Since we moved to our farm(stead), I've mentioned how welcome our neighbors have made us feel, and that feeling continues. For one thing, people still wave when they drive by, and we've gone to "neighborhood" shindigs or whatever you might want to call it where the folks on the road just come together for an evening of food and fun. Last night we attended one of these supper get together opportunities that gives me a chance to sample some great cooking, and learn a little bit about the whys and whats of farming and livestock.
Did you know cows can get too big to be good sellers? That was just one of the many information bits that I learned from our conversation last night. Not wanting to sound too stupid, I pretty much tried to listen to what was being said and asked a couple clarification questions that I hope didn't make 'em think... where did this idiot come from and why is he here?
It doesn't take much visiting to get the drift that the rewards of farming outweighs the effort... but sometimes you wonder by how much. For a city dude, I feel way out of touch with what goes on outside my window. I see such a small part of farming and livestock from our little place on the hill. Someday maybe the school sports team members names will make some real sense to me... it sure does my neighbors! Made for a great evening for the newest movers from the city to the country. These folks are all locals...'cept us, and we appreciate how they have kinda taken us under their wing to give us boost in more ways than one.
The food was... great! The cooks in our neighborhood know their stuff, and we get a chance to sample something new every time we get together. There were some ham balls that I'd never had anything like before, and of course there was this 7 kinds of chocolate in one cake for dessert. If I ate like that everyday, it wouldn't take me long to put on 50 or 60 pounds.
And to really top off the evening, we were treated to the wonderful artwork of the owners mother. The artist had talent to be sure. If somebody from MONA reads this, you should contact me as I think this work is well worthy of a showing. For those that don't know... MONA stands for Museum Of Nebraska Art and is the official art museum of Nebraska located in Kearney. Margie and I have been there, and what we saw last night compares well with displays shown there.
So once again, we had a great time and I left already looking forward to the next time we can get together.
For more info about MONA... http://monet.unk.edu/mona/
Monday, February 23, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
For A Good Cause
Whether you are involved in organized religion or not, you would be hard pressed to say that churches don't provide a positive influence to the local community and society as a whole. I hate to say it that there have been some examples that could be argued about church leaders not being beneficial, but this isn't a religious blog entry, just an account of an after service dinner and dessert auction fund raiser.
A great dinner was prepared and offered by church volunteers. Local farmers donated a great ham, corn, and potatoes dinner that came with various other veggies, rolls, and salads perfect for just about anyone. Now I have to admit... My observation is that part of any social activity around here includes breakfast, dinner, supper, or dessert, and the folks in my neck of the woods seem to know how to do it up right.
But the dinner was just a warm up as the dessert auction started before we really had a chance to clean our plates. And what wonderful looking sweet treats were up for grabs to the highest bidder. I think before next years auction, I may have to find work to afford the opportunity to bid because the bidders were extremely generous. Of course the proceeds were for a good cause, but there was this cherry pie I had my eye on... it went for $80, and my limit was well below that.
Ken the auctioneer did a great job keeping things moving and having some fun along the way. His 4 legged Texas chicken story was tops! The donated creations numbered well over 50, including one very unusual cake in a cat box called cat box cake with Tootsie Rolls and a crumb topping that made the whole thing look kinda like... well the name says it all.
I didn't do a mental tally of the proceeds, but the goodie auction coupled with the tasty dinner made for a fun day. It's great to see that such a few can make so much difference in a small even in these tough economic times... just for what they consider a good cause.
A great dinner was prepared and offered by church volunteers. Local farmers donated a great ham, corn, and potatoes dinner that came with various other veggies, rolls, and salads perfect for just about anyone. Now I have to admit... My observation is that part of any social activity around here includes breakfast, dinner, supper, or dessert, and the folks in my neck of the woods seem to know how to do it up right.
But the dinner was just a warm up as the dessert auction started before we really had a chance to clean our plates. And what wonderful looking sweet treats were up for grabs to the highest bidder. I think before next years auction, I may have to find work to afford the opportunity to bid because the bidders were extremely generous. Of course the proceeds were for a good cause, but there was this cherry pie I had my eye on... it went for $80, and my limit was well below that.
Ken the auctioneer did a great job keeping things moving and having some fun along the way. His 4 legged Texas chicken story was tops! The donated creations numbered well over 50, including one very unusual cake in a cat box called cat box cake with Tootsie Rolls and a crumb topping that made the whole thing look kinda like... well the name says it all.
I didn't do a mental tally of the proceeds, but the goodie auction coupled with the tasty dinner made for a fun day. It's great to see that such a few can make so much difference in a small even in these tough economic times... just for what they consider a good cause.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Treasure Hunters
The news last week had a bit about some treasure hunters that located an old British ship reported to have around a billion dollars worth of gold coins that went down with the ship in the 1700's. Many of you have likely heard of the lost Dutchman Mine in Superstition Mountains of Arizona, and those of you with metal detectors have likely found some "treasure" of your own.
