It's A Mystery...

That would be my response if Alex Trebek were asking the question, rather than giving the answer, to "How did you get that collection of pens you have?"

The other day I was writing something and noticed some wording on the pen. That lead to a hunt-and-seek to see what other pens are lying around the house. Among my collection are pens from:

American Bank of Heber, Utah (not where I have ever banked)

Utah Collex Inc (whatever that is) from Payson, Utah

Walgreens

Zyrtec (a navy and lime-colored pen I got from the doctor one day. I was wearing a lime green shirt and navy blue pants and made a comment about matching the pen, and he handed it to me.)

Bilco Safe & Lock

A pen that looks like a candy cane

Utah Retirement Systems (every 22 years you get a free pen)

The Mending Shed, a fabulous little fix-it shop in Orem

And one from Disneyland (where I've never been) given to me by a co-worker.

My regular daily pen-of-choice is the good old all-blue Papermate. Once in a while, I'll get on a Bic kick, especially the "Round Stic". For years, I was legendary at work for only wanting the clear pen from Bic with the black ink (10 for $1.00), and considered it a personal challenge to use up every drop of ink, no doubt some inherited frugality issue. It's amazing how much you can get out of a pen even when it looks like it's empty. A couple of times I even wrapped some Scotch tape around the tip to hold it together til the ink was all gone. Pure satisfaction! However...if a pen starts to leak, whether old or brand new, I have no qualms whatsoever about throwing it in the nearest trash can.

Just out of curiosity (why are there so dang many pens around here?), I decided to count them...not every one in the house, under the beds, etc, mind you, just in the usual places. I was amazed to find we have more than 100 pens around here, and all of them have ink, so without ever buying another one, we are good to go for several lifetimes. However, Imelda Marcos-like, I know at some point, I will walk down an aisle sometime/somewhere and be overcome by the urge to buy another pen. It's my cheap thrill.

When I was a kid, The Lindy Co. (now defunct) made a wonderful line of "stick pens" with metal clips which came in several colors (13 to be exact) and two different lengths, @2-3 for a dollar, the only example of reverse-inflation in the universe. Now, if there's something neater than a regular pen, it's a pint-sized version. Oh, how I wish I had 100 Lindy pens lying around!

I own two pens used just for writing, and then only for serious writing. They are both silver and made by Cross. One is a man's pen and a little too fat for me to use comfortably. The other is a lady pen, not wonderfully slick like the fat pen and a little too trimline to keep a good grip. But, like Cinderella's step-sisters, I know a glass slipper when I see one :o)

Love Is Never Having to Say You're Sorry?

This story is priceless, another day (episode) in the life of Grandson Talon. He is obsessed with Calvin & Hobbes and could indeed give Mr. Patterson a run for his money.

In Dayna's words (mostly):

"The night before last (Saturday) around 1:00 am. Talon got an extra surge of energy, he goes into his room and when he comes out, he had a poster board wanting me to cut out a mask for him 'cause he wanted to be a Super hero. I made him a mask. His hero's outfit consisted of a sword on his right hip, a little toilet plunger on the left hip, two colored markers in his belt loop, no shirt, and a plastic bag for his cape and mask. Then back into his room. When returning to the front room, he asked me to make him a real cape. Now it was late so I told him not now, we'll have to do it tomorrow. He needed to go to bed. The next thing I noticed, he had paper and a marker and was drawing (which is nothing new since he is always creating something).

The next morning as I got up and walked past his bedroom door, I noticed the sign:

Then entering the kitchen, I saw laid out on the counter the book. Looking at the picture on the cover of the book, it was exactly like Talon's super hero costume the night before.

I opened up the book. You'll see many scenes and segments of him. Cleaning the house, eating his favorite foods then the story turns to him going to the dump, me yelling at him, me over his grave, etc.

