Buffalo Gal

I really enjoy proof reading for the local newspaper. Last week I got to read all the “letters to Santa” from first graders and kindergarteners. It was the first grade letters that were truly interesting…first graders know phonics and their spelling is often purely phonetic…what it sounds like! Fortunately the first grade teachers did not correct the little students’ writing and send them in just the way the kids wrote them.
Here are some that I enjoyed:

Lots of kids were not at all shy about asking for a lot of presents. One even ended the letter by saying ” Please bring me everything”.

Dear Santa, I want an IPod touch for Christmas. My favorite reindeer is Comit. I will leave some cookies and water for you.
(water? what happened to the milk?)

Dear Santa, I want an Ipod tuch, trainesformer,snobord, lego boat, DS Wii, NDSU jersey number 12,
Titanic model, and Saints jersey number 9.

Dear Santa, I would like hocy glovs and pads and a hemit too. I had a nise time with you in town. Thanks a lot. Merry Christmas.

(Most kids wished Santa a Merry Christmas but only 3 said “thank you”)

Dear Santa, I want a Ipad 2, Santa I want a candy crane. Santa I want a password journal. Mom and Dad said I have been a good girl because I help with Boscoe and Wyatt. Please bring Boscoe and Moe our dog and cat something too.

(Some of the kids did not ask for anything but asked a lot of questions)

Dear Santa, Are your elves busy? Is it cold outside when you dliver the prezents and howe old are you? Duez your hat keep you warm? Is it fun to ride in the slay? Do you laf and sing all the whay?

Dear Santa, My favrit reindeer is Rudolf. I would like a new shotgun.

Dear Santa, What is your favorite rain Deer? Is it Roodolf? Is it prancer? Danser or Vicsin? Who do you lke?

Dear Santa, I am wondering you and your elfs are? I think you are a fun gie. I love you Santa.
Mary Chrismis Santa and your elfs.
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES

I got an email yesterday in which a small child was with his parents at a store where a long line of children were waiting to talk to Santa. The boy asked his parents,
“Where is the line for Jesus?”
(the boy obviously understood a lot more than a lot of adults)

I also enjoyed a sign I saw at Swansons’Health store:
“UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO AND A PUPPY”

( that ought to make the parents who pay little attention to what their children are doing in public places a moment to think twice about letting their children run lose.)

Another sign I saw that I really liked was this one at Bergens in Detroit Lakes:

“The greatest gift of a garden is the restoration of the five senses.”
MAY WE ALL BE ABLE TO SAY WITH TINY TIM: “GOD BLESS US EVERYONE”

The news outlets are filled with Kim Il Jong’s death in North Korea.
One article in the ATLANTIC refers to it as “the death of Dr. Evil”.

Three other interesting essays from Dec. 19 2011 (today):

1. “Capitalism and the Right To Rise” in the Wall Street Journal for Dec 19, 2011 by Jeb Bush.

2. “A Democrat Reaches Across The Aisle On Medicare”
M. Barone in Wash. Examiner , Dec 19, 2011

3.”Obama flip flops on 60 minutes interview” in Florida Sun-Sentinel, Dec 19, 2011 by Cal Thomas.

All of these essays appeared on Realclearpolitics website for Dec. 19 2011.

News Junkies, read on!!!!

A commenter asked for the lefse recipe so here it is:

It is cheater’s lefse because it uses Hungry Jack potato flakes. It tastes like the real riced potato lefse though…and it is so easy to make.

LUCIA SCHROEDER’S WINNING LEFSE RECIPE AT BARNESVILLE POTATO DAYS IN 2000.

2 and 2/3 cup Hungry Jack flakes (press down in dry measuring cup to get a full cup of flakes)
2 and 1/4 cups boiling water
1/4 cup of cooking oil (I use canola oil but other oil is fine)
1 TBS sugar
1 tsp salt

combine ingredients in bowl and let cool thoroughly til potato mix is cool through and through.

