Barn, Weather, Sewing, Computer and WMA Meeting

Another week has passed, and we actually have something to show for it. Paul went up to Petersboro on Monday after work and put in the last of the fourteen outer wall supports on our barn at our property there. This was a proud moment because this means that that first big step is completed. It also means that we can move on to other steps. This is actually quite exciting, we can see this project moving forward. There is so much more to do—it will go on for a long time, but it is moving and that is gratifying. We are having really interesting weather here; Mother Nature is having a hard time deciding which season we are in. Paul mowed the front yard on Tuesday and I did the back yard on Wednesday (and Thursday—I ran out of gas on Wednesday and then finished up on Thursday after I got some more gas—(There was a minor disaster associated with that. When I put the gas can onto the back seat floor there was a significant spurt out of the tiny air intake hole, which totally fumigated our car with gas, gas vapors and gas fumes. We are still in the process of airing out the gas smell.) We didn't really have lush grass to mow—but it was starting to look a bit shaggy—a few green high growth patches in the midst of low scraggly places. The great thing is when you mow-everything gets leveled off and looks so much better. We had two days of steady, consistent rain, which really improved the looks of everything, and then when I looked out the window on Sunday morning, there was snow on the ground—not inches, just a skiff, but enough so that you could actually see that it was snow. Kind of amazing when we have had such a snowless winter, to suddenly have snow after all this time and late in the season. It seems like some kind of injustice that we didn't really have much of a winter in Utah and now to be having an on again off again winter in April. I have been trying to get down to my sewing room a bit every day. I have some sewing projects that are almost finished and I just want to get some of them totally finished up. I have had a number of quilting projects that I have been working on, and I wanted to get a couple of almost finished tops finished up and the backs ready to go so that I can take them to the friend that does the long arm work. And I am plugging away on my jean quilts, too. I haven’t wanted to cut more squares than I need, and so I started putting the squares together so that I would know exactly how many more squares of each size I would need. I am now back to cutting before I continue sewing again. This project is also starting to take shape. Anyway, I got three tops and backs ready to go to the quilter this week. Two of them are lap size and one is sort of a short twin (the width of a twin but not fully long enough to really be a twin). This week I will buy the batting to fill them and then off they go to the quilter. So that is a feeling of accomplishment. Of course when they come back then they will need to be bound—so it isn't really over yet, but there is also light at the end of that tunnel. And so on we go…. I got a happy email from K.C.’s wife, Elizabeth, this week. She was writing on the plane between Hawaii and Japan, on her way to Korea. She has finished the semester at the University of North Carolina, has closed down her life there, and was on her way to join K.C. She sounded excited and glad to be starting her new life with K.C. and we are pleased that they are together again. K.C. has finished his time at Samsung Off-Site training and is now a real part of the Global Strategies Team. So it seems that their life is starting in earnest in Korea and he seems very happy to have begun. We are very pleased and proud of him and all he has done to get himself to this point in his life. We are already planning to go to Korea for a visit next summer as we are going to the Ukraine this s summer. Among other interests this week, I got a new computer. I have been using the same laptop for about the last seven years and in the past year I had to have it repaired twice and when it failed the third time, I took it in and had all my information transferred to an external hard drive and then went without a computer for a little while until Paul took me to the store on Thursday and had me pick out a computer of my choice. I decided to go with a Dell. Paul thinks it looks ridiculously big since it has both a keyboard and a 10 key number pad on the base, but I am really happy with it. It has Microsoft 8.1 as the operating system so I am actually having to learn how to navigate its features which have changed or been added, but it is going to be great to have a new computer. Saturday Paul and I decided to go on a horse ride in the afternoon. Paul was shopping and gathering some items for his next trip to Petersboro in the morning and I was sewing, but at 4:00 we headed off to the pasture. When we got there and looked to the south it was just black with storm clouds rolling in and Paul said—“Let’s give it up, we will for sure be caught in the cold rain.” We didn't even hook up the trailer. Paul fed the horses, we ran a quick errand and before we got home it was raining. We were sorry to miss our horse ride, but so happy not to be in the middle of Dimple Dell in the cold rain. Last night, we attended a bi-monthly meeting of the Western Music Association. This is a group of cowboy and western musicians that we know from Paul’s various performances over the year. Paul joined a couple of years ago, but we haven’t regularly attended their meetings; this was the second we have attended. It is a very nice group of people. There is a “business portion” at the beginning, then a pot-luck dinner and then a jam session. I had sort of forgotten about the pot-luck portion of the event until Sunday morning and hadn't really purchased ingredients for anything. So I really had to be creative on Sunday morning. I had to make something that would stay warm for an hour while we drove to Weber for the meeting. I ended up making a quiche and here is the part that I am most proud of. I didn't have a large quantity of the vegetables normally found in quiche—spinach, broccoli, etc. But I did have a bag of chopped salad greens. So I just put them in the bottom of the quiche. There was some cabbage and a few match stick carrots, though it was mostly chopped lettuce. I really wasn't sure how it would turn out, but it worked, smelled great, (was helped a lot by the cheese and eggs and chicken)—and was eaten enthusiastically by the populous so I was happy that it came off okay. I prepared it so it came out of the oven just as we were leaving, and I wrapped it in a couple of towels and then put it in an insulated bag, and it was still quite warm when I unpacked it when we got there. So that was a success. Paul also performed well in the jam session with many compliments on his performances. The jam sessions are really interesting and inclusive. The performers all sit in a circle and then move around the circle each performing something, a poem or a song. If it is a well-known number, the group joins in playing their guitars and singing along. It is very friendly and congenial. We had a nice time.

