Long time no write

Hope you've all been having a good new year (you know, now that its March and all).  Here are some pic's to update you on stuff going on since my last post in November (yeah, I'm bad--like I say to Dan a lot when I don't get something done that I meant to do--"It's because I'm a terrible person.")

Ummm . . . big thing, I guess--we went to Mexico with my brother and sister-in-law back in the beginning of December)

Us in Tepic

Dan and our family's old exchange student, Michele in Tepic

With my brother and his wife on his birthday!

The street in front of our hotel

Me in the water on Stone Island

Restaurants on Stone Island

Olas Altas Bay--from our hotel room balcony

Fun was had by all (and we left on the day of a snow storm and arrived back . . . ummm . . . two days later than expected due to the snowstorm that took down the Metrodome roof)

But--we do like the snow--we love the snow!


Sooo . . . snowy wintery scenes around the farm . . .

Tinkerbell and Rowdy eating in the snow

Rowdy eating in the feed bunk

Dan added this divider so that the cows could no longer stand in the feed bunk to eat--while it makes an adorable picture, it causes quite a mess (as cows don't care where they do their business) and we weren't quite sure if the bunk's 2 x 12 boards were really able to handle pregnant cows day after day!

Sleeping out in the snow--Dan and his cousin slept out one Friday evening in early Feb.  Meanwhile, I stayed in the house and watched a movie and some old episodes of Bewitched with my sister-in-law.  Woohoo--sorry, Dan, I know that couples should do things together, but sleeping out on the frozen ground is not on my agenda--love camping--I've even camped out in well below freezing temps, but that was in a Teepee.

Wheat in the field where Dan and his cousin slept--would this be considered winter wheat?

Me last week in front of a mongo drift that formed in front of one of our old buildings.

A last look at the cows on a snowy, foggy day!

 Well, hope that catches you all up! 

Chilly, Christmas-y Winter Days Are Here Again

Brrrr . . . I'm chilly today . . . and yesterday . . . and the day before

Do I use . . . too much?

I don't know . . . (he, he, he)

Well, this post hasn't said much so far, but I thought I would show you one thing I had designed in the last month that might be of some interest.

For the last couple of years, I have been designing and printing banners to be hung at my church during different seasons of the year. Our little country church gets decorated so beautifully at Christmastime with candles, wreaths, and greenery. It already looked so special, so I didn't know if anyone really wanted me to design anything to be put up in front for Christmas, but I asked the Pastor and he said that he thought people would like them during this season as well.

So this is what I came up with . . .


I split this picture in two and it is up on either side of the cross in front of the church. The thing I like about this picture most is the scene truly is from the hillside around Bethlehem. (Although a heavily photoshopped version of it all!)

Dan took a picture looking out over Bethlehem when we went to Israel a couple of years ago. Do you notice the tall mound on the far right. That is a Herodioan (built by Herod/Herod's people) from way, way, way back to before the time of Jesus (at least that is my understanding). Mary and Joseph would have looked out on those hills, the Magi may have had to have crossed those hills to get back home. Those hills were there when Jesus was born and, if hills could talk, could attest to have seen angels in the air announcing His birth. Anyway, those are some special hills :o)

Do you want to see the real picture Dan took?

Well, yes, you do.


The part in the banners is in the way back--I am doubting that Bethlehem currently looks much the same as it did in Jesus' time. I hope I did it all some justice in the banners (highly smooshed and manipulated is they may be).

***Me on my bit of a soap box***
I think that there are times when people today think that God doesn't really have anything to do with the world anymore (if He ever did). That maybe He just ended stuff whenever the Bible was done being written (or, that whole thing was faked anyway). He doesn't care about anyone, none of what He did (or was thought to do) can really be explained, so He must not really be out there at all. I get that. I can understand that people don't see things the same way as I do, but, I say, "What if . . .what if God truly is there and truly loves each one of us and truly has a plan for every single persons life on this earth? What if He truly has known you since before you were born?"

My mind and my heart say that we will see one day that God and all the science and everything out there really do work together. And that thoses hills that were there way back at Jesus birth will attest to the fact that He was born one night 2000+ years ago to really save the people of this world (before and after Him) from the sins that have separated us from our perfect relationship with God since the Fall of Adam.

But, I digress, I am not here to start some kind of theological argument. I just get thoughtful about things sometimes and don't know where to put those thoughts except for out here somewhere where they might cause someone else to think something or other.