WHEN THE FIRST MIX IS COOL…..add 1 cup flour to the pot. mix and stir in well.
Now you are ready to roll the lefse. About 1 ice cream scoop of dough makes a good 10-12 inch lefse. Rolling board should be floured and rolling pin with a stocking on it should be floured too…so lefse will not stick on cloth.
Prepare hot griddle ( preheated up to 450-500 degrees) by sprinkling flour on it til you see flour turning brown. Wipe off griddle with dry washcloth of small towel.
Fry on griddle at high heat…450 to 500 degrees til lefse is lightly browned on one side. Flip the lefse to other side for a minute or so. Over frying is not good. There should be bubbles on the lefse before you turn it with light brown spots on the frying side.

I lay the lefse on a damp pillowcase and put another damp pillow case on top of it to make it soft and suppple and to keep it from drying out. Package cool lefse in a plastic one gallon bag…can be frozen to keep freshness.

December 16 was Lefse Day this December of 2011.
Yesterday— with the good help of one daughter in law and two grandkids— we made 5 big batches of the Norwegian immigrant peasant food so dearly loved by those of Norse/Swedish extraction (and others who are so lucky as to eat it and love it!)
It is definitely “peasant food” made primarily from potatoes and flour. One of our good friends born in Norway, whose family went through the WW 2 Nazi occupation of Norway said they “lived on” a form of lefse they called “potato cake”. That particular lefse was made from potatos and flour alone and dipped in water to soften it up instead of it being like a stiff cracker. Inge was the best “potato cake” maker I have ever known..her “lefse” was incomparable..made from only potatoes and flour and then “washed” in a shallow pan. It had been eaten as a wartime food when food was hard to come by–except for potatoes and flour.
Ours is made from a winning recipe at the Barnesville Potato Days in 2000. It is also tender and tasty and especially good when eaten with melted butter hot off the griddle!
Except for the butter and sugar , my recipe is pretty “healthy” using canola oil instead of butter in the dough. It also rolls like a dream and we rarely have a ruined lefse when rolling it out.
I got to sit in a rocking chair and watch the others roll and fry the lefse yesterday. I had made the dough and cooled it but when the family members arrived they brouht an extra griddle and rolling pin and really took over for me….it was fun to sit in the sun beaming through the big windows and watching them do the work as I sat and rocked and took in the fragrant scent of frying potato lefse and the distinctive aroma of flour browned on the lefse griddle.
The house still smelled good last night when we came home from the youngest grandson’s 8th grade basketball game.
I am baking or making a lot of gifts this Christmas. Plum jelly from our own plum trees is one of the gifts. Homemade bread and fudge are two other gifts. Making such things really beats shopping in crowded malls and big box stores and people enjoy the effort of making something for them.
I am not missing snow in the least. I am content to view the pictures I get of snowy scenes on emails or from other sources. My memories of snowy Decembers is good enough!

In today’s DAILY CALLER

I more than sensible look at extreme social conservatives.

“Open Letter To Social Conservatives”
by Rob. Laurie, 12/14111

I agree with this essay.

