Month: September 2019

The Roundup

Some summer bounty from our garden this year

Fall is here so it’s time to dust off the crock pot. Crockery Pot Cooking offers a huge array of recipes to try in your slow cooker.

ThriftBooks stated purpose is they “believe reading empowers people, offering them empathy to live for a moment in someone else’s shoes, offers them education, a critical asset to improving one’s life, and offers an occasional escape to fantastic worlds inhabited by interesting characters. Yes, we save millions of books every year from being destroyed, but our mission goes beyond the environment. We save these books and make them accessible to readers for the chance to shape another mind, share another story, and teach a bit of wisdom.”

The Poorhouse Story provides “a clearinghouse for information about 19th century American Poorhouses for … history buffs, genealogists, teachers/students, and others with a similar interest.”

Rather-Be-Shopping.com “is an online coupon and deal finding site where our mission is to find, sort, and post the best online coupons and free shipping codes available to help you save money when shopping on the Internet. We currently have over 5,000 coupons in our database, good at 800+ online stores.”

The New Neighborhood

In front of our house looking east down our road

Along the two mile stretch of our gravel road from the county highway on our east until the first cross road to our west, there are seven acreages. That leaves much room between neighbors, but not so much that you don’t know each other. The first neighbor to give us a welcome and introduce himself and his young son gave us some sage country advice, “Out here we are friendly, but we like to be left alone.” Last year we were visited by another one who has an art degree, works at a local co-op, and helps run a custom jewelry business with his wife. Yet another works as a physical education teacher, and the other two are a cattle rancher and the crop farmer who owns almost all the land around the rest of us. On the property closest to us to the east the house is gone. The out buildings survive and the family keeps it up, mows, and the yard light still burns at night, but no one lives there. What used to be the eighth acreage was sold a few years ago, all the outbuildings removed, and now corn grows where the yard was. The only clue that anything but crops ever existed there is the short, weedy gravel driveway approach from the road, and the four digit house number sign leaning next to it on a post. There are two streams that wind through the area and cross under our road at either ends of our two miles. A cemetery with a couple hundred graves sits on a hill overlooking our road and one of the streams. The oldest burial I have found dates from 1881. Usually the vehicles on the road belong to local folks going to and returning from jobs, giving a wave if they see you in the yard. The traffic will soon increase to a steady stream of farm equipment, bringing in the fall harvest.

Website Review: National Weather Service

I have been using the National Weather Service website for years now. It is part of my morning routine to check the weather and the news before I begin my day. Just enter your zip code for your local forecast. The site also offers radar, weather records and education, alerts and safety information. I have sampled other weather sites over the years and the NWS has the most accurate weather information and forecasts I have found on the web.

Spicy Summer Salsa

Some salsa recruits from our garden

Since we finished moving to the country last winter this is our first garden out here. We planted in a freshly tilled section of the yard and the results have been almost unbelievable. We have put up 12 quarts of tomatoes so far and we should easily be able to at least double that while also making stews, soups, spaghetti, chili and salsa. All that from seven plants. I am going to make my third batch of salsa this weekend and thought I would share the recipe. As usual, I don’t measure the ingredients, so flavor to your taste.

Ingredients:

Celery, diced

Green onions, sliced

Tomatoes, diced

Garlic cloves (I use a hand held garlic press)

Green peppers, diced

Jalapeno peppers, diced

In a mixing bowl stir together all the above ingredients then add:

Basil, salt and pepper, cilantro, parsley, paprika, oregano, Tabasco, cayenne pepper and cumin. Stir well then chill or serve at room temperature with tortilla chips.

This version is chunky. If you prefer more juice, puree some tomatoes and a scoop or two of the salsa together, and add back to the bowl.