Well, enjoy these special days and I hope that wherever you are (here in my hometown or out far away) that your fingers and toes are warm and will continue to be throughout the winter.

Is is just me, or did I do tooooo much this weekend?

Hello, all!

Okay, so I did it. I sang and played guitar on Friday night and survived. Whew. I wasn't that great or anything, but I survived (probably won't be asked to do that again, though). I would tell you about the large crowds that came out to hear me perform, but that large crowd consisted of - the two ladies who work at the shop, one of their husbands, my parents, my husband (who arrived late by the way, bad husband), some other guy, and a family of three that has come into our gallery a few times. Yep, that's what I was nervous about. I sang and played stuff (including a few verses of The Ballad of Jesse James(music comes up right away on this site, so if you are in quiet place you may not want to click on this link)). Anyway, it went by (and as it turned out, I had to play for 2 1/2 hours not 1 1/2 (is was 6:00-8:30 not 6:30-8:00)


This was my day Saturday

10:45 -leave for "the cities" to get to baby shower for one of my best friends
12:30-5:00- have tons of fun with my friend and her family (it was wonderful by the way-her mom makes the nicest food and she made us all feel so special by putting fresh strawberries in our drinks and giving everyone a beautiful gerbera daisy as we left). She absolutely loved the little hat that I made.
5:00-8:00-drive home, stop for groceries, get some art supplies for a drawing I want to do, and finally arrive home.
8 something- have peanut butter sandwiches for supper and sit down for a while to do nothing for a minute
9:30- start making salad for 75 to serve at a surprise birthday for my mom on Sunday
10:45-3 gallons of salad are in the refrigerator all ready to go, so I sit down to watch the episode of Martha that I had taped. (The perfect woman to watch at the end of that kind of busy day-she doesn't sleep and probably makes salad for 75 every day)


Sunday-

10:30- go to church
11:45- leave church to rush to my parents house (before they get home from church) and pick up old family photo albums for the surprise party that will be at church later this afternoon.
12-ish-try to figure out something quick I can make for lunch, wrap faux birthday present from my brothers, me and my dad (because the present we ordered for my mom won't arrive for another couple weeks), brother-in-law calls and want to come over, lunch ends up not being as quick to make as I would like sooooo . . .
1:15- eat lunch
1:45-3:30-brother-in-law arrives, husband and brother-in-law go outside to walk around the farm and figure out what they need to do for the pasture in order for everything to be ready by the end of the month when the horses go out on it, I finish off the scrapbook I had started about our trip to Israel (only on page needed to be finished) because Dan and I will be making a presentation at church about our trip to Israel at a church service that we are having this afternoon right before the surprise party for my mom that will also be happening at the church, try to figure out what to say at the presentation and write down a few notes.
3:30-run into town to put gas in the car (because we will not make it to church and back on the amount of gas we have in the car) and pick up supplies for punch for the party.
3:45-leave for church
4:00-5:00-family service at church where Dan and I talk about our trip to Israel
5:00-8:00-SURPRISE, my mom has a ton of fun (my dad and I sent our invites to all sorts of her friends and to a bunch of her cousins that she hadn't seen in a while), oldest brother and his family from come up from Iowa, youngest brother (he's older than me, but he is the youngest of my three brothers) and his family come out from "the cities" (middle brother lives in Idaho and has a 2 year old and an 8 month old, so he stayed put.),
8:15 -9:00 or so- clean up the church from the party and pack up the vehicles with presents and leftovers.
9 something-arrive home and do as little as possible until it is time to go to bed.


Then this morning before I came to work I went outside and picked a bunch of violets from the hundreds (maybe even thousand) that are growing wild in our yard. Ahhhh . . .violets have a wonderfully calming effect.

I'm Back

Well, we got back Monday morning from Israel. We were soooooo tired and it is nice to be back. Yesterday I caught up on all of the blogging I had missed. You guys are all so much fun and I like to read what you have to say. I'm not always the best with words (good thing I didn't stay and ESL education major in college and moved onto art instead) and reading everyone else's blogs always makes me want to describe my life better and all that, but that probably won't happen ;o)

My Stetson Man

Today I was reading archives from while I was gone of Pioneer Woman (thanks D for linking to her a while back-I love her blog) and at the end of one of her posts she asked whose mind you would pick to read for 24 hours if you had the chance. I thought about it and right away my husbands mind came to mind. I don't know if you guys have the same kind of thought, but my wonderful Dan is not that verbal. (I am, if you couldn't guess) It's something I love about him and some times I wish that I could stop blabbing on and on about nothing and be more quiet and all.