Then later on that morning he and I were on the couch. I was watching a movie and he was holding his note and book he just made. He looks over at me and says: "Mom if you apologize, I will rip up the note and book". I explained I wasn't going to apologize for sending him to bed because it was late, and I didn't do anything wrong.

About 20 or 30 minutes later we were still on the couch and I was really involved in the movie we were watching, Mantracker. When he started to ask me questions, thinking he was playing one of his many little games, and not wanting to hurt his feelings again, I answered his questions while watching tv, not really paying attention. First question was "Mom, what's the first letter in Super hero?" I answered S. Then a few minutes later "Mom, what's the first letter in Octopus?" I said O. Again a few minutes later, "So Mom, what's the second to the last letter in Shark?" Annoyed, since I knew he knew the answers, but still playing along, I'm like R, Talon. "Mom, what the first letter in Roar?" R, Talon. "Mom what's the first letter in Yellow? I answered, its Y. Then Talon looks at me with a slight grin and holds up the letter he had written...and begins to rip it down the middle.

That's when I realized he'd played me better than Mantracker, and I had just spelled out the word SORRY.

About Fencing

Not the action kind that involves swords and sabers and Zorro,(though the old electric fences could certainly give that effect, and I can verify that personally) but the kind that kept the cows corralled. Most fences around the farm yard were made out of wood rather than the fancy pipe ones they make now, which improvement I applaud. The wood fences had to be painted over and over and over. Though it seemed we painted them all every year, Dad told me once that he bought a 5-gallon bucket each spring and painted til it was gone. Sometimes it was red paint, and sometimes it was white. Somewhere I have a picture of my two oldest boys "helping" Grandpa paint. Apparently not all five gallons went on the actual fences, and my suspicion is that the painting did at least as much to keep us occupied and out of trouble as it did to improve the looks of the wood.

Well do I remember Dad's diligent upkeep of those funky cedar fence posts. They were famous for tipping one way or the other, causing the wire staples to work loose. He kept a tin can with fence-mending material and a hammer on hand on an every-day basis. There were also some wire-stretchers for more major repair. Somewhere along the line, he developed a real interest in collecting old barbed wire, probably because it was a visual symbol of hard work, with some creative ingenuity thrown in.

He had some of his own wire, people learned of his interest and gave him some they came across, and he would take his metal detector on rides to old places to search for stuff like that. It was one of his few hobbies, that and reading. He mounted them on a shed wall, then later on something more mobile. One time he was asked to show them at a library or school in the Logan area and give a small presentation to some kids. I remember that day; he dressed up in a long-sleeved shirt, shined boots, bolo tie, and ever-present hat. It pleased him that someone would care about what he had done. It was always his pleasure to learn and teach others about historical and conservative things. 

 After my dad passed away, a caring craftsman built several professional wood-framed panels, all labeled and covered with glass, to display Dad's barbed wire collection. That would have pleased my dad, and did me as well. 

1941

Today marks seventy years since my mother and dad got married, her first anniversary without him. I imagine today was one of the longest days of her life. Love you, Mom!!!


In honor of their farming years, here is a bit of trivia to store in your brain:

Barns are red because the original "paint" farmers had was a mixture of things lying around...milk, oil, and rust. That's what it says. It makes sense. I don't know why the milk or rust, but the oil was probably to protect the wood from the elements. Perhaps the rust just gave it color, or maybe it gave some boost for lasting, or even might have been a bug inhibitor. Maybe the milk was a catalyst of some kind. Maybe it was to make the cows feel at home. Maybe....

Who knows? I'm sure they had their reasons and, frankly, I can't imagine a barn any other color and am not going to start second-guessing any farmer...or farmer's wife, either.

