Life, Libraries, Lutherans & Life with Latif

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Feb 1-20 1967

2012-02-12T16:20:00.001-08:00

February 1 Wendesday
I went for a little walk

2. Thursday
My wife had her birthday and we stayed at home.

3. Friday
We went to the American Club for diner. Afterward we visited two friends of our son in law and had there a good time.

4 Saturday
I went to Near East Tour traveling agenci and picked up my refund of 120 Rials afterward I went to Pakistan Abacy for visas

5. Sunday
I went for a little walk.

6. Monday
I wrote some mails

7. Tuesday
I had a little ride in the city

8. wendsday
I walked down town just for window shopping

9 Thursday
It was a lazy day.

10 Friday.
We went out for lunch in a famous perian resturant and afterward we drove around the city and saw a round 3 story building like a bal. The whole house stays on a one an half m in cross + cement base and have also seen the old palace of the Shah Pahlovi and the old and new sommer palace

11. Saturday
I went out for a little walk

12. Sunday
My wife and I walked downtown just for window shoping

13 Monday
We went into the bazaar and did some shopping
14 Tuesday
It was a lazy day

15 Wednesday
We went into Theater or movy and saw the Bibel story part of Genesy

16. Thursday
I walked

17. Friday
I went Grocery shopping

18. Saturday
I was a nasty day, we stayed at home

19. Sunday
In the evening we went to a movey

Narrating my own thoughts

2012-02-11T17:54:00.000-08:00

I pick up accents easily. I will watch a movie set in the south and for the rest of the evening my husband has to endure his wife not talking like the Midwest girl he fell in love with. The crazy thing is that I can pick them up from books. My thinking will automatically without even being conscious of it emulate the style of whatever I am reading or listening to being read.

My husband is currently reading Joseph Pearce’s biography of Oscar Wilde to me. I go to bed each night now narrating my life in the third person past tense explaining the contradictions between my & my husband’s public and personal personas or perhaps the lack of them. It is crazy. So now I’m reading Sarah Vowell (whom I will have the pleasure of hearing read on March 9th at Boswell Books) and I like her writing voice—partly because I think it most resembles my natural voice and I come away from reading her work feeling, speaking, and thinking more like myself.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Mate Szedlak Travel Journal Jan 23-31

2012-02-02T07:30:00.000-08:00

Tour to Near East
23. Monday.
We left at 6.00 to the air port and at 7.00 we flew with Iranian airline and arrived at 7.55 in Esfahan.
Sight seeing in Esfahan
1. The fourty pillars palace or museum in which shah Abbas entertained his royal guest.
2. The king Mosque of Masjed E Shah. One of the most beautiful in the world
4. Masjed E Jum a, The oldest and most interesting Mosque. illustrating many styles of architecture.
4. The famous Bazaar, where everything is made by hand we have seen.

24 Tuesday.
There the gold silver cupper and brass sinieds, how they are making jewels tryses etg.
5. The art school and museum Chahar Bagh The anciend Theological school of Greec Orthodox
6. Mumar Jonban, the shaking minarets
7 Zoroastrian fire temple
8.The fine carpet waving art school and the
9. Khahan and Sio Sia bridges, They spanning the Zayanderood river. We left at 7.45 the Iranien tour hotel and at 8.35 we flew to Shiras arrived at 9.30

25 Wendsday
Park Saadi Hotel Shiraz Sight seeing of Shirar
1. The ark citadel the
2. tomb of the poem Saadi
3. Tomb of Hafer
4. The Mosque of Jun
5. Ghavani Mirror house and orange garden
6. Bazaar and the shopping center

26. Thursday Excursion to Persopolis to the majesting stone ruins of the Achanamin capital wich was founded by Darius the great in 500 B.C. and extended by Xerxes Artaxerse and Darius The second it was destroy by Alexander the gr or the Macedonian & Nagash-e Rostam, the Rock tomb of Achamenian Emperors Darius, Xerxes, Artaxeres and the carved Rock, The image of Darius the great, how he defided the Roman Emperor

27 Friday
We left at 10.00 Shiras and arrived at 10.50 in Abadon, Bahran was waiting us and he took us to the Abadon Hotel. Afternoon he showed us the city and bazaar and shopping center, then he drove us to the port of Kharranshar and in the evening he went with us in a Theater.

The city of Abadon has a population of 300,000. It had the largest oil refinery in the World. The oil refinery was build in 1941. It had 5 square mile extend and has an output of refined oil 19,000,000 tons a year. There are 10,500 daly paid and 2600 montly paid employies.

28. Saturday
Bahran had given us a 560 Km excursion ride at long the province of Khozestan
1. we have seen in Susa the tomb of the profet Daniel
2. The fortress of Susa
3. The ruins of the ancient capital of Elam founded
by Dahde Tarjus at 5000 B.C.
4. have seen a excevation of Haphtopy, where cc 100 people were working
5 The excevated temple of Chaghe Zanbil where every day (according to legend) a human been was sacreficed
6. The tombs of the ancient people
7 The City of Ahwas and the oil field and the military camp

29. Sunday
Sight seeing in oil refinery of Abadon. The company there shoved us a film of the exploration and drilling in the rugged parched mountain region in South Western part of Iran. and by seven years of fruitles searching they strucked oil on 1911 Masjid-i Sulaiman in the foothills of the Zagros range and so the Middle East Oil Industry was born. Afterwords they showed us the instalation of the oil refinery. It was very interesting

we left Abadon at 20.30 and Arrived at 22.00 in Teheran.

30. Monday.
It was a laizy day. We didn't go out.

31 Thursday Gen & Madame Fazeli were here. They were curious of our Near East Tour and we did have to teling them of what we had seen on our round trip.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Jan 15-22

2012-01-21T11:21:00.001-08:00

15. Sunday
Since my arm did sore from the vaccination shot so we didn’t go out.

16. Monday
I went for my daly walk

17. Tuesday
We went down to the City arranging our tour to Isfahan Shiras and Abadon, afterward we walked in the City the whole day.

18 Wendsday
My daly walk on the hills

19 Thursday
My daly walk

20. Friday We took our grandchildren to the school for children program

21 Saturday
We got on second Collera Vaccination and this was very strong. My whole body was shaken.

22. Sunday
We stayed in the house and packed our lagguage for a week long tour to South East and South west. In the evening Gen & Madam Fazeli visited us.

Book store anxiety

2012-01-13T19:05:00.001-08:00

I just got back from an author reading at a locally owned book store. My natural inclination is to come home from work and not go anywhere—big thanks to Mr. Gaba for getting me out of the house. It was a very nice event. The author, Ayad Akhtar, was fun to listen to. I haven’t read his book. For a librarian I oddly don’t do a lot of causal reading.

I often feel intimidated at book stores—so much writing I haven’t done. I haven’t been published in anything but school publications and professional proceedings. Tonight was better. Why? Well, Mr. Gaba wanted to be sure to get a good seat so we arrived an hour before the event, so I brought my ten goals journal with me and did some writing while waiting for the event to start. It was a way of saying to myself, “See, I’m a writer, I’m working on something right now.” The fact that I’m just making a list that includes things like, “take a walk tomorrow, drive to my folks, write in this journal” doesn’t matter. I’m writing. I have a journal so all those imagined accusing voices of the books on the shelves taunting me about not being published in the commercial market can just shut up!

For whatever reason libraries do not have this effect on me at all.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Jan 8-14

2012-01-09T11:54:00.000-08:00

8. Sunday I mad a long walk and came home tired with a back ack in the eveing Gen. & Madam Fazeli visited us.

9. Monday We went for a long walk at long the and at the evening we had a ride to the city.

10. Tuesday I had a terrible cold with a Tripping nose. I stayed the whole day in the room.

11. Wednesday I went for a little walk than we had a ride in the city.

12. Thursday I walked to the Zoo.

13. Friday in the morning we picked up our grandson Polad from the hospital and afternoon we went to the American Club for dinner.

14. Satruday
We got our Collera vaccination free at the clining. Than afterward we walked in the city.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal January 1-7, 1966

2012-01-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

New Year 1967 Sunday
1 of Jan. I went up to the mountain with our daughter and son in law skeeing.

Jan 2 Monday
I went to Park Hotel to arrange by the Sita our tour to Shiras.

3 Tuesday today is a Moslem holy day or mourning day and all stors are closed. However I made a walk up to the hills

4. Wednesday In the morning we had 2 inches of snow. In the evening to the American club theater.

5. Thursday we went to Gen Fazelis for dinner. There were more people invited.

6. Fridday We went for a walk in nero and mudy street and have seen a group of people a Moslem preacher was preaching to them.

7. Saturday I cacht a cold again. My whole body does aching.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Dec 22-31 1966

2012-01-03T19:54:00.000-08:00

22. Afternoon our son in law took us out for a ride and we made some Christmas shopping for our grandchildren.

23. Our grandson Polad had his birthday party and the whole house was ful with kids. Then late afternoon Gen & Mrs. & Miss Fazeli came for a short visit and we had a good conversation. They invited us for dinner.

24.
Christmas Schopping for the grandchildren and we had a nice Christmas evening. Our grand children were very excited when they saw their new bicicls.

25 at day Time I made a little walk and in the evening went to a movi. I went to a German Lutheran church service

26.I went on my daly walk and in the evening we went to the American Club for a little chat.

27 I mad a long walk and in the evening we went bowling, but the bowlerana was overcrowded so we went for a rid up to the mountain foot.

28-29 we stayed at home

30 In the evening we went to our son in law’s friend for dinner we had there some caviar and had a good time.

31 We didn’t go out in New Year’s eve since it was a strict Moslem mourning day and all puplic places were closth.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal December 19-21 1966

2011-12-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

Dez. 19
We ended our Holy land tour and we spend the day with leisure. We did some window shopping just for killing time. Afternoon at 3.30 We flew from Athen to Beiruth. Since the Ailrline Quanatis with them what should have to fly, was on stricks. So we did have to fly with the M.Easth airline to Beiruth and from Beiruth, with the Swiss Airline to Teheran. We arrived midnight in Teheran with a Trippy nose and a bad cold. We cald up our sone-in-law by phon and They picked us up from the Airport. Through the Quanties airline striche, I did have to pay of $65.50, because we made a little detour.

Dez. 20 We are by our daughter and soninlaw as guest for two months. Since we are tired and both of us have a bad cold a long rest will be good for us. Our daughter father in law Gen. Fazeli visited us and invited us to his house but as long as we have a cold, we will go nowhere.

21. Stayed the whole day in the house. Our little ground son Pirus is in the Hospitel and we can’t even see him.

Transcribing My Grandfathers journal.

2011-12-21T03:31:00.000-08:00

The point of this Trip Around the World project is to share my Grandfather’s journal. This is a fun project for me. I love history and any time a personal twist can be added all the better.
As best as I can I’ve tried to transcribe this document without editing it. Now I am the last person in a position to complain about spelling and handwriting, but I want you to realize that this project is not as simple as say, compiling Facebook statuses into a journal.

I usually need to go over each entry about three times. The first I just read, then I transcribe, then I wait a few days or hours before comparing my transcription with the journal and hope that I’ve managed to decipher it correctly and often that last read through I can figure out some of the more difficult words.
Reading a person’s handwriting is a skill that improves with practice, but even with practice I still come across things that I have a hard time figuring out. It does not help that I’m not always familiar with the places he is describing and he often uses unfamiliar spellings for many places. The two scanned examples will let you see some of my challenge. You can click on them to see a larger image.
The first is November 26 and the second is the conclusion of December 10 and the start of 11.
Enjoy.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Dec 1-18

2011-12-20T12:34:00.000-08:00

Dez 1.
Sightseeing to the Sakkaro archeological area. We have seen the ruins of ancient Memphis alabaster Sphinx the tombs and pyramids of the King Sakkara, who reignt 2900 B.C. The pyramids were the cemetery for the Kings of Egybt. By the Pyramids there are also the ruins of the Tempels. The Splings of Memphis and Splings King Sagar. afternoon we have seen the allabster Masque Church wich is build of alabaster marcher. Before we entered with Masque they put over our shoes linen sak cover.
The citadella of Cairo, or fortress. There also before we entered the Masque of the zitodel wich also build allabaster manor and is about of 70 by 50 m in [ ] did have to cover our shoes. From the terasa of the zitodelle is a nice feu over the whol city of Cairo.
The cemetery of Cairo is very interesting bietwin the graves are huts or small houses. There is costum, that the people stay by the graves one or two days after the burial, therefore are there the houses.
We also have seen the shopping center or the open market on the street.
Alabaster Sphinz, colossal statue of Ramses II, The serapeum the tombs of Ti and Ptah Hotep Excursion to the Citadel, the mosques of Sulton Hassan, Mohamed Aly.

Dez 2.
Visit Egyptian Museum containing the famous treasures of king Tut Ankh Amon By exgreveting the kings tomb, they found the king and momis in 4 champers and in 4 cofiens
The top Cofien as of 24 carat and weight 110 kg. Other 3 are of wood and covered with gold each solid gold and coffin weigh 110 kg.
Excursion to the Pyramids of Guizeh. Camel ride to the great pyramid of Cheops: wich is 450 feet high. 10,000 people build this pyramid in 30 years. The Sphinx of the farao Ramses had 200 feet high and is 300 feet long. We went inside to the greatest pyramid, has very nerow steps and the halls to the chambar are only 3 feet high. Late in the evening, we went to the great pyramids and have heard and seen the Sound and Light of the Pyramids and Sphinx or the great story of the great Faraors of Egypt afterward we went to the Desert camp for dinner and was for us entertainment.

Dez 3.
Flight to Luxsor Luxor is a old city and in the city is not much to see. However Luxor has a great history, with her natural pyramids Tombs and temple of their great Ferors or the Kings of Egypt who built this places
The Tombs and Tempels With her splendor work of art is very magnificent for the whole world.

Dez 4.
Excursion to the Mountan Thebes, or the natural Pyramid of the Tombs. We have seen the Tomb and in the tomb the moumy of the King Tut Aukh Amon Tomb of Seti who reignet 3500 B.C. The fathers of the great Farou Ramses the 2nd, Tomb of Arnenophis II, Tomb of Ramses IX, The Luxerious Tempel of the quen Hatshepsout and the Tempel of Karnak or the grat temple of aumon Rah. With her splendid columns and art work. This Tempel has had three different cult or worshiper. The front of the Tempel were the egypian in the center the Islams and on the back the Christians. The emperor Constantin of Rom dedeated this part for the Chritions
The tombs are 300 feet underground. The artists worked in the tombs chamber with miror light. The Kings build their tombs during Their reign and when they died then the work also stopt for ever on his tomb and also on his temple. We also have seen the tombs and temple of the noble man and the architect Ramose 1000 B.C. who did not belive on the many gods of Egypt, but he belived in one God, The untouchable god of light and so als his daughter Nefeltay the wife of the King Ramses II. Back to Cairo

Dez 5.
Egypt the city of Cario has tow culture in dweling and also in constan. It had modern buildings in Western stile has many souveneer shops. The city people are mostly dressed in Europian stile, but the people in the country wore robs and they are dwelling in mud hut and have no roof on it. The people are laisy,
We leave Cairo at 3.30P.M. and arrived in Beirute Lebanon at 5.15 P.M.

Dez. 6
Excursion a 200 mil long from Beirut to Pigeon Crotlo, Dog River Byblos or Bibas Fortress, was build in 1100 by the Christan Crusade The temple of King Ahakrien of 2300 B.C. Salt bath at Meditheranie allmerek City ashtrom |1 Pcel. Dany Thomas Village The oldes cidar tree is 3000 B.C. or 5000 years old Tripoly City Kadisha Mountain and valley. The whole ride was up on the Libaniex Mountain it was the niciest senery what I ever have seen.
We stopped by our driver a friend for a coffe and the people there were very kind . at night we were in the thealnie have seen the Myana.

Dez. 7
Excursion early in the morning to Baalbeck and Damascus. Driving along the Lebanese summer resorts ally Balback the second largest city of Lebanon. The place where east and west have met merged a crossroads where different influences and belifs have come together in mutual underdanding.
Temple Jupiter where still six huge colums or pillar are standing a hight of 65 feet.
Tempel Bacchus is complete except the roof and the temple venus.
The tempels were build by the Romans 200 B.C. pillar are of 3 huge stones, and the bottom on weigh 250 tons. The huge 3 blocks, each measures between 19-20 m by 4.50 in diameters. The large court and the altar with wite steps where the Romans sacrafyst ther animals to their gods.
Damascus Siria The Omayad Mosque is very interesting wich was the Aramean Temple in 930 B.C. of god Hadad and was turned converted into a Temple of Jupiter in 2nd Century and in the 4th century was the Basilica of St. John the Baptist, in the time of Theadosius the Great and since 750 centuries D.C. was wholly converted into a mosque and still carrying the legent that St. John is buried in it.
This large building is 500 feet long and 140 feet weit. In the great building four different culture worshiped their gods. From 750 D.C. till the present time is a moslem Mosque. It is allowed just to go into the Mosque by bar foot. Pasha Azein Palace with the splendor decoration and orange parc. St. Paul converting place to clorisenity the house where St. Paul was let to escape. The Eastern gate of the city and the straight street wich was at the time of Christ 13 feet lower as the straight str. Is now. It is 1.5 mil long.

Dez. 8
De leaved early in the morning Beirut at 6.15 from the Hotel Riverio and 7.30 we floo to Jerusalem. When we were above Jerusalem the fog was so tick, that the plane counldn’t landing we flyet a few times around und the airport and finaly after two hour flyet we did land at the airport of Arman instead of Jerusalem.
Excursions to the Shepherds field, The garden of gethsemane, Church of Pater Nostra, Wehre Jesus was praying and where Judas did betraied Him
The hill Chapel where Jesus went into Haven. We still can see the foot print of Jesus, where He stood.
The Town of Bethlehem, The place where Jesus was born and did live till Joseph and Maria escaped with Him to Egypt. The emperor Constantin of Rom, build a church on Jesus birth place The church of Nativity was build at the church has Altar for the Gree Ordodox, Armianian and Catholics.

Dez. 9
Excursion to Jeriho
Temptamshem mountain where Jesus was Tempted by the Devil
Jordan River the place where Jesus was baptized
Death or salty sea
Coruran village of the 1-8 Century was destroyed by earthquake The hill where the scrol was founded of the old testament. The wall of Jerusalem was erected by Salomon
Garden of Gethsemane with the 3 churches
The Lasarus Church where Lazarus was arisen from the death by Jesus.
Old city of Jerusalem
The Golden Gate
Herods Gate
The church of Calvary or the Church of the Resurection The place where was condemned to crucifying by Pilatus. The Holy Sepulchere, Mount Calvary and the place where the Holy cross was founded. The road where Jesus carried the cross up to the scalp hill where he was crucifiet.

Dez. 10
Excursin
The garden Tomp Interior and Golgatha Hill. An excavation of Rev. Gordon of England Be believes this place was or is the Sepulehre of Jesus and the hill on the North of garden is the seal hill where Jesus was crucified.
The ruin of the temple Salamon. The Toump of the Rock, Qubbat as Lakhara Arabic Architecture. The Mosque is 167.60-1675 in the center of the building is the sacred Rock. The Rock is 17.70 long and 13.50 wide and is 1.65 high
High over the Rock is the beautiful dome in Mosaic colanr and glory supported by an ornate cylindrical drum, wich in turn is supported by 12 marble pillars and four granite piers. The whol glorious building is decorated with stained glass windows in gold also outside the whole great mosque is glorious with the colorful mosaic walls and columns St Anno Church where Maria was born and the pond with wasse where Jesus hield the sick.
The old city of Jerusalem was 2000 years ago 80 feet lower as it is at the piesent time. The city of Jerusalem is build on 5 hills.
The garden tomps was excavated in 1873 by archaeological Mr. Rider Haggard and Rev. Germene Gordon and they belive that the crucifiction and the sepulcher of our Lord Jesus is on this place according to the Bibel the crucificetion was carried Nord out of the Dacuaseus gate on the skull hill and the family sepulchre of Joseph of Arimathea was used for Jesus what likely is in the garden timap place.

Dez. 11
We leaved Jerusalem Jordan through the Maundebbaum gate to the other side of Jerusalem to Israel at 8.30 and went to the Mountain Zion to the King David Tomp Domintion Church was build by the Roman Emperor Constantin. The room of the Last Supper
Euplem of Israel parlament building
Bil Rose Garden art museum, Hadassah Medical Guran Region where the Serol was found.
Town of Judea where John the Babtise was born. A ride through the Shero region that is the richest fertile land of Israel with orange plantation and grain field a ride of 220 Km to Tiberias.

Dez 12.
Excursion from Tiberias to Capernaum where Jesus priched in the temple the old town was in 2and century excavated.
Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus did feed the multitude of 5000 people. Pop 30,000 Nazareth. The Grotto of Maria Ananciation and the Grotto where Maria and Joseph and Jesus lieved on the place is the anuncation church in construction. It will be the largest church in middle of east.
The memory of Jesus childhood.
Capernaum with Lake Galilee Nasaret up the hill left St. Joseph Church of the city of Tel Avio 450,000
See port Haifa Pop 230,000
Cuesarea water Equaduct was build 2000 years ago
Fortress or fortification was buildt by the crusaders at the 10 century
Jaffa the city daling back 3500 year.

Dez. 13
We didn’t have program for this day so we slept longer made 2 hour long walk in the town of Lad, close to the Hotel Avid. A Jewish Town of 15,000 popolation 50% are Jewish refugies. They lieve in poor housing. At 19.45 we leaved Tel Avio and At 22.00 arived in Instanbul.

Dez. 14
Excursion with a ferry boat atlong through the Bosphorus till Sariyer ride of 16 M and back with a car to Instanbul. Had a diner of Turkies special foods and afterwords have seen the famous St. Sophia Greek Baselica built by Constantin at 365 D.C. Build by architect Justinian The wall and the Tombs are in mosaic is 77 m. long 71 wite 56 high. The tomb is 31 wide has 107 column. The Fortress of Bonphorus the underground Palace water zister or water reservation build by the Romanus has 135 colums is 170 M long and 60 m. wite.
The blue Mosque, build by Mohamed the first in 1650, had 6 minaretts and 105 colums of marmas the whole Mosque insid is blue and gold in mosaic the Hippodrom with the obelisk of Theodosius The whole is brought from Egypt. The famous grant Oriental bassar.

Dez. 15
We leaved at 10.30 Instainbul and arrived in Athen airport at 11.50 excursion in Athen, The Royal Palace and changing guard, the house of parliament and the tomb of unkown soldier. Temple of Parthenon was bud. 5th century B.C.
4 pic taken
Temple Zeus
Odaion of Herod Atticus
Temple of Athen
The acropolis hill is a place fortified by nature. The excavation have proved it has been inhabited since theneolithic age (3500-3000 B.C.) During the Mycenean era (1600-100 B.C.) a strong cyclopcian wall of 4-4.5 m thick surrounded the hill of the acropolis where the king’s palace stood.
There was a second external wall, they called this second wall encapylos, wich the word explains which has nine gates or entrances.
The acropolis was adorned by splendid temples of their gods and godess Kekrops Athene. Olypya Zeus, Nicke Apollo ECTR. Jupiter. The Sacred Rock the Temple Nike acripo was destroyed during the invasion of the Persians in 480 B.C.