If the federal government bans cell phone use and texting while driving it will be amazing! It has been highly recommended by the federal agency concerned with traffic safety. And it will be brought up as a bill in congress. Whether the people in both houses of Congress have the guts to put public safety over their own popularity or re-elections remaind to be seen but I think we know how it will turn out.
It would be a revolutionary move to get cell phoning and texting banned while driving a car or other vehicle. It would be like getting the horse in after the barn door had been left open for many years and the horse had gone totally wild.
There are probably not accurate statistics on how many accidents have been caused by cell phoning/texting but a huge pileup of vehicles on Missouri highway with deaths and injuries about a year ago—- caused by a 19 year old driver texting— was the trigger for this proposed federal legislation.
I know of at least 3 accidents caused by cell phones…personal experiences of people I know. In the worst one, a relative’s neighbor was killed in a head on crash on a country lane by a teenage girl texting. In the other two, people I know were hit from behind by a cell phoner and suffered car damage but not serious injury other than stiff necks.
I have been staunchly opposed to driving while cellphone activity is occurring. I hate it when someone passes me and I see them on the phone or are looking down in order to text message.
There are many driving distractions including eating while driving or putting on makeup or reading a book (I have seen that too) but cellphone use has increased by leaps and bounds in just a few years and must be responsible for more accidents or near misses than other distractions.
There has been plenty said about this proposal…one of the best I heard is that instead of another traffic law that is hard to enforce….enact a law that anyone who can be proved to have caused an accident by distracted driving, be fined a huge amount of money…like up to $100,000 dollars….and maybe serve some jail time. Also lose their driver’s license for a long period of time. (that does not stop some from driving though) But hitting them hard with a high fine might be a good way to get them to quit their distracted driving.
Another suggestion is it have technology developed that would automatically shut down cell phones when the car is in motion. That would also do the trick.
It would force the addicted cell phoners and texters to pull off the road to do their obsessive communicating.
I hope it happens….making illegal the driving and use of distracting devices

I spent a couple of hours in some previously ignored “corners” of my home, namely part of my basement. There were things there I did not know (or had forgotten) I had.
After finding a lot of old pictures in one box and one plastic bag, I took them upstairs to sort and discard what I could. But it was all too precious.
My Mother’s high school graduation picture, her high school yearbook, THE YELWAH (Hawley spelled backwards..how creative they were in 1927!)
her Moorhead Teachers’ College Yearbook from 1928..then I found an album she put together about the courtship with my Dad…..another few pages (on old black photo album paper with neat printing in white ink) titled “Wedding Day June 14, 1933″ Snaphots of the wedding party and the bride and groom with their ringbearer and flower girl (my oldest cousins Harland and Joyce..one deceased and one in his 80s now) and finally snapshots of the trip to Duluth and the North Shore with one of my Dad sitting in front of Hibbing High School which must have been very new…it is still considered a showplace in Minnesota with architecture and adornment made possible by iron ore wealth from the huge pit mine there. Then pages titled “The Newlyweds at Home” with a couple of good pictures of my Mom with her cat and my Dad all dressed up in the most goofy clothes and a silly hat jammed on his head!!!!
What fun to see my young parents before they were parents!
I also discovered a small diary my Dad kept in 1979 when my husband took him to Alaska on the trip of his lifetime. He recorded almost everything that happened each day and was particularly thrilled to fly on a helicopter with my brother in law to an oil well in the Cook Inlet.
It was like having my Mom and Dad back with me for just one hour while I looked through the old “relics” from the box and bag I found.
They have been dead since 1988 and 1991.
Now it is all sorted but I must label the pictures for my children who will find these treasures when I am gone.
Generations…they come and go and live out lifetimes and go to their rests one by one. I found many other people from past generations..pictures of two aunts who have been dead for many years; my aunt and uncle and their 3 sons in a family picture from decades ago; graduation pictures of cousins grown old like me; my friend’s nursing graduation photo from the early 1960′s; one very old picture of my three little boys when they were very young… all sitting in a row on my parent’s sofa in their home.
What a flood of memories were unleashed today. It only takes a few pictures to do it.

It is December 9 and we are still snowless. I took my bike out of winter storage and have ridden it several days this week……I just got in from riding as the sun sets and the FULL MOON rises in the east. Beautiful sites both east and west courtesy of the Creator…to whom I give Thanks each day.
My face got cold or I could have peddled longer…I think I have rosy cheeks like I did when I was a kid and played outside in the cold.
When I was driving to town to pick up some newspaper articles to proofread over the weekend (it makes Monday easier when we read some of it on the weekend) …I flipped on the radio to a local station and heard Mike McFeeley talking about “death wishes”. Someone had contacted him with news about some vehicles driving on Lake Ida…..pickups and SUVs. I cannot believe the stupidity of some people. The lake ice is not thick enough for such things…..my Dad was so cautious we never went on the ice til sometime in January when he took me darkhouse fishing. Even then we sometimes parked on shore and walked to the darkhouse.
I fear hearing news about someone crashing through lake ice and drowning. It is way too early to drive on a lake as big as Ida.

