Maybe true?????

Lloyd and I would occasionally exchange overnight stays. There were four children in my family and six in his. We were country school classmates and our farms were three and half miles apart. It was always a treat to stay overnight with Lloyd with five siblings there was always something brewing. Lloyd's father, Arnt, had emigrated from Norway. I can still see Arnt leaning into a milk cow and hear the milk squirting into the pail as he carried on a conversation with himself in Norwegian.
Lloyd likes to tell the story of staying at my house one night. We walked home from school together. Gathered around the dinner table my father said, "You boys were late coming home from school tonight." I supposedly replied, "Ya, we had to stay after school for something we didn't do!" "What was that?" my father asked. "We didn't do our arithmetic" I said. Lloyd claims it's a true story but I have no recollection of it and it seems out of character for me. :)

Sneaky!

We never heard her come in. Our little country school had three windows each on the west and the east. The road ran east west on the south side of the school so the driveway was out of sight. We never knew how long Miss VanMaanen had been listening in the entry before she knocked on the door. As County Superintendent of Schools for Brookings County, SD, it was her job to supervise the teachers in the rural county schools. She must have coasted into the school yard in her old car, carefully closed the car door and entered the porch very quietly. No doubt she thought that that was the best way to find out how our teacher was doing. I always found it a bit unnerving and I would think that the teacher must have felt that way, too.

It was 1943...

School was a one room building with a enclosed unheated, porch for boots and coats. On the coldest days the porch was so cold that our sandwiches would freeze by noon. There was no basement so the little building perched on a stone foundation. It was 1943 and I was in first grade. Some animal had dug under the foundation so Marvin Jepson, who was in eighth grade, set an animal trap (#1 Victor) in the hole. When we arrived at school the next day we found a very angry skunk in the trap. Marvin's farm was about a quarter of a mile away so he ran home for his .22 rifle. Shooting the skunk did not improve the situation noticeably though, our teacher, Ruth Quail, did dismiss school for three days to allow the smell to subside.

"I wouldn't change a thing........"

I've often wished I would have bought some art. Lisa and I were in Peru together about seven years ago. We spent some time in the old Inca capital, Cuzco, before visiting Machu Picchu. In Cuzco there were many young artists peddling their art on the street, both drawings and paintings. They weren't asking very much for them, just a few pesos. I regret not buying a large number of them. If I had it to do over I'd buy many of the drawings/paintings. Why? Primarily to support the artists and could probably have found some use for them. It wouldn't have cost me much but it would have been a boost to them.
I did buy a few finger puppets from a woman who had knit them. I wish I'd have bought her whole basket full of them for her asking price...no bargaining her down.
Some people claim to have no regrets about decisions they have made as they move into or through old age. I'm not one of them. There are many things I'd do differently. This reminds me that there is a vast difference between having "one year of experience twenty times" and "having twenty years of experience."

And the winner of the greased pig contest is......

Saturday was the annual fund raiser for the Sinai, SD, fire department. The weather was of my dreams, 80 degrees, full sun and a light breeze. There was no tractor pull this year. Many antique tractors were on display with a variety of competitions; backing a two wheel trailer and a four wheel trailer, pulling a log through a series of traffic cones, a race that involved hand cranking the tractor, rolling a barrel with the front wheels of a tractor and a slow race to see which tractor could go the slowest. All of these activities took second place to the greased pig competition.
There were three classes of competitors; children, women and men. The ground in the pen was soaked with water until the mud was ankle deep. The children's competition was unisex and uniage. The youngest were a couple of boys I'd guess to to be about four or five. They were competing against some girls who must have been at least in their teens. A pig was smeared with lard and turned loose in the pen. The object was to pick up the pig and put it in a tub in the center of the ring. That quickly became second place for some of boys to the joy of belly flopping in the mud. It was a tie between two boys, one holding the front legs and the other the back.
In the women's contest the pig was larger. When one woman successfully tackled the pig she ended up sitting with the pig in her lap. After much effort she finally rose from the mud and deposited the pig in the tub while the other women watched.
For the men the unwritten rules were very different. As soon as a man would get a grip on the pig someone would tackle him. There was no polite standing back to give him a chance as the women did. They seemed to have as much fun wallowing in the mud as did the little boys.
It could go with out saying, there were no members of People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals present.

More pics..that's Gov. Quinn speaking.

Mai-Evy, 7 weeks and first picket duty