Dez. 16
Exursion ot Daphni Thebes, Lavadio is 3000 feet above see level Delphi the excavation of the temple Apollo, the Museum and the theatre. Temple Apollo was build 6th Century B.C. was destroyed by Earthquage and by the Bisanges

Dez. 17
From Delphi to Itea from there a ferry boat ride to Corinth Island Philip. The town of King Mydinian of 19th Century B.C. tomb of King Agamenon

Dezc. 18
Argalis to Epidaurus, Temple of Asklepeios, The museum and Theeatre of Tholos. Was build 8th Century B.C. it has 115 stairs. Wich connect the two gulf fron coret to cstis.
The Corinth Canal is 6 Km. long 250 M wide on the top at the bottom 75 feet and deph 225 fe. The water is 95 F dep.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Nov 26-30

2011-12-20T05:33:00.001-08:00

Nov 26 Sightseening to Napoli and to Capri. We leaved in the morning at 8.05 Rome with a fast train and arrived in Napoli at 10.25 as we did look for the information office, there came to us a man from a sightseeing crook camp. What I cal them. And he seth to us that he is from the information office and he will show us the way where to go. When we came out from the rail station there was a car for us waiting and he sath set into the care we take you to Capri and it will cost for both of us the trip to Capri and back to Napli 24,000 Lira or 29.50.
We will see in Pugliano a coral factory and there we have seen how they make there by hands nice and expensive jewels from corals and shells in gold and silver frames. From there they drove us to Pompei an old exgrevated Roman City and from there we went to Socrento Souento is a nice city, population of 15,000. On the clift of the Meditheranian are bild the Luxerous Hotels and Villas
I Sovrento they put us in a small cargo bout wich was loaded with woods, bricks, iron beams, roof tiles and many other junks. The ship carried also a cow and a pair of Goats and 9 pasanger on the deck according to the boat schedule, the boat leaved the harbor one hour later. We had one and a half hour ride in the Meditheranian to the Capri island
The boat was dirty and it did stink, just like a barn yard.
We arrived at 15.10 in Capri and the next pasanger ship from Capry to Napoli did lieve at 16:00 so there was not much time to see of the Island Capry
[We found out, that we payed for the trip the double money then wath it should have cost.]
The Capry island is build on a small bay. The island consist of two rocky mounten a surface of 10.3 KM and has a population of 8000.
The city and so also the while Island is very actractive with her clifts and sineries. At 16.00 We leaved Copry with the a pasanger Ship De Espan to Neapoli and arrived at 18.00 in Neapoli. There we made a walk of 45 minute from the harbor through city to the railroad station. We leave by train Napoli at 19.00 and arrived at 21.90 in Roma

Nov 27 Sightseeing in Roma
The story of Rome covers 27 centuries. The foundation of Rome has been set by Romulus at 753 B.C. and now has a population of 2,500,000
By the tour we have seen the Villa Borghase, The olimpic stadium, Duca of Aosla bridge. The sport studio with is sorounded with statues of Navons. The Pantheon The oldest Christian Church or Basalice in the world. Has been build by Marcus Agrippa at 27 B.C. as a pantheon and the Chriten of Roma made of that pantheon their first church. The basilica has 43 feet in circumference and is 43 feet high. The whole structure is round and has a bronz capula and has no pillar inside. The door is mad of bronz and is one foot thick. Basilica St. Maria De angeli, also one of the oldest church of Rome is a old Roman structure. Is build inside with red and wite marurs and the whole church is ful with oil painting and statues. The whole church look inside very fabolus, but outside it look like a Roman rouin. St Peter Basalica of Rome the largest Baselica in the world. The we received Gods blessing from the pope

Nov 28 Sight seeing the second day of Roma
We have seen St. Giovani Basilica the first Crition in the word was build 2000 year ago by the Roman Emperor Constantin of it was before a sinagage the catacomb. The place has been before a old slave cemeter and during the Christian persecution the Christen used this places for assempling and living places It covers wast area had 4 floor underground and the graves tunel 17 km long.
Basalica of St. Paul or St Palo This church was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantin on the spot where the Apostle Paul were preserved. Wes almost destroyed by fire in 1823 and has been rebuild in Baroc stile and is the most richest church in the world. The Church as 1000 white marmor pillars and 300 gold medals and has mosace frescos and mosaic floor. 320 by 300 [ ] feet and has also a monastery with a exsotic flower garden. Pyramid of cestius and the old Roman Colossemum

Nov 29 We leaved the air line bus terminal of Roma at 10.40, and arrived at the Roma Airport at 11:30.
Since the TWAirline was late of 1.30 minutes so we got a free lunch at the airport.
We leaved Roma at 13.40 and arrived at the Cario Airport at 16.45 a man of the Sita Travel agency was waiting for us at the airport and he took us to the Nile Hilton Hotel.

Nov 30 Sight seeing to the Nile Delta.
We have seen a few dams and bridges on the Nile and quite a few mud huts. The soil or the Land of the Delta is very rich; however, the people are very poor. They liave in the huts with no roof on it and the cows and bufalows are also poor and bony.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Nov 6-25

2011-12-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

Sorry I got so far behind. I hope to be caught up by Christmas.

Nov 6. We were invited to Miss A Unger for super

Nov. 7 We were invited for diner to the Plasers and for supper to Mr. & Mrs. Kohl.

Nov 8-9 We went to Burgenland and visited on old friend of Heilig in Lurndorf and in Parma our old Neighbor of our former Home land Hungary the Furhermans

Nov 10. We went sightseening in Wiena to the Shopping Center, Empire Palace and have seen in the palace the Empires furniture, Freskos and paintings and velualbe decorations

Nov 11. We went to Swanenstad visiting on old friends of us the Kastles.

Nov 12 Linz is a nice old city, The Capitol of Upon Austria has a shopping center, Cathedral and a park atlong the Danube river.

Nov 13 St. Pilter
We went to visit a former school teacher from Hungary. Mr. Kurz. He lives outside of the city of St. Palter. It was 2 ½ mil long walk and it was a raining
We got real wet.

Nov 14 Back in Wiena
We were invited for a supper to Mr. & Mrs. Eisenbach, an old friend of my wife.

Nov 15-16 We stayed at home. I wrote daeri. I was behind with my writing for a few days and my wife did some sowing.

Nov 17
Sight seeing to the Empire Castle, The Spanish hors ride school. Hof burg and Schatz Kamer. Have seen the Koronation Jewels and the ornaments and many other things. St. Stephan Cathedral with high tower and some other churches. The Park of Schonbrin and also the parlament and many other historical buildings and Statues. Belvedere palace.

Nov 18 Mrs. Nehis invited us in the evening to a wine stoobe for wine dringing on the home way was raining, so we got wet inside and so also outside.

Nov 19. We made a visit to our former neighbor to Mrs. Hoffer, from Hungary. We didn’t see each other for 21 year. Since we were driven out by communist regime. Than afterword we went to a friend of my wife To Miss A Unger to say good by and there we met to ladies from Hungary. We had there a good conversation of the old time.

Nov. 20.
For noon, we went into a church of Lising and afternoon we were invited for diner to Mr. & Mrs. Walter Kohl and after diner, I show them the films wath I made in our European tour through 14 countries and we had there a good time.

Nov 21. We stayed at home by the Wormer and wrote my diary and som postcards for our friends.

Nov 22
We went to Schimbrien into the Zoo of Wiene and have seen all kinds of birds from all countinents and all kinds of animals. Then afterwards we went to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law to say good by We werein Wiena for 23 days and during that time we had almost every day rain and fog. So we didn’t see much of Wiena.

Nov 23 We leaved Wiena at noon at 12.00 with a fast train train to Roma, Italia and when we came to the Wiena newstad about 80KM the sun came out and we had a nice sunshine trip till Scuering.
In Seumering, There was a foot snow on the ground and when we came to Arnoldstein, the Austraian and Italian border there was snowing and morning on Nov 24, when we arrived in Rome at 8.25 it did raining.

Nov 24 Rome
Afternoon we made some shopping

Nov 25 We were out shopping for the whole day. We bought some presents for our grandchildren daughter and son-in-law and for his parents and sister

Mate Szedlak's travel journal Oct 24-Nov 5

2011-11-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

24-25 Gerlingen & Stuttgart

After our long tour we came back to Gerlingen for resting a few days and to say good by to our relatives

26.
We mad some shopping in Stuttgart and on 27 we went to Allfeld to my sister-in-law to say good-by. And on 28-29 to Eberbach to my Nefews and we made ride to Manheim.

Oct 30
We went back to Gerlingeen packed our lagguage and on 31 of Oct we leaved Gerlingen and at the same day we arrived in Wiena West rail station. My brother-in-law and Sister-in-law did wait us There.

Nov 1 Wiena
We mad a visit to the Plasers a brother-in-law of myne.

Nov 2.
We visited a old friend of my wife Mr. & Mrs. Eisenbach and a other friend of us Miss O Unger. Late in the evening when we came home I checked my papers and I noticed that the voucher of the Hotel acomandation is missing or lost.

Next morning Nov. 3 I notified my travel agency of the lost voucher and I went at noon with the Orient Expres from Wiena to Stuttgart looking for the lost Hotel papers.

Nov 4
I didn’t find the lost paper. However I came just right back to Germany to picking up my heritage in Sinsheim. 120.30 D.M and 169.70 D.M in Helustad. Together 290.00 or $75.00 What my uncle leftover after his death. I also visited some friends in BadMingabheim. The wether was very bad. The whole day was rainy mixed with snow.

Nov 5. I came back to Wiena at 22.22

A daughter returns home

2011-10-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

Being a pastor’s daughter in North Dakota I always felt more like a tumble weed than a rooted plant. I was passing through and no matter what brush I might have gotten caught in, I had no roots. When the winds changed I’d eventually be on my way. At least that’s what I thought. For 14 years of my life I was a member at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, ten miles outside of St. Thomas, ND. The parsonage was across the road. I was confirmed at that church and married there, then I left with my husband and have lived in Milwaukee Wisconsin, Fort Wayne Indiana and now I’m back in Milwaukee. Since I left North Dakota in 1994 I’ve only been back to that bit of country once to visit my parents, and it wasn’t a Sunday. So the last service I attended at St. Paul’s was my own wedding. Dad retired in 1998 and moved to Eau Claire Wisconsin, so in my mind I had no reason ever to go back there.

When my sister Sarah proposed us taking a road trip to Winnipeg for my cousin’s wedding I was excited and in the planning it looked like going to church in North Dakota would be an easy fit for our plans. Figuring out the service time was easy since I knew the pastor from my time in Fort Wayne and had friended him on Facebook.
I had learned from Sarah the year before that the parsonage was sold and moved away. The pastor that serves my father’s former parish lives in Cavalier. When I saw the pictures I got teary eyed. The view from the church just didn’t look right. In some sense I wanted to see it for myself but I was unsure of what emotional effect it would have.

The video below shows starting what would be the end of the driveway to the parsonage.

Sarah and I arrived early and there were about two cars in the parking lot. St. Paul’s does not have the Lord’s Supper every Sunday, but we were happy to see we’d be doing Matins, modified slightly for Sunday worship. It was wonderful. That’s the only word that comes to mind. The people, the church, the music, were all familiar. It was like returning home and sleeping in your old bed.

On one hand it was odd to be there with the parsonage gone and Mom and Dad still in Winnipeg. Rebecca was there with her whole family and then there was Sarah and me.
The sermon was good. I told a few people before church how excited I was when I saw the call list and realized who their pastor would be. Rev. Chepulis is not one to dumb things down or tread lightly around the truth. He preaches Christ and Him crucified. It was a joy to hear the law preached in all its harshness followed by the gospel in all its delight.

My sisters and I were greeted with open arms. Somewhere in the middle of the Te Deum it hit me. I was in the pew and with me in the nave were people who had taught me Sunday school, taken me to youth gatherings, whose children I had taught Sunday School. Women I had helped in the kitchen before and after potlucks. People who sent me aid when my house burned down six years ago. People who have prayed for my father through all his bouts with cancer. There was not an unfamiliar or unfriendly face. I was a daughter of St. Paul’s returning home for a visit and it was so good to be there. The only thing that would have made it better would have been the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament.

Mate Szedlak Travel Journal Oct 13-23

2011-10-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Oct 13.
Bern Capitol of Sehneiz
We have seen the Parlament or government building, Munster church, The museum of Art. It has old Armors, Jewels, paintings and many other handwork and also environment of the primitive peoples of Asia and Afrika. Shoping Center.

Oct 14-15 Genova Italia
We have seen the Colombus square with the statue of Colombus, Plassa De Verdi with the large Terase from there we saw over the City the old Roman fortress, the harbor with the big ocean shipps. The King palace, academy of art. Piassa & Ella Vittoria with the nice flower park and Vis Codorne the sculpture gate, The Basalica of Genova and many other Churches. The churches buildings are in Gothic structure. The churches are outside shaby, but inside they are very colorful with frescos and statues.
The people are kind and well dressed, even the teen agers are well dressed and have nice hair due. It seems to be, that the Beatles didn’t conquer Italy yet.

Oct 16 Monte Carlo, Monaco
We leaved Genovo and a rainy morning to Monaco with a fast train wich stoped almost by each chicken cube.
The whole train was over crowed with labors and with their lugguages. The whole train was filty, even the first clas was filty. We have seen the Castel of Monaco or the palace of Prince Renold. The famos Gambling Casino and the sinery of Monte Carlo.

Oct. 17. Barzelona
The train Monaco to Barzeelona was over filed mostly with labors and lagguages
We arrived at 1.30 after midnight on the border station of Port Bou, Spain all pasanger of the train did have to leave the train with all their lagguages to the custody building for custody inspection. The inspection took more than one hour. The same did happen to us before we leaved the border of Spain.
Barzelona with her big harbor is the trade center of Spain. Has a museum and a romantic park with statues and water fall, big churches and government buildings.
Olsidently in the Cathedral of Barzelona we was a big wedding of the dignatory of the City. All the man wore froks and the ladies were in silk and furs.

Oct 18-19 Madrid
The ride on the Train from Barzelona to Madrid is not much to see. We have seen only rocky mountains and bare hils with no tries or shrubs. This very pour country.
We arrived at 9.40 in Madrid. It rained the whol day, so we stayed the first day in the hotel because the Streets were all dirty or mudy. The second day we went out for sight seeing to the King palace and park, Casidra of Madrid and other churches and statues. Since my wife didn’t feel well and also through lack of knowledge of the Spanish language, we desided not to go to Gibraltar and to Lisabon as we had pland it.
We leaved Madrid at 22.30 and arrived in the morning at 9.30 in Bayonne.

Oct 20 Bayonne
Since my did not feel well we stayed in the Rail raod station restaurant, till got a Train to Lourdes. We arrived in Lourdes at 17.30.

Oct 21. Lourdes
Sight seeing to the church of Francis of Assisy. The Basalica of Lourdes, The Calvary fourteen station, The Holy Spring Shrine, and the Lourdes Hospital where hundreds of sick and crippled people were pushed with the wheel chair from the hospital to the Holy Spring for heeling then from there to the Basalicka for the Lords Blessings. From there we went to the old Fortress of Charteuaugehe. The Fortress was build by the Arabs at 730 and on 814 the Normands took the fortress over and they build around the fortress wall. In 1373 England took over the fortress and since 1404 belongs to the Kindom of Franze. King Louis XV of France made of the fortress a prison and it was a political prison til 1920 and since that time is a museum of human environment or development from the stone age till the present Time.

Oct 22-23 Paris
Sight seeing to the Conservatory Museum of Tehnology in Mashinery, Electricity and mining of Minerals.
Statue of Blasse Pascal the founder of the Barometer. The Notre Dome Church, Basclica, The parlament of France, Court of Justice, Eifel Tower, Lafaette Palace and Park & Shopping Center

A few random moments with Dorian

2011-10-15T12:34:00.003-07:00

There are few things more relaxing in my life than watching my cat do something--that is something other than sleeping or spitting up his lunch. I just thought I'd share these.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Oct 7-12 1966

2011-10-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

Oct. 7
We were in Augsburg where I worked once by the American Army. And we have visit some old friends.

Oct. 8. Munchen.
Have seen the City hall and we went up to the top on the City hall tower and had a nice view over the city. The Frauen Church, Cathedral and other historical and government buildings. At the evening we went to the state theater and saw a performance of Countuse Marica

Oct 9. We were in Wien

Oct 10. Salzburg.
Have seen the Cathedral and the Ost drunk Castle and the statue, The Fortress of Salzburg and the catacombs and the cemetery and also the

Oct 11 Insbruck
Have seen the Museum of Tirol, The Cathedral, The City park and some historical buildings. The rid on the Train from Insbruck to Zurich through the Alpine mountains has very nice seeneries and is also colorful with the Snow covered mountain.

Oct 12
Zurich a population of 440,000 has a shopping center, great Munster church, Ladis Church, St. Peter Church, City hall, The house of Congres and college.
The reid from Zurich to Bern was raining and foggy. The City is sorounded with the snow covered mountains

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Oct 4,5 & 6 1966

2011-10-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

Oct 4 Manheim.
Has a romantic park with statues, flowers and water fall and on the center water tower. Nier the Cathedral, The City has been destroyed in the last war and the whole city is rebuild now.
Oct 4. Bad Durkleins has the largest wine barrel in the world. The barrel is used now as a restaurant.
Speyer is famous with her Roman build large Cathedral where 13 Emperors of the Roman Empire are buried.

Oct. 5
We have visited some old friend from Hungary in Jacksfeld and Offeman.

Oct.6
We were by my Niece in Gerlengen

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Oct 3, 1966

2011-10-03T19:02:00.000-07:00

Oct 3 Sightseeing in Heidelberg
The old Castle of Heidelberg was build between 1155-1300 by the Pfaly grafer or Count of Hohrnstaufer. Louis the XIV of France occupied on 1688 and on 1659 before the France army leaved the city, they destroyed the whole castle and never was rebuild again and since that time the castle is a ruin and is a famous place now for the tourist and with the beauty Necker river and vally has a nice sinery and the famous University.
Museum of Heidelberg.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Oct 2, 1966

2011-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Oct 2
After a two week tour through six countries we did rest a whole day in Eberbach

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 30 & Oct 1, 1966

2011-10-01T05:17:00.001-07:00

Sep 30 Luxemburg
Sight seeing to the old fortress of Luxenburg and the velly of the city.
Prinze Charle Palace
Cathedral of Luxemburg
The velly with the many viaduct bridges and the old fortress walls and shopping center.
The City is preaty and has many nice seneries and the people are very kind.

Oct 1.
We have seen the old Roman City of Trier and from there we came back to Eberbach

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 28 & 29, 1966

2011-09-28T19:36:00.001-07:00

Sept 28
Sightseeing in Copenhaven. City hall, the fortress of the City with it splendor flower garden and statues.
King palace of Christiansburg and the guard changing.
Museum of art.
Fredrick Church.
Round tower Church and the shopping center.

Sept 29 Bielefeld
We made a visit to Mr. Von Hacken in Bielefeld and from there we went to Koblauz and stayed there over night.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 27, 1966

2011-09-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

Sept 27.
We arrived in Copenhaven at 9.25 and wen to the Hotel and slept till 16.00 ock.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 26, 1966

2011-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

Sep. 26. Oslo
Sight seeing.
King palace, the University, The Vigeland Sculputer in the Fragnor park. It covers and area of 75 acres.
The gigantic work of Gustav Vigeland, Comprising 256 single Statues of bronse. 150 statues of granite stones and a 30 feet high obiesk of a Granit stone is carved all over with from the bottom till the top with human figures. The whole statues simbalising the human being from the beginning till to end or death.
The great sculpture Vigeland worked on this project for 40 years.
Beyond the park is the museum at one time was the Vigeland’s studio. The oldest Ski museum in the world, with the Homenkollen Ski jump tower. The famos City hall of Oslo with the tower on wich is a 17 teen feet in diameter a gold clock. The walls of the hall, has lot of wood carvings and frescos, and the floor and the stairs are in mosaic of white, black, and gray marmors.
In the center of Oslo, is the old fortress.
Since we didn’t find a Hotel room in Oslo, we leaved the same night Oslo with the Train to Copenhaven.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 24-25, 1966

2011-09-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

Sweden
Sept 24-25 Stockholm.
Sight seeing to the King palace, King libury guen Charlote Castel, Palace of Justice, City hall and Park, the harbor.
Afternoon we made five hour walk around the island of Stockholm The teenager are bad dressed and they are also immoral...
The prises are prity high.
We left on 25th at 10P.M. Stockholm and arrived in Oslo, Norway next morning a 9.30.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 22& 23, 1966

2011-09-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Holland
Sept. 22 Ansterdam
Sight seeing.
The industrial center. The Harbor with the canals St. Nicolaus Church. Shopping Center and other historical buildings and statues.
The Streets are over croweded with people and bikes. When the people drive home from work with their bikes through the streets, it look like as a army goes through the City. I never saw so many bikes in my life.

Sept 23
We leaved Amsterdam at 7.35 with the Orient Express and went through Copenhaven and arrived next morning at 9.20 in Stockholm. We went to the Hotel and slept for a few hours. After noon Through the shopping center and made some Shopping.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 20-21, 1966

2011-09-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Belgium
Sept. 20-21 Brussel
Sightseeing. City hall with the Tower, old King palace, Palace of justice. The houses of the Crote Markt are decorated with Statues and color glasses of mosaic. The King palace and the guards of the palace. City park with statues and government buildings. The central Railroad Station of Brussel is underground and stranger get easy lost there.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 19, 1966

2011-09-19T11:11:00.001-07:00

Sept. 19 Elsdorf
We visited a unknown friend and had a wonderful time there.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 18, 1966

2011-09-18T15:50:00.001-07:00

Sept. 18 Eberbach
My cousin was very happy to see us again. We didn’t see each other for 15 years.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 17, 1966

2011-09-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Sept 17
Ollfeld by my Sister in law. and the widow of my cousin

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 16, 1966

2011-09-16T09:57:00.001-07:00

Sept 16.
Back in Gerlingan

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 15, 1966

2011-09-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Sept 15.
We were in Jackfeld and Offemen. Visited an old friend of our home town Rajka and Schwanauers.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 14, 1966

2011-09-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

Sept 14

We visited my God Father in Sinsheim and it was the same treatment eating and dinning.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 13, 1966

2011-09-11T16:18:00.001-07:00

Sept. 13
We start to use our Euraulpass from Stuttgart to Pforzhein and visited a old school mate of myn. From there we went to Phillipsburg to my cousin, We didn’t see each other for 25 years. It was a hapy surprise and every where were we treated and feeded like a king.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 11-12, 1966

2011-09-11T15:48:00.001-07:00

Gerlingen b/Stuttgart.
Sept 11.-12
We made our Temporary home by my niece during our Europian Tour. We took a couple days rest and were feded very wel.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 10, 1966

2011-09-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

Sept 10.
We leaved Berlin at 8.30 with the Pan am. To Stuttgart
We arrived at 9.30 on the Stuttgart Airport, where my niece with her husband did wait for us.
I didn’t see my niece for 15 years ago. Then she was a young Teenager and now she is married and has two lovely girls and fine husband and they own a nice home.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 9, 1966

2011-09-09T12:24:00.000-07:00

Germany
Sept, 9. Berlin.
Have seen Kaiser Wilhems Memorial Church, Tuptow Park, Soviet war Memorial, Karl Marx ollce Alexander Plotz Unter Dem Linden, Checkpoint Charley, Potsdamer platz Brandenburg gate, old Reichs Tag, Parlament Hausa—quarter Charlottenburg—castle, Radio Tower and the ugly wall of Berlin
Kurfursten daumum
We also went into the States Theater and have seen the performent of the Land of Laugh.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 8, 1966

2011-09-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

Sept 8
We leaved London at 10.15 with the B.E.Airplain and arrived at 12.30 in Berlin
Hotel Astoria.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal: Sept 7th 1966

2011-09-07T07:52:00.001-07:00

Sept 7
The House of Parlement, Westminster Abbey The Coronation church for 900 years, with the coronational jewels. Churchil Castel guirns(??) Tower bridge, Buckingham palace Fortress of London, where the King Henry the VIII had headed off his seven wifes heads and We have seen also the guillotine chamber with equipment and alos old armors.
Afternoon we went to the palace Theater and have see the performent of the Sound of Music. It was enjoyable, however; during the performent somebody has stolen my valet with $29.00.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 6, 1966

2011-09-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

England
Sept 6 London
Sight seeing of the City. Have seen the old City, St. Paul Cathedral, Statue of Queen Anna. Tower of London, Statue of prince Albert the Councelor.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 5, 1966

2011-09-05T04:25:00.000-07:00

Sept. 5
We made some shopping and walked around the stores just for time killing.
We leaved New York from the Kennedy airport to London at 20.15 with PanAm and arrived on the morning at 9.00 London.
The first custom inspection in foreign contry England. This token more than one a half hour the custody inspection
Bernes Hotel London

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 4, 1966

2011-09-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

Sept. 4.
Sight seeing of the City of New York. Have seen the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The building is Gothic style. The construction had begun on 1820, and will be completed maybe on the year of 2000. It will be the largest and the impressive Cathedral in the U.S.A. St. Patric Cathedral, it look like the famous cathedral of Cologne (Germany) Greenwich Village, The Harlem, The Negro and Porto Rican section and the China Town. Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hal, United Nation Building, Washington bridge, Brooklyn bridge the longest in the U.S.A. wich connect the Manhatten Island. It spans the bay.
Statue of Liberty. We walked up on the top into the statue. Afterward we could hardly stand on our legs.
We also went up with the lift on the Empire State building to the 102 coud floor. It is the tallest building in the World. It rained the whole day, so I couldn’t take pictures of the city.
We came back to our Hotel exhausted and tired.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 3, 1966

2011-09-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

New York Sept 3.
Motor Hotel
Two hundred miles long sightseeing in the State of New York, at long the Hudson River. We went through the Washington Hil, the 10m. long Rockefeller estate,
Rockefeller Country Club, where the membership cost for the first year $50.000.00, The state gas chamber and electric chair. The pigeon Mountain with the highest and sloppiest railroad in the world. Bear Pigeon Bridge, Bear Mountain, St. John Seminary, West Point the great military academy and Cadeth Chapel.
Statues of G. Washington and of Colonel Thayer, the father of the military academy and the war heros of the West Point. The 140 acres Hyde Park of the Franklin D. Roosevelt home and birth place. The garden of roses and the groves where president Roosevelt and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt are buried. The whole place is a museum now. We had a good diner at the famous Bear Mountain Restaurant.
On the home way, we went on the other side of the Hudson River.
On the steep ridge of the Anthony’s Nose, a road carved through the rock directly above the Hudson River.
It has a glorious beauty, scenery. The whole ride was 11 hours.

