesting Box #4 golf ball with a friend

And the little red hen must be saying, "Hey, I know I left something in here".

Harvest Time

As I am putting the garden to "bed" for the winter, there are still carrots and beets to pull.  However, as I started that little project, I ran across this really big carrot and have come to the conclusion that I will mulch that bed in with straw (thank you for the reminder, Judy) and just pull them as needed.  This carrot will feed us for two to three meals.  It has been a good year in the garden.

And then there are the chickens.  This is what happens when academics get together and try to solve non-academic challenges.  One of Paul's colleagues told him to put golf balls in the nesting boxes to encourage egg production (Huh!) and to teach the chickens to not peck on the eggs when they do appear, so the next morning when I went out to check the nesting boxes and found golf balls nestled in the pine chips, I have to admit my first instinct was to throw them out.  I asked Paul if I could post this on the blog, and he was just a little hesitant.  However, what if it will help?  Chickens are 22 weeks on the 29th so by Thanksgiving there should be something besides golf balls to gather!

As many of you know, we made a quick trip to Glendale, Arizona to go to church with Greg and Kim and to participate in their son's, (Shaun), ordination to the Aaronic Priesthood.  Their ward now has a new, handsome deacon to help out.  While we were there, there wasn't much time for doing anything, but we did manage to drive by where their new temple is being built.  It is about 10 minutes from where Greg and Kim live, and will be such a blessing to the church members in the northwest part of Phoenix.  After getting through so many obstacles, the framework is up.  Needless to say, this is an exciting time for them.

Rainbows, John Deere Tractors, and Squash and Pumpkins

I thought we needed some rainbows.  I know the background is too bright, but bear with me for awhile and I'll change it again.  This John Deere is much fancier than the one that we had, the one Dad constantly had to fix and order parts for and even drive it in to Powell to the John Deere store, and which I spent endless hours driving to rake hay and other field work.

To My Siblings: Penrose Memories

To My Siblings: Do you remember these little gems?

1. Mother: "Hurry up or you'll miss the bus!"
2. The water bucket on the wash stand inside the door with water carried from the pump about 20 yards from the house with the dipper that we all drank from day in and day out.
3. Dad: "Have you cleaned out the chicken house?"  Ghastly.
4. The "slop pail" which took the place of a sink with a garbage disposal into which went all the refuse of the day and which I proudly taught Steve to twirl over his head in the yard without spilling a drop and poor Judy never mastered the scientific principles of centrifugal force.
5. Taking baths in the galvanized round tub, usually Saturday night, but more frequent as I became more fastidious in my advanced high school years.
6. "Mother, Dwight's picking his pimples again."  Well, I didn't have a mirror in my bedroom so I had to sit on the vanity in the girls' bedroom to see the mirror.  Whereupon mother would show up the with mercurochrome bottle and paint red blotches all over my face so I would cease and desist my pimple squeezing.  Tattle tale girls.
7. Who got to read the serials in the Saturday Evening Post first?
8. Crowding six kids and two adults into our Model A Ford, which served as our family transportation until after WWII when we finally got a normal car.  We hunkered down when we got to town because we didn't want anyone else to see us in our historic automobile.
9. Gathering around the stove in the living room on frigid winter mornings when we left our unheated bedrooms to finish getting dressed when it was below zero and the wind howling.;
10. Watching for cars driving down the road near our house so we knew who was going to town and when they came back.
11. Going up to Grandma Wasden's when we absolutely had to make a phone call, whereupon Grandma would ring the number for us, we would listen to see who else was on the line, and then make our phone call.  We didn't have a phone at home until several years after I left home.
12. Who else could have known what it was like to be raised an only boy in a whole house full of girls, with my one little brother being born too late to do me any good?  Unbelievable!

Whatever we six Bloods remember, whatever we did without, whatever we did have, the six of us today are still here, with Judy leading our round-robin phone relays, and occasionally we hear when I reveal a secret that only I knew, "Well, Judy certainly didn't tell me that!"  I don't think any of us have ever left Penrose and we go their often in our dreams and in our quiet moments.

