Why I love 'Blogging!'

Blogging

I find that term interesting. Why is it called 'Blogging???'

I love it! A month ago in Relief Society, the first Sunday-when it's the presidency message, we were talking about how to keep in touch. I raised my hand and told them about how my daughters and I have 'blog' pages and how my oldest daughter walked me through the steps to get started over the phone. There were a few 'ahhs' and a few 'what's that?' They know, having been their former RS Pres. a few years back, that I am pro computer and all about the internet!I had made the VT routes all via internet with the exception of a very few who did not have a computer or internet. One 'click' and your route has been reported! They are on their 3rd RS Pres since my departure and they are still using the internet VT reporting! That's progress!

Now that I have digressed a bit, I do love the internet for keeping in touch! It's so great. I love clicking on the blogs and catching up. I click on my grand kids' pictures and via a 'click' transport them to their family My Picture files! :o) I love going to Drop Shots and seeing the pictures and videos they post. I love their scrapbooking pages as well! Being a long distance grandmother is not fun I can tell you. Keeping them a 'click' away and seeing them and their families makes my heart swell! I am always amazed how fast they are growing up and how tall they are getting. Not too far and they'll start being teenagers, wonderful young people! :o)

Our kids gave dad and I a 'Digital Picture Frame' for a Mothers/Fathers Day gift. We love it! Soon I am going to have to add more pictures to it as I've been collecting more photos.

I'm not much into My Space or Face book. To me, blog does the same thing. I'm a grandma, and sometimes I learn slow and have to have my daughters grin and bear a few repetitious steps on computer things, but God bless them! I love 'learning!' It keeps your mind from getting mushy!

Thanks to my wonderful children who help me keep learning!

Love,
Mom :o)

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #14

Story #14 - Duck Pond Soup

I wonder what picture comes to your mind when you think of ‘Duck Pond Soup’? Do you think of ducks on a pond or do you think of ducks sitting in your bowl of soup?

I was probably about 12 or 13 years old. We had some friends by that last name of Murray. They had 6 or 7 kids and were Catholic. The 2nd to the oldest in their family was named Michael. He was one year older than my twin brother and I. I had a crush (it means I liked him) on him. He liked me too! We had chores to do everyday during the summer and on weekends when school was in session. Michael would come over sometimes in the summer and help my brother and I get our chores done, mostly for my sake, so we could all play and Michael could spend more time with me.

They lived in a small apartment in town and then later they moved out to a big farmhouse west of town out by the old cotton gin. It was a much bigger house and accommodated the size of their family a lot better. That was such fun to play at their house, both inside the house and outside in the yard. My twin brother and I rode our bikes across town, over the railroad tracks and out to their house. It was probably a three-mile ride to their house from our house. If it happened to be lunchtime when we played, she would invite my brother and I to eat with them. My favorite was her ‘Duck Pond Soup.’ We never had anything like that at our house. It was mashed potatoes with a scoop out of the middle to make room for the pond. Then she would pour alphabet soup or vegetable soup into the scooped out pond. It would fill with soup. Billie, the mom’s name, said that she just invented the name. It made it fun for her kids.
It tasted wonderful! It was so good! We’d tell our mother about it and she would be very kind and say, “They have a lot of kids so this is probably a good way to stretch their food budget.” Well, at my age, the last thing I thought of was ‘budgets’ and what did that all mean??? I just knew it tasted good and wanted her to make it. She never did.

My mom did make us another dish that I loved. I guess you could say this was a poor man’s dish too. She would cook cracked wheat and make cooked cereal. I was not especially fond of it. However, she would take the left over cooked cereal and pour it into a bread loaf pan. Then she put it in the refrigerator. The next morning she would slice it into one-inch thick slices and fry it in a pan and then pour warmed Log Cabin Syrup over it. Mmmm, it was sooo good! I loved it fixed that way!

Well moving forward to adult years---Julie and Lisa had their wisdom teeth taken out together on the same day one half hour apart from each other. Julie was 18 and Lisa was 16. It’s not fun having your wisdom teeth pulled. Your jaw gets swollen and it’s hard to eat anything. Well I fixed them ‘Duck Pond Soup!’ I used alphabet soup. They thought that tasted sooo good. I made a lot for them.

In February of this year (2008) we lost power and we had no electricity for almost 5 days! That meant we had no heat. Fortunately we had a gas stove. You can strike a match and turn the burner on and it will light. So I was able to cook things on the stovetop. I made ‘Duck Pond Soup’ and I think it was the first time dad (Grandpa Neil) ever ate it. He liked it! I’ve made it several times since. It’s a really easy meal to fix for Kirsten too and she loves it!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl- #13

Story #13 - My favorite book - A Sort of a Sage by Bill Mauldin

I read this book when I was about 13 years old and I loved it! My father read it and would tell us snippets of the story here and there. He had got the book and we had it for years. Later when I was married and moved up to Oregon, I checked it out of a library and read it again. I laughed as much that time as I did when I read it at age 13. Bill Mauldin lived near Cloudcroft, New Mexico, which was about half an hour from where we lived. He grew up there. He served in World War II in the Army. He later became a cartoonist and his cartoons were syndicated in the newspapers. Some of his cartoons were war characters and other times they were political figures. His cartoons were always funny. He also wrote a book called ‘Up Front’ and ‘Back Home’ (printed before ‘A Sort of A Saga’) that were about his war stories and how life was when he returned home. I enjoyed ‘A Sort of A Saga’ the berst of all!