Book Club, Cowboy Poetry and the Barn in Petersboro

This week passed in a flash. Actually it seems that my whole life is passing like a flash. It seems hard to believe that we are already the 20th of April. We are now in the final six weeks until graduation so it seems like the wheel is spinning faster than usual and everyone is a tiny bit more hysterical than it was six weeks ago. Our lower performing students are not realizing that if they don’t finish make-up work they will not graduate and parents and students are now desperately wanting to see their counselors in the hope that the counselor will be able to wave their magic wand and sprinkle fairy dust everywhere and solve the problems that the student has created for him/herself. Ah, the joys of the end of the year. On the flip side of that, Paul and I will be hoping on a plane in less than two months to go to the Ukraine. When we bought our tickets last August it seemed like the time would never come and now here we are able to see that this trip is really going to happen—and fortunately for us the political turmoil and fighting has calmed down and we look like we will be able to go there safely as well. Oh, Happy Day!! This week I got two quilts that I have been working on ready to go to the quilter. That is a big milestone. And I can get back to working on my jeans quilts. They somehow got pushed to the side after I began working on them and they are in bits and pieces throughout the basement. I have squares in the open area counter spread all around, and more pieces of jeans in my sewing room. I want to get moving on all of it this week and see if I can make some progress. Thursday this week was one of my book club meetings. This is the book club that Erika also belongs to, and the meeting was at her house. This is the first time that she hosted. She chose a book she hadn’t read—one that she learned about when she was taking a literature class at BYU-I. The class members all bought it, but as the class progressed, they ran out of time to read this particular book and she was curious about it and wanted to read it, so she chose it as her book for the month. The book is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It was a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 2000 by Michael Chabon. It was a long book about 800 pages, and it had a lot of interesting aspects to it. The book opens in 1939—and sort of follows the mid-century, being an epic in nature. It follows the “Golden Age of Comic Books” as the two main characters are comic book developers, developing and writing a fictional comic book super hero called THE ESCAPIST. But it also follows their own lives and their successes and struggles. The story of families separated and fleeing the oppression and invasion of Nazi Germany is covered in this story among other side stories. When I think about the ideas that were developed in this book, and the things I learned because of the historical aspects of this book, I think it is quite impressive. However, I really didn't find this book to be gripping, or a page turner, or even that engaging. It was very wordy and long and I was really glad when I finished it. And I thought to myself over and over—this book won a Pulitzer Prize? ?? ??. It is interesting though, that when a group of people gather together and talk about a book new insights come out and I enjoyed an engaging and interesting discussion of this book after the fact. I invested a lot of time in its reading and so I felt like it paid off in the lively discussion that we had lead by Erika. Incidentally, pretty much as a group everyone shared the same opinion, that it was interesting and full of information about a period (midcentury) and a subject (The Golden Age of Comic Books) that was enlightening, but all of us thought that it was not necessarily worthy of all the acclaim it received, such as… “published to "nearly unanimous praise" and became a New York Times Best Seller,[1] receiving nominations for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2006,Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation",[2] and in 2007, The New York Review of Books called the novel Chabon's magnum opus.[3] Friday evening we drove to Mapleton where Paul performed cowboy poetry for a private party. It was a dance club and the Western and Square Dance evening is one of their annual events. The event committee organizes a catered dinner and entertainment and then they dance. The group who attended wasn't particularly big—there were about sixteen couples, but they were fun and enthusiastic. And they came dressed in western attire, mostly prairie skirts and blouses and not the gingham square dance dresses that I expected. Paul performed for about a half an hour, reciting poetry and accompanying himself on the guitar. A woman he works with joined him with her dulcimer for one number. We were provided with dinner, too. And we sat at the same table with Wayne Crawford who was the square dance caller. He was an interesting fellow—has worked as a caller for the last 40 years. Paul did a really nice job It is interesting and gratifying that Paul is being asked to do these kinds of events. He is getting to be known in the area as a performer who is willing and can do performing in these small venues as well as in the large cowboy poetry and music gatherings. Saturday morning Paul and I both headed off to Petersboro for a day of work on the barn. Paul has worked there several times since the last time we put in a day together. It is really coming together. There are fourteen concrete footed uprights that have to be installed and we have finished thirteen. There is just one more to go. It is very interesting to see the barn take shape. We got three of the uprights put in on Saturday. We arrived there at about 10:00 and worked until after seven pretty much steadily—stopping for about 15 minutes for lunch at about 1:30. Paul does most of the work. I hold stuff and steady things and move things around, and generally help, but this is really the “Paul Show”—it represents his experience, understanding, and expertise. It is a function of his ability to see his ideas clearly and then put them into a physical reality. Rather amazing really. The next step will require scaffolding and he is starting to get that ready, too. I’m excited to see this all come together. It will be a work in progress for a while, but Paul didn’t expect to be this far this soon—we have been able to take full advantage of the fact that there has been practically no winter in Utah this year.