Massacre at Mountain Meadows

A depiction of the massacre

I recently finished reading a book on a very disturbing episode in U.S. History. Massacre at Mountain Meadows was written by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Glen M. Leonard and published in 2008. The book centers on the circumstances leading up to and including a Mormon and Indian attack on a wagon train in Utah Territory. The authors were given access to LDS archives and also combed through primary sources to assemble this well researched and engrossing work. After giving a through look at the history of the Mormons up to that point in history the events chronicled mainly involve Mormon settlers living in the Utah Territory, some Paiute Indians, and emigrants passing through on their way to California. A wagon train of around 120 men, women and children, mostly from Arkansas, is traveling through the Territory in 1857. They stop to rest and refresh at Mountain Meadows, a well known area on the trail. For a variety of reasons including the Mormon history of persecution by others, suspicion of outsiders, and a fear at the time of an invasion and war with the U.S. Army, the wagon train is attacked on September 7 by a Mormon militia and some Paiute Indians. The emigrants circle the wagons, dig in and fight back for five days. On the 11th the militia approach the wagon train under a flag of truce and deceive the emigrants into surrendering. Given the title of the book one knows what the ultimate fate of the emigrants will be, but the description is still heartbreaking to read. Only one man was tried and convicted, 20 years later, of mass murder. He was hauled back to the site of the massacre and executed by firing squad.

The Roundup

Flowering weeds in our front ditch

Homesteading.com “is a place for information and ideas to be shared about homesteading, skills, craftsmanship, and sustainability. We strive to help people of all experience levels take steps towards happier, healthier, and more holistic lives with a natural and thoughtful approach to a safer and more effective way of living. Whether on or off the homestead, we believe in making and growing, harvesting and raising, creating, and doing.”

Wassily Kandinsky is one of my favorite artists and this site has to be one of the most comprehensive compilations of his life and work on the web.

Live Science features articles about space and physics, history, health, animals, culture, tech and, my favorite, strange news. They also offer a free email newsletter.

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Traveling Past and Future

Our kids at Mount Rushmore

When our two kids were able to walk and talk and were out of diapers we began taking them camping. They loved to gather sticks for the campfire, roast hot dogs and make s’mores. If there was a beach they would play in the water until they were wrinkled like raisins. When they learned to ride a bike we would bring those, too. Around the time they reached their teen years we stretched out these vacations in both time and distance. Over the next few years we traveled to The Dells, The Badlands and Mount Rushmore, Grand Tetons, the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone. We usually stayed in cabins, sometimes next to a river or stream or on a mountain. We had to quickly climb a slope to avoid a bison, break for bears and share a river with moose. We toured caves and zoos and museums, took hikes, enjoyed campfires. And then it was over; the kids graduated high school and were off to college. Recently one of our granddaughters stayed with us for a few days. Peanut, her nickname, is seven years old. I was looking at a thin paperback book by Lincoln Borglum about the construction of Mount Rushmore. Peanut wandered up to me and was looking at the photos. I asked if she knew what that was. She shook her head no. I briefly explained what it was and then added that her mommy and uncle had traveled there with us to see it when they were younger. “You mean you saw that, in person,” she asked, her eyes lighting up. I told her yes. “Did you climb up it,” she wondered. I told her no. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. I want to go see it, too,” she said, doing a little dance. “Can we go see it?” I replied, “Well, you just never know, Peanut.” We looked at each other and smiled, content with that answer for now.

The Old Neighborhood

Me in the front yard of the house I grew up in

The house I grew up in sits in a neighborhood that didn’t have much traffic because it is not a through street, so most of the cars one encountered belonged to people who lived in the area. That meant us local kids were free to ride our bikes and run races in the street without fear of getting hit. When a car approached one of us would yell “car” and everyone moved to the curb until it passed, and then playing resumed. On our street there was a core group of seven or eight kids that lived within a few houses of each other. Some of the standard games we played included Hide and Seek, Redlight/Greenlight, Ghost at Midnight (also known as Ghost in the Graveyard), Red Rover and Simon Says. The games that involved hiding were usually played at night, lit by streetlights and fireflies. Behind our house ran a wide gully, full of trees and bushes with a stream running through it all the way down to the river. A tree house hung in an oak tree about 30 feet high over the edge of the gully behind our garage, built by my dad and brother 10 years earlier. My brother was off on his own by then so the tree house was all mine. Earlier residents of the neighborhood had dumped occasional garbage into the gully, but only the metal parts remained, so we gathered pots and pans and other cool rusty stuff to use during our Swiss Family Robinson and Planet of the Apes reenactments, usually including the treehouse as part of our play. I think my favorite times up there were when I was all alone during the summer. Lying on my back and looking at the green canopy above, feeling the tree house sway back and forth on a windy day, not a care at all.