Mate Szedlak's Travel Journal Sept 2, 1966

2011-09-02T04:22:00.000-07:00

Sept 2

We leaved Washington D.C. at 11.30 and arrived in New York at 12.35 after noon, we made a walk at long The Broadway.

Mate Szedlak's travel journal Sept 1 1966

2011-08-31T20:12:00.000-07:00

Washington Sep. 1
Manger Hamilton Hotel.
Sight seeing. The City was over kroudet with tourists. We have seen The Capitol Hill, White house, the court palace of Justice, Lincoln Museum, the former Theater where Lincoln was shot and the house where he died. Mount Vernon, Washington’s birth place. The historical Church of Christ in Alexandria, The pentagon bldg. and the Arlington cemetery and the grove of President Kennedy.
On our tour, we had a delicious diner at the Hogotas Resturant in Alexandria.

Mate & Theresia Szedlak's trip around the world

2011-08-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

This summer I enjoyed a family reunion with my Dad’s side of the family. I even got a story I wrote about it in the River Falls Journal.
I spent a lot of time in the last year prepping for this event by scanning old photos and slides. There was one photo I failed to find. It was a portrait Grandma Szedlak had taken of her and her three children during the war. Grandpa was off with the military and Grandma feared that they wouldn’t all make it through the war alive, so she had the picture taken. While at my folks for the reunion, I made a frantic search for the missing picture. We never did find it, but in the process I found my Grandfather’s travel log from the trip they took around the world in 1966. I was happily surprised to discover it was in English. My first scanning project had been photos taken during that trip—most of them of my Grandmother as Grandpa almost never let her use the camera. For my blog this year I’m going to transcribe his entries. My grandfather wrote with an accent. For me it’s part of the charm of his entries, so I don’t plan to do much, if any, editing. It was 45 years ago today that they left their home in River Falls to visit family in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The journal ends before they got home and not every day has an entry but I hope you will enjoy the ride.

Mate Szedlak’s Journal from his trip around the world
After 6 months of preparing and planning our trip around the world, we leaved in God’s name, our home on 31 of August 1966 and went to the Minneapolis airport and at 17.50 we flyet with the Pan Am Jet to Washington DC. We arrived in Washington at 22.00

Gifts from cats.

2011-07-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

There is much in my life that is too dull to post and things going on in and around my life that I should not speak of in such a public venue, so I’ve been at a loss for good blog topics.

For a short time after Easter I thought I’d be spending my July moving to another state, but that opportunity sadly fell through. So we are here. In an effort to make the best of things I’ve been systematically cleaning each room of our small home in a manner similar to what one does in preparation for a move. It’s been good to de-clutter my space. I’ve also started to make some other changes that I may relate here in a few weeks, but I want those changes to become closer to habits before I speak of them on this blog.

This summer has been good in a few ways. First we have an air conditioner—small underpowered unit but coupled with a powerful small fan (on loan from Latif’s brother) we’ve been able to keep the house dry and usually under 80 degrees.

This summer we also have a cat. He used to hang out in the bedroom most of the evening, but he doesn’t like the noise, or perhaps the cold, and has taken to napping by the front door—a space he is blocked from in the winter in an effort to cut down on drafts.

In North Dakota I had a cat, Neko. He was a strictly outdoor animal and in the spring would forgo his dry food and hunt fresh meat. His diet was varied. He’d even eat leftover stew—all but the peas (a very smart animal in my estimation—I HATE PEAS.) Much of his summer was spent hanging out by the big front picture window waiting for a bird to mistake it for sky and slam into it. The stunned bird on the sidewalk easily became lunch, and Neko would proudly stroll the front walk with bird feet hanging out of his mouth. In the late fall, without fail he would find a small mouse or shrew and leave it as a gift at our back step. Neko was a farm cat and a fine hunter with all his tools and weapons.

Dorian is not a farm cat. He has no claws and aside from the odd insect that he encounters, does not catch is own food. He has (like the priest in my husband’s favorite movie) a rather “capricious stomach” and aside from buttered croissants has showed zero interest in anything we eat. He is rather inept at stalking and pouncing and aside from a few ventures to our deck and the front walk to get a good brush down to deal with shedding, he never goes outside. He is the opposite of Neko. But after his own fashion he likes to leave us offerings. Pictured is a toy of his. I call it the “jingle sock.” There are bells tucked in that sound when he plays with it. Every few days I wake up in the morning to find that Dorian has left it at the foot of our bed. He will not play with it again until I toss it back into the living room. Then he will in the night attack it and leave it for us as a gift.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Advice for those long dull summer days

2011-06-23T15:11:00.001-07:00

Sometimes in the summer I would be at my grandparents’ house in Winnipeg and like all children I would run out of amusements and complain to the closest adult that I was bored. Grandpa Schafer would suggest thumb twiddling. He would demonstrate with the thumbs going clockwise and then add that if that became boring one could switch direction. He would then demonstrate them going counter-clockwise. Grandma would often ask, “Have you had a good cry? When I get frustrated and can’t think of what to do with myself, I sit down and have a good cry. Perhaps you should do that. Go sit over there and have a good cry.”

REG

lhg edited and approved

Spring Break

2011-03-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Spring Break for students and instructors means time off and often travel. For support staff I’ve come to realize that spring break is pretty much summed up in three things. Less noise, fewer places to get food on campus, and better parking. That’s it. I did however enjoy one extra perk. The library closed at 7:00pm instead of 2:00am and thus I was able to leave work Monday two hours earlier than the standard 9:00pm. My Monday schedule is in some ways cruel since Mr. Gaba’s latest work schedule involves working Tuesday to Sunday nights. That’s right. The only night he has off is the only night I work (barring my working the occasional Sunday 12:30 to 9:00pm shift.) So we took full advantage of my spring break and went out to eat Monday. Latif narrowed it down to three places: one in our Riverwest neighborhood, one Downtown, and one on the East Side. More than that he would not tell me. Mr. Gaba actively works to dissuade me of the notion that I should be able to plan and anticipate my future with any kind of a clear idea of what will happen. We were able to easily get a table at the place in Riverwest—the Centro Cafe. It’s a very small Italian place with amazing food, cooked just feet away from the tables in an open kitchen. I really hope we go again sometime.

As my spring break progressed I found myself spending several hours at the circulation desk. This was the result of the Access Services Librarian being out with health issues and no students volunteering to work during some parts of the break. I don’t blame the students. With the coffee shop closed the library has taken on the more hushed ambiance of those days when I was paid $3.75/hr to sit at the desk. It feels very familiar. Also familiar is the feeling that I had as a freshmen of not really knowing enough to be completely helpful. This is after all the first time I’ve been by myself at the circulation desk since last August. I’m OK with the basics, but if someone needed to pay a fine I would have had to call for backup. I also had to open the library myself on Thursday. It has been a few years since I opened a library and it wasn’t this library. I did manage to figure out where all the light switches were and how to log on to the circulation computers.

Saturday while students and faculty began considering having to head back to campus, I got to spend four hours at work. Only four. This is after all a break. The hours went by quickly as I had a test to proctor and then did two library instruction sessions for international MBA students who operate on a different academic schedule.

Spring break just isn’t what it used to be.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Liturgical Irony

2011-03-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

I grew up a pastor’s kid in North Dakota. Our church didn’t bother with the “new” hymnal and stuck with TLH. The liturgy never changed. By the age of 10 I had stopped using the hymnal on Sundays for everything but the hymns. It was a great way to grow up. No matter what else was going on in my life that was a constant. Regrettably our little country church only had communion once a month and on high occasions like Christmas, Maundy Thursday, or Easter. Still, every time we had communion my father picked communion hymns, one before the consecration, one for the distribution and one after the benediction. A typical first Sunday of the month would have us singing “Draw Nigh and Take the Body of the Lord” before the sacrament. “Soul Adorn Thyself with Gladness” or “I Come O Savior to Thy Table” and we would end the service with “Oh Lord We Praise Thee.”

Our church restricted communion to those who had been confirmed, and that didn’t happen until after the eighth grade. Thus for most of my years at home, I sat in the pew and sang all of these hymns. “I Come O Savior to Thy Table” was an early favorite of mine. I remember singing the refrain: “May Thy body and Thy blood be for my soul the highest good” before I was in kindergarten. It was one of the few hymns that I could sing with the congregation before I could read. Later it was a big deal for me to get to sing that phrase all 15 times. This was not all that frequent of an occurrence. First there was the infrequency of communion and the fact that this hymn wasn’t sung every time. Add to that it was a distribution hymn so singing the entire hymn depended on enough people being in church to commune. Then the right organist had to be playing; one that didn’t feel the need to play an interlude every five verses to give our voices a break. You also lost the chance to sing them if you were communing, but this wasn’t too much of an issue for my family since we sat in the front (well, four or five pews back from the front, but no one sat in front of us) and was usually the first to commune and thus in the same table as the organist. The organ was just off the chancel. The most I would miss was the first stanza depending on how fast the organist got to the bench and how quickly she started playing. The last communion Sunday before I was confirmed everything came together and I got to sing all 15 versus.

Fast forward to now and I am glad to say that I have attended churches that offer communion every Sunday. But with this wonderful gain there has come some personally regrettable losses. First the liturgy keeps changing. This often happens with the church season and while I’ve become familiar with most of the orders in the hymnal, gone are the days where I can abandon the hymnal for everything but hymns. The second thing is now that communion is every Sunday I rarely sing communion hymns. Pastors use the distribution hymns to emphasis the theme of the Sunday and if several hymns are used he may toss in one communion hymn. The only service where I can count on singing them is Maundy Thursday. Couple this with a new hymnal and the regrettable practice of messing with the words and now when I do sing one of those old often repeated in my childhood hymns, I invariably end up frustrated by the changes. If I sang them more often I’d eventually get over this, or at least think about what the hymn is conveying instead of being angry at synodical busy bodies who felt the need to mess with something for some high minded reason like this word or that more accurately reflects the original form of the Latin or German or is a less archaic English word, completely disregarding the notion that some faithful Lutheran may have memorized this hymn in his childhood and isn’t going to appreciate the nuances. Alas, now that I get communion every Sunday I rarely sing about it and when I do, rather than it being a joy, for now, I just get annoyed.

REG

lhg edited and approved

My Life as a Public Worker in Wisconsin

2011-02-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

For 18 months of my life I was a public worker in Wisconsin. I was a Circulation Assistant 1 at Milwaukee Public Library’s Central Library. If I had kept that job my life would be much different. I’d be earning, even without my library degree, much more than I am now and I’d be fully vested in a very nice pension plan. If I had gotten my degree while working there, the city would have paid for it, and I wouldn’t still be shelling out monthly to pay for student loans. The Christmas I worked there was wonderful—we were able to afford to give Usinger sausage gift boxes to our parents and siblings. Something I’ve never been in a position to do since. Loved the union wage. Loved the benefits. Loved the library. Hated the union.

I hated that money out of each of my paychecks, only about, I think, $16, went to the union. Now when you are earning so much more than a non-union library job with all the perks and benefits, four hundred some odd dollars a year is a small price to pay. I understood that I benefited from their collective bargaining and I was OK with that money being taken, but I didn’t like that my money was going to support political causes to which I was fundamentally morally opposed. In particular, supporting organizations and candidates who believe that women have a right to murder their own children, provided it’s done in the womb. When asked by co-workers why I didn’t join the union I stated flatly, “I don’t fiscally support the candidates I do vote for, why would I support the ones I disagree with?” But I had no choice in the money being taken.

The only recourse I had as a non-union member was to apply to get back the portion of my union dues that went to political contributions. It was claimed that it amounted to only something like $24 a year, but it’s the principle of things, so I went through the hassle of hunting down the form and having each person I needed to speak to along the way look at me like some sort of diseased moron for wanting to do such a thing. The form was cumbersome and tedious and on the form in no less than seven places was written that the union was not responsible for the form getting lost in the mail. The form then had to be mailed. No person or address was given. I could not deliver it in person. I could not send it registered mail. It had to go to a designated PO Box. If this box did not exist, or if a postal worker just kept “losing” things addressed to it, I never discovered. I moved to Fort Wayne and was not sticking around to fight. I never got my money back.

Just after I started at the library, the union contract expired and the negotiations were not going smoothly. In the end the whole thing went to arbitration. It took almost the entire time I worked there, before it was settled. Every worker got an extra $100 just for the union finally agreeing to the contract and then got a very nice check of back wages to settle the wage increase from the year before that we would have gotten all along if negotiations hadn’t taken so long. It was crazy.

Now I believe in public libraries. I think they contribute greatly to an educated free society and do more than any other institution to bridge the digital divide. I’m proud of my city for having one of the oldest public library systems in the country. I think library workers should make a livable wage and that they do our city and the public a great service. But even with a large cut in pay I was very glad to get back to private academia, because it irked me that money I worked for helped pay for the union president to attend Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball in Washington DC. It irked me that the union president was a co-worker who would decide on a whim to enforce or not bother with library rules and policy and was never reprimanded or corrected for such behavior. It also irked me that nobody in that place was willing to lift a finger outside of their assigned time and duties to make the library a better place to work.

I personally spent months of lunch hours relabeling one of the underground tiers of journals so I could find things faster. Everyone who went to that floor benefited from my work, but when I mentioned that I was doing this during my lunches I was generally scorned. The idea that workers would use their own initiative or worse yet, time, to improve their workplace was a foreign concept to my union minded co-workers. So was the idea of doing tasks as a team and completing them efficiently. One time I was assigned to spend two hours on a shifting project that involved moving two columns (14 shelves) of government documents from one range of shelves to a range that was about ten feet away. My supervisor looked at me like I was crazy when I requested working with a co-worker and using a cart, but finally agreed. We got them all shifted within an hour. My supervisor was amazed because she figured that task would take at least another week to complete. Of course if I had been taking them by handfuls instead of loading them on a cart with each person using one hand to hand the thing off, and one hand to keep the documents from flopping over while filling a cart shelf—yes it would have taken another week to finish the job.

Just before I started, the Milwaukee County Federated Library System started to use a new library automation system. It was the same system I had used at two other libraries: Libraries where I did the same sort of work for less than half the hourly rate and with lesser or no benefits. To many of my co-workers learning a new system was a hardship. Their response was not to use their collective bargaining to get us better or more training. Or even a seminar on dealing with stress in the workplace, but rather to argue for higher wages since their jobs were so much more stressful what with having to learn the new computer system. I’m glad to say the city rejected the appeal, but it made me wonder about how much of those mandated collective bargaining dues went towards this frivolous and downright silly play for more money, not to mention how much of my tax dollars the city had to spend responding to it.

All this is to say that my eighteen months over a decade ago as a city worker represented by a public employees union has colored the way I view the current budget battle in Wisconsin. I support Governor Scott Walker.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Opinions on trick-or-treaters

2010-10-31T20:24:00.001-07:00

I spent about three hours today dressed for warmth and hanging out on my porch to give out candy. Mr. Gaba joined me for about an hour and a half of it, and for almost the entire three hours a neighborhood boy, Tony, sat on our porch swing and we chatted. Other neighbors stopped by and mostly it was a pleasant way to spend a few hours. Last year I ran out of candy in less than one hour so this year I over-bought, but it became clear that this October I’m on a much less popular street.
I bear no ill will to the late October beggars who come clambering up my stairs for candy, but I do expect them to at least attempt to costume themselves with more than a grocery bag in hand to identify themselves as trick-or-treaters. In one case, two boys clad in jeans, sneakers, dark sweatshirts and open jackets (it was hovering just below 50 degrees) climbed up my stairs and held out their Wal-mart bags, I asked, “So what are you supposed to be?” They stared at me, ignored my question, said, “Trick or Treat” and then failed to say thank you after I put candy in their bags. At that point I decided that any kid approaching with no sign of any costume would get one piece of candy. Kids who made an effort of any sort: face paint (one kid had his face painted black which was hard to see until he got up my stairs since it was almost the same shade as the rest of his skin), a hat or even a mask carried in their hand or worn off their face would get two. The fully clad Spiderman got four.
The other thing I noticed was the lack of imaginative costumes. They either didn’t try to dress up at all, only wore one piece of costume, or were in obviously store bought costumes that screamed “we went to a Halloween store.” There were no monochromatic kids with cone shaped paper hats and a hand drawn color label down their front and back, no cardboard robots, no fairies with tinfoil star wands, not even an assortment of bums or hobos. The closest to made-it-up-from-what-we-had-around were two boys with shoulder pads who carried helmets that appeared to be part of their pee-wee football uniforms. It is sort of sad. When I was a kid Halloween was an occasion for creativity and ingenuity; now it’s just an opportunity to get candy—costume optional. In some cases coming to the door was optional as well, as in the case of one mother holding three bags and expecting me to put treats in each, as her little ones didn’t want to get out of the warmth of the car—they also only got one piece each.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Dorian's tale last report from the air.

2010-10-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

Sep 12, 2010 in the air over America

When asked what I wanted to do in Utah I came up blank. While I feel that it is always good when you travel to try and take in the local culture I made the trip to get a cat and I was more than a little short on ideas. One thing was for sure. I don’t really care at all about Mormon history. In the end we did something that I’m very glad indeed that I did. Sadly without a guided tour, but I visited the state capital. It makes for a rather odd addition to capitals I’ve scoped out: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Utah. (Insert Sesame Street—“One of these things is not like the others” music here)

After the capital we stopped a few streets away at the Catholic cathedral which, of all the catholic buildings I’ve been in is, in decorating terms, “Not afraid of color.”

So I managed to find a state building and a church to tour in Utah, and I took pictures of the lions and a Manhattan Indian and avoided shots of Brigham Young.

We also stopped at an Old Navy to get Jillian some much needed fall clothes, and in the process drove past a Brazilian festival at the downtown mall.

While Utah is not known for its great food I did enjoy some all you can eat sushi, some really good hummus and pita bread at a place called Roosters, and when we went to a Five Guys burger joint I learned of a local custom—fry sauce. Fry sauce is an alternative to ketchup for your fries. It consists of ketchup, mayo and pickle juice. I tried it twice to be sure, but I don’t think I’ll be trying to make my own at home.
In my mixed up, screwed up head I planned this trip with the impression that I was coming home on Monday, so I packed for that and it wasn’t until we were headed to the capital on Saturday that I learned of my mistake. We double checked our various itinerary e-mails when we got back before dinner and sure enough I was flying out Sunday. I then once again got in frantic traveling mode. It’s just as well that I spent most of Saturday believing I had an extra day, it made me a much calmer person to be around.

I had told Latif he was getting me Monday so I called and left him a message to return my call so I would sleep better. He called somewhere close to 11pm and I slept as well as I can the day before flying. I was up at 5am. I used the computer and read up on flying with cats and what to expect. I made a list of things of Dorian’s that I needed to ask about and then I got myself ready and packed everything up. 8:20 we left for church. It was about 12:30 when we got home. I changed and gathered things up and said goodbye and they said goodbye to their cat. For all concerned this is the best of all worlds. They know Dorian is going to a good home they know that they will be able to see him come summer when they visit Milwaukee again for the SSP retreat and to take in that great city on a Great Lake.

Five years ago the Greens took Dorian in. Five years ago I lost both my cats. I was offered many cats after I lost the second one in our house fire, but I think we were just waiting for Dorian to need a home. In about two hours he’ll be in Riverwest.

Dorian's back story

2010-10-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

Mike and Amy had friends in New Orleans who bought a home and were told that the cat came with it. The friends were told the cat male but as it turns out that “male” cat gave birth to kittens underneath the home. They were all terribly flea infested, one was so bad her back legs had so much blood drawn that she couldn’t stand. That kitten was taken to the vet, cleaned up and named Gloria. Mike and Amy took her home and spoiled her rotten. Gender confusion seemed to run in the family, because after a while someone pointed out that Gloria was a male. Not wanting to confuse a cat that had gotten used to the tone of his name they searched for something male that sounded similar enough and settled on Dorian. That is how an orange and white cat ended up with a name that leads everyone to assume that he is gray. Dorian by then was completely healthy—he has a slightly unusual gate for a cat but you’d have to be looking for it to notice. He was also neutered and much to his owner’s later regret completely declawed. He will have to remain an indoor cat for the rest of his life. Just as he was getting to full size Katrina hit. The Greens were on the move and Dorian became a Katrina refugee. Mike got a job in Salt Lake and they relocated there. Amy flew with Dorian to their new home on Delta and bought the carrier that he now sits in at my feet.
Dorian enjoyed only-child status in the home, as the Greens worked to adopt, being told that they just may not be able to have children in the more conventional way. Dorian got used to not having children around and when a small nephew visited, decided that he didn’t like this little person and bit him. Not long after that, God surprised the Greens with Jillian, their miracle baby. Now Amy had a problem. Dorian was not getting the attention he was used to and went into a deep depression, she considered giving him to a no-kill shelter, but felt that she would always worry that a new owner would abuse him or let him outside. She wasn’t sure that Dorian would take to Jillian once she became mobile, and keeping up with the amount of fur was getting hard since the baby took priority. “I’d be coming upstairs with a baby in one arm and laundry in the other and see him and realize that I hadn’t pet him all day. I just felt so guilty.”

The timing of this small new addition to our lives truthfully could not be better. Latif is working essentially 2nd shift. The change from three months of him being there to him being almost instantly totally absent was startling, so I’m glad that in the evenings I will have someone to keep me company and to talk to. Cats are great listeners, as I discovered with my cat Neko when I was a teen. If you talk to yourself people will think you are crazy but talking to an animal is perfectly sane, though I will admit that I got some stares for appearing to talk to my carry-on luggage.

Dorians Tale part 3

2010-10-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Sep 12, 2010 6:40pm Las Vegas

Dorian is stowed below the seat in front of me for what, I’m sure he hopes, is his last flight. Again it’s a full flight and again it is leaving late.