Trip to Loveland, Denver Temple Visit and Theodore Roosevelt and the Teddy Bear-The Colorado Hotel in Glenwood Springs

Paul and I just returned from a long weekend in Loveland. This last week was my spring break from school and we left on Thursday and came home on Sunday. We drove to Colorado by way of I-80—miles and miles of barren land. We left at about 3:00 p.m. and once we got out on the road, Paul began to feel the food poisoning effects of a shrimp salad he had eaten for lunch. By the time we got to Laramie, he could go no further and we got a hotel room where he spent the night in various degrees of digestive distress. We arrived on Friday morning and Paul did begin to feel a little better as we spent time there, but was still pretty queasy most of the time we were there. I had wanted to try and do a session in the Denver Temple, but Paul didn't feel up to the drive, the session and the drive home—I looked up to find that the Denver Temple very conveniently had sessions every half hour on Saturday, and so I determined to leave at 6:30 am and try to make an early morning session. My googlemaps directions told me that I could make it in 1 hour and 17 minutes. It actually took 1 hour and 20 minutes. I arrived without incident and without any serious traffic issues and was at the recommend desk at 7:55. The temple worker told me that I was too late to make the 8:00 session, but gave me a tile for the 8:30 session. I headed to the locker room, got changed, got a new name and went to the chapel. It was about 8:02 and the 8:00 session was just leaving the chapel, so I was able to make the 8:00 session after all. I finished, headed home and arrived back in Loveland at 11:30 a.m. I was very pleased that everything had gone so smoothly. Paul’s mother doesn't effuse over the Denver Temple and says the traffic to go there is terrible, but I found the temple to be very beautiful, and this weekend the grounds were fabulous with a profusion of tulips in every bed. I found my experience there positive in every way. When I got back to Loveland, Richard had arrived and he and Paul had a nice visit, we all had lunch together, and we got a full report on the comings and goings of all of Richard’s family. A lot going on with nine children. Not having very happy memories of the trip across Wyoming to come to Loveland, we decided to travel home by I-70 which is an hour longer, but better scenery. This was the first time that I have traveled on this road and it was very picturesque compared to I-80. It was interesting to drive through Breckenridge and Vail and compare them to Park City. We were surprised by how many hotels were right along the freeway rather than the ski-in/ski-out hotels which are so popular in Park City—like the Marriot where Holly has stayed or Westgate where we stay. They were pretty areas though and there was still skiing going on. The lifts were running and we could see skiers on the slopes. Colorado seems to have gotten more snow than Utah from what we could see. We also stopped at Glenwood Springs. We have talked off and on over the past few years about taking a get-away in Glenwood Springs and we wanted to stop for a few minutes and take a look at what there was to see and what it offered. We went into the Colorado Hotel—which Paul’s mother had told us about and where they have that delightful gift shop full of stuffed bears. (She has a bear in their Loveland home which they purchased there.) There is a display case with a teddy bear tea party in progress, which was very cute and tasteful—and a placard of the story about the origin of the “teddy bear”. This is that story which was on a placard in the display case and also in the hotel brochure: PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT In 1905, Hotel Colorado became the temporary home for the President of the United States and his assistants during a three-week bear hunting expedition. Already a fan of the state of Colorado, Roosevelt stayed at the Hotel Colorado on multiple occasions. On a three-week trip in January 1901, the Vice-President hunted mountain lion on the Keystone Ranch near Meeker. It was reported by his guide that Colonel Roosevelt hung over a cliff to shoot a wounded lion between the eyes. Roosevelt’s first trip to Glenwood Springs delighted him so much that he returned year after year. According to legend, the world's most irresistible toy, the teddy bear, received its birth at Hotel Colorado. To cheer Theodore Roosevelt after an unsuccessful day of hunting, Hotel Colorado maids presented him with a stuffed bear pieced together with scraps of fine material. Later, when he did bag a bear, his daughter Alice admired it saying, "I will call it Teddy." The term caught on and became the name for the world's most popular toy, the Teddy Bear. I was interested in this version of the story because I had just read a long and very comprehensive history of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor William Howard Taft and that was not the version that was covered in this very thorough study of his life. So I thought that I would do a little research and see if I could find any other references to the Colorado Hotel and the hotel maids that made him a “teddy bear.” First I searched on the internet and found this history of the Teddy bear. History: A 1902 political cartoon in The Washington Post spawned the Teddy bear name. The name Teddy Bear comes from former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who was commonly known as "Teddy" (though