Harvest Home

During the Top Shot show last night (and what a great episode), there was a trailer for a new tv series called "Harvest", which begins tomorrow. It caught my attention, not because I intend to watch it, but because it was a catalyst to an old memory. Recalling the event causes me mixed emotions, and here's why:

I love windchimes. Some people hate them. Such is life. I can't help it if people are weird :o) My neighbor, Carolyn, had a wonderful big windchime that went bong bong bong, in a low tone. I told her how much I enjoyed hearing its soothing sound. (Had it bonged constantly, I would have felt differently.) Another neighbor complained to her about how annoying it was and next thing I knew, here was Carolyn standing on my doorstep with a gift...her windchime. I put it outside my back door and considered myself one lucky duck.

When my granddaughter came to live here, we had a few nights of canyon breezes, and the bonging scared her so much that she spent the nights wide-eyed, like Calvin and Hobbes waiting for the boogey man under their bed. So, unfortunately, my windchimes are resting in the shed for another day.

This all comes to mind because I need to mow my lawn. Here's how that ties together.

We had purchased probably three lawn mowers in five years. The salesmen, of course, always say how wonderfully the mower starts up at the first pull. Invariably, sometime the next year, I'd end up all but pulling my arm out of the socket trying to make the thing start.

When I was a teenager, we had an electric lawn mower. It did, indeed, start the first time every time. The problem was that you had to flip the blankity blank cord over the mower every single round! I tied enough knots to make a boy scout jealous trying to keep that cord plugged into the mower, to no avail. It was the one time (back then) that I allowed myself to swear. This was done at the same time I was beating the cord over and over on Grandma's fence post.

About this time of year, maybe five or six years ago, I became near-apoplectic over the latest machine, which had sucked the cord back into itself like a Jack Benny penny and would not relent one iota. No idea if I was swearing then or not, but it's possible. Right then and there, I made the judgment call, got in my truck, and drove directly to Lowe's. While in the mower aisle, I noticed they were playing music, windchime music. How relaxing and amazing is that? Then I went to Sears.Guess what??? They were playing the same music!!! My first thought was what a coincidence! Then it dawned on me that maybe some big corporation, possibly Coca-Cola or Pepsi, owned BOTH Lowe's and Sears. It could happen, you know.

Meanwhile, after driving home carefully with my new acquisition, I went in to get some help unloading it. Nik said, "Mom, why don't you ever answer your phone?" I said, "What do you mean? I didn't hear my phone ring."

Then I remembered.

Nik knew how much I loved the sound of windchimes and had given me a set years before, so when I recently purchased my cell phone, I programmed it to have a tinkling windchime sound when he called...

Old School

The other day, Teelay and I made a run to the local library. It's a pretty fantastic place. A couple of years ago, they remodeled things, so now it's mostly a self-checkout setup, unless there's some kind of glitch with a bar code or something. You drop your library card into a little slot and up comes a screen on a monitor asking for your "pin" number. You also have to declare if you want the instructions in English or not. Once that's done, it tells you to place three books/items on the flat surface where some invisible scanner reads the book titles. The titles are listed on the monitor and turn green once they pass inspection. You repeat the process until all your items are swooped. Then it asks if you want a print out of the items or not. You can also pay any overdue fees with this machine.

Eons ago, when checking out a book from the county or school libraries, the procedure was quite different. Tightly glued to the reverse side of the front cover was a little envelope-type thing. Inside the little envelope was a "check out" card, about the size of a recipe card, with lines on it. You took the book to the librarian and told her who you were. She took the card out of the envelope and stamped the date on it. Then you put your signature on the appropriate line and knew you had two weeks from that date to return it.

Both systems work and I don't mean to criticize either. There was, however, something wonderful and personal about pulling out that little card and adding your signature before it went on file. It's a tad ironic to me that we go to a library which only carries items meant to communicate, yet never communicate with an actual library employee, just Ms. Machine. I understand the cost-saving issues and even the possible time-saving issues, and really love the way you can renew your items by phone or online rather than having to drag them all back and forth, but it was a little more wonderful when someone smiled at you on your way out.