A Letter to My Siblings

Much time has gone by since I updated the stuff I know that may have heretofore gone unnoticed, unappreciated, or just plain ignored, to wit:

1. Ann has abandoned her nucular powered salt and pepper shakers.  Apparently her grandchildren think they are fun toys and so she had to put them away.  Sad.  She did, however, haul me to Costco soon after she bought hers where I foolishly bought my set.  I got back from St. George this year, and the batteries were dead in both the salt and the pepper shakers.  I put about 10 bucks worth of batteries in the salt shaker, which doesn't hold much sea salt anyway.  For pepper, I decided to give my Costco Tellicherry black pepper grinder a mild twist and thereby, voila, I have pepper without firing up my nucular powered pepper shaker with another ten bucks of batteries.  Moral:  if Ann tempts you to buy something, always wait at least two years to see if she has junked, abandoned, or donated it to DI.
2. Ann and Paul have the only bunch of chickens herded by a dog and a cat.
3. Ann's latest is 69 bucks spent on a Panini press with a two sided grill.  A Panini press, for the uninitated, is a press that squooshes decorative ridges into a sandwich, flattening all the stuff in the sandwich to boot.  But, she says, she can turn the grid over and fry an egg.  But from whence does the egg come from?  Not from the herd of chickens in her yard.
4. Louise has recuperated, apparently, from her awful bout with bronchitis or whatever she had, lucky that it wasn't pneumonia.  We assume she is back at her quilt factory churning them out one by one.
5. Judy walks on the wet grass in the middle of the night to ease her burning feet.  When I wake up in the night, I picture her out there, and communicate with her.  This is kind of eerie, ghostlike, sort of.  What will she do in the winter?
6. For those not in on the know, Judy left her Bosch mixer, some 40 years old or so, sitting on the counter mixing bread dough or such when she went in the other room.  Said Bosch decided to dance a jig, dancing itself off the counter, on to the floor, shattering into bits, throwing dough all over the floor, walls, and kitchen.  I asked her what she said.  She said, I said, "damn."  So now she has a spiffy new Bosch and has sense enough to stand watch over it every moment it is on and a huge load of guilt for saying damn.  Mother would have been proud.
7. Liz says her new pace maker is a Model T or Model A variety, whereas Ron has a Cadillac pacemaker.  Is this fair?
8. I have admonished Liz to hurry and get home because I noticed that her fabric stash is not all color coordinated.
9. Steve, from latest reports, is busy making furniture and posting fake pictures of locomotives chugging into Frannie.  I have thought seriously about relocating in Frannie since Steve posted this picture.  For one thing, Frannie is just Fannie with an R.  For two things, Frannie has a lot of urban amenities that Penrose doesn't have and you are closer to Deaver and Cowley, a huge advantage.
10. As for Velna and me, we voted straight party line on our absentee ballot and mailed it today, thus reminding ourselves that we are disenfranchised in the state of Utah where 98% of the vote is Republican no matter who should be elected or not, the magic letter in the ballot box is the letter "R".  We didn't even wait for the rest of the "debates" to decide who to vote for.

I hope this update has been informative and has provided you with the necessary information to guide your lives for the indefinite future.  As further tidbits become revealed to me, I will pass them along post haste, and if they are juicy or significant enough, I will pass them along even faster than that.

Letter to Elizabeth

Dear LizzyBeth,

Welcome home.  I hope you get home today with your Model T Pacemaker and that you will cease your stubborn attraction to exotic twitterpations.  But you have always been a stubborn one, to wit:

Let us analyze this picture carefully:

1. Who has the right to have their hand on the pitchfork?
2. Who has a look that suggests that he or she has a constitutional right to have their hand on this pitchfork?
3. Who has a look of total exasperation and disgust at the injustice being committed?

I think it is obvious that a miscarriage of rightful privilege of having one's hand on the pitchfork is being committed here.  I have worried about how this came about all of my life.

OK Lizabeth, hold my hand and we'll take our little can of worms and our primitive fishing poles and walk down to the river.  We'll wait for the cars to pass, if any, and walk out to the middle concrete pier which holds up the two sections of the old railroad bridge that once provided the entry into Penrose.  We'll climb down on the pier, dangle our feet over the edge, hang our fishing lines loaded with worms in the moving waters.  We will know full well that we will never catch a fish because we never, ever have caught one and, even if we did, it would be a bony sucker we would just chuck back in the river.

We will sit and while away the time, watching the river waters flow past, wondering where the waters came from and how far they will go.  So we will have a few moments of peace and tranquillity and calm that will light our memories for the rest of our lives, the waters moving by, the cars rumbling overhead, and no cares to trouble our minds.  But those moments were enough.  We never needed or wanted anything more.

Get well. Love, Dwight

 



OUT OF THE ROUNDHOUSE

A LITTLE NOSTALGIA 

Couldn't help but think of Garland, Powell and Laurel, still love it.