MAKING JELLY: On this cold December day I made a big kettle of plum jelly from our own plums. I prefer making jelly now to making it in the heat of late summer.
Plum jelly will be gifts for some folks on my list.
I have lots more to make and have not even cracked open the chokecherry juice yet.
USING MY LIGHT
I decided to get out my full spectrum light box yesterday.
The short days and short hours of light are telling me to sit by that light box early in the morning again.
It really makes a difference in the dark of December.

JOY TO THE WORLD!

I got new boots last week. I have spent 2 years hunting for my old boots which were perfectly fine but I have not found the old ones. Now that I sprang for new ones, I WILL FIND THEM (maybe) That is one of Murphys’ Unwritten Laws. “If you lose something and buy a new one(s) the old ones will show up”
I wish the bag of “stocking stuffers” I got about 4 weeks ago would show up. They have vanished into———————–
THIN AIR. I have had this happen before. One year I could not find 3 robes I had bought on sale for my daughters in law.
I nearly drove myself insane looking for them but I did not find them——-till the following fall. They were right where I had searched but they were in a black plastic bag that did no look like it came from Dayton’s even though it did. DAYTONS: that store name has been gone a long time already. I wish I could go into the old downtown Minneapolis Dayton’s again..and Donaldson’s..with my cousin Garnet like we did when we were 13. We could safely ride the streetcars and be downtown in those days…no bad people bothering anyone then.
Oh what fun it was….going to the Nanking for Chinese dinner, to one of the big downtown theaters for a movie and finally to Bridgeman;s for a “marble sundae” before we rode home on the streetcar again. Those were the days. I wish I could be transported back to them just for one day.

OTHER STUFF I can smell banana bread baking and it is fragrant. Some stocking stuffers will be things that kids and grandids love that Grandma makes for them. Now how can I put rommegrot into a stocking? It will not work? I could put it in a jar first……reminds me of a Pogo page from the 1950s when my friends and I would read Pogo aloud to each other while traveling with a college choir on a big
Greyhound bus to the west coast or the east coast for 3 weeks.
One page had one of Pogo’s friends bringing him breakfast in bed. Pogo expressed his thanks and lifted the covers and said:
“just put it in here with all the other breakfasts”. That one just made me hoot..for some strange reason. I wonder if you can still buy Pogo books…probably on
Amazon or some place that has really old books available.
ALL THE LITTLE BIRDIES GO TWEET TWEET TWEET……
I bring out bird seed and other things the birds like to eat and put it under the row of big blue spruces where the birds hang out when it is cold. When I approach, the tweeting anbd singing stops and everything goes silent. After I deposit the foodstuffs and walk away the tweeting and joyful singing resumes. I think there are hundreds and hundreds of small birds in those spruces….chickadees, juncos, goldfinches and an occasional bothersome pesty bluejay or bluejays. I watched a bluejay balance in the swift north wind , teetering on the large pan of homemade suet on the deck. His feathers were ruffled and if he lost his grip he would have gone sailing…involuntarily. I don’t put the favorite food into the feeder on the deck when wind is blowing hard. The small birds like what is called “finch food” but it blows out of the feeder in a bad wind. Calm days only for finchfood!
NO RABBITS
We realized recently thqt we have seen NO RABBITS for a long time….months and months. We have seen adult bald eagles flying overhead searching. I think they have gotten a lot of rabbits…and so have the coyotes in the den north of our neighbor’s farm. One fellow found the den and it was surrounded by fawn bones…sad days ahead..No deer herds with no fawns. I hear that more than a couple of coyotes can kill an adult buck deer..it has been done. An article in last week’s local newspaper said that fewer and fewer deer are around. One man who checks his traplines said he used to scare up many deer in early mornings but now he sees very few. Nature is not like the Walt Disney movies where the animals usually get away….but not Bambi’s mother over whom I cried for years when I was young and could not stay for the rest of ther movie after Bambi’s mother got shot.