A few more things that have become retro are:

Handle-wound pencil sharpeners. Mostly now they have the electric kind. You jab your pencil in and pull it back out in less than two seconds. With the old kind, you turned the handle on the wall-mounted sharpener several times. It seemed so much more satisfying. What I've noticed is that both types have the same downside; certain operators empty the shavings into the garbage on a regular basis even if they've only used it once that week and certain other operators find that effort beneath themselves.

Typewriters used to be manual. To you youngins, that means they weren't plugged into an electric socket, nor did they have batteries; you were on your own. The "keys" back then were not the same type (pun intended) as the keys we use now. They were striker keys, more like how a pianist plays the keys which hit some other gizmo which causes the sound (that's the best description a non-piano player can do). These typewriters weren't attached to printers. You rolled a sheet of paper in the top and turned a knob on the side, feeding the paper into the proper position. The keys would strike a fabric ribbon, which was pressed against the paper. If the words weren't showing up very well, it was time to get a new ribbon. You had to clean off the key strikers now and then or they would smudge, especially letters like b, d, q, those with open parts. You set the margins by hand with a little sliding thing and when it reached close to the right side margin, you would hear a little "ping", letting you know you had maybe 4-5 more letters before it froze up. That meant you had to manually slide the big lever attached to the roller on the left, placing it at the left margin before you could type a new line.

I hadn't used a typewriter for many years and had occasion to use one for work one time on a marriage license. Good grief. You have to deliberately PUNCH each key down to make it work. I felt like a wimp. My favorite typewriter in high school was the IBM Selectric. It had a little interchangeable ball that had all the letters etc on it. Instead of needing keys to strike, this little ball zipped around and did that work. We thought it was near-magical. We had no correction tape, no delete, edit, move, cut, copy, or paste options. There were two kinds of fonts (pica and some other kind) and you had to physically change out the ball to change the font.

Before Xerox or Whiteout came along, we had duplicating machines. These had a container of rubbing alcohol attached to the top, upside down, so it could somehow blend with the carbon paper and make copies. This is not the same carbon paper as kids use to make images. This was the kind with the white front and purple back. If you had a typo, you had to unroll the paper, making sure it didn't slip or come all the way out, use a razor to scrape off the typo, roll it back in and make the best repair you could. At BYU we had a mimeograph machine that was a royal mess to use. You put some tar-like ink on top of the master and rolled it over the pages. It's benefit was that you could print thousands of copies from the mimeograph while you could only get a couple hundred out of the carbon kind. No electric staplers or sorters either, just staff members. The help button in our high school typing class was Mrs. Frederickson, the teacher.

This little ditty, The Typewriter Song, might give you some idea of how it was, though there was no cheery little music playing along in the background:

Windchimes and Lawn Mowers

I love windchimes. Some people hate them. Such is life. I can't help it if people are weird :o) My neighbor, Carolyn, had a wonderful big windchime that went bong bong bong, in a low tone. I told her how much I enjoyed hearing its soothing sound. (Had it bonged constantly, I would have felt differently.) Another neighbor complained to her about how annoying it was and next thing I knew, here was Carolyn standing on my doorstep with a gift...her windchime. I put it outside my back door and considered myself one lucky duck.

When my granddaughter came to live here, we had a few nights of canyon breezes, and the bonging scared her so much that she spent the nights wide-eyed, like Calvin and Hobbes waiting for the boogey man under their bed. So, unfortunately, my windchimes are resting in the shed for another day.

This all comes to mind because I need to mow my lawn. Here's how that ties together.

We had purchased probably three lawn mowers in five years. The salesmen, of course, always say how wonderfully the mower starts up at the first pull. Invariably, sometime the next year, I'd end up all but pulling my arm out of the socket trying to make the thing start.

When I was a teenager, we had an electric lawn mower. It did, indeed, start the first time every time. The problem was that you had to flip the blankity blank cord over the mower every single round! I tied enough knots to make a boy scout jealous trying to keep that cord plugged into the mower, to no avail. It was the one time (back then) that I allowed myself to swear. This was done at the same time I was beating the cord over and over on Grandma's fence post.