I wonder things like-why did he ever like me? am i waaaaay to weird? does my pestering about what he's thinking bother him? (well, I know the answer to that-YES!) and much, much more.

All I know is that we had fun on our trip to Israel because we were together. It would have been miserable if one of us had just gone on our own. (oh, is wasn't that bad or anything-once I have pics ready I'll show you. It just didn't start out very well) Our flight was to leave on the 24th a little after 5 pm, but our flight got cancelled because we had no flight crew. Well, we ended up leaving Minneapolis on a different flight a little after 7 instead and missed our connecting flight to Israel by 11 minutes (arghhh, if our 2nd flight from Minneapolis had actually been on time, we would have caught the connection) We got booked onto another flight to Israel that left Newark at 4 in the afternoon the next day. Thankfully, Northwest had to put us up in a hotel and pay for our meals while we were delayed as the situation was entirely their fault, but it was still not fun. I called our emergency contact in Tel Aviv to tell them what happened, so that we would be able to be picked up by someone at the right time. That got all worked out (thank goodness). So anyway we arrived in Tel Aviv a little before 10 am on Monday morning (rather than 3:30 Sunday afternoon) and a taxi brought us to meet our group that had already started the tour a little earlier that morning. We started right in touring and finally got to rest at the hotel later that night.

Like I say-I am so thankful that we were together. I don't know how I could have handled it all if Dan hadn't of been there. I dealt with the details and he dealt with me ;0)

In knitting news (if you're still reading at this point), I did very little on the trip. Oh, yes I had lots of time, but my brain was fried. I made one mini sweater. Yep-that's all. Oh, and I think I am going to rip out the beginning of the myrtle leaf shawl. Somewhere on the trip a big section of the lace slipped off the needles and I have no clue where to start to fix that, so I'll just start over (I only had three repeats done out of forty). This time I'll use metal needles instead-I just can't get the hang of those wood ones. It all goes so slow with them.

We're leaving on a jet plane

Well, tomorrow afternoon we leave for Israel. I guess I am nervous/excited/hopeful all at the same time. I'm the kind of person that worries about getting to the plane on time and doing all that kind of stuff. (Once, when I was younger and about to fly to Romania all by myself, I accidentally left my plane ticket at home. Thankfully I had my passport and we were able to get a replacement ticket, but now I think about that happening all the time) We are mostly all packed and the house is just about clean, so we're just about ready. Dan's never been on a plane before and I haven't been on a plane in about 6 or 7 years. (That seems sooo crazy because used to travel somewhere practically every year. I've even been able to take free flights because of the flight mileage I've gotten) Anyway, we're looking forward to it and hope that everything goes well.

For your amusement, I put together a little photo montage of one of our cats. So here's Norman being himself.

l to r: top: Norman asleep on the living room floor, Norman and Dan in matching "coats"
bottom: Norman asleep under the chair, Norman asleep on the couch (don't worry he's still alive)

We get no end of amusement from our fun pets. From the looks of it Norman sleeps a lot-he does, but sometimes he gets this giant amount of energy that sends him racing from room to room, up the top of the chair and down. He sometimes gets so crazy he starts fighting with himself. He'll sit down on the floor and act like he's going to wash his back feet, but instead he starts kicking is own chin and growls and bites at his feet. The more he does to himself the more mad he gets at himself. We try to tell him that he is beating himself up, but he won't listen. At first, we thought this was just kittenish behavior, but he continues to do it even now that he is four years old.

Well, I hope that your next week is great (I hope mine is too). Hope you enjoyed the random information.

happy windy friday ;o)

Well, I know I said that I would have pictures of things and everything today, but alas and alack (sp?) I do not. We finally got everything together for the Home and Garden Show (happening in Hutchinson this weekend by the way) yesterday and then we went and set up our booth earlier today. Guess what-the camera that is holding the myrtle leaf shawl (2 repeats done) pic's is at the show and I am not. (my dad is currently manning the booth while I man the shop. I'll be going over later after the shop closes to help at the booth.) Go ahead-call me a bad blogger-I've only been doing this for a little over a month and already I don't post very regularly and I don't have any knitting pic's to show you-bad, bad blogger. To distract you from the nonknitting material, I will show you a picture of a crazy kitty in the sink!