DING! goes the timer: the banana bread is done.

I watched a national newscast a few moments ago and one segment featured a piece of film of Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton speaking about some international thing.
I saw another flim clip earlier today and she was speaking at a conference that looked a lot like it was in the U.N.
What I noticed way too much was Hillary’s newest hair style. She has grown it out to near-shoulder length and wears it straight as a stick…like the style seems to be at the moment.
(whatvever happened to the “cobra look”? remember when longish hair fanned out at the sides like an Indian cobra’s hood?)
I am sorry to make this observation but Hillary is in her mid-sixties and appears to be auditioning for the role of one of the Hags in Shakespeare’s “Mac Beth”. Long, limp droopy staight hair is not becoming on Hillary or anyone else (opinion).
But since it is the dicatated popular hairstyle of the moment most, prominent people are wearing their hair in that style..whether it is becoming or not.
In the earlier appearance I saw, Hillary looked like a barber had been at her head and had cut all the hair off. She really had it pulled back into some sort of ponytail but she looked bald when you saw her straight on.
I wonder what she thinks when she looks in a mirror? Does she say “I look like one of the Hags from MacBeth”. Or does she think “I should get my hair styled and curled”? I think she looks in a mirror and sees herself as stylishly “with it”.
Most who wear their hair thus must see it that way.
A photo of Hillary taken a few years ago showed her with a short, slightly curled really pretty hairdo. Remember that one? She looked great.
“Hair” was the title of a 1960s musical that made it big time in many cities…..it was the story of a cell of long haired Hippies in New York City who were trying to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. The most famous song from that musical is probably “The Age of Aquarius” which used to be heard on pop radio in the late 1960s. Most of us could sing it or hum along with it. That musical distinguished itself by its use of profanity, nude scenes, anti war lyrics that became anthems of the Vietnam War protests…and long haired actors in the cast.
It is probably still playing somewhere in the world although its timeliness is long gone.
Other hairstyles that I recall have come and gone. Remember the pincurled “sausage rolls” of the 19640′s? The “Pageboys” ? The Poodle Cut? The age of curly permed hair of all lengths?
Hairstyles for women change rapidly just as clothes styles do. Even men’s hairstyles have evolved from the long greasy duck tails to the longish locks of Beatledom to current short and well styled hair.
I sometimes envy the bald people for whom a hairstyle is not even an issue.
And that reminds me of a joke from long ago about a young woman who entered Veterinary school at the time most women did not want to be in that profession. This lady persisted until late in her last year of professional training and education her class was scheduled to visit a cattle breeding farm. The Professor mistakenly asked her if she wanted to skip the trip since she might be embarrassed among her male colleagues at the bull breeding activity amobng the cows. She got very ruffled and told him certainly not..she was going along and was not going to be bothered one bit.
So off they went to the breeding farm. They observed a very big and prized bull lying in a pen by himself..but in the next pen were cows in “dead heat” for breeding. The bull seemed not to take any notice and his handler gave him a couple of whacks with a prod but the bull remained on the ground taking no notice of the eager cows. Finally after nothing had gotten the bull up, the handler grabbed the bull by the thick forelock of hair on top of its head and pulled out a huge chunk of it. Suddenly the bull was up and into the pen of cows where he proceeded to “do his duty” while the students watched it all.
After the field trip the Professor called the woman vet student into his office and asked what she thought of the breeding farm and their observatations of bull-cow breeding.
“Well,” she said, “I think I now know why there are so many bald headed men.”