What is it about hunting for treasure that draws so many adventurers? Most likely it's the thought of unimaginable riches in an old shipwreck or the gold buried under a pile of rocks that some miner hid and forgot where he put it or died before he could return to claim his cache. When I was a kid, we'd play pirates and make our own treasure maps. My friends and me would don our skull caps, eye patches and swords and go out in search of whatever we thought was at that magical point where "X" marks the spot. Of course we never found anything that way, but it was a fun game to be sure.
The fact that lost treasure is well... lost, keeps most people from looking for it, but there are plenty of folks that do go in search of treasure just the same. For some, it's the thrill of the hunt and expectation that riches are to be found, for others it's an excuse to go out and do something even if there is little chance of finding riches.
For me and Margie, we're in the latter group of above mentioned treasure hunters. Yep... we look for stuff left by somebody else just for the fun of it. The good thing about our searches is that we almost always find what we're looking for, even here in Nebraska.
Take yesterday for example. The perfect 70 degree weather was ideal for treasure hunting, so we visited a web site with all the information we required to find hidden stuff and went out and found everything we were looking for, all within 15 miles of our house. We located 4 separate hiding places in less than 2 hours, and learned a little history while we were at it. We discovered hiding places we'd driven by numerous times, got some exercise, and burned a couple three gallons of gas at the most.
What we were doing is called geocaching, and if you have a hand held GPS unit and some spare time, you have everything you need to go on your own treasure hunts. Check out http://www.geocaching.com and hit the "Hide & Seek A Cache" button on the left hand side of the page. You get presented a list of ways to search for hidden locations, but just using your Zip Code is as good as any. By punching in the Zip for Cambridge, and limiting the search to 25 miles, there are 48 hidden places (cache locations) to go searching for. Plug the GPS coordinates into your hand held unit and off ya go!
Yesterday, besides finding two hidden stuff (cache) locations near Harry Strunk Lake, we were to the old Pleasantview-Denney Cemetery and the ghost town of Orofina. We found what we were searching for, and even traded some "treasure".
Registration is free, and you get to keep track of your finds on the geocaching.com web site. There is a premium membership available, but over 99% of the caches listed on the web site don't require anything more than the free basic membership to find and log. In most cases, cache locations are in interesting places, and our adventures in Arizona had us finding ghost towns, abandoned mines, WWII training sites, and very unusual places that you would likely never find on your own.
So we recommend giving geocaching a try. It's a great activity for the whole family, and there are over 725,000 caches so far worldwide to go searching for. Most are pretty easy, some require technical mountain climbing skills or underwater diving equipment, but all are just plain fun to go looking for.
To help get you started, check this page to find geocaches in the McCook area...
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=40.202800&lng=-100.625733
What is it about hunting for treasure that draws so many adventurers? Most likely it's the thought of unimaginable riches in an old shipwreck or the gold buried under a pile of rocks that some miner hid and forgot where he put it or died before he could return to claim his cache. When I was a kid, we'd play pirates and make our own treasure maps. My friends and me would don our skull caps, eye patches and swords and go out in search of whatever we thought was at that magical point where "X" marks the spot. Of course we never found anything that way, but it was a fun game to be sure.
The fact that lost treasure is well... lost, keeps most people from looking for it, but there are plenty of folks that do go in search of treasure just the same. For some, it's the thrill of the hunt and expectation that riches are to be found, for others it's an excuse to go out and do something even if there is little chance of finding riches.
For me and Margie, we're in the latter group of above mentioned treasure hunters. Yep... we look for stuff left by somebody else just for the fun of it. The good thing about our searches is that we almost always find what we're looking for, even here in Nebraska.
Take yesterday for example. The perfect 70 degree weather was ideal for treasure hunting, so we visited a web site with all the information we required to find hidden stuff and went out and found everything we were looking for, all within 15 miles of our house. We located 4 separate hiding places in less than 2 hours, and learned a little history while we were at it. We discovered hiding places we'd driven by numerous times, got some exercise, and burned a couple three gallons of gas at the most.
What we were doing is called geocaching, and if you have a hand held GPS unit and some spare time, you have everything you need to go on your own treasure hunts. Check out http://www.geocaching.com and hit the "Hide & Seek A Cache" button on the left hand side of the page. You get presented a list of ways to search for hidden locations, but just using your Zip Code is as good as any. By punching in the Zip for Cambridge, and limiting the search to 25 miles, there are 48 hidden places (cache locations) to go searching for. Plug the GPS coordinates into your hand held unit and off ya go!
Yesterday, besides finding two hidden stuff (cache) locations near Harry Strunk Lake, we were to the old Pleasantview-Denney Cemetery and the ghost town of Orofina. We found what we were searching for, and even traded some "treasure".
Registration is free, and you get to keep track of your finds on the geocaching.com web site. There is a premium membership available, but over 99% of the caches listed on the web site don't require anything more than the free basic membership to find and log. In most cases, cache locations are in interesting places, and our adventures in Arizona had us finding ghost towns, abandoned mines, WWII training sites, and very unusual places that you would likely never find on your own.