So, anyway, I thought that I would tell you about the trip to Israel in March-I bet you are excited. My husband has always wanted to go to Israel (I traveled a fair amount before we got married, so I've been to a lot of places that I really wanted to visit), so when his boss gave him a huuuuuuge bonus for being at his job for 10 years we decided that we would go there. (we probably could have used the money to pay bills with or to buy flooring for our upstairs, but his boss really wanted to give us the money for a trip that we would never be able to afford on our own and we were happy to do that) We're going on a tour with Pilgrim Tours that does Holy Land tours and gears them toward Christian people.

The thing that is so funny/ironic is that before Christmas Dan had been saying he would really like a picture book of Israel, so I ended getting him an Israel guidebook that had all sorts of pictures in it before we even knew that we would be able to even go on this trip. It has been really helpful to look at (especially when we were trying to figure out which tours we wanted to go on to make sure we got to see things that we would really like to see) and Dan looks at this book like every night before we go to bed. He's really excited about the trip (I'm a little more nervous because I'm a worrier-I'll be excited when we get there, but I always get nervous about all of the arrangements working out and everything beforehand)

Well, have a great weekend and I wish you the "very best in all your endeavors" (as I recall, that's something like what my friend, Sid, wrote in my yearbook senior year-funny what you remember).

p.s.-random "I'm-not-very-smart-question" for you all-how do I save buttons and all other such stuff to my server?-I'm not an internet savvy person-I'm great at photoshop, but not so good with other stuff that deals with html info.

Elizabeth Zimmermann and Israel!

Okay, I just realized in the other day's post I spelled Elizabeth Zimmermann's name wrong. I'm sorry-I often write without any reference information in front of me. Well, anyway, I am definitely going to make make the bi-color Norwegian mittens from her book the Knitter's Almanac.
Of course, now that I think about it maybe I should convert the mitten to a little bit more of a Swedish pattern because I don't have any Norwegian blood in me. Maybe I could use a Swedish Horse Motif or something like that. Hmmm .... Just when you think I have it all figured out I decide to throw a wrench into the middle of it all. Well, that's just the way life works.
I haven't done any knitting since my last post. Monday evening I had my guitar lesson and didn't feel like doing anything after it and last night I had a church council meeting and didn't feel like doing anything constructive after it either. I just looked through the Almanac to get ideas.
During this past week, I have been trying to get a trip together for my husband and myself to go on at the end of March. I am excited to say that the last week of March we are going on a tour of Israel. Our airline tickets are bought, the payments are all in, and our passports should be here in a couple weeks.
My husband's boss gave him a big bonus to go on a trip to wherever we want to go because Dan has been working at his job for 10 years this year and is also a very good employee. (It's a small business with about 5 employees, so this isn't something that has ever happened before)
Sorry about no pictures this post. I promise I'll do better, at some point :0)

ATTN: NO KNITTING CONTENT AVAILABLE

In order to distract you from the fact that I didn't do any knitting this weekend, I am giving you a beautiful picture of my husband and me in Rocky Mountain National Park this past summer!
I am tired out and I ache.
My weekend including not a stitch of knitting time (pun intended) and now I am sore. It's my husband's birthday today and Saturday was his dad's birthday, so we had a birthday party at our house last night.
So, earlier in the week (or earlier in the month) Dan decided that we should really fix up our basement-nasty old boxes of junk sitting in the corners, cardboard boxes on a bed and you name it. It has all been sitting like this for about three years. Plus, he does leatherworking and the area where he has had his bench is right next to the furnace and is a too cramped.

Some of Dan's leatherwork (spur straps he made for his brother)
So . . . we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Saturday, after I got home from work, we sorted through boxes, threw things away, and organized everything. Oh My. I scrubbed the walls and the floor. It was yucky and spider-y. Anyway, we were done about 1 am and we were tired.
On Sunday, after church we got home (still things to clean up a bit in the basement) and had to make sure the rest of the house was clean and baby-proofed. (Dan's sister has five-going on six kids ranging in age from 1 to 10). So we were home about 12:45 and everyone was coming at 6:30. It all got done and things went well-plus five loads of laundry, but boy I am tired. The kids loved running around in the basement and now are all asking about when they can come have a sleep over.