His book ‘A Sort of A Saga’ was so funny! He told stories about when he grew up. I guess the reason I liked it so well was because I knew what he was talking about as we lived kind of in the same area. One of his stories I remember was---A neighbor that lived down the road from Bill had an old 2-door sedan probably 1929 or 30’s model. We’ll get back to this guy in a minute---Bill’s friend caught a skunk and de-sacked it and put the skunk musk in a bottle. The problem was that it stunk so badly! They buried it in Bill’s backyard. They wondered what they should do with it. They wrote a letter to Sears and Roebuck Co. and said that they had ‘skunk musk’ and would they be interested in purchasing it for their perfume. They heard that musk helps perfume cling better. Musk was supposed to be valuable. They waited two weeks and did not hear a word from either Sears or Wards and gave up on the idea and kept the musk ‘buried!’ So much for striking it rich selling skunk musk! Ha! Ha! I thought that was so funny! Well, they didn’t know what to do with it.

Now-- Back to the neighbor with his car. About 3 times a week in the evenings Bill’s folks had friends over at their house and they played bridge. Bill and his brother Sid had to go to bed while the adults played bridge and Bill and his brother didn’t like that too much. This guy with the car had a big voice and was rather loud and obnoxious. Bill and his brother Sid didn’t particularly like this guy; perhaps it was just because he was loud and obnoxious. The guy didn’t exactly talk in a low voice, it boomed! One particular night while in bed the ‘voice’ was loud and Bill’s dad told him that the kids were sleeping and try to keep the noise down. The guy with the ‘big voice’ said that if kids worked hard all day that they would be so tired that they would probably be sleeping already. Well Bill and his brother Sid heard that and didn’t like it. So they slipped out of bed and snuck outside to the guy’s car. Bill wanted to smear the skunk musk all over those new leather car seats. His brother Sid had a much better idea. He put some down the carburetor. They snuck back to bed. Well the next time the guy drove he had to roll down his windows. He thought he hit a skunk and checked his whole car over top to bottom and end-to-end but could not find the skunk. So all winter long he had to drive his car with the windows down because he couldn’t stand the skunk smell. I thought that was so funny!

After writing this story, I went to Amazon.com and found there were still copies available. So for $5.95 plus $3.99 shipping-a total of $9.94, I ordered it. It came in the mail and I read it in 2 days! If any of my children or grandchildren is interested in reading it they can borrow it from me. It sure is entertaining reading!

Book-'A Sort of A Saga'- entertaining reading!

I just finished reading this book, 'A Sort of A Saga' by Bill Mauldin. It's 301 pages and has lots of cartoon pictures that he himself drew for this book relating to his stories that he tells. It was printed in 1949 for $3.50. I just bought it on Amazon and I love it! I bought it, hardback, for $5.95 plus shipping. It's entertaining to read! I laughed all the way through it! Just ask your dad. I had to make several, ummm, potty stops, and enjoyed the book immensely!

I grew up in the southwest in southern New Mexico. The book takes place not far from where we lived. It also has a few chapters when they lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area. I highly recommend this book for reading. If you can't get it at your local library I would be happy to loan it to you. My dad read the book and I read it when he was finished. I was 13 at the time. I read it again around age 30 and now I've read it a third time. I never tire of the humor it offers!I read it in two days. I do have to say, it does have a few swear words in it, but nothing horribly vulgar. I think J. Golden Kimball would have loved Bill Mauldin's dad!

Wen Grandma Was A Little Girl - #12

Story #12 - The rapids – rain, storms and flashfloods!

About 5 miles out of town where we lived was a canyon area that had a stream running through it and some low waterfalls. In the summer it would get around 100 degrees and it got hot! A lot of people, like us, would go to the falls to swim, cool off and have fun. We would pack a picnic lunch and spend several hours there. It was the most fun! We really looked forward to going there. Usually you would see some of your friends with their families up there.

The mountains were probably about 20 miles away. When there were clouds rolling in and once in awhile you could hear thunder and feel the breeze down in the valley where we lived, you could smell the rain on the wind. Usually that meant the mountains got the rain and we got the dust! But that first breeze with the rain smell in the air was so wonderful! When you have arroyos (smaller and lower than a canyon) and canyons, you have to be careful. It may be dry down in the valley and the gulches and arroyos and small canyons, but not for long when it rained in the mountains. So you usually went to those when the mountains didn’t have rain.