So we recommend giving geocaching a try. It's a great activity for the whole family, and there are over 725,000 caches so far worldwide to go searching for. Most are pretty easy, some require technical mountain climbing skills or underwater diving equipment, but all are just plain fun to go looking for.
To help get you started, check this page to find geocaches in the McCook area...
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=40.202800&lng=-100.625733
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Hobby House
When I was a kid, I had a hobby. I was an amateur radio operator when I lived at home and when I went to college, I operated the college radio shack as well. I'd stay up well into the night when the "skip" was in so I could communicate with distant lands, and I had a wall of "QSL" cards from those distant hams to prove our communications had actually happened. WAS and WAC was my goal then. WAS stands for worked all states, and WAC was for worked all continents. I never achieved either goal, but it was exciting to me pounding out the dots and dashes of Morris code and keeping track of where the folks I visited over the air waves with lived.
After college when I grew up and started working for a living, I gave up amateur radio as I was getting started with fixer-upper homes. Our houses generally didn't need a lot of work it seemed. but the usual yard work and painting projects came up as well as renovation work including adding a bathroom to one of the houses. Much of my spare time was spent working on the house of the moment for years, and there were several houses to work on during that time. I never considered working on the houses a hobby, but more of a necessary function to be comfortable. I did pick up a new hobby along the way however... model railroading.
More recently after moving up the corporate ladder, our last Denver home didn't need a lot of work it seemed. It needed paint desperately and received same, but as far as major work needing to be accomplished, it didn't have any. Other than the rather large yard to maintain, I rebuilt our brand new Jeep into a rock crawling machine that today I'm totally unwilling to take many of the places I built it to go in the first place, and I started building my 3rd model railroad. We would go "wheelin" and camping almost every weekend during the summer, and winter had me working on the railroad.
After retirement, we sold everything and hit the road in our RV and towed the Jeep all over the western US. We kept our eyes open for the "perfect" property, but until we stumbled on an Internet ad for the place we now own here in Nebraska, we couldn't find exactly what we wanted. We wanted to live in a rural area outside a town with open country surrounding us. We wanted a view, and wildlife in the area, and just a little bit of property... why I still don't know for sure, but I expect that it was the thought we needed a "buffer zone" around us after living in the city our whole life.
So now I'm back to house renovating, and I guess for the time being, it's also my hobby. Being retired and looking back at what I was doing besides working, I wonder how I got anything accomplished. I must have had a lot more energy than I do now, or I was just a lot faster in the old days... probably both. When we bought this place, I knew I was going to stay busy working on the place as a lot needed to be done to make it our own, and to be sure, I'm making progress but it sure seems to be moving forward slowly.
The basement here will eventually hold my dream railroad, but today it's covered in sawdust from renovation projects. I'm looking forward to the day when I can start building the benchwork that will support the mountains, rivers, trains and tracks I envision, but for the time being, I need to quit typing and get back to work on this hobby house.
After college when I grew up and started working for a living, I gave up amateur radio as I was getting started with fixer-upper homes. Our houses generally didn't need a lot of work it seemed. but the usual yard work and painting projects came up as well as renovation work including adding a bathroom to one of the houses. Much of my spare time was spent working on the house of the moment for years, and there were several houses to work on during that time. I never considered working on the houses a hobby, but more of a necessary function to be comfortable. I did pick up a new hobby along the way however... model railroading.
More recently after moving up the corporate ladder, our last Denver home didn't need a lot of work it seemed. It needed paint desperately and received same, but as far as major work needing to be accomplished, it didn't have any. Other than the rather large yard to maintain, I rebuilt our brand new Jeep into a rock crawling machine that today I'm totally unwilling to take many of the places I built it to go in the first place, and I started building my 3rd model railroad. We would go "wheelin" and camping almost every weekend during the summer, and winter had me working on the railroad.
After retirement, we sold everything and hit the road in our RV and towed the Jeep all over the western US. We kept our eyes open for the "perfect" property, but until we stumbled on an Internet ad for the place we now own here in Nebraska, we couldn't find exactly what we wanted. We wanted to live in a rural area outside a town with open country surrounding us. We wanted a view, and wildlife in the area, and just a little bit of property... why I still don't know for sure, but I expect that it was the thought we needed a "buffer zone" around us after living in the city our whole life.
So now I'm back to house renovating, and I guess for the time being, it's also my hobby. Being retired and looking back at what I was doing besides working, I wonder how I got anything accomplished. I must have had a lot more energy than I do now, or I was just a lot faster in the old days... probably both. When we bought this place, I knew I was going to stay busy working on the place as a lot needed to be done to make it our own, and to be sure, I'm making progress but it sure seems to be moving forward slowly.
The basement here will eventually hold my dream railroad, but today it's covered in sawdust from renovation projects. I'm looking forward to the day when I can start building the benchwork that will support the mountains, rivers, trains and tracks I envision, but for the time being, I need to quit typing and get back to work on this hobby house.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