I got to the Salt Lake airport with plenty of time. Paid the $75 for pet transport, got him tagged, and then turned my bags over to security. I checked two bags. One was my stuff; the other was a hard case pet taxi, filled with Dorian’s food, toys, water bowl, and litter scoop & lint rollers. With wheels on the suitcase and cat stuff not weighing as much as the cat, I found getting to security a bit of a challenge. I ended up making a request at security; Dorian was skittish and I didn’t want to take him out of the bag. I asked if it could be hand inspected they said no but opened a gate and took the cat carrier. I went through security and followed two security agents to a small room where I held Dorian and an agent patted him down (she really likes cats.) while the other one ran the carrier through the x-ray machine. They declared both bomb free. When the guy brought in the bag Dorian practically jumped back into it and squatted down to make it easy to zip shut. It was a far cry from the wrestling match Amy and I did to get him zipped into it for the trip to the airport.

After security I needed to hike to my gate. It was not a short trip and while Dorian is not the fattest cat I’ve ever owned, he’s not the lightest either. The carrier has no wheels and by the time I found my gate the first order of business was getting a drink, and taking some pills for my back and then doing a little bit of stretching—stretching that I failed to do in Vegas. I didn’t notice until that point that the flight was delayed. We got off the ground an hour late. I felt sorry for Dorian who could have enjoyed another hour not trapped in a carrier. That’s the thing, as long of a day as it is for me I can at least do things like eat, drink, and most importantly, use a bathroom. I did bring a bit of food for him but we cut off his water supply before leaving for church. I’ve wet my fingers a few times on my trips to bathrooms and stuck them in the carrier in case he would like to lick them dry. I’ve also grabbed a few of his food pellets and from time to time have offered him some. In truth I’m glad that my flight from Salt Lake was late because given the choice I’d much rather sit in that airport and watch the Packer game on monitors, than sit in the sun in Vegas and have to look at slot machines. Go Pack Go. The game was just finishing the 3rd quarter when we boarded. For the first half I was sitting too far away. I thought Dorian would enjoy looking out a window so I sat by the windows that were far from the monitors. People asked about him and I happily told his story. Vegas no one made eye-contact even though we’re all headed back to Wisconsin. I tried to strike up a conversation with one woman, but she didn’t seem to enjoy the idea of returning to Milwaukee as much as I did.

In Las Vegas we were supposed to land at gate B12 and the flight was to take off from B12, but because they were holding flights for those who were late our plan gated at B20 and again I had some walking to do with a very squirmy cat. With Southwest’s numbered boarding system and this trip being planned back in July, I had good numbers. For the first flight I was the 68th passenger to board. For the next I was 32. All the planes are the same 737s and If you must know I like to sit just behind the wing on the left side when facing front. Row 17 is my favorite but with a bunch of crumbs on the floor this flight I moved one row back and I’ve got to tell you I don’t like the position of the windows. It’s kind of sad. Each flight is a bit less fun than the one before. The pilot just chimed in and the wind is in our favor so we may not be too late. The book I was reading I finished, so all I’ve got now is my writing.

I didn’t’ buy dinner; the Vegas airport did not impress me at all.

Dorian's tale Part 2

2010-09-29T20:48:00.000-07:00

Sep 11, 2010 6:50 am

I’m in the living room next to the entry way of the Greens’ home and there is catnip all over the floor. Dorian is standing in the middle of it looking guilty, but not so guilty that he doesn't keep attacking the plastic bag he robbed off the shelf to get at it. I remember hearing something go bump last night. Amy was putting together a pile of things to go with Dorian to his new home and the bag of catnip was amongst those things. Well the catnip will no longer be going with him because it’s scattered all over the floor and he’s so strung out that he almost doesn’t notice it any more.

Back to my trip. The winds were against us going to Phoenix so we arrived 15 minutes late. I had enough time to get to my next gate, use a bathroom, and fail to talk myself into spending $8 for a slice of pizza. I ate a granola bar I brought along and it was time to board the plane. No games or prizes this time. The plane to Salt Lake was brand new, all shiny and bright. The flight was only a third full, so getting a window seat was easy. I even managed to be on the ideal side of the plane to view the Grand Canyon. Wow. First time I’ve ever looked at that wonder of God’s creation. Even from 10,000 feet up you cannot take it all in with one look. By the time you see the end of it the beginning of it is out of view. Let me say after that, that anyone who uses the word “grand” to describe the size of something like a van, a coffee, or a dinner roll is committing linguistic fraud.

I didn’t write more during the flight for two reasons. 1. The skies were clear and I was seeing a part of the country I’ve never known before. I am a heart a Midwest girl. Most of my above ground viewing has been farm land in Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. On this flight I was seeing the topography I’d never looked at before. Farms with round fields set up for most efficient use of irrigation and mountains, and brown and red earth, terraced fields with their wavy patterns. 2. My sister Rebecca passed on some book club books to me. Fiction is dangerous for me. I get addicted easily and then become useless. The author’s style gets into my head and I start narrating my own life. So when I wasn’t gazing out the window I was reading. That and eating peanuts and drinking Dr. Pepper.

The wind that slowed us down going to phoenix pushed us to salt Lake City and we arrived 15 minutes early. I failed to tell my hosts I had a cell phone—I don’t use it much but I did make sure it was charged and that I had active minutes and I brought it along. I even got Latif to get me a number for Mike so I called him and then he called his wife Amy and called me, and well, long story short, Amy found me at the passenger pick up. Our first stop was for food. We met Mike at Zapos and enjoyed soup and sandwiches. So after eating we arrived at their place. You had to be careful entering the door so that Dorian wouldn’t bolt out of it. I came in with my suitcase and there he was. I put my hand down and he sniffed it and then let me pet him. “See,” Amy said, “You pet him and you have a friend for life.”

Mike and Amy Green

The LORD has a way of connecting people that is both mysterious and wonderful. Mike Green is a member of the Society of Saint Polycarp as is my husband. The SSP has its annual retreat north of Milwaukee at Holy Hill. The Greens turned Mikes trip to the retreat into a family vacation and due to some storms in Denver arrived in Milwaukee too late to pick up their rental car. So Latif, who only knew Mike via the SSP Yahoo group picked them up at the airport in our two door Ford Focus and got them to the Ramada Inn Downtown. The next morning he took Mike back to the airport to get the rental car. See it wasn’t just Mike and Amy, but Mike, Amy and Jillian their baby daughter (dubbed the “miracle baby” because they were told that they probably couldn’t have children, but God surprised them with Jillian). Babies need a lot of stuff, so getting three adults, an infant, stroller, car seat and a week’s worth of luggage into our car was a bit of a challenge. In the end Amy had to hold a suitcase on her lap to make it work.

When not at the retreat Latif and I played host and tour guide and it was a wonderful week. Latif was newly unemployed and I had taken the week off of work so for me it was a “be a tourist in your home town” kind of vacation all the more fun as I could show off my favorite city to our out-of-town guests. We took in a neighborhood street festival, the art museum, a few brew pubs, (something not as common in Salt Lake City) and even made our way to a Kopps frozen custard. In the course of all this fun we of course got to know our new friends and two facts came to light: Latif and I were planning on adopting a cat in the coming year and the Greens had a cat that they were trying to give to a good home.

REG

lhg
edited and approved

Dorian's tale

2010-09-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

This was written on my trip out to Utah to pick up a cat.

Part 1.

Sep 10, 2010 in the air over America

There is something about travel that makes me anxious. I worry about forgetting things; I worry about getting lost, but most of all, I worry about being late. So I am always ready way too early. I have to work to slow down and take my time or I end up ready to go hours ahead of when I need to be, and then I just become this fidgety mess. This trip was no different. My flight took off at 10:30 am Milwaukee time. I needed to be at the airport by around 9:30. Last night I got home from work late. There was a class I needed to teach at 6:30 so even heading right home I didn’t get there until about 7:50. By 8:20 p.m. I was completely packed. I then sat at the computer to check into my flight and get my boarding pass.

We were out of paper at home, so I grabbed a stack of “good on one side” scrap paper at work on which to print things. Most of it was old library handouts, drafts of new handouts, printed schedules and calendars. I failed to notice that not all the sheets were white and as it came out, I managed to print my boarding pass for my first flight on a pink sheet of paper the back side of which explained how to do research on children’s literature. Turns out my poverty was an asset because Southwest gave me a prize (a can caddy) for having my boarding pass printed on a different color.

I was the 91st person to board the plane and got a window seat just behind the wing. An extra bonus was the flight taking off towards the lake and turning over the downtown offering some great views of some of my most loved landmarks including St. Stephen’s.

Anyway, back to the story, I had that “I’m flying on a plane for the first time in 8 years” thing going on and spent a lot of time making sure I wasn’t going to try to bring anything that I shouldn’t. Packing light is a challenge for me. It’s sort of like complicated math for me: I can do it but it takes a lot of thinking and you can’t interrupt me. I debated at length about taking my Neo, going light and just grabbing a pen and pad of paper, but as I sit here typing away I can say that I’m very glad to have my writing tool with me. My hands would have cramped up by this point if I was hand writing.

(The pilot is talking and I can’t understand a word he is saying. Drinks are also coming. I’ve already eaten my cheese sandwich crackers but I’m saving my Ritz chips for the arrival of my glass of Dr. Pepper.)

So this morning I was up around 6:00. Latif got home last night, and well, since he started his job hosting at Benihana I haven’t seen much of him when he is conscious. I didn’t get to bed until after midnight and I didn’t sleep well, because I was cold, until Mr. Gaba came to bed a little later.

This morning I got up about 6:05. Late for me, but still way too early. I played around online, watched the local news, and tried to put off, as long as I could stand it, getting dressed and putting the last two items in my suitcase before closing it up. I was all ready to go by 8:00 am, but hanging around an airport costs money. Parking is free if it’s less than 30 minutes so I really did not want to hang around the airport. I read a few blogs, checked facebook again, and checked the flight status. I checked my bag to make sure I had everything I needed. I debated at length with myself about taking my thumb drive with me, fussed about whether I should re-print my boarding pass on white paper or if anyone would care that it was pink. Finally, at 8:40 we left. Latif drove and did not hurry. He made a usual missed exit kind of mistake that he seems to always make when he drops me off at an airport. This time he just took the next exit and we drove past the hotel where he used to work. (Once in Fort Wayne he simply put the car in reverse and drove backwards on the freeway to get to the exit.—It’s never a journey—It’s always an adventure.) Drinks are here. I’ll write more later.

Summer writing

2010-09-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long summer and I was supposed to dedicate my writing efforts to cranking out a rough draft of my work on the study habits of seminary students, so I put blogging aside for the summer. I did make some progress, but not as much as I intended. Anyway, I will try to get back to writing something at least once a week.

I did do some other writing this summer. Most particularly I wrote this story, with the help of two of my nieces, while I was on vacation at my eldest sister’s home in Fridley MN. You may be able to pick out what parts were contributed by the teenager, the five-year-old and the adult.

Enjoy.

Annabel’s home

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Annabel who lived in a tree in the middle of the city with her best friends, squirrels named Nutmeg Squally and Quirrel. The squirrels at times make her crazy especially during storms because they squeaked sooooooooo loud. One night there was a very bad storm. She woke not from the thunder but from the squeaking and said, “Stop squirrels,” but the squirrels wouldn’t stop. The next morning after the rain stopped she decided that she needed a new squirrel free home. And she got one.

This time Annabel’s new home was in the sewer with the rats. But unstable atmospheric conditions led to yet another horrible thunder storm. And it was a very prickly place. This didn’t help when rats squeaked from the thunder and made her jump on the prickly things.

“Oh dear” she thought, “I can’t live here either.”

So the next day she moved to a kennel and lived with the dogs. And she liked it so much in there because there was a really soft blanket that she could use to muffle noise the barking dogs made. Unfortunately her best squirrel friends were afraid of the dogs and refused to visit her there. But it was so cozy there she couldn’t move anywhere else. Until the dogs started ganging up on her and started to get out of her cages and tried to attack her.

“Oh dear” she thought, “maybe I will have to move after all.”

And she did move after all. She moved to a bee farm and found their honey quite delightful. Even the squirrels liked it there, and would visit often. But she didn’t like it anymore because she didn’t like getting stung.

“Oh dear,” she said. And then she thought, “Oh, Deer!” I’ll move to the wildlife sanctuary with the deer.

When she got there she met a very kind deer named Bambi. He let Annabel ride on him. But Annabel had gained weight from eating honey and it hurt Bambi, so he bit her. She was terrible upset by this and felt that it was necessary to leave immediately. But she was crying that she wanted her Mamma and Dada.

Then Nutmeg Squally and Quirrel showed up and said, “Oh Annabel the jet stream has moved south bringing in cooler temperatures and stabilizing the atmosphere so if you come back to live in the tree there will not be thunderstorms to scare us, so you will not have to go back to your mamma and dada who we know are ogres.”

So Annabel moved back to the tree in the city with her three friends and collected their fluff and made ear plugs and never had to move again. Until the tree was invaded by a fungus and the city had to cut it down, but that’s a story for another day.

A slice of life with Latif

2010-06-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

Last week as Latif and I played host to our New Orleans friends, we stopped in at Usinger Sausage on old world 3rd street, and along with the meat I bought to eat and share with our guests, I also got a small garlic summer sausage for us off the discount table. Tonight Latif decided to slice some of that along with a block of cheddar in his usual comical fashion. Words and pictures fail to capture it, but this video comes close.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Graduation and a final look.

2010-05-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

I wore my new silk dress to church that morning and taught Sunday school. After a quick lunch I drove myself to town. The seniors all assembled in the home-ec room where we exchanged gifts and robed. St Thomas had the nicest graduation gown in the area. They were the school’s old choir robes that they had bought matching caps for. They looked sharp but you always hoped that it would still be a bit cool out since they were heavy.

Margo gave us milk crates and rolls of toilet paper. Jaci gave us each a gumball machine that did not require change. Kevin gave us caps with our names on them. I got a mug from Peggy and I gave them a card with the picture of the eight of us that was taken the night before our junior prom. I also gave them small plastic baskets and a bottle of bubbles.

The pastors in town had a rotation for doing the invocation and the benediction at graduation and that year my Dad was up in the order. Jaci’s dad as principal was also on stage. Margo’s dad was on the school board for many years and often served as president and would be on stage to hand out the diplomas but Margo’s Mom wanted him to sit by her and asked him not to serve in that roll our senior year. He surprised his daughter though by coming in from the side to hand her the diploma before returning to sit next to his wife. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite singing a song about staying friends forever when I didn’t have any plans to stay in touch with any of my classmates.

Peter’s Speech:

12 short years ago, on this very stage, 14 5&6 year olds graduated from kindergarten. From those 14 kids, half are gone and a new one had joined in.
That graduation received a write up in the school’s newspaper. In it Terry was asked his name.
“Terry” he said.
When asked “Terry who?” Terry said, “I haven’t learned that yet.”
Also in the article was a paragraph that said, “When the kids were asked what they thought of school they all agreed that they liked it. In fact, some kids liked it so much they wish they could come on Saturday and Sunday too.” Go figure.
As the years went by, our class had its share of stupid stunts, most people know about my ramming my head into telephone poles and doorways. I wasn’t the only one with these stunts. How many have heard about Jason, while in second grade, sharpening his crayon in the pencil sharpener. Terry was blamed by at least 10 eye witnesses, until Jason finally confesses. Now picture this: a cold winter’s day during recess in grade school, a metal pole, and Peggy’s tongue. Put them all together and you get a sticky situation.
A lot more of these stunts occurred but these ones stand out the most in my mind, so the rest of the class is off the hook.
Sometimes during the school day, we had some free time and were pretty bored. Some of the things we talked about were downright weird. For example, on more than one occasion Ruth’s thumbs came up as a topic of discussion. I think they look like toes and could be interchangeable. Jaci thinks they are a cross between a spaceman and a garbage can. Everyone else doesn’t know what to think of them.
Another topic is about the striking resemblance of Ruth and a 1937 graduate named Betty Ray. Just about everyone asked sees the resemblance except for Ruth.
A lot has happened since 1978, three presidents, the Dallas Cowboys won their last Super Bowl in 1978 and I was less than 4 feet tall.
But things do change, The Cowboys stink, I finally grew and Terry can write his full name.
We must always remember that when change comes, we must also make the necessary changes and adjustments or be left behind.

My Speech:

Today you see eight of us up here graduating and you are probably thinking, “That is a small class.” What you don’t know is that if every person who had ever been in the St. Thomas class of 1990, dating back to kindergarten, would still be in this class, there would not be 8 of us up here. There would be 24.
We hit our peak in the 4th grade when there were 16 of us. After that we lost a person or two every year until our freshman year when we reached the eight mark and have been there ever since.
When a class is small, education is very personal. But we’re heading into the big world where many of us may become just another number or statistic. So to give a taste of this I’ve decided to take a highly impersonal approach and do this speech by the numbers. Keep in mind as I go through this that 1 person equals 12.5% of the class.
This class had a 1:1 boy girl ratio. 100% of the boys claim Catholic as their religion and 100% of the girls claim Lutheran.
62.5% are the oldest child in their family and 37.5% are the youngest. The average family having 4.25 kids which is well above the current national average of 1.7
75% live in town and 25% in the country.
The class of 90 has its share of smarts with 62.5% being honor students, which may explain why 50% of the class is making speeches today. 75% took 4 full years of math and 50% took 4 years of science.
When it comes to talent there is no shortage, except maybe in band where no one had been a member since the 6th grade. But 50% are in chorus and 87.5% participated in the drama club at least one year. 100% of the class has earned a school letter and 75% have held a starting position on some varsity team.
This class is 100% literate and despite all the people it has lost, has a 0% dropout rate.
By the numbers we look pretty good and I pray that God will keep blessing us as we go our separate ways.

After we recessed out of the gym—at a more normal pace—we stood in the receiving line which was a bit strange for me. A few alums who I had never been social with when they were students felt compelled to give me hugs. All of Kevin’s relatives introduced themselves to me. Lucky for Peter, nobody made a point of examining my thumbs. Kim who graduated the year before was disgusted with me commenting, “Well, no tears here.” Freshmen Marty made a point of telling me that he liked my speech saying, “It was short and I could hear all of it.”

After the receiving line we went back into the home-ec room to collect our belongings. It was Margo who lifted up her head and did a quick count. “All eight of us are here. This may be the last time in ten years that we are all together.” I didn’t think much of the comment then. I was anxious to get home and so glad to be done with high school, but she was right… more than right. It was and is the last time the eight of us would be together. For one decade of my life those were my classmates and while I didn’t always like them or they me, we had that in common.

I got home. All told 47 people came for the open house. Peter showed up with Freshman Mark and gave me a gift of a piece of crystal stem ware. I kept my tassel in it (until I lost both in a house fire). A month after graduation Jason showed up at our door and gave me an alabaster box as a graduation gift. I don’t have a record of a gift from Terry but a vague recollection of a card with a two dollar bill.

Rebecca called me from Hong Kong and I had to stand behind the curtain in the dining room to block out enough noise to hear her. I described all the food on the table and she thanked me. We had fancy rolled sandwiches, cream puffs, a tort, fresh fruit, glorified rice and banana cake. Most of the cake mom had forgotten to get out of the freezer downstairs didn’t think of it until all the guests had left. I had fun talking to my cousin Colleen and we both enjoyed teasing Sarah and Bob. Mom and Dad gave me luggage and bedding for college and I got all sorts of practical going away to school gifts. Aunty Norma (also my God mother) sat beside me while I opened the cards and gifts. Colleen was on the other side recording my gifts so I could do the dreaded thank you notes. The gifts were all displayed on my bookcase that we set up in the living room for the occasion. When the day was over I was exhausted and very glad it was all over.

School ended but the yearbook meetings did not. There was one on Wednesday where we finished everything we could until the roll with our graduation pictures got developed. When they did I was the only editor who made it to the final meeting with Mrs. Kappel. In picking out a class graduation day picture, I chose based entirely on how good I looked in the picture. The picture of Mrs. Billings’ retirement open house ended up being included on the graduation page because the other pages were completed and it had to go somewhere. On the page with our class picture and individual portraits we needed some copy to fill the space in the two page spread. I avoided sentimental statements and carefully composed the following:

“Eight people clumped together not because of common goals, backgrounds, or interests but simply because they were born at a certain time and live in a certain place. For this they have grown and learned together.”

I didn’t make it for the ten year reunion. I hoped to go. But My Father-in-Law’s death in the spring of 2000 left me without vacation days and our landlords’ decision to rent to their granddaughter and not renew our lease meant I had to move and had no money for a trip.

I just realized that I’ve mentioned our class motto a few times, but never stated what it was. Well here it is:

“Life has many wonders in store for he who looks at every finish line as the start of the next race.”

With this blog I’m at the end of my class of 1990 recollections. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. Now on to the next thing for me: More frequent writings about Life, Libraries, Lutherans and Life with Latif.

Class of 1990 the last week of school

2010-05-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

Monday:

I had earned enough extra credit from yearbook that I had points to spare. I tried selling them to the highest bidder. Jaci and Peggy were both interested but Mrs. Kappel said no.

I started working on creating an inventory database for the science room.

Sarah was back from her weekend in Minot with Bob and his folks. She picked me up from school and told me stories on the way home about his folks' “yapping dog.”

Tuesday:

Terry found an article about the class’s kindergarten graduation that he was going to give to somebody to use in their speech. He then looks at me and says, “You didn’t go to kindergarten here. That means you’re not really part of the class.”

At lunch Peter, Kevin, Peggy, Margo, Jaci, and I skipped the chili being served at school and headed out to find some lunch. First we were going to Jaci’s but then we changed our minds and headed for Kevin’s house. Halfway there Peggy’s dad picked us up and drove us. I think we had frozen pizza. After we ate, we walked back to school side by side spanning the witdth of Main Street.

In girls Phy-Ed we talked Mrs. Barker into letting us play mat ball. It’s a form of kickball that has a few odd twists. One, the ball is set, not rolled to the kicker. Two the bases are large tumbling mats that can hold multiple runners. You run 1st to 3rd base twice before heading home. The only time you have to run after you get to 1st is when the last kicker is up. You can only go through the kicking order once. It was a game none of us had played since the 6th grade and we had to go down to the 4th grade room to get the mats. It was a lot of fun and for the first and only time in my gym class life I caught a fly ball.

At home I finally finished my bookshelves.

Wednesday:

I spent most of the day putting the science room’s inventory into an Apple Works Data Base for Miss Kassian. The junior honor students called “gray gowns,” though they didn’t wear gowns at graduation, but rather got gray ropes to wear, served as ushers at graduation. They got to pin flowers on parents of the graduates, hand out bulletins, and before graduation they had to put the senior class motto up on the gym wall next to the stage. Our class colors were green and silver so they had to cut out the letters and put tin foil cut outs behind them. Jr. Stephanie didn’t like our motto because it was too long. The juniors were working on the letters in the library and some of my class was supervising when Mrs. Barker came in and scolded us for sitting on the tables. She just noticed that I was one of them sitting on the tables when the bell rang. Wednesday it was official, my marks were good enough that I was exempt from my finals.

Thursday

I went to school just long enough to practice our song for graduation. Sarah and I went to Grafton so I could shop for a gift for my LYF friend Linda. We also stopped at the school in Grafton and filled out forms to work for the Migrant School in the summer. I would be working in the 3 year old room. At home I finished making cards for all my classmates and Mrs. Hollis showed up so my mom could help her sew a quilt for a wedding. I finally got to working on my speech and went to bed about 2:00 am.

Friday

I got to school too late to practice our song for graduation. I went to the library and finished writing my speech and then went to the computer room to type it out. After that it was off to graduation practice.

Part of the object of graduation in St. Thomas, North Dakota is to make it last at least one hour. It’s a town event and people want to feel like they traveled to see something. With only 8 students this took some practice. We got to walk in two at a time but we had to walk very slowly. I was paired with Peggy since we would split up at the stage and come in at opposite sides, and we needed to be in alphabetical order once we were up on stage. As I noted in my journal: “If I walked any slower I’d be standing still.” We ran through our speeches. I was last and Mr. Dick made no corrections to my volume and speed. Even though he had imposed minimum lengths (A rule invention that I credit to my sister Sarah who was the sole honor student at her graduation and gave a speech of less than two minutes) he didn’t seem to mind that mine was a bit short of the five minute minimum. Another time consumer was that when we received our diplomas we had to walk the entire stage. The moving line started from the podium and we had to again practice walking slowly across the stage to the table with the deplomas. When Mr. Hanson called my name I corrected the pronunciation of my last name. He yelled at me. “You’re family has been here 10 years and nobody ever told me I was saying your name wrong?!” Rebecca later told me that she had tried several times to correct him when she was a freshman, but gave up after a while.