One afternoon we were at the falls and enjoying ourselves. I was probably about 12 years old. We noticed that clouds had formed in the mountains so my folks were anxious that we all get out of the water and get our stuff and head out of there. I was the last one to cross over the water. I was still on the wrong side where the falls were, away from my family. We heard this ‘roaring’ sound thundering down the canyon. My parents yelled, ‘Diana get across now!’ Just as I was hiking up the side and out there came the muddy water and it crashed down! I was almost caught in a ‘flashflood’ of muddy water and sticks and debris.

When a flashflood came it took everything in its path with it. The rains would come down and the rivers would fill and come rushing down the mountainside down to the valley below. That scared me! I could have got caught in it and that would have been the end of me! I would have drowned and been carried a few miles down the creek to the gulch below. We looked up the stream and we saw muddy water and debris rushing by. We got in the car quick and made a run for it to the road. Where the road was you went a few miles and then had to cross through a gulch and up out onto the road again. By the time we got to the gulch it had less than a foot of water. So we hurried across. I remember saying a prayer to myself being so ‘thankful’ we all made it out of there.

One time in the paper we read about a car carried downstream and after one of the big rains came and whoever was in that car was driving through the gulch and they made it out of the car but the car went on down the creek bed.

About 15 miles above our town the highway had big ‘dips’ in it. It was above a town called Carrizozo. They had signs along the side of the road just before you got to the dips. They would say, ‘Dip’ and some would say ‘Dangerous -watch for flood waters.’ It was not a joke. When the rains came and it flowed down into the valley and washed across those ‘dips’, you stayed out of there. Those dips were 6-feet deep and would fill with water and a car wouldn’t make it through.

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #11

Story #11 - My ride down the water tough – it almost killed me!

We would go up to Cloudcroft in the mountains and not too far off the highway was a public waterspout. It was mountain water that was runoff and they had a small 3x3-foot rock pillar about 4 feet tall with a pipe spout half way down the front side where you could collect the water. It went down onto a trough and behind the pillar back down the mountainside. I guess you could say it was like a natural spring. The water was ‘soft’ as they would say and tasted wonderful and it was always mountain cool! It felt good on hot summer days to go up there and then feel the cool water. The water we had at home and in the town was mineral tasting and hard. My dad used to tease and say, ‘Watch out if you throw that water at someone, it will knock you down!’ In other words it was ‘hard water’ and tasted a little bitter. As a kid, personally I thought it tasted great! Nobody in our household thought so! My mother had about eight 5-gallon water jugs and about a dozen one-gallon jugs. We would fill them up and haul them all home. We had a water cooler in our kitchen that my dad and sometimes my brothers would lift the 5-gallon water jugs onto.

When we were up in the mountains filling the jugs my mother would warn us, especially my twin brother and I, NOT to climb into the trough behind the pillar. It was dangerous and it was not to be touched! I was about 5 or 6 years old and well, one day my curiosity got the best of me and I just HAD to go for a ride down that trough. I barely got on it and hadn’t gone 3 feet when I was ‘snatched’ up off of there and scolded for doing so! Then I was shown what would have happened to me had I not been snatched up. It scared my parents to death! I can’t remember who snatched me, whether it was my mom or my dad. I kind of think it was my dad. Having two little twins made their work twice as hard! We could think of a lot to get into, and that would be trouble. Well they showed me where the trough went and then I was scared! You see the trough was only a few feet long and went over the side. What you couldn’t see was that there was barbed wire stretched across the trough as it got very steep and went over the side and fell far below onto rocks. There was about a foot gap under the stretched barbed wire. Perhaps a person could slip through, but hopefully the barbed wire would save them first. That was a long way down! I never went near that trough again. In fact, it scared me so badly that I was afraid if I went behind the pillar I might slip onto the trough and get massacred by the barbed wire. From then on I always stayed in front where the water came out!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl-#10

Story #10 - Hide and Seek on Starry Nights

I grew up in a little town called Tularosa in southern New Mexico. Tularosa means City of Roses. The population of that town was just under 4,000! It was not too far a drive to go into the foothills or the mountains. The mountains got the rain and we got the ‘dust!’ We would joke and say we got a 12-in rain today! The drops were 12-inches apart! Ha! Ha! Ha! But at night when you looked up at the stars they were so beautiful. It was like you could reach up and pick them out of the sky! My bothers and I would lie down on the grass and look up at the sky. It was very common to see shooting stars. The Milky Way was so bright and so beautiful! The sunsets were just as gorgeous. The sun would make the sky turn the wispy clouds orange!

One of our favorite past times at night was to play ‘Hide and Seek.’ We had a low wall and trees and shrubs to hide behind. I always hated being ‘it’ because I had such a hard time finding my brothers and any friends we had over. We had a neat porch with pillars. Usually the porch post was ‘home base.’ I hated to wander too far from the porch because they could outrun me and usually tag ‘home.’ Then I would be stuck being ‘it’ all over again. But the times I wasn’t ‘it’ I had fun hiding and not being found and making it to ‘home’. Another game we like to play was Red Rover. We played a lot of games to entertain ourselves.