About this time of year, maybe five or six years ago, I became near-apoplectic over the latest machine, which had sucked the cord back into itself like a Jack Benny penny and would not relent one iota. No idea if I was swearing then or not, but it's possible. Right then and there, I made the judgment call, got in my truck, and drove directly to Lowe's. While in the mower aisle, I noticed they were playing music, windchime music. How relaxing and amazing is that? Then I went to Sears. Guess what??? They were playing the same music!!! My first thought was what a coincidence! Then it dawned on me that maybe some big corporation, possibly Coca-Cola or Pepsi, owned BOTH Lowe's and Sears. It could happen, you know.

Meanwhile, after driving home carefully with my new acquisition, I went in to get some help unloading it. Nik said, "Mom, why don't you ever answer your phone?" I said, "What do you mean? I didn't hear my phone ring."

Then I remembered.

Nik knew how much I loved the sound of windchimes and had given me a set years before, so when I recently purchased my cell phone, I programmed it to have a tinkling windchime sound when he called...

You can guess the Rest of the Story.

Grandma's Coal Chute

(I have retyped this blog entry three times and cannot get it to format right, so "it is what it is.")

Clunkers? Clinkers? Apparently it's clinkers, though the only clinks I've heard mentioned are the ones like hoosegows, the kind bad guys were "thrown" into in the Wild West. Clunkers are old cars/things that either don't run or just barely run...Cash For Clunkers. You might say the grand old car John Candy drove in Uncle Buck could be a clunker. Others might call it a "classic."

I don't think anybody would call it a clinker.

What started this line of thought is a mystery, but somehow I got thinking about Grandma Rice's coal chute. There was a little room in her basement, next to the wringer washer & tub area, with a door of its own. There must have been a furnace beast in there somewhere, but I have no recollection of it at all. It borders on my vision of hell.

I do remember the magical-looking chute on the north side of her home, at basement level. How the loads of coal got transported from the yard to the chute is anybody's guess, but I'd guess my dad. The fence wasn't movable, so anybody unloading coal had to probably use a wheelbarrow and make ten trips.

My family's coal was stored west of our house in a pile. There were big hunks on down to the slack coal, which basically nobody wanted to mess with. During the worst of the winter, you brought in two buckets of coal; by the end of the day, what was left were clinkers..."The incombustible residue, fused into an irregular lump that remains after the combustion of coal"

Well do I remember the Nasty North and Wicked West windy days that forced the coal soot back down the chimney and into the house, gagging us all and filling the house with big billows of black smoke. More work for Mother. We had two coal stoves, one in the kitchen for cooking and heating bricks and dad's feet in between chores on frigid winter days, and the Warm Morning one in the living room. When the coal in the kitchen stove burned down, we'd dig out the clinkers and take them outside. It runs in my mind, though it could be phantom memory, that there was an old hook with a long handle, like the ones we used to catch chickens by their legs, that was used to "fish out" clinkers from the Warm Morning, but I never had to do that, so who knows? Clinkers were a real drag. They were scratchy and uneven and you had to take them outside to put into another pile that either magically disintegrated or got hauled off, probably by Dad.

One of the funnest experiences I've had with coal did not involve making eyes for snowmen. There were 30 kids or so in our class at West Side High. Somebody came up with the idea of us unloading a train car of coal, by hand, for a fund raiser. On the appointed day, about 14 of us reported for duty with our shovels. I remember Kenny Kendall, Robert Bingham, Randy Howell and I (and probably others) working our buns off for several hours unloading that big car of coal. It was a memorable experience, and those who participated probably still remember it as a satisfying experience, though not necessarily one they'd like to repeat. Also, I have no idea where the $90 went.

Coal starts out as leafy compost. Block out the air, add some pressure and let it simmer for ages. The longer it simmers, the harder the coal. The harder the coal, the hotter the burn.

Graphite, used often on bicycles and pinewood derby cars, is a type of coal.