At home I wrapped my classmate’s gifts in Winnipeg Free Press comic pages from 1980—the year I moved to North Dakota. I don’t think anyone got the connection. Dad started bugging me about my warped book case side and felt I should make a hook to hold the shelf tight to the side. I finally told him, “If you want to make a hook, go ahead.” And he did.

That night mom drove me to Niagara to attend Linda’s graduation. We spent a little time at her open house before heading home.

Saturday

I watched Loony Toons,.cleaned my room, trimmed the grass, watered the flowers, retyped my speech, and took a long walk. Aunty Norma and my cousin Colleen came and we all sat up and talked until past midnight. Mom was busy getting food ready for the open house after my graduation. She had borrowed these fancy coffee pots and I thought they looked stupid.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 36

2010-05-15T04:04:00.000-07:00

From fourth grade until the junior high, I was on the school’s acro team: a tumbling team that would perform at half time at varsity basketball games. While I was no great tumbler, I was very flexible. In the sixth grade Mrs. Barker, the acro coach, challenged us all to learn to do the splits. She said that anyone who could do them before she could would get a can of pop. It was this challenge that motivated me to stretch like I’ve never done before and by the end of the season I had earned my pop. But Mrs. Barker never made good on her promise. I kept reminding her over the years. At times when warming up in Phy-Ed I would announce to her that I was thirsty as I casually slid into the splits. Monday was awards night. Peter got the constitution award. Kevin got the math award. Terry got all the most valuable player sports trophies. Jason got all the spirit trophies. I collected participation pins for drama, choir, library, yearbook, newspaper, a letter bar for being a student manager for volleyball, and then Mrs. Barker added an award that was not on the program and presented me with a six pack of coke-a-cola. When I got back to my seat Terry asked if he could have a can. I told him I would exchange one can for one of his trophies. He did not agree.

Tuesday Sarah drove me to school so she could have the car. After lunch we had our plays’ matinee for the school. I don’t think I mentioned it but that year we did two plays: The Lottery and Feathertop. I was not in The Lottery at all so I used the time to review my lines. We started the second play too soon so freshman Sarah who had parts in both plays was late getting on stage. Mostly it went well except for me forgetting a few lines and Peter breaking his sword. I stuck around after school and watched the video recording of our performance. I couldn’t leave anyway since I had to wait for Sarah to come and pick me up.

Wednesday a woman came to talk to the junior high and high school students about alcoholism. She talked for two hours. She kept asking the teachers if her time was up. We students would call for more, the teachers would shrug, and she would keep talking.

Thursday Physics class was fun. We took our projects down to the grade school. I did mine for the 3rd, 4th, and 6th grade rooms. It was so much fun. At that moment I was convinced that I wanted to do nothing else with my life besides teach kids.
That evening was the final performance of the plays. We finished it with all our props intact.
After the play there was a cast party at the Barkers. Freshmen Mark and Peter played the most bizarre game of horse using a Nerf hoop that was only 4.5 feet off the ground. I left when the guys started a Spanish swearing contest.

Friday I did my physics project for the 5th and the 1st grade. In Choir we sang “When love is kind.” After school there was a yearbook meeting and Jaci and I sang all sorts of songs as self appointed members of PAS (Positive attitude society) in an attempt to finish writing the copy for the music pages.

At home I finished staining & varnishing my book shelves. Saturday Mom and I went to Cavalier so I could buy graduation gifts for my classmates. Mom and Dad headed off to Winnipeg after church and I spent a rainy Sunday watching TV and writing Rebecca a letter.

REG

lhg edited and approved

class of 1990 Week 35

2010-04-30T05:12:00.000-07:00

Monday I met Mrs. Kappel at 6:30am in the school parking lot and we headed to the NIPA conference in Grand Forks. It was a long day. Kevin and Peter were already there and were wound up. The last part of it was the awards banquet. Each time an entry from St. Thomas placed, one of us would have to go up to the front to collect the trophy or certificate. The guys kept refusing to go up stating, “That’s not my tomato.” We rode back in Mrs. Kappel’s little red Ford Escort. I was in the front and the guys were in the back. At stop lights they would sway side to side and make the car rock. They never stopped talking the entire way back to St. Thomas.
That night at play practice the guys were still wound up. I almost had all my lines down. My problem was working on volume.
Wednesday I have a note stating that the Grand Forks Harold had five sections and that none of them has a loose page that had to be attached before putting it on the newspaper poll. I think this is the first time that I wrote about a lack of loose pages being a good thing.

I finally got my costume for the play worked out. My dress had a huge bustle in the back. At Thursday’s play practice we needed to tape a paper barn to the back of the stage. Whenever someone wasn’t on stage they were rolling tap for the back of the barn. After rehearsal we had a barn raising using push brooms to get it stuck to the back of the stage wall. The brooms left streaks of dust at the top causing Mrs. Barker to comment that our barn was a bit dusty upstairs.

Friday we finally got the school paper out. The last paper of the year always featured the senior spots. There was a picture of each graduate and we would fill out a question survey stating things like our favorite food, nick names, pet peeves and advice to underclassmen. In answer to the question about what I’d miss the most about STHS I wrote, “That exhilarating rush of energy I get when I leave the building.”

Friday was also the town clean-up-day. Once a year in the spring on a Friday all the students of St. Thomas Public School were assigned sections of the town and sent out with cheap flimsy plastic bags to pick up trash. The first and second graders did the school grounds. The other grades got sections of the town. In the junior high students would be driven about a mile out of town and would then walk back in picking up trash in the ditches. The grade school classes were supervised by their teachers and the upper classes by their class advisor. A few of the senior boys would get to drive a truck around the town and pick up large trash that the people would put out. At the end of it everyone would come back to the school and the city council would treat the students to those little ice-cream cups with the wooden spoons and a can of pop. If we finished early we would be dismissed to go home. Peter and Kevin go to drive the truck. The rest of us went to pick up trash in the city park by the playground equipment. Margo, Jaci, Jason and Terry had a context to see who could swing the highest. Terry won just moments before Mr. Dick showed up to supervise us. It was clear that he would have preferred to have all the students in class. We finished our area as quickly as possible, got hour treats, and since we were seniors we didn’t have to wait for an official dismissal before heading home. I enjoyed driving out of town and passing underclassmen still out picking up trash.

Sarah came home for the weekend and we enjoyed playing catch in the front yard. Sunday Jason was confirmed. After church we went to an open house at his home in St. Thomas. Jason’s home was across the street from the school which was good since I had to be at the school at 1:00 p.m. to sing with the choir for Mrs. Billings’ (4th grade teacher) retirement reception.

Play practice was at 7pm that night and it was a dress rehearsal. The first act was OK but the second act all our props were falling apart. Peter broke his pipe. Kevin’s stage knife broke. We recorded the practice and watched it afterward.

Class of 1990 Week 34

2010-04-23T05:08:00.000-07:00

I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. working on my paper for English. I got up at 7:00am, packed up my typewriter, and took it to school with me. I set it up in the back of the English classroom and typed my endnotes and outline. Everyone in our class turned the paper in on time. The English research paper was one of those must finish assignments. If it didn’t get in, you failed the class and would not be able to graduate. With the papers done Mrs. Kappel had us turn our attention to getting the school newspaper out. She wanted a story from each of us each day for the rest of the week. This included the senior spots that each of us did.

On Wednesday a hole appeared in the school parking lot. It turned out there was an old forgotten-about cistern there. It was driven over that morning and a few cars ended up trapped between the building and what turned out to be a seven feet long, eight feet deep hole. It was filled the same day.

In Physics we paired up to do simple physics projects that we would then demonstrate to several of the grade school classes. Miss Kassian let me work on my own. The previous year I got pared up with Terry. I picked the project and did all the talking. He got an A for shaking a test tube. I planned a project on gravity and air resistance.

Thursday night play practice was a bit comical. Only Kevin and I showed up so Mrs. Barker and Miss Kassian got up on stage and filled in for all the other parts. It was hard to keep track of who was playing what character at what time. We all did a lot a laughing.

That weekend Mom started addressing graduation invitations. Saturday Mom and I planned to go to Grand Forks to find shoes to go with the dress mom had made me from the silk that Rebecca had sent, but there was snow on the ground; five inches of heavy sloppy wet snow had appeared during the night. By noon it was over a foot. I spent the day cleaning my room and working on my senior memory book. Sunday after church was the confirmation/graduation recognition dinner. That night I annoyed people at play practice by singing “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.” Kevin and Peter were not there. They had gone to Grand Forks for the NIPA (Northern Interscholastic Press Association) conference. I would have gone, but had to bow out so I could be at the church dinner in my honor.

Luther on what should go in a library

2010-04-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

In honor of National Library Week a Luther quote I pulled out of a book from 1889 called Luther on Education

But my advice is, not to collect all sorts of books indiscriminately, thinking only of getting a vast number together. I would have discrimination used, because it is not necessary to collect the commentaries of all the jurists, the productions of all the theologians, the discussions of all the philosophers, and the sermons of all the monks. Such trash I would reject altogether, and provide my library only with useful books; and in making the selection, I would advise with learned men.

In the first place, a library should containable Holy Scriptures in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, and other languages. Then the best and most ancient commentators in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Secondly, such books as are useful in acquiring the languages, as the poets and orators, without considering whether they are heathen or Christian, Greek or Latin. For it is from such works that grammar must be learned.

Thirdly, books treating of all the arts and sciences.

Lastly, books on jurisprudence and medicine, though here discrimination is necessary.

A prominent place should be given, to chronicles and histories, in whatever languages they may be obtained; for they are wonderfully useful in understanding and regulating the course of the world, and in disclosing the marvelous works of God. O how many noble deeds and wise maxims produced on German soil have been forgotten and lost, because no one at the time wrote them down; or if they were . written, no one preserved the books: hence we Germans are unknown in other lands, and are called

brutes that know only how to fight, eat, and drink. But the Greeks and Romans, and even the Hebrews, have recorded their history with such particularity, that even if a woman or child did any thing noteworthy, all the world was obliged to read and know it; but we Germans are always Germans, and will remain Germans.

Class of 1990 Week 33

2010-04-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

Easter Monday there was no school. It had been a mild enough winter that we didn't have to make up any days. Sarah and Bob left in the morning. Mom and I went into Cavalier to do some shopping. After supper I drove myself to town for play practice.

Tuesday night Mom was doing a fitting for someone's prom dress when we got a phone call from Detroit. It was a man that my Dad had baptized on Easter in Japan the week I was born. He had lost touch with my folks and had recently been transferred by Mazda to work in their Detroit factory. Now a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, his pastor showed him an LCMS Lutheran Annual and he was able to contact my father for the first time in more than a decade and a half.

Wednesday I was getting more and more behind in my school work. That evening I got a call from Mary, the admissions counselor from Concordia University Wisconsin, who called me to register for my Fall classes over the phone. I also wrote a letter to the president of the North Dakota district to work on getting some financial aid since I was planning on becoming a church worker.

The rest of the week I struggled to make progress on my research paper for English, my writing assignment for the Institute of Children's Literature, and to memorize my lines for the play. It was nice outside and I kept coming home and spending time sweeping the back patio and playing with our cat, Neko. On Saturday Dad decided that the weather was nice enough that there was no reason for the cat to be in the garage. Most of the winter we had propped open the door with an ice cream bucket so Neko could get in and out. We had a box in there for him to sleep in and put his food and water there in the winter. The cat was never, even on the coldest of days, allowed in the house. His coat would get very thick and like all cats he would seek out warm places, be it standing by the front door when the UPS delivery guy came, or best of all curling up on the hood of the car after it had been running. Dad was sick of the cat leaving muddy paw prints on the car, so the bucket was kicked aside and Neko would have to be kept out as much as possible. This also meant that Neko's food and water would be outside of the back door. The previous summer that had been a bit of an issue as a couple of magpies had taken to stealing his food for their young.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 32

2010-04-09T06:28:00.000-07:00

At St. Thomas Public School grade school students could only leave the school unattended during the day if they were walking home for lunch. Starting in Jr. High you could leave school unattended during the noon hour and there were no restrictions on where you went. Most often this involved going up town for candy and such or in the case of some going home to watch Days of our Lives. Seniors in their last term, when the administration felt they deserved it, got Senior Privileges. That meant that you did not need to be on school grounds if you were not in class. So you could leave during any study hall or open period, not just lunch. You still could not operate a vehicle during school hours unless you had special permission—like going to a doctor’s appointment or soliciting for yearbook ads. With our music issues for graduation worked out the week before, my class was finally granted our senior privileges. Tuesday I took advantage of them by using my study hall to go up town to buy stamps.

Geographical note
In St. Thomas you never went “down town” you went “up town.” From the school that constituted walking one block east (preferably not cutting through Thomson’s yard) to main street. It consisted of a post office, café, insurance office, K & D Hartz grocery store. There was also a bank, the city council building, and the Jack Gust Store which was a sort of general store that sold groceries, hardware, stationary—pretty much a bit of everything except clothes. His motto was “If I don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Main street itself is quite wide. At one time the highway went through town, now it curves around, but the wide street remained. It was possible to have cars parked on each curb and have a “car conversation” {persons driving opposite directions recognize each other, stop so the divers windows align, and then roll down their windows and sit in their vehicles—usually pick-ups—in the middle of the street and have a good talk} and still be able to get around.

The week was one of studying for tests, working and falling behind in my research paper for English that I was doing on recyclable and photo degradable plastics. I also had another assignment to work on for the Institute of Children’s Literature.

Thursday we were dismissed early—me earlier than most because with senior privileges and not taking shop I didn’t need to hang around until 1:30. I left school at 12:45 and stopped at the Cenex station outside of town. Sarah had caught a ride home from the University of North Dakota with Kim (class of 1989). When they saw my car at the Cenex Kim pulled in and Sarah got in the driver’s seat of our Cavalier and drove me home after I finished filling the tank. Bob arrived at our house around 7:00pm, just in time for Maundy Thursday services.

That week I also got a package from Hong Kong with red printed silk for mom to make me a dress for graduation. Friday Mom and I went into Cavalier and found a dress pattern for me. Mom was getting busy with sewing at home. She did alterations and a steady stream of girls with their prom dresses was showing up to get them fitted. My Mom prided herself in fixing gaping necklines and making the dresses more decent.

Friday we had church in the morning and then I helped set up for the Easter Breakfast. At home Sarah played hymns and sang alto, Bob sang bass, and I took the soprano line. It was, to quote my journal, “sooo totally cool!” After supper, Mom and I took on Sarah and Bob in a game of Trivial Pursuit and lost. I filled out my housing application for Concordia University Wisconsin before going to bed.

Saturday Sarah, Bob, and I went to Winnipeg. We took Grandma out for lunch at Alycia’s. After that we took in the “Touch the Universe” exhibit at the museum and then had dinner at the Potapoff's before heading home.

Easter was lovely. I helped with the Easter breakfast, then church, then light lunch of egg salad sandwiches. For supper we drove about a mile and ate with Flossy and Harvey. After supper we played UNO. Bob won and Dad built the most character.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 31

2010-04-09T06:27:00.001-07:00

Neche North Dakota is a border town and each year they held an invitational music contest. Winning there didn’t get you to the state music festival but it was a good place to try out what you had worked on and see what needed improving before heading off to the regional contest in Mayville. That year none of the ensembles starred. In fact the only star was Freshmen Justin’s solo “Sing me a Chantey.” The quartet I was in needed a lot more practice but after school conflicted with Stephanie, before school was vetoed by Stephanie and Kathy because they said they couldn’t sing well in the morning and 5th hour was out because Mr. Torgeson was taking the juniors through the Choices program.

Friday was the music contest in Mayville. We left school at 6:45. I didn’t write much about that day except to say that I enjoyed talking to some of my LYF friends and I was happy that we had failed to star in anything and would not be going to the state music contest. I was happy about this for a few reasons. First, I generally didn’t enjoy class trips. Second, I really didn’t think we deserved to go given the lack of willingness to practice and the general attitude of the choir that year. Last, I was starting to fall behind in my school work and really needed the time.

SRA tests:
On Tuesday SRA tests started. Seniors didn’t take the tests, but what with combined classes like physics and how the tests impacted teachers schedules it was a messed up week. Mr. Hanson was involved with administering the tests so in Business Law we were left to work on our research papers for English. Most of the hour however was spent arguing. Peggy had decided that Peter would again be taking her to prom as he did our junior year. Peter had no desire to go to prom. I defended him and Margo and Jaci jumped in on Peggy’s side. It was really more funny than anything else.

At home I watched too much TV, didn’t do near enough homework, and had fun helping out in the kitchen with the rest of the LYF group after church on Wednesday.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 30

2010-04-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Monday quite a few students who went on the trip missed school because they were sick and burned. We had play tryouts that night. Tuesday I discovered that I had landed the role of Mistress Goodkin in a theatrical adaptation of Hawthorne’s Feathertop. Peter got the part of Feathertop. I had 170 lines to memorize.

That week I had one of those rare co-ed phy-ed classes with Mr. Dick. I never really liked phy-ed but I always appreciated Mrs. Barker’s life-time fitness approach. She always divided us into teams that were evenly matched and often lost track of the score. The point was to warm up, play hard, cool down and learn the value of physical activity. Mr. Dick took a different approach with phy-ed. He believed that it was aggression release time. He would pick out two athletic types, have them pick teams so that it became clear to each person what their peers thought of his or her abilities, then you would play a game and the loosing team would be punished with having to do 25 push-ups. He would secretly pick out a person on the penalized team to count, and if that person failed to do all 25 the entire team would have to complete the task again. It made an un-liked class downright detestable.

My class also had to settle on what music we were going to have for our graduation ceremony. Our senior class privileges were being withheld until the administration agreed with our plans. There were only four of us in choir: Jason, Kevin, Jaci and me. No one in our class had been in band since grade school and no one was a soloist in any form. The four of us who did sing agreed to do Michel W. Smith’s Friends arranged for two parts. The band would grudgingly play for our processional and recessional. We presented our plans and were told that we could not graduate with only one vocal piece of music. That there were going to be five speeches was not enough. Finally we got the boys choir to agree sing something.

That year for my birthday I did something I had not done since I was six. I invited boys to my party. I invited all seven of my classmates for sukiyaki dinner. As it turned out that night the school was having a presentation to introduce the taxpayers to a new interactive TV system that would save our school and expand the classes that were offered in the high school. The Operation Contact group was providing babysitting for the event and since Kevin, Jaci and Margo were on that task force and Jason, Peggy and Peter road with them (Terry turned down the invitation) my guests all left right after dinner. Even though life in the parsonage meant no property tax my mom was curious and wanted to go. Dad was at church, so by 7:30 I was home alone on my birthday. This surprisingly did not depress me. It was nice outside (by that I mean the wind was down and the temps were somewhere in the 40s) and the ice in the ditch was melting so I put on my father’s rubber boots and went out in the front yard and used my feet to move around the large thin sheets of ice that were in our ditch. Mom got home at 11:30 and we had tea and she told me all about the presentation.
Sarah came home that weekend bringing Bob with her. Bob was able to change the bit in our drill so I could start to put the hinges on my book case. I spent much of the weekend sanding them in the basement. Sunday night I drove myself to play practice. I was working on memorizing my lines as I drove to town: not a safe practice even in the low traffic environment of North Dakota.

Class of 1990 Week 29

2010-03-20T11:17:00.001-07:00

Of all the weeks of my high school career I probably enjoyed this one the most. It was the week of the triennial school science trip to Florida and I was one of the few who stayed behind. Only Peter and I remained in the senior class.

My reasons for not going were two fold. On the one had there was my dislike of traveling in general and class trips in particular. On the other hand was the price. Most of the fundraising for the trip took the form of half time bingo at basketball games and calendar raffles. Since my parents are morally opposed to all forms of gambling these revenue generators were cut off to me. That left me with only the Taco feeds, about two a year that generated about $16/student going on the trip. Most of the cost of the trip would end up coming out of my own funds. Since I was planning on going to a private college out of state (an education that I’m still paying for) I was remiss to spend money on such a trip.

For a lot of classes I hung out in the library creating signs in calligraphy for Mr. Hanson. Mrs. Hollis had us creating our own newsletter on the computer. Mine was called the NonInformer and I sent it to Rebecca in Hong Kong. (Later I revived the title in college as part of an elaborate scheme to catch a man—it worked) Most of the classes ended up being combined. There were only eight of us sophomores-seniors that stayed behind. Much of the week was dedicated to the yearbook. Mrs. Kappel would have the Home Ec. class cook something and then we would all assemble in the Home Ec. room and eat and work on the yearbook. Some days four hours were dedicated to yearbook work. I also managed to get to the shop classroom and got my project to the point where I could take it home to stain and varnish it. I had copied a collapsible bookcase that Rebecca had bought from Target. In the end, mine ended up costing me twice as much as the original and one side was warped.

Some periods I spent shelf reading the library and going through the reference collection. I made a few changes. We had World Book encyclopedia sets from ‘74 through ‘79. None of the sets were complete and I reasoned that aside from going for the current set students didn’t really care about the year as much as they cared about the letter so I took all the back sets and arranged them by letter then year. We had like three As, four Bs, two Cs. There were also these books on the states that were arranged by the author’s last name but I alphabetized them by state. I didn’t ask Mrs. Barker if it was OK to do these things but I reasoned that if it made more sense to me it would make more sense everyone else. Three years later when I came back in college to do a practicum at the school my changes were still in place.

By the end of the week we had completed about 12 yearbook pages, I finished my signs for Mr. Hanson and made an extra one for Mrs. Hollis that said, “Work now, Procrastinate later.” It was a paraphrase of something my mother had recently told me.

I spent time at home planning my birthday party. I made invitations out of large index cards that had a folded crane inside. I was inviting my class over to my house for sukiyaki dinner on my birthday. When I told Peter about it he let out a yell. “I was going to get you a present.” He said, “When I was in the twin cities I found the perfect gift. It was Brad’s fault! I never got back to the store to get it.” He told me he planned to get me the sound track to the movie the Princess Bride. I was blown away. For me this is still the perfect example of “It’s the thought that counts.”

Saturday we had a Lutheran Youth Fellowship Zone Rally in Cavalier at the curling club. I didn’t curl but enjoyed hanging out and even got some of the other non-players to engage in a game of Ker-Plunk.

Sunday Dad traded pulpits with Pastor Watkins from Wittenberg chapel in Grand Forks. I stayed home. Typical of my high school experience, with music contests just over a week away I started to get a sore throat.

During the week, I wrote many times in my journal how much I was enjoying the week and how much I was dreading things going back to normal on Monday.

Class of 1990 Week 28

2010-03-17T06:22:00.000-07:00

It was a short week with spring break starting on Wednesday. Spring break was always set to coincide with the North Dakota State Class B boy’s basketball tournament. Many people went to the games regardless of one's own school's participation in the tournament. Having these days off was almost sacred to the point that if school was cancelled for too many snow days it was preferable to go to school on Good Friday to make up a day than to give up the travel day to the tournament.

Monday I had a wonderful day. It was in the upper 40s, grey and foggy out. That type of weather has always put me in a good mood. Peter, on one of those many occasions that my class was left alone, something I thought was normal until my freshman year in college when a Foundations of Education instructor admonished us many times to never, under any circumstances, leave a class unattended.—but I digress. Anyway, Peter entertained us with his impersonations of some of the teachers. His Mr. Torgeson was very good.