he loathed being referred to as such). The name originated from an incident on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, to which Roosevelt was invited by Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino. There were several other hunters competing, and most of them had already killed an animal. A suite of Roosevelt's attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American Black Bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he should shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery, and it became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post on November 16, 1902. While the initial cartoon of an adult black bear lassoed by a handler and a disgusted Roosevelt had symbolic overtones, later issues of that and other Berryman cartoons made the bear smaller and cuter. Morris Michtom saw the drawing of Roosevelt and was inspired to create a new toy. He created a little stuffed bear cub and put it in his shop window with a sign that read "Teddy's bear," after sending a bear to Roosevelt and receiving permission to use his name. The toys were an immediate success and Michtom founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co. At the same time in Germany, the Steiff firm, unaware of Michtom's bear, produced a stuffed bear from Richard Steiff's designs. Steiff exhibited the toy at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903, where it was seen by Hermann Berg, a buyer for George Borgfeldt & Company in New York. He ordered 3000 to be sent to the United States. Although Steiff's records show that the bears were produced, they are not recorded as arriving in the U.S., and no example of the type, "55 PB", has ever been seen, leading to the story that the bears were shipwrecked. However, the story is disputed - Gunther Pfieffer notes that it was only recorded in 1953 and says it is more likely that the 55 PB was not sufficiently durable to survive until the present day. Although Steiff and Michtom were both making teddy bears at around the same time, neither would have known of the other's creation due to poor transatlantic communication. By 1906 manufacturers other than Michtom and Steiff had joined in and the craze for "Roosevelt Bears" was such that ladies carried them everywhere, children were photographed with them, and Roosevelt used one as a mascot in his bid for re-election. North American educator Seymour Eaton wrote the children's book series The Roosevelt Bears, while composer John Walter Bratton wrote an instrumental "The Teddy Bears' Picnic", a "characteristic two-step", in 1907, which later had words written to it by lyricist Jimmy Kennedy in 1932. Early teddy bears were made to look like real bears, with extended snouts and beady eyes. Modern teddy bears tend to have larger eyes and foreheads and smaller noses, baby-like features that enhance the toy's cuteness. Early teddy bears were covered in tawny mohair fur. So that is the version that is the explanation on the internet when I searched for the origin of the Teddy Bear. This is also the version, more or less that is found in The Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Chapter 10 “That Damned Cowboy is President” page 320. Here is the quote in that book about the coming of the “Teddy Bear.” With each passing month, the president’s hold on the American people grew stronger. “It is very curious,” Roosevelt told his newspaper friend Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “ever since I have been in the Presidency I have been pictured constantly as a huge creature with enormous clenched teeth, a big spiked club and a belt full of pistols—a blustering, roaring, swashbuckler type of ruffian, and yet all the time I have been growing in popularity. I don’t understand it at all.” To Bishop, the reason was perfectly clear: “All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good natured.” Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time. Except in the brochure from the Colorado Hotel, I could find no reference to the Teddy bear coming from the hunt in Colorado or the hotel maids or anything else associated with that visit. I don’t know what the real history is, the hunt in Mississippi predates his hunting trip in Colorado—so maybe the “teddy bear” was already on the radar when he visited there and the maids just continued the legacy. In this day of information and internet access, it is harder to preserve legends that are not based in fact. There are always people like me who are checking and rechecking the truth of a story—kind of like what happened to Brian Williams. But the Colorado Hotel story is a good one. Paul and I think that we would like to make a quick trip to Glenwood Springs and stay overnight in that jewel of a hotel. There is also an involved set of stories that the hotel is haunted. Even though it may be haunted, Paul and I think it would be great to spend a night in the hotel and go to the hot springs/pools during the stay. On Saturdays—a woman from the historical society comes to the hotel and gives a 40 minute tour of the building with lots of its history. (She charges $8.00 a person, but I think it would be worth it.) It would be a fun little weekend get-away. We thought we would try to do something this summer maybe. We looked into taking the train, but the train would take twice as long as driving and it would leave Salt Lake at 3:30 in the morning. That kind of takes the fun out of taking the train. But even without the train ride it would be a good time.