Coal is the official state mineral of Kentucky, even though coal is not a mineral, and is the official state rock of Utah.

"China is by far the largest producer of coal in the world and relies on coal for about 70% of its energy needs. An estimated 5 million people work in China's coal-mining industry. At some place in Tajikistan, coal deposits have been burning for thousands of years, creating vast underground labyrinths of unique and beautiful minerals. Wild coal fires were reported by Lewis & Clark. In Centralia, Pennsylvania, an exposed vein of coal ignited in 1962 due to a trash fire in the landfill. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continues to burn underground to this day."

Australia exports more coal than any other country in the world, followed by Indonesia. Japan, China and South Korea are the biggest importers.

The current price of coal is $30-50 a ton, depending on the quality. The current price of a cord of wood (4'x4'x8') runs roughly $150. Harder wood goes for more.

My suspicion is, if you plan to stock up on either coal or wood, now would not be too soon.

WHIFFIES

Even though there are at least 8 partial boxes of different kinds of cereal on our shelf at any given time, requests are still made for one we don't have. Talon reminded me that the Fruity Pebbles were all gone, which I actually thought was a good thing, but what do I know?

It's interesting how you can walk up and down the cereal aisle three times and not spot the one particular brand you are looking for, or you can spend as much time trying to decide what kind of cereal to get this time. You'd think a family could decide on one...say Cheerios for instance. That's my choice almost every morning. I'm talking the regular kind, not the Honey Nut ones, which strangely enough, I find too sugary. There are also Multi-Grain, Apple Cinnamon, Banana Nut, Chocolate, Cinnamon Burst, Frosted, Fruity, Oat Cluster Crunch and Yogurt Burst Cheerios, though I won't run out and try these, either. I'm a stick in the mud when it comes to Cheerios. Kyle likes Honey Nut Cheerios, and one time I was trying to make room for more cereal so I dumped one partial box into another partial box, not noticing they weren't exactly the same. Big mistake...which I discovered the next morning as soon as the first spoonful hit my mouth. Ick.

When I was a kid, I used to like puffed rice cereal (not to be confused with the kind you use to make Rice Crispy Treats), the almost-without-flavor kind that look like grains of white rice right before they might explode. How they do that is a mystery. Anyway, my dad used to call them "Whiffies". He said that was because there was no food value in them whatsoever and any energy you might get from them was gone in a whiff; hence the name. I was probably 30 before I learned they were called puffed rice.

Today I perused the entire cereal aisle, box by box and sack by sack. No Whiffies. What is this world coming to???

Top Secret

Since the big brother who had been babysitting Talon got a new full-time job, Dayna has been bringing Talon over here weekdays for Teelay to "watch" until school starts. It's more than just babysitting; it's an education in last-child psychology to spend time with Talon.

At the moment he's still asleep on the couch where he collapsed after they dropped him off this morning. But here's what went on one day last week.

I decided he had had enough tv and computer time and needed some outside activity. Teelay had raked together a bunch of leaves out back, so I got out some gloves and told him we needed to go out and put the leaves in big bags. He said, "What do I win?" I told him, "The satisfaction of doing a good job."

After we got done, I came in and made him a tuna fish sandwich, since his mom says that's what he likes. He ate the whole thing and said it was so good, he would like another one..."Only, this time, Grandma, please leave off the crust."

My favorite was when he came in with a big piece of purple construction paper, covered with writing in big black letters. He was explaining it to me, step by step (like Grandma Rice), this "secret recipe" for pizza that he had written down from some internet Egyptian game site. Here it is:

Top. Secarate Resipe
One 1/2 cup of milke
8 kolometers of khiken and
6 drops.of.bakan.
8. pieses.of.peprone.and.
rolles.and braed.

So, if I can just find a pan big enough to throw in that 8 kolometers of khiken, we can have that for lunch today :o) Feel free to copy it. You can't have too many secarate resipes.