Monday was also a first for me. I finished my draft of my Institute of Children’s Literature assignment and it was too short. My writing had gotten so tight that I needed to add substance instead of trimming word fat to fall within the word count. In college my tight writing style meant that I almost never reached the page minimum required/recommended by professors, yet in five years I only had one professor dock my grade for not writing enough pages. Most seemed to appreciate the way I got to the point. –The paper I got my grade docked on was a five pager—I handed in four—for Theology of the Lutheran Confessions. This of course was just at the beginning of laser and ink jet printing that made it possible to manipulate paper lengths with font size. My word processor/typewriter still limited me to pica and elite. Anyway, back to the subject at hand:

Tuesday was mostly useless, as are most days before a long break. I spent the rest of the week, reading, doing jigsaw puzzles, watching TV, and filling out financial aid and other college forms. I generally enjoyed my days off.

On Thursday I went to Cavalier and opened a checking account so I could send off a check to Concordia University Wisconsin with my application. The place looked like a Halloween Ghost town. Cavalier, whose school colors were orange and black, had made it to the state tournament and most of the town had gone to the tournament. So as empty as the streets were there were orange and black and banners and steamers hanging all over town. Before I went home I treated myself to a cream cheese croissant and a cabbage pocket from Burke’s Bakery.

Saturday we got snow. I wrote Rebecca a long letter; in it I waxed on about how someday I would write a book. Sunday the wind picked up. The weather was not bad enough to cancel church, but bad enough to keep most people away.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 27

2010-03-08T15:57:00.000-08:00

Monday my class had a class meeting with Mr. Dick to discuss the senior breakfast that was scheduled for that Thursday. This was the tradition where the senior class cooked and served breakfast for all the teachers in the school as a thank you for putting up with us over the years. Even the grade school teachers came for this. It was always done in the Home Ec. room. Mr. Dick had definite ideas about what should be served and how it should be prepared.
"OK are you going to buy the cheap frozen OK that nobody likes or are you going to get the good stuff in the carton?"
"Who is going to boil the potatoes the night before so you can make the hash browns?"

I had never made hash browns but others in the class had and boiling the potatoes ahead of time didn't make sense to them. There was quite an argument about it that ended with him simply declaring, "Look, this is the way it should be done and this is how you are going to do it. So who is going to boil the potatoes ahead of time?"

Terry formally quit as Yearbook editor and Mrs. Kappel declared me to be the third editor. We had a meeting after school. Between class time and the meeting after we managed to finish copy for 3 ½ pages in one day. Margo helped me take down the volleyball posters in the gym.
Mrs. Barker sent me home with the play Feathertop so I could look it over and see if the presence of a witch in Hawthorn's play was going to cause any problems. When Rebecca was in high school they did Dracula and my parents did not let her have any part of it.

Mom and Dad spent Dad's day off by going to Winnipeg and spending it with Grandma. That night they came back and I leaned that Dad finally made his decision about the call. As I wrote it then, "We are (Praise the Lord) not going!"

Tuesday was spent working on the yearbook and trying to finish "The Time Machine" by Wells that I finally settled on for my book report that I thought was due Friday. Turns out Mrs. Kappel pushed it off till the following Tuesday.

Wednesday I reminded Mrs. Hollis about playing for church and she made herself a little sign that said "LENT church" that she carried around all day so she wouldn't forget. After the service Dad announced to the congregation that he was staying. Well, to the 17 people that showed up. The reaction was mostly positive.

Thursday we all showed up early at school to make the breakfast. I was the only one who served the tables. Mrs. Hollis came late so she sat and ate with us at the end of it. We got out of first hour so we could clean up. We finished early and those of us in Physics used the time to cram for a test we were taking that day. After the test Miss Kassian declared that she wasn't going to teach us anything new until the she gets back from Florida after the Science trip. In Business Law Mr. Hanson used the period to share with us his thoughts on the baseball strike.

I spent my study halls in the library as a "student librarian" I'd put papers on poles, check in the periodicals, shelve books and do check out if any grade school classes came in that hour. The study hall that hour only had two or three people and since the social studies classroom was cold, Mr. Torgeson often just brought the group to the library where it was ten to fifteen degrees warmer. Terry was also there and was trying to get Mr. Torgeson to tell him anything he knew about the book Robinson Crusoe. Terry was trying to read it for his book report and found it cumbersome to get through. When Mr. Torgeson didn't offer any assistance he asked me. I said I didn't know anything about the book but I pulled out a grade school version of it. 145 pages with larger print vs. the 350 page book he was struggling through. Terry took the book and Mr. Torgeson and I had a bit of a discussion about whether it was ethical for me to give him the abridged dumbed down copy. I reasoned that at least this way he would actually read something.

I was getting frustrated again with choir. I wrote about the quartet I was in, stating, "Except for not knowing the words, missing a few notes and not breathing in the right places, "He's Gone Away" is ready for state.

Saturday it was wonderful out: 37 degrees. The moon was full and you could see for miles. I took a walk by myself on the road. Sunday was even better, 45 degrees, muggy, windy and grey. I thought it was beautiful. I finished a roll of film taking pictures of the sludge in the ditches, snert, and various other early signs of spring. In the evening the wind died down and it was so quiet outside you could hear your own heart beat. I caught up on all my homework and even got some work done on my next Institute of Children's Literature assignment. Mom and I both agreed that it seemed like God's purpose in sending my Dad that call was to make us very happy about being North Dakota.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Week 26

2010-02-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

Monday when I left for school it was raining. The rain froze as it hit the car, and since the car wasn’t warm yet, by the time I drove the half mile down our road toward county road three I had to stop to scrape my window. I almost fell when I got out of the car, the road was so slick. It was a very slow ride to school. It was a crazy weather day. When I got out of school it was snowing and blowing and visibility was terrible. By 5:00 it was clear and the sun was shining.

Tuesday after school Mom and I went to Cavalier so the country nurse could give me a tetanus shot so we could finish my health form and send it off to Concordia Wisconsin.

Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. I had a hard time getting dressed because my arm was so sore from the shot. It was another picture day. We retook the volleyball picture so we would have the right stats in the picture. We didn’t get much done in senior math as Mrs. Hollis kept going off on tangents. People kept asking me if I was going to prom. I’d reply, “Only if someone asks me, and nobody will, so I guess I won’t be.” They would then point out that I went by myself Jr. Year. It’s one thing to go to a prom that you’ve spent hours the prior week prepping and decorating for but how socially pathetic do you have to be to go alone twice. Twenty people came to church that night. Only seven stayed for the youth group coffee after. The big news of Wednesday was that I got a scholarship from Concordia University Wisconsin. The Presidential Scholarship would cover about a third of my expenses and was renewable provided I managed to keep my GPA over a 3 point each semester.

Thursday Mr. Hanson took some time out of business law to inform us that Kevin would be the valedictorian and three of us would be co-salutatorians, Terry, Peter, and me. That meant that half the class would be making speeches for graduation. In Math I gave Mrs. Hollis a hard time for missing playing organ at the Lenten service the night before. I also made it to Shop during study hall so I could work on my bookcase. After school I helped set up for the Science Fair. My arm was still hurting so I just taped numbers on the tables. After that I went to a Year Book meeting. After that was a workshop for the school play. I got out of doing charades. I did everything else but I’ve always hated charades.

Friday was the school science fair. Thanks to Mr. Watson (the previous science teacher) once Science was an elective you were no longer required to do a project. He also eliminated the science fair for the 1st to 4th grade, reasoning, correctly that the parents worked harder on them than the students did. There was an experiment where you soaked a hardboiled egg in vinegar for like a month and then it would bounce—if I remember right, Peter, Jason, & Peggy had all done that project in various years. Juniors and seniors taking the science elective spent the day helping out. We also paired up to act as judges for the fifth and sixth grade projects. I was paired with Jr. Corey. We judged 6th grade projects. Basically, I asked all the questions and made all the decisions and Corey wrote them down. Jr. Paul and Kevin were also judging 6th graders. As I wrote it then:

After the 6th graders left for lunch we tallied our scores, then Kevin said, “Let's pretend were judging Tooter.” So we went, but he wouldn’t answer our questions, but Rachel jumped up very eager to talk about her project. Then we went back to Tooter and grilled him. Man it was funny. Next we did J.J. It was a riot. His project didn’t make sense at all.

The students we pretened to judge were freshmen. All the jr. high and high school students projects were judged by people Miss Kassian invited from UND. Without fail the real judges all had backgrounds in biology which made for a deep disadvantage if your project was in another field.

With the end of the Science fair my little reference business was over. I made three bucks. I gathered all the books on the topics, copied any articles we had and gave them a page with all the title and page number citations in the school's reference books that pertained to their topic I could have made $4 but I turned down one client. I still use the one I turned down as a teaching example in my work. When I asked her what her project was on she said, “Rocks.”

“What about rocks?”

“You know, like different kinds of rocks and stuff.”

“Is it about properties or how they are formed or where you find them?”

“It’s just all about rocks.”

"I need something more specific to work with, there are too many resources to gather about rocks.”We went in circles like this for a few minutes and then I told her that she could come and find me when she narrowed her topic. She never did.

Mom and Dad had gone to Plumas, MB, to visit the church that had issued the call to my dad. They didn’t get home until 9:30. Mom and I stayed up until 12:30 talking about what moving there would entail. The parsonage was small: one bathroom, two bedrooms, and only three closets in the entire house and no place at all for Dad’s books. Mom wasn’t sure how she would handle it. A lot of stuff would have to go.

Saturday I slept in until 11 am. I then spent the day taking my room apart. Mom was encouraging me to get rid of some junk. That night she went to a homemaker’s dinner and I made pancakes for Dad and Myself. We watched Star Trek the Next Generation and then Columbo together.

Sunday I taught Sunday school. In the afternoon the LYF went curling in Cavalier and because I was one of only two members who had ever curled before they made me a skip. I didn’t like that because if you are not sweeping it’s very easy to get cold on the ice. I was proud of myself for not falling down at all.That night the Simpsons was on and Bart was writing my all time favorite sentence on the board, “I will not waste chalk.”

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Week 25

2010-02-18T18:02:00.000-08:00

In school I got three clients for my reference business. That night was parent's night and I was charged with making the commemorative sign for the parents section. I drew the letters and others painted them. After school I drove to Cavalier to pick up the flowers, then home. I got dressed in a mother approved outfit; I was the only one in my class who wore a skirt. I thought my folks were the best dressed of the parents. Kevin wore a suit.

After my work on the sign was seen Betty Walski, the school secretary, asked me to make some signs for the office since "I have such a nice printing style." Thanks to the Calligraphy course I took by correspondence the year before, I went from having the worst handwriting in the school to being asked to make signs. I still had bad handwriting which confused people. But the thing to realize is that calligraphy is drawing each letter like it is its own work of art. Handwriting was something I tend to do too fast as I try to keep up with the flow of words coming out of my brain.

On Thursday of that week we were left alone for a while in Business Law and the class discussion turned to tattoos. Peggy wanted to get one and was telling us about all the cool things that the tattoo artists in Grand Forks could do. I sarcastically commented, "Thrill, you can look young forever. Just have the guy tattoo zits on your face." Peter and Kevin laughed and then Peter added looking at his arm, "What about freckles?"

Friday was a big all-school pep rally. The cheerleaders planned to do a "family feud" game and in preparation passed around some surveys earlier in the week. Mr. Stuberg (Sixth grade teacher, driver's education, coach for Jr. high football and high school basketball) was up for the first questions. Jr. Stephanie was the host and the first question was "Who is the biggest flirt in the school? " Mr. Stuberg hit the bell first and shouted pointing at the host, "YOU!" It was the top answer and his team decided to try to get the rest of the answers. As he walked back to his side, Peter, who was on the other team, yelled a suggestion, "Pick Ruth!" There was a huge burst of laughter and I don't think anyone laughed harder than me. After several minutes of being doubled over Mr. Torgeson felt compelled to come over and ask me if I was OK.

At home I finally finished the LYF newsletter; I finally got a rough draft done for my Institute of Children's Literature class. Mom decided to pitch our run of Reader's Digest that went back to 1974. She let me flip through them first and I ripped out all the "word power" quizzes and some of the cartoons and jokes. I also started to do needle point.

Saturday I spent the day in Grand Forks at a Zone Great Commission Convocation. In one of the sessions we looked at the theological content of hymns and we discussed Lutheran Problems with the hymn "In the garden." It was the first time I had ever heard of that hymn. It is one of the ironies in my life that I have only sung it four times and each time it was sung it was done as an introduction to an explanation on why it has no place in the Lutheran Liturgy. If you're going to rip it up, why have me sing it first?

Class of 1990 Week 24

2010-02-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

Class of 1990 Week 24

Things we did in class that week

Present Day Problems with Mr. Torgeson: We did a project that required us to call a bank and ask questions about setting up accounts and getting loans. I dreaded making phone calls and put off the assignment as long a possible. I ended up calling the bank the morning the assignment was due and was fortunate that the guy was in early to answer my questions

Business Law with Mr. Hanson: We finished and were tested on the taxes portion of the class.

Senior math with Mrs. Hollis: We ate pie to celebrate her birthday.

English with Mrs. Kappel: We watched a movie version of Macbeth. My class had a habit of cracking knuckles, not just knuckles, snapping and cracking almost any body part, be it wrists, neck, back basically any joint that could make a pop. We were quite good at it. I don’t think it was our senior year, but on one watching the movie after reading the book or play occasion Mrs. Kappel was grading papers at the table in the back of the room since she had seen them so many times before. Someone in the class had held their arm in the same place for too long and when the person straightened, it made a loud pop. That set the rest of us off and for the next five minutes everyone was cracking their knuckles. It sounded like popcorn and Mrs. Kappel who was mostly ignoring us finally pulled her head up to ask what was going on. We just laughed.

That week on Friday we had our test for Macbeth and Mrs. Kappel was not there. Normally we would have the standard sub come in, Mr. Russum, who was not good at maintaining class discipline (understatement of the year). Mrs. Kappel had found her own sub that day. I don’t remember the sub’s names, but she was a nun though, as Peggy put it she wasn’t “dressed in her nun suit.” The guys in my class were all Roman Catholic. They had never behaved as well as they did that day.

Physics with Miss Kassian: We worked with the ripple tank that week. Sadly we did not finish our assignment on Friday with enough time to have paper boat races.

Girls Phy-ed with Mrs. Barker: With volleyball finally over we enjoyed having the entire gym to use for floor hockey.

Choir with Mr. Hillius: Most of the time was spent forming groups for the coming spring music contests. Juniors Kathy, Terri, & Stephanie joined me in forming a quartet for singing “He’s Gone Away.” I had made it into all the groups and was thinking that perhaps I could get out of the one doing “Life Keeps Moving.” That year the guys had a really good chance at some male ensembles. We even had one freshman guy working on a solo. It may have been the only vocal solo being done that year.

At home that week:

Wednesday was St. Valentines’ Day. Mom and dad gave me a box of chocolates. I watched and recorded The Princess Bride. I had seen it for the first time the previous summer in the Wisconsin Dells when Mom and Dad and I went on a trip to check out Concordia University Wisconsin. It was fast becoming my favorite movie.

That weekend Mom and I found and listened to some old reel to reel recorded letters from when Mom and Dad were in Japan. There was a very cute one of my cousin Colleen singing “I’ve got me a baby bumble bee.”

Class of 1990 Week 23

2010-02-09T14:11:00.000-08:00

Monday:
In business law we spent another day watching IRS provided “boy meets girl and they talk about taxes” films. The one about the “Land of Celery” was the only deviation from the boy meets girl format.

That night we had our first Volley Ball playoff game against Drayton. We beat them in five.

Tuesday:
We had two lyceums that day. The first was the one done by the Mixed Blood Theater Co., who presented a program about Jackie Robinson as part of Black History Month. The second was a zoo keeper. He told some great stories and had some animals with him. He even shared his moose call, “Here moosy!” Phyed was the last day of weight lifting.

For weeks Peter had been bugging me about not attending any basketball games. He kept telling me I should go because one of these times he was going to slam dunk the ball and I wouldn’t want to miss it. So with that encouragement, I attended my first boys' basketball game that night. Peter, Jaci and Peggy told me they were glad to see me at the game. Others were less than friendly and almost seemed offended by my being there. “What are you doing here?” I’d honestly tell them, “Peter told me I had to come to the game tonight.” Half time Peggy paid me two bucks to work the letter winners’ popcorn stand.

Wednesday:
I started my own business. I put a sign up on the bulletin board in the library offering to find all the resources our small library held for your science fair project for only $1.00. My weekly allowance in those days amounted to only about $1.00 a week and babysitting jobs were not that frequent. My Christmas money was spent or in the bank for college and my birthday was more than a month off. I figured if I only made a dollar or two it would still let me have the occasional pop for a year book meeting.

Thursday:
Mr. Torgeson, upon seeing my sign, found me in the hall and loudly called me a “greedy capitalist pig.” The whole week was drunk driving awareness week. That day we had a state highway patrolman come in and talk to us. In volleyball we lost our last playoff match to Park River in three games. I had fun joking around with the student managers from Park River.

Friday:
As part of drunk driving awareness week our school had a Ghost Out. The statistic was that every 17 minutes in American a person is killed by a drunk driver. To symbolize this every 17 minutes the name of someone from the 7th -12th grade was pulled out of a hat and their name was announced. That person then went to the office and their face was covered in white make-up and for the rest of the day he or she would sit in the back of the class rooms and not talk to anyone. 30% of the Jr.High and High school was “dead” by 3:00pm. I lived. Three in my class died. The last name was Kevin, who was on the team that organized the event. We had an assembly at the end of the day to discuss what we learned and he mentioned how odd it was to pull his own name out of the hat.

At home Sarah arrived for the weekend. Later Bob showed up. Before school Rebecca had called and I got to talk to her for a few minutes.

Weekend:
I was very lazy that weekend. Wrote a poem in my journal about how lazy I was. It is not worth sharing. Sunday I taught Sunday School, went to church, and that afternoon was an LYF meeting. Mom made a birthday cake for Bob. Dad had not decided about the call yet.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 22

2010-01-31T18:59:00.000-08:00

Before the school year all the teachers received some sort of in-service on T notes. This system had students putting a line down their paper and taking notes on one side and then writing questions on the other that related to the notes so that to study you would cover the note side and ask yourself the questions. I didn't like them. But then I didn't like to take any notes because it meant not having my hands folded into my sleeves where they would be kept warm. Miss Kassian went one step beyond requiring T notes to insisting that we divide our notebooks into three columns. One column for notes taken from our text book, the next column was for notes taken from her class lectures, and the third column was for the questions. She required a fixed number of questions and she would grade our notebooks. I did as required but expressed my distain for being forced into a particular style of note taking by exceeding the required number of questions with ones that were irrelevant to the subject of Physics, questions like "why do we have to do these stupid T notes?" and "what is my shoe size?" On Monday of that week she docked me a point on my notes grade for this.

That night we played Minto and just as the game was supposed to start Mom called the school. The roads were looking bad and she wanted me home. So I gave Peggy a five minute lesson on how to keep the book and left. It took twice as long as usual to get home and I never got above 35mph on the roads.

The next day Mom and Dad left for River Falls, Wisconsin to visit Grandma Szedlak on her birthday. I loved having the house to myself. In the evening I would turn on the stereo in the living room and the radio in my bedroom and one in the basement all to the same station and revel in playing loud music in the entire house.

Thursday at school was the volleyball pep rally. A few of the gifts that were given: Jaci got a back line with Mrs. Kappel's face on it. Peggy's on again off again role as a student manager was acknowledged by giving her a switch. Kevin was given a sign for cheering. One side said "Lunch" the other said "You came here to lose!" I got a set of dice to signify that I had developed some superstitious habits over the course of the season, like needing to say "over" three times before anyone on our team served or they wouldn't get the ball over the net.

The last home boy's basketball game of the season was always Parents' night for the seniors. A section of the gym was decorated for the seniors' parents to sit and then at half time of the varsity game the parents' names would be read and their son or daughter would pin a flower on their mother and escort them both to the center of the gym to stand and be looked at until all the other parents were out there.

On Friday we had a brief class meeting to discuss preparations for parents' night the following week.

Mr. Dick: Who is going to ask Mr. Hanson to announce the parents' names?

I shot my hand up.

Mr. Dick: Good Ruth, You'll do it

Me: But he's one of the parents.

Mr. Dick: (sigh) Well I guess that won't work. Didn't think of that.

Jaci (Mr. Hanson's daughter): I didn't even think of that.

Margo: Well it's a good thing someone is thinking.

Mr. Dick: OK, who is going to ask me to announce the parents' names?

Friday night Mom and Dad returned home. I spent most of the weekend watching TV, working on the LYF district Newsletter, and writing Rebecca a letter. Dad was still undecided about the call.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Week 21

2010-01-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

It was a week of getting assigned a lot of homework and struggling to get any of it done. I really missed my typewriter. I made some progress on newspaper stories, and working on my book case. There were a few significant things that happened of note.

Mom and Dad went to Winnipeg for the day. Mondays were always Dad's day off. Occasionally they would head north. The bummer was that the planetarium in Winnipeg was always closed on Monday's. While they were gone our cat Neko got into a fight. It was really loud and I called him a few times. When he finally came I took him in the back bathroom to check him out. He had blood drops all over him but they seemed to be from the stray that wondered into his turf. I didn’t find any wounds but his claws were splintered and bloody. After I cleaned him up I sat on the floor in the back hall and held him. He purred and because we never cleaned his teeth, after a few minutes he started to drool profusely, so I put him back outside.

Friday in Physics I got Peter and Kevin as lab partners. We were doing an experiment on the specific heat of metals: The exact project that I had taken to the state science fair two years before. I gave the directions, Peter took measurements, and Kevin did the math. We finished way ahead of every other group and spent the rest of the hour amusing ourselves by tossing ice into boiling water and watching the rapid melt. It was quite captivating, about as cool to watch as a lava lamp. We joked about setting up a Bunsen burner and beaker and melting ice that way as a conversation piece at a party. It was the most fun I had ever had in a science class in high school.

Mrs. Kappel and I had a talk after one of her classes. The volleyball team had one pep rally a year. It was before the last home game of the season and it was an all school pep rally that included the grade school. A major part of it was the acknowledging of each player and manager with a funny, sometimes slightly insulting prize based on inside jokes, personality quirks and incidents that happened during the year. (Why yes this is the inspiration behind the Walther Library Mandatory Student Staff Appreciation Meetings) I was a stat for five years starting in the eighth grade, and on more than one occasion she would use the pep rally to make fun of my difficulty with spelling. The year before she started her little shpeal about me with the words, “We all know that Ruth can’t spell…” Perhaps before she said that there may have been some first graders unaware of my learning disability, but her presentation solved that. It really bothered me. So knowing that it was coming up, I approached her after class one day and told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she made a public joke about my lack of spelling skills at the pep rally I would quit then and there and have nothing more to do with volleyball for the remainder of the season.

That weekend Sarah and Bob came and brought my typewriter with them. It still wasn’t quite right. Sunday it started to really snow. I shoveled the sidewalk and then had to clean it again two hours later. I enjoyed watching San Francisco beat Denver 55-10. Terry had made several bets against the 49ers. I noted that he was going to be "a bit sore in the pocket book come Monday."

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 week 20

2010-01-15T07:43:00.000-08:00

Monday there was no school. I made a trip to town with Mom to get things I needed to finish my bookcase. I also finally got to work on an LYF newsletter only to find something wrong with my typewriter. It was not giving a clean print, and no matter what I tried it would not improve. That afternoon Mrs. Kapple picked me up in her car to get me to the volleyball game in Langdon. We lost, and it was a long ride back home.

Tuesday was the start of a new semester. I was no longer in Shop but I still had my bookcase to finish. I would be able to come in during study halls and work on it. Computer class was over and we started Senior Math. If Senior Math had been offered in the fall instead of the spring I would have done much better on the Math part of the ACT. All those formulas I couldn't think of in the exam were covered the first week of the class. We also started Business Law with Mr. Hanson. Mrs. Kappel shelved Macbeth for a few weeks so we could get another school newspaper out. The big news of the day was that my Dad received a call to Plumas, Manitoba about two hours northwest of Winnipeg. Mom and I spend all evening playing "what if?" What if I stayed with someone in the congregation so I wouldn't have to move my senior year? How would that impact Sarah's and my financial aid for college? I got to call Sarah and tell her about it, then mom took the phone and I went and watched TV. The Wonder Years was my favorite show in those days.

The next day was a half day with Parent Teacher conferences. Both Mom and Dad went. Mostly my teachers liked me. A few said that they wished I wasn't a senior. Mom and Miss Kassian got into it a bit as Miss Kassian defended the idea that there was nothing wrong with letting Goal Keepers have extra time on the exam.

Thursday was volleyball with Munich. We lost both matches, but were missing three players and just about everyone played their limit. There were no fans as the American Legion in town was sponsoring a fun night. Peter kept the score board and freshmen stat keeper David was gone so Peggy had to do stats with Kevin. The two of them had some sort of argument earlier and Peggy had been sulking all day.

Friday I got a chill first hour that didn't go away until I got home. I fell asleep after school in Dad's chair while I was looking at the new JC Penny catalog. At 5:30 pm Sarah woke me up asking for my car keys. About 10 minutes later she left for Minot. Mom and Dad took my typewriter to Grand Forks and it was left there for repairs.

Saturday we had a home game against Valley. Won the JV in 2. Lost the varsity in 4. Valley was a team we were used to beating in volleyball and since all our other sports we co-oped with them, there was some pride in beating them at the one sport we competed against them in. Peggy was sick and in the end 5th grader Eric kept the score board. He did a perfect job, but nobody really trusted him and people kept asking him if he posted points. We also made use of two eighth grade girls to act as line judges, but they kept missing things and then made bad calls, mostly in our favor. It looked really bad.

Sunday Kayla and Troy read the Sunday School lesson in turns instead of my reading it to them. It was a big deal. Sarah got back home about 5:00 pm and Mom and Dad took her back to UND. I spent the evening writing Rebecca a letter.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

lhg edited and approved

2010-01-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

You may notice this tag on many of my blogs. It should be on all of them, but I have a way of forgetting. Without going into all the reasons for this, let me simply say that Mr. Gaba reads and tries to catch all my errors before I post them, thus saving me from embarassment. For instance in returning to me my last post he made this comment, “By the way, there are officially about eleven different acceptable ways to spell pierogi, depending on the country. Yours was none of them. Also technically, pierogi is already a plural form, but in America, it is acceptable to say pierogies.”

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Weeks 18 & 19

2010-01-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

“Started this New Year the way one should: I got up, showered then went to church.”The rest of the day I spent watching TV with Dad and playing Rummikub with Mom.

Tuesday it was back to school. I forgot my purse that had my eyeglasses in it; Mom and Dad dropped them off at the school on their way to Grand Forks. Jr. Becky quit stating for Volleyball so that night I had to keep both the book and the last touch points by myself. Freshmen Jayson kept the score board, it turned out he was also a fan of Robotech, also hanging out was 7th grader David, my Classmate Jason’s little brother who annoyed me greatly by constantly calling me “Ruthie Baby.”

Mr. Torgeson seemed to take great pleasure in teasing students about the opposite sex. “Who was that ugly girl I saw you with?” was not an uncommon question and I was often surprised at how much relationship news students told him. At times it seemed like he had the best picture of what students were couples and who had a crush on whom. I don’t recall the incident but my journal reports that Peggy royally embarrassed herself in front of Mr. Torgeson on the topic of a New Year’s kiss.

In English we started reading Macbeth. That day the US captured Manuel Noriega.By the end of the week I was dealing with a cold. I was also annoyed and amused by the way Miss Kassian placed us for tests. As I wrote it, “She didn’t want me right beside Cory so she moves me a desk up and I announce, ‘Oh good now I can see “Stephanie’s paper perfectly.” Almost everyone went to the Park River Holliday Basketball Tournament so it was a very quiet afternoon in the school. I was amused by the perception of many of my peers that I had spent all my time at home reading classical literature and studying for school.

Friday after taking a test in English I left school feeling too sick to stick around. Saturday I spent most of the day watching cartoons and other TV, Mom and Dad went to Grand Forks and picked up Sarah from the airport.

Sunday I taught Sunday school and there was church and then I went home and spent much of my afternoon re-reading Robotech books. Pastor & Peggy Watkins came for a visit. They arrived just as Sarah was finishing up a two hour phone call to Bob. We had pierogies for dinner. After I spent a long time entertaining little Hannah Watkins by showing her my bead collection. I helped take down Christmas decorations before bed and found that my cold was starting to get worse again.

Week 18

It seemed like there was always one week in January where, after many sub zero weeks the jet stream would move north and bring up warm air from the gulf and for a few days we would have a most welcome reprieve from winter. The problem was that with ice and snow packed it made everything a very slushy slippery mess, but the ability to step outside and not need hat and gloves more than made up for the muck. On Monday it was over 40 degrees. The roads were very slick. I lost my voice which was annoying since we were finally singing music I liked in chorus.

That night we played Drayton in Volleyball. Peggy officially became a stat again and I was so glad to have her back. We won the game. Volleyball games did not draw many spectators unlike the crowds at a basketball game, but they did have their amusements. A group of guys sat in a single line in end corner of the gym and did the wave, where the bleachers were empty they would point to where the wave would be and then anticipate when it was their turn to stand again. After one round Mr. Dick and two guys from Drayton who were sitting in the corner bleachers by the door would stand up when the arms pointed at them.

Tuesday I got my assignment back from the Institute of Children’s Literature and the deadline for my next assignment, January 30.

Wednesday my classmates all faked having sore throats so they could get out of reading in English. Mrs. Kappel didn’t believe any of us, so even though I could barely speak, I was assigned to read the part of Lady Macbeth which that day constituted more than half of the reading. It got all the way up to 50 outside.

Thursday I had two semester tests including one in Physics. This test lead to yet another conflict with Miss Kassian. Semester tests were limited to the class period. When the period was up so was your time for the test. A few years before Mr. Torgeson had instituted a program in the school called Goal Keepers. The program had the lofty goal of encouraging students to set and meet attainable goals for academic improvement. It was supposed to work like this, each week a student would set a goal for a test or assignment and would speak to the teacher ahead of time. A B average student in math would make a goal of getting an A on their pending math exam and before the test the teacher would sign off on a form stating that the student was aiming for that grade. If they met the grade they would earn a point. After earning five points they would get “Goal Keeper privileges” these included most predominately things like getting dismissed early from class to hang out in the halls or the gym, or before lunch going to lunch early. To keep your privileges you had to try for a point every week. I never participated in the program. First I was an idealist and thought grades were arbitrary and didn’t represent true learning. From my freshman year on I never looked at my report cards. Mom and Dad had a problem with this, but Mom finally reasoned that as long as my grades stayed high enough that State Farm gave us the good student discount she wasn’t going to push the issue. The second reason I didn’t bother with Goal Keepers was that I socially didn’t fit and didn’t see hanging out in the halls as a privilege, but rather an opportunity to feel awkward and invisible. At times I was the only student in the school not getting out of my classes early and most days the cafeteria staff knew that when they saw me they were done serving food for the day. So on that Thursday Miss Kassian let the Goal Keepers start their semester exam early. When I arrived in the classroom they were all taking the test. The term infuriating comes to mind. I was thankful to Mrs. Barker who let me hang out in her office after the period, until I could compose myself. To her credit, while Miss Kassien didn’t agree with me that letting Goal Keepers start the test early constituted an academic advantage that was not a proper privilege in the program, the next day she copied my answers down onto a fresh blank test and gave me ten minutes to go over it. She did however make a point of announcing to the whole class that ultimately I didn’t help my grade any with those ten minutes. I didn’t care, it was the principle that mattered.

Saturday was the Drayton Invitational Volleyball tournament and for the first time in the history of that tourney we stayed in the winning bracket all the way to the championship game. Then we lost to Thompson, ND and since it was a double elimination tournament, we played and lost to them again to take second in the tournament. After the game we headed to Grafton for a pizza party. It was the best we had ever done in a volleyball tournament. I didn’t get home until after 10pm only to find Auntie Norma and Colleen were there. They left Sunday afternoon just as all the cars were pulling into the church parking lot for the annual voters meeting. I spent the afternoon and evening in front of the TV.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 17 plus Christmas break

2010-01-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Class of 1990 week 17 + Christmas break

The choir was recorded for a Christmas radio broadcast on Monday. In computer class we used a mouse for the first time. I had to stay at school until after the volleyball game that night. I had a Kit Kat for supper. We beat Valley in both the JV and the varsity.

It was a very cold week and Tuesday I left for school early in hopes of getting a good spot to plug in the car. That night mom and I made candy for me to share on Wednesday.

Wednesday was a typical useless day before break. There was exchanging of gifts and I wrote about how dull I found the school Christmas party to be. I mostly hung out in the library and then drew some giant faces on the chalk board in the Home-Ec room. That night the Advent service was canceled due to the extreme cold.

Christmas Break:

Sarah flew to Hong Kong and spent Christmas with Rebecca. That left just me with Mom and Dad at home. I spent a lot of my break playing solitaire, reading Robotech, doing jigsaw puzzles and watching TV including the Simpson’s Christmas special. (The first time the Simpsons ever were featured in their own show.)

Gifts

From classmates
Margo—necklace
Jaci- barrette
Peggy—brush and bracelet
From Sunday school students
Kayla—Address book
Troy—tin of chocolate covered cherries
From Family
Mom and Dad—Pencil sharpener, cassette tape carrying case, a cleaning cassette, & Chocolate mints
Rebecca—a very bright pink sweater with all sorts of wild appliqués on it, A coin purse made out of a sea shell a barrette made with shells (she got them in the Philippians) and a blue and white vase and matching cat (the vase and cat are the only gifts that I still own—they survived the fire without damage.)
Sarah—a green sweatshirt that she decorated with a counted cross stitch panda holding balloons that spelled my name. Originally she had planned to work on it on the plane going to Hong Kong, but finals week at UND was so dull that she finished the gift before her break and I got my gift at Christmas.
Grandma—Sony walkman
Auntie Norma—a large dictionary

After church on Christmas Eve Mom and Dad and I used the smoked crystal glasses that Mom had gotten from her dad. We rarely used them as there were only four glasses, and five in the family. After the move back from Japan the glasses were unavailable to enlarge the set. That night I dropped my glass and it hit the side of a china plate and broke, so now there are only three of them.

Christmas church got cancelled due to weather, but it cleared up enough that we braved very icy roads and headed to Winnipeg. It was an unusual trip in that for the first and only time I spent it hanging out with my cousin Colleen. I rode along when she took Grandma home.
Boxing Day Auntie Norma hosted an open house. In the morning Colleen and I went shopping. She got jeans and a sweater that was almost as loud and crazy as the one Rebecca sent me. We also needed to find cinnamon for Auntie Norma and ended up finally finding some at the second 7-11 we stopped at. Grocery stores were closed for the holiday but most mall stores were open. Go figure.
The open house was attended by a lot of extended family of the Weitzel and Schaefer variety.
As I wrote in my journal
Q: how do you tell a Schaefer from a Weitzel?
A: Weitzels stand, talk, and eat; Schaefers sit quietly, and don’t touch the food.

We came back home on the 27th. The next day I went to Cavalier to see the dentist. Mom gave me permission to refuse the fluoride treatment—they always made me gag. Dr. Olson tried to give one to me, “What would your mother think?” he asked.
“She said I could say no.”
“All right, but if you get a cavity next time I’ll give you two!”

Bob gave our family the game Rummikub and I spent a lot of time playing it with mom. Occasionally we even got Dad to join us.

On the 31st there was a Lutheran Youth Fellowship Zone Rally at Turtle River State Park. It was a sledding party. I took one run down the hill and then went inside and watched people and hung out with my LYF friends.

I ended the year babysitting. It was not a fun gig, and when I got home I thanked my parents for disciplining me. I made $10 for watching three very poorly behaved kids & I promised myself to never spend New Year’s Eve babysitting again.

Class of 1990 week 16

2009-12-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Monday was one of those terrible long days. Since Mom took one car to Winnipeg Dad had to take me to school, and since there was a game that night I didn’t get to go home until after the game. I filled the time by writing letters and working on a one woman play I had dreamed up the night before. In volleyball we played Park River. Peggy had stated that she didn’t want to be a student manager but she showed up for the game and ended up first keeping the score board and then keeping last touch points. We had a lot of fun working together again. As I wrote it then, “So here’s to Peggy, the best score keeper in the world. She never messes up. That’s why she gets to drink out of the players water bottles. [She made 4 mess-ups on the board]”

On Tuesday I suggested to Dad that it would be a wonderful surprise for Mom if we got the tree before she got home. So after school we went to Cavalier and got a small tree. I set it up on a box and decorated it.

In shop class Mr. Lloyd had forgotten some wood that he promised to bring me, leftovers from a project a student did in Drayton. So I spent shop class writing out Christmas cards. I was treated to a conversation where my classmates discussed the first time they swore in front of their parents.

Wednesday the high was -20. In English class we assembled the newspaper. There was no Phy-Ed as we were taking team pictures. For the fifth year I posed in the back of the volleyball team picture. I had started keeping books in the 8th grade.
Mom got home. She really liked the tree. Attendance at the midweek Advent service was really poor. Afterward Mom and I drank tea and talked till after 11:00pm.

Thursday was even colder. It was the school “Christmas” concert. Since I was in about the 5th or 6th grade the highlight of the concert was a play featuring Santa put on by the 1st-8th grade and then a few selections by the bands and the high school choir.

Friday we got assigned more homework than the rest of the week combined. Heidi, Mrs. Hollis’s daughter, was home from basic training and hung out at the school a bit. After school Mom and Dad picked me up and we went to Grand Forks to go out for supper and do some Christmas shopping. I also bought a book for myself.

Saturday I went to the Sunday school children’s program practice. It went well. I spent the rest of the day reading my book and doing odd jobs including making a cake for the party after the Christmas program Sunday night.

Sunday I taught Sunday school before church and then relaxed in the afternoon. That evening was the Sunday school program at church and after we had a birthday party for Jesus. There was a really good turn out for it. I spent some of it visiting with Heidi.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Weeks 14 & 15

2009-12-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

These two weeks were marked by a few things.

Volleyball:
I finished the posters and the guys put them up. I thought they were rather ingenious. I had a whistle person blowing a whistle for the coach. Pencil people holding pencils for the student managers and for the players it was knee pad people wearing knee pads. Half were setting and half were bumping-on their knees of course. I thought they were cute and was proud of my design until someone from a visiting team asked what washing machines had to do with volleyball.
Monday Dec 4 was the start of the season with a game in Walhalla. For games in Walhalla and Cavalier the team bus had to pass our road and so I would be picked up and dropped off for those games. When we played Minto we picked up Mrs. Kappel who lived in Grafton. After the game we stopped at the Hardees in Grafton (the only year round fast food place in that corner of ND) Mrs. Kappel treated us all to fries. I got a hot ham-n-cheese & a big cookie.
Newspaper:
My plan to write a story on education reform was shot out of the water and replaced with one that would have me interviewing my Dad about his impressions about the fall of communism in Europe. That proved to be difficult. Dad was finishing up a letter he was handwriting to Rebecca and he read it to me. It gave me a lot of insight, but nothing I could really use in my story. It took a few more times to get what I needed for my story. I asked Dad questions and he wrote out his carefully crafted answers that I worked into my story.For my column I wrote about "heater gangs." To understand this you need to realize that our school hallways were carpeted. As I wrote it then:

I hate being cold. My teeth chatter. My hands turn deep purple. My muscles twitch in an unfashionable manner. My whole body goes rigid and I break out in unsightly goose bumps.

No doubt about it; being cold ranks up there with fluoride treatments and stubbing my toe.

Not long ago I heard a mother complain that her son never knew what to wear to school in the winter. "The bus is so cold and you don't dare wear a sweater to school, unless you want to burn up, " she said.

No Kidding? This really happened. Obviously this woman was not from St. Thomas. First, we do not have any school buses and more importantly, in our school you have to warm up to be cool.

What do you expect form a school where one's social status can be determined by what heater one sits by?

Some schools have cliques and clubs. STHS has heater gangs.

With an average hall temperature at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, is it any wonder that the most asked question at the beginning of the noon hour has become, "Are they on?"If you keep your eyes open you can learn a lot about this phenomenon.

First of all the heaters are ranked. The most popular one is the one by the gym door where the morning crowd hangs out. This is followed by the one next to pop machines. Next in the rank is the heater by the canteen. Then if you're absolutely desperate there is always the one between the two bathrooms.

Approximately three people can sit comfortably across one heater. If all the heaters are used about 12 persons get the privilege of roasting their backs.

Certain rules are understood concerning the heaters:

First come; first serve. The early bird gets the best spot.

Secondly, you can only hog a heater if you're saving a spot for someone; otherwise you must share.

Lastly, once you get up you've lost your spot.

I have a theory about the cold halls of STHS. Maybe by sitting up against the heaters we're blocking the flow of warm air, and the school would be warmer if we would all back off.

Of course, this is just a theory and not one to be tested anytime soon. So in the meantime, wear a sweater, and as you scramble down the hall ask the magic question: "Are they on?" Then, try to get a good spot.

Szedlak, Ruth. "Nothing by Nobody." Knight Life 2 Dec 1989: 3,12. Print.

In getting the newspaper ready for publication Mrs. Kappel had to be with the 8th graders for a Home-Ec Kids party. So my class was left in the typing room with no supervision. At first there was some telling of off color jokes but then there was the fear that the office might be listening in on the intercom so Peter and Kevin led us all in a sing-a-long as we worked. We sang the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch, & Sunny Days from Sesame Street.-along with singing to 12. We also sang to Kenny Roger's The Gambler and a grade school music class song of "Scratch Scratch My Back."
Cold:
A requirement of all sweaters and sweatshirts was that the sleeves were loose enough at the wrist for me to fold my arms inside of the sleeves. This generally discouraged me from wanting to take notes. Also in the bitter cold of winter there were two options for parking. You could park on the wall protected from the north wind that did not have outlets, or you could park on the west side of the gym and plug in the cars block heater but be totally exposed to the wind. The rule for me was that the temp had to be minus 0 before I would be willing to deal with the wind chill.
On the first day of school each kid that lived outside of the city of St. Thomas had to register a storm family. That is the family you would stay with if a storm came up and it wasn't safe to go home. I kept a survival kit in the trunk of my car that included a change of clothes for such occasions. My storm family was the Hollis' who conveniently live across the street from the school.
I had one occasion in week 14 where I realized that I really shouldn't be driving home. Mom and Dad were out of town, but I wanted to sleep in my own bed so without talking to anyone and with no one at home waiting for me I headed out. Visibility was terrible. When I turned from Highway 81 to County Road 3 I couldn't see more than twenty feet and it was as I rounded the corner that I saw the headlights of the Greyhound bus coming at me from Highway 81. I had enough time to make the corner but on a normal visibility day I would have never attempted to beat the bus. When I got home and put the car in the garage & turned aruond. I could just barely make out the church across the road. There was no way I should have been out there.
ICL:
Two months and twenty days past my deadline I finally mailed my assignment for the Institute of Children's Literature. Mom let me know that if I ever missed another deadline she would be taking the tuition money out of my allowance.
ACT results:
I got my ACT score back and I was happy with the results. Concordia University required an 18 to apply and I had well above that. My lowest score was in Math. I was happy with it as I drew a complete blank on some of the formulas I needed for the problems, but Mr. Green (school vocational counselor) was standing over my shoulder and when he saw my scores he said, "Ruth, the math, what happened?"
"I'm not Sarah."I replied. My sister had a perfect score on the math portion. I wanted to hit him. Why did people always assume that I should be just like my sisters. That sort of assumption was a large part of the reason I was so eager to get out of St. Thomas and go somewhere to college that my sisters had never been.

It should be noted-as I made special mention of it in my journal, that Terry, who I often did not get along with, did me a favor on December 6th. I was sitting by the Pop machines and asked him to get my dictionary, and he did!
At home:
We called Rebecca on her birthday before I left for school. Hong Kong being 12 hrs ahead of North Dakota. She was glad to be a world away from our icy roads and freezing temps.

Saturday Dec 9th I was babysitting the Bigwoods again. I got a call from Dad. Dad and Pastor Rothchild in Bottineau were switching pulpits on Sunday so Rev. Rothchild would be close enough to Minnesota to attend his brothers ordination-(or instillation-something like that) Anyway Mom and Dad had traveled to Bottineau and were staying at a member's home when dad realized that he had left his sermon behind. When I got home from babysitting I was to locate it and call the number. I didn't get home until 2am. The phone at the farm house rang about 20 times before dad picked it up. He had managed to reconstruct most of his sermon but I read him the bits that he needed. It took a little bit as it was written in his tiny script and his own personal short hand. Sunday Mom and Dad got home at 3pm and an hour later Mom left for two days in Winnipeg.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 Week 13

2009-11-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

Monday I hit my head on the desk in English class and thus spent the rest of the day into Tuesday putting up with remarks about my head banging. The volleyball team started practicing during girl’s phy-ed. That’s the problem with having so many teams and only one gym. So those of us girls who did not play on the team—about five of us met with Mrs. Barker in the weight room next to the gym and lifted weights. I generally enjoyed any phy-ed activity that did not involve running or playing on a team. Being unathletic is bad enough. Having people mad at you because you are unathletic is just cruel.

With Thanksgiving it was a short week. Wednesday was odd in that I arrived home to an empty house after school. Next Bob, Sarah’s boyfriend showed up, then Mom and Dad and finally Sarah who got a ride home from UND with Kerry. Thursday morning we had church and then Pastor Allen and his wife and newly adopted son William joined us for dinner. The week had an odd feel, sort of like Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday Saturday, Saturday, Sunday. I was already anticipating missing Mom and Dad when I would head off to Concordia University Wisconsin the next year. I spent my break reading, watching TV, playing on Dad’s computer, and starting to paint the posters for the volleyball team.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 week 12

2009-11-13T05:04:00.000-08:00

Most of my notes from that week are about trying to get my writing done for the Institute of Children’s Literature (ICL) course and feeling stressed about school work. On Monday we did our first lab in Physics. I was partnered with Jr. Jennifer and managed to burn my hand while fire polishing a glass tube. Terry told me that he hoped I got blisters. I attended the yearbook meeting and spent time writing body copy. Most of the week I was fed up and frustrated, but Friday I was getting a grip on things including finishing a major rewrite of my ICL story.

I finished the small drawings for the volleyball posters. Mr. Kappel approved of them. The next step would be to trace them onto a transparency and then use an overhead projector to make a poster for each member of the team, each of the student managers and one for the coach. The basketball cheerleaders did the posters for those teams, but for the volleyball team it fell to me as part of my student manager duties. Generally Peggy and I did the posters and the guy managers put up the posters on our wall in the gym. I also made smaller signs for the team member’s locker. Those were easier, because you could just run them off on the copy machine. Then it was just a matter of coloring and cutting them.

Saturday I got up before 6:00 a.m. and drove to Niagara, ND and picked up Linda then we picked up Cari and Erich and we all headed to Carrington, ND to plan a joint District Lutheran Youth Fellowship gathering with South Dakota. The gathering would be in Aberdeen, SD. It was a productive, fun, but very long day. One the way home I got a terrible headache and was in no shape to drive the all the way home so I followed Linda to her home. Once there I started feeling really sick and threw up. Oddly after that I felt much better and was able to drive home. It was weird.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 week 11

2009-11-06T05:06:00.000-08:00

It was a busy school week, homework-wise. The roads were very slick on Thursday. Friday we had off of school and Mom and I went shopping in Grand Forks. I did some Christmas shopping, including gifts for Sarah and Rebecca as Sarah was going to visit Rebecca in Hong Kong for Christmas that year. I continued to procrastinate on my Institute of Children’s Literature writing assignment that was due in the middle of October. I finally started putting a draft together in the middle of the week. The week before mom had cut off three inches of my hair and nobody at school noticed. On Veterans Day I wrote, "The walls are down and the people are crossing into West Berlin."

I did a lot of work on the yearbook that week. In class I traced numerous pictures of wrapped gumballs for the page numbers. After school I attended a yearbook meetings. Margo and I worked together to write copy for the grade school classes. We had sent survey questions to the rooms, but the problem was that the larger the class, the more material you had to play with, the less copy you needed to fill the page. The smaller classes had less quotes and more space to fill. We did a lot of laughing as we tried to stretch the comments into body copy. I’d come up with lines and Margo would write them down and count the characters to see how much more we needed to write. Occasionally I’d make notes on paper and Margo would try to read them and then get frustrated by my handwriting and spelling. A lot of times brain storming involved making exaggerated hand gestures. I would put my hands on my head and then extend my arms completely saying “ummm” and then bring my hands back to my head repeating this until I finally came up with another phrase for the copy. It was completely silly.

my first NaNoWriMo

2009-11-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

I finally did it. Encouraged by a girlfriend from Alaska I'm spending November taking a stab at fiction. I'm doing my first NaNoWriMo http://www.nanowrimo.org/. As the website says it's 30 days and nights of literary abandon. In November you try to write a 50,000 word novel draft. Revising is for December. On day #2 I'm already 11% done. That is well ahead of the daily word output of 1667 to stay on track and right now I'm feeling really good.

Part of what helps is knowing that more than 100,000 other folks around the world are doing the same thing. I met about 20 of them last Friday at a regional party at the Milwaukee Area Technical College library in Oak Creek WI. By signing up for this I also get the pep talks and these are great. My favorite quote from a recent one has this:

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she's always nervous.

I have so far avoided any nervous characters but you never know--I could have my main character, who works at Milwaukee Public Library, do some long stints of shelf reading and if desperate fill a few pages with call number gibberish.

REG

lhg edited and approved

class of 1990 week 10

2009-10-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

For weeks Miss Kassian had been giving vague and odd instructions to members of St. Thomas Operation Contact (our schools peer counseling team.) She told them to keep the 30^th free. At one point she told them to bring balloons, and then two days later told them to forget about the balloons. The week before, she told them to invite guests. I won’t lie—I had a rather cynical attitude towards the group and their mission, particularly the mandate to help raise people's self esteem, but I was grateful for the invite Kevin gave me and to be included in whatever was going on. So Monday after a normal school day, I went home and then left for town at 7:40. It turned out to be an elaborate costume scavenger hunt. We divided into teams of three and were each given a number and a list of houses to go to. At first we didn’t know what we were asking for and you had to get your clues in the right order, so you would knock on a door and then give your number and they would tell you if they had anything for you. They could also tell you if they had something that you would have to come back for, so a lot of the homes we had to go to more than once. It was a lot of walking around. I was on a team with Kevin and one other female but my journal has only two cryptic sentences about the whole thing.

Halloween in St Thomas and the week leading up to it were the only times the town had a police presence. The sheriff would send a car or two around because the normal Halloween fun involved pulling anything that wasn’t nailed down into the street or shifting things around town. Generally as long as nothing was destroyed or vandalized the police didn’t interfere. A few of the scavenger hunt parties were stopped by the cops and asked what they were up to.

In the end we all found the bits of our costumes, and put together the clues that lead us to a party at Miss Kassian's house. It was a fun night. We decided to wear our costumes the next day to school. I got home and to bed around 12:30. After, I reflected that physics would be a whole lot better if Miss Kassian put half the effort into lessons plans that she did in organizing the event.

October 31^st I wore my costume to school as did most of the students who were on the hunt. Mrs. Hollis also wore a costume. My legs were very sore from all the walking around town the night before. Aside from homecoming float building it was a rare thing for me to be in St. Thomas and not be at the school. I spent the night of Reformation Day at home. Dad had planned a showing of the Martin Luther film, (the old black and white one) but no one showed up. I was not surprised.

Now I’m not entirely sure this next thing happened my senior year, but I know for a fact that it happened on November 1. As usual anything that was not nailed down got moved. Most of the picnic tables from the city park found their way to the front of the school along with a realtors “For Sale” sign. Early in the day Mr. Hanson (who was also on the park board) got on the intercom and called all the boys from 7^th grade to senior to report to the gym. Once there, he marched them out of the school to carry all the picnic tables across the street to the city park. After the guys were back in class, he then got on the intercom and thanked them for being good citizens and volunteering for this civic duty. What really rankled the girls was that he only called the boys, when the girls were just as responsible for the disheveled state of the town.

Wednesday was parent-teacher conferences. Mom went but mostly to visit socially with some of my teachers. When I asked what they said she just said, “Oh, they all like you.”

That same day I got a library book from the Carnegie Regional Library in Grafton in the mail. I had requested it over the phone. Mrs. Kappel was insistent on us reading book report books from the country and time period we were studying in Lit., ideally they had to be from the school’s own library, but she let me order the book from Grafton. I was reading Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Earnest.” I read it twice and then gave it to my dad who spent two hours carefully unfolding the bent corners of the pages and carefully erasing pencil marks in the margins before reading it himself. It didn't hit me until after I handed in my report that my father's name is the the Hungarian form of Earnest.

Thursday was Peggy’s birthday and we celebrated all day. We had cake in PDP, cake and milk in Computer class. Then the high school all traveled to Crystal ND for a pep rally for the girl's basketball team who had earned a spot in the regional tournament. We got back in time for study hall and then after lunch had cookies in Shop. English we spent writing captions. I also started working in earnest on the posters for the volleyball team.

Friday we got an inch of snow. I made some nice progress on my bookcase in Shop. That night I babysat for the Bigwoods until 1am. Saturday it was cold and muggy, 40 degrees, and rained for about an hour in the morning. I loved it (I’m still weird like that) and noted that it would have been a “perfect spring day.” Sunday after church there was an Aid Association for Lutherans dinner after church. I got a Frisbee with their new logo on it.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 week 9

2009-10-23T04:15:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Kappel liked the gumball machine I drew. Another student had also drawn one that was nicer but he failed to keep his in the size limits so mine got used. The fall concert was on Tuesday. I was glad when it was over. I also took and distributed my senior pictures to my classmates. On Wednesday I was studying for the ACT, but I took some time out to redesign my signature. I didn’t like the way it looked and I didn’t want it on any forms that would follow me to college.

Friday the grade school had its annual Halloween carnival. I got a little checker board from the fishpond in the first grade room and played a game against Terry when I got back to study hall in the library. I would’ve won if the bell hadn’t rung.

Saturday I left for Grand Forks at 6:32am to take the ACT. I was in the same room as Peter. We later learned that we had the same version of the test. That year big changes were made to the test. I thought I did OK, but I had a brain freeze on part of the math portion. Mom and I went out for lunch after and then that evening I babysat for the Bigwood’s. They didn’t get home until around 2:15am. I was asleep on their couch when they came in. Once home, I was thankful for daylight savings time.

Sunday I taught Sunday School, then I was the only one from St. Paul’s who went to the Lutheran Youth Fellowship Zone Rally. Still it was good to see all my friends from camp and I enjoyed the hay ride. Instead of playing the radio, Dad and I talked all the way back home.

REG

lhg edited and approved.

Class of 1990 Week 8

2009-10-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

I lamented that just as we finished one chapter in Physics and started a new one Miss Kassian would put the next text date up on the board. Mr. Hillious was not there for choir on Monday so I spent the last hour of the day straightening up books in the library. On Tuesday an earthquake hit California delaying the World Series. All the news focused on the quake. On Wednesday the boys kept trying to get teachers to talk about it to avoid getting anywhere with lessons and perhaps avoid homework over the break. As I wrote it in my journal:

No teacher would get into it with them. They tried the hardest in English and almost got it when we started talking about the Great Vowel Shift. “Shifts? That’s sort of what those two continental plates did…”

We got out of school at 2:30 and had the rest of the week off for the Teachers convention. I was only a few days out from my story deadline for the Institute of Children’s literature, so I got very busy doing everything but writing the story. I stripped posters off my wall and rearranged the furniture in my bedroom (the journal has before and after diagrams). I wrote letters, drew gumball machines for the yearbook. Friday I got my senior pictures back.

Saturday I went to Grand Forks to spend the weekend with Sarah at the University of North Dakota. All her suitemates were gone. We walked around campus, watched TV, and then Bob called. I finished reading the book I brought and had nothing to do while she talked so she suggested that I should wash her dishes. So I did, but I kept making smart comments and she got sick of hearing it so she closed the room door and locked me into the suite area where the sink was until she finished talking. When she hung up we played a “rousing game of cribbage.” We ordered pizza for supper. Sunday we went to Wittenberg Chapel. We both napped and then in the evening went to the Michel W. Smith concert at Chester Fritz auditorium. I saw a few people I knew from Girls State, Lutheran Youth Fellowship and even a group of students from St. Thomas. Mom took me home after the show. I finally got to bed at about 1:10 am.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 week 7

2009-10-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

We had worksheets to do in Physics. They took a long time for me to do and on Tuesday I stayed up past midnight getting the questions done. We graded them in class and I got an A. In English we finished our journalism unit and started English literature. In shop I painted my tool box red as Sarah told me to. With the tool box project wrapping up we were now going to do individual projects so I brought the collapsible bookcase of Rebecca’s so Mr. Lloyd could measure it so I could copy it. He had some left over wood from another student’s project in Drayton that I could use for it. (Our school shared our shop teacher with the high school in Drayton, ND. Mr. Lloyd was in Drayton in the mornings and St. Thomas in the afternoons.)

Part of English for the seniors at STHS was producing both the school newspaper and the yearbook. Editors were chosen from the senior class. It was assumed that I would be a yearbook editor, but one of my guiding principles in high school was to avoid extra curricular activities that my elder sisters excelled at and Rebecca had been an editor and had even worked on yearbook throughout her college career and even became an advisor for the yearbook at the Hong Kong International School where she taught. Thus I had no interest in being an editor. The selected editors were Margo, Jaci & Terry. The editors were expected to show up for the weekly yearbook meetings with Mrs. Kappel. Other seniors could come and earn extra credit for English. Thursday that week I, for reasons I didn’t quite understand myself, showed up for the yearbook meeting. It ended up being just me, Mrs. Kappel, and Jaci. On Friday of that week the class went to Kevin’s house to retake a picture. The last time we took it the film was black and white and we wanted a color picture of us all blowing bubbles, as the yearbook had a bubble gum theme, “Sticking Together” and we needed color pictures for the theme page.

Most nights I watched the ABC lineup or PPT (Prairie Public Television—PBS in the rest of world) those two channels and Fox--which had limited programming in those days were the only channels that came in reliably clear. I got a letter from Rebecca—since she did not get comic strips in Hong Kong I would clip ones I thought she would enjoy and mail them to her. Usually Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, & Far Side. Her letter back put me in a good mood. I still didn’t have a completed rough draft for my Institute of Children’s Literature assignment. I was also only getting between 5 & 7 hours of sleep a night. I tended to stay up late in my room reading and would leave a rolled up blanket to block the light from coming out of the gap under my door so Dad couldn’t tell that I was up.

Sunday night Mom, Dad, and I watched the ABC family drama “Life Goes On.” It was the one with the character with Down syndrome. That particular episode ended with the family having a food fight and laughing. Mom said that they would never let such a thing occur in our house, to which Dad added, “Especially if there were any books around.”

Class of 1990 week 6

2009-10-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

Class of 1990 week 6

Monday Dad left for a pastoral conference and half my class (4 of them) was at the Northern Interscholastic Press Association (NIPA) convention. Mrs. Kappel made me temporary newspaper editor. I thought the idea that we would be getting a newspaper out by the next day was laughable. I got a letter from Rebecca. She discovered that if I spent my second semester in Hong Kong I wouldn’t be able to graduate there and I would miss graduation in St. Thomas. At that point I gave up on the idea of spending a term living with my sister. The next day at school Jr. Carrie announced that she was moving to Washington to live with her aunt. I was a bit envious. It was funny to me to see the reaction of some of the underclassmen who couldn’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else than St. Thomas.

Tuesday I spent English class running up and down the stairs between the English classroom and the business classroom with all the typewriters up stairs. I’d run up, type a caption or a “by…” line or a “continued on…” continued from…” line and race back down where someone would cut it out of the page and paste it on the lay out sheet. I think newspapers were more fun to put together before the computer era.

Mr. Lloyd (8^th & 11-12 industrial arts) had decreed that too many of us were in shop class to start the year with individual projects, so he decided that we were all going to make metal tool boxes. Some of the girls complained and he said, “Fine, you can make a metal make-up kit.” So far it had all be making notches, bending metal and doing spot welding. That day we started spray painting them. Mr. Lloyd advised us to use flat black paint but most of us had more creative ideas.

Wednesday we finally finished the first edition of the newspaper. My column was called “Nothing by Nobody.” I did it in part to needle the self-esteem police. There was some argument about if it should have a by line. I said no because the author, “nobody” is listed in the title, but was overruled so "Nothing by Nobody" was by Ruth Szedlak. Dad got home that day from his trip.

Thursday I was less than thrilled being stuck going to a career fair with the amount of homework being assigned by Miss. Kassian (7-Sr. Science, 7^th grade class adviser, Asst. play director Operation Contact adviser), Mr. Torgeson (7-10 & 12 Social Studies 8^th grade class adviser, HS Football coach), and Mrs. Hollis. We got back from the fair with 15 minutes left in the day and were dismissed to go home. I got in my car and then as I pulled on to Main Street I remembered that it was Thursday. On Thursdays I took 8^th grader Jason to confirmation class since church is 10 miles out of town & I lived across the road from it. So I went around the block went back in the school and found his Mom, Mrs. Hollis, who told me that she was planning on taking him. So I left the school and Jr. Dawn wanted a ride home so I gave her one. After dropping her off, I had to turn up the air in the car because I hate hairspray fumes.

Friday my class played hide and seek with Mrs. Hollis. When she was late for class we decided to hide behind the steps. Then when she didn’t find us in the classroom she went off to find us and we made a mad dash for the door.

[Quick note about Mr. Torgeson—the other day I was doing a library instruction session and a student answered my question and I replied—“You’re pretty sharp. Must live on the edge of town.” The guy laughed a few minutes later when he got the joke. What does it mean when you start delivering your former teacher’s worst lines?]

At home Sarah and Bob came for a visit. After they left I finally got a good start on my Institute of Children’s Literature assignment. Sunday night dad and I got into a discussion of what body temperature has to do with the temperature of water used to take a shower and that morphed into a discussion of whistling ranges.

Class of 1990 Week 5

2009-09-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

The school work was starting to get quite heavy and I was going mad trying to think of what to write for my newspaper column. Monday night I went back to rule number one of writing: write what you know. So I wrote about being mad. The sophomores were selling World's Finest Chocolates and bought two boxes of Mint Meltaways. The school typewrites were also a problem for me. They were primitive compared to my Smith Corona at home, so I resolved to do all my typing at home. We played a new game in phy-ed, Branna Ball (sp??) I don't remember what it was, but I actually enjoyed playing it. On Thursday we had a Lyceum. As I wrote it in my journal:

We had a lyceum today, a magician, Rusty Ammerman. He was OK, but he ended his act by making his two doves disappear. That was it. The birds were gone. End of show. We didn't know what to do. Even as we left the gym we wanted to know what happened to the birds. Jaci & Margo went back to the gym to find out, but they were too chicken to approach the guy. He walked out of the gym and coughed and out through his hand came feathers. The guys who helped Rusty pack his stuff up know what happened but they're not telling.

Friday I summed up my school life as a contradiction in terms:

I love physics-hate the class
I love to sing-hate chorus
Enjoy writing-tolerating newspaper
Enjoy writing-surviving word processing
Love to read-not getting any time for it.

At home I got my ACT application in the mail. Mom added some fabric to the bottom of my pajama top-she had originally made the top too short so it didn't stay tucked in. This was a problem since I had a thing for doing cartwheels in the living room before I went to bed. I spent a lot of evenings watching TV with the folks. Saturday night Dad and I enjoyed seeing the season premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I also spent time playing with Sarah's old Light Bright doing different patterns within a large hexagon.

Sunday was LWML (Lutheran Women's Missionary League) Sunday and the women decided to commemorate it by all sitting together on the lectern side of the church. This meant that all the loudest voices communed together. I was on the pulpit side and just about sang solo for a few verses and tried to sing loud so Mrs. Hollis (also our church organist) would not be left stranded. That afternoon we had a Lutheran Youth Fellowship meeting and went bowling in Cavalier.

Evidence that I have been here before

2009-09-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that Rincker Memorial Library at Concordia University Wisconsin has undergone two major renovations since I graduated, the marks of my more than four years as a student employee are still to be found. This is most noticeable in the books themselves. The collection was bar-coded between my freshmen and sophomore year. Just as my sophomore year was ending and I was gearing up to work in the library full time for the summer, a terrible discovery was made. All the smart barcodes (smart meaning they had the title and barcode of the book printed on them) started with the wrong digit. The barcode wand would not read them. The best the programmers could do for us was to change the first digit in the system and we could key them in by hand changing the initial 3 for a 2. So it began. For the next two and a half years (full time in the summers, 10 hours a week in the school year) I spent my time in the stacks and ripped out those smart barcodes, replacing them with the dumb barcodes (dumb because they did not have a title or call # on them) that started with the correct number. The books were then loaded on carts taken to cataloging and the barcode was corrected in the system so that it could now be read with a wave of the wand. (Wave may be a poetic extrapolation-more like a swipe and several before it takes-but still so much easier than typing 2505400...The work of my hands is on almost every book purchased before 1991.

Today I discovered another place that my presence left an enduring mark. When I lecture students I often make use of visual aids. I grab a drawer out of our shelf list (we still have one-that's the card catalog that is in call number order and thus only useful to catalogers and librarian types. No it's not current-we stopped

collecting new cards long ago) and a volume of the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and explain how when I was a student we used one for books and the other for articles as a way to impress on them that there was and still is a different way to get at each. (You'd be surprised how many students despair of finding journal articles in our catalog and resort to Wikipedia.) Anyway when I was a student worker the shelf list was current and we used it to track our progress in the rebar-coding process. You had books without cards, books without any barcode, (smart or otherwise) and tragically cards without books. Those were pulled and gathered into an empty drawer and so we would know what those cards were about I labeled the drawer "Missing books." Today I happened to notice that my hand written label of 15 years ago is still there. I doubt than anyone but I would recognize it as my hand, but for me it was like a time capsule. This library is so different from the one I worked in, but there are still impressions from the past if you know where to look for them.

REG

lhg edited and approved

Class of 1990 week 4 (homecoming week)

2009-09-18T04:01:00.000-07:00

Monday:

PJ day-almost all the girls dressed up, almost none of the guys did. The most exciting part of the day for me was discovering the book, Bells on Their Toes, in the school library. It is the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen. I had spent many hours speculating why 3rd born sister Mary was only mentioned three times in Cheaper by the Dozen. In Bells on Their Toes there is a foot note near the beginning that explains that Mary died of diphtheria at the age of four. I was so excited about it that I startled a few people by loudly exclaiming as I left the library, "Mary died! That's what happened!" Ten years in St Thomas, three as a student librarian, and I didn't find that book until I was a senior.

Tuesday:

50 & 60s day-the day ended with a soc-hop in the gym. I was anxious to get the day done because Mom & I headed for Grafton to Twetens to get my senior pictures taken. We went to Twetens because he gave us a discount for living so far away. Float building happened at Jaci's; we had it all together by 11:37pm. I printed out the side banners at home on our Epson dot matrix printer. It took about six hours to print out the signs.

Wednesday:

Picture day-I woke up with a cold but not so sick as to stay home. The senior class picture was taken in Jaci's back yard. I was starting to get panicky about newspaper stories and physics homework that needed to be done. I had trouble even coming up with ideas for the newspaper. Rebecca wired me a single red rose with a note that read, "If I could vote, I'd vote for you."

Thursday:

We were led to the office to cast our ballots for Homecoming king and queen. I voted for Peter and then, despite the laughable idea of me being an embodiment of school spirit and the popular notion that one shouldn't vote for oneself, I voted for myself, reasoning that I didn't vote for myself no one would.

I still was not feeling well and no one would tell me what time the bonfire to announce the winners was, except to say that it was after the girl's basketball game. So I drove myself to the game and was ignored. I followed the crowd to the bonfire and was ignored by all except a group of 7th grade girls, who came up to me to tell me that they had overhead the votes being counted in the office and knew that I was going to be queen. I sharply told them to stop spreading lies. When my name was called to come forward as a nominee I struggled to get up to the fire as a group of students from Valley (we cooperated with them for sports) were blocking my way and I had to explain that it was my name that was just called and I needed to get up there. The winners were announced. Jason was King, Stephanie was Queen. I got back to my car without anyone saying a word to me and drove home. Junior. Tom (the football team's Jr. King Nominee) would be my escort in the parade and for the coronation and football game procession. To this day I hate the picture of myself standing next to Jason and Stephanie at the bonfire that made it into the Yearbook. I had been assigned lay out of that section and had tried to crop myself out of it, but Mrs. Kappel insisted that I keep myself in it so the picture would fit right. It's ironic that mine is one of the largest faces on the page, since I had never felt more invisible in my life.

Friday:

There was freakish weather before the parade and we wondered if it would have to be called off: First rain, then a flurry of snow and then, minutes before we lined up the floats and cars, hale. But just when things were getting started the sun came out. All in all getting nominated was much more fun than being on the court. Our float was carried by 6th graders. I was glad to not have to carry it. Four out of the six years I had to lug a corner of that frame. Tom and I road in a Trans Am-the only car with a top on it. In the evening I picked up Peggy and Junior. Kathy and I took them to the game. It was 40 degrees. Right before the half time procession Freshman Joanna asked the girls on the court if we were nervous and I replied that it didn't matter because standing in a prom dress in the middle of an open field we would all be shaking anyway. The St. Thomas girls changed back into weather appropriate clothes right away but the girls from Valley kept their dresses on for the rest of the game, huddling under blankets. When I got back out to the game Peggy found me and told me that she and Kathy had found a ride to the party: the party that I was not invited to and would never have had interest in going to if I was. I stuck around for the end of the game. We lost 20-26 with our opponents scoring a final TD with only 24 seconds left. It was the last football game I attended until last fall when I saw my nephew play.

The weekend:

Saturday Mom and I went to Grand Forks to shop, picking up my sr. picture proofs in Grafton on the way. On Sunday after church those of us who went to the LCMS Denver Youth gathering in July held a dinner for members of the congregation that helps pay for our trip. I got up and did a slide show. Sunday afternoon I ended up falling asleep in the middle of the living room floor reading the comics. That night I went to bed still trying to come up with an idea for a newspaper story.

Class of 1990 week 3

2009-09-11T04:30:00.000-07:00

Monday I got to school by 7:30 am so we could all be in Grafton at 8:00 am for our homecoming pictures. Jr. Corey was really too sick to be there, but he made it. Friday morning of that week the juniors and seniors went to Drayton to spend the morning golfing. I was teamed up with Margo and Jr. Dawn.

I was starting to feel overwhelmed by homework, particularly in English, where I needed to do a journalism style book, and was assigned to do a column and a comic panel for the school newspaper. Mr. Green (vocational guidance counselor) handed out applications for the ACT. We also got to watch a recording of President Bush's talk to the nation's kids about drugs.

In Chorus I was missing the voices from the class of 89, and was dismayed that Mr. Hillius (4th-12 Band, 1st-12th Chorus, Jr. High girls Basketball coach) wanted Jr. Holly & I to sing the Star Spangled Banner at basketball games as a duet in unison with little or nothing in the way of vocal dynamics. This is a far cry from the harmony I enjoyed when singing it my freshman year.

At home I got back my lesson from the Institute of Children's Literature, whose young writer's course I was taking. I was excited to see all positive comments from my instructor. Mom moved my senior pictures to the following Tuesday. Saturday I lamented not getting anything done aside from "cutting grass and washing the stupid car." I also complained that the computers at school had a different touch than my Smith Corona typewriter and I was getting frustrated by it. Sunday after church I wrote Peter's and Peggy's names in calligraphy to go with their Homecoming photos for the senior class window display. Homecoming week festivities would start on Monday.

Class of 1990 Week 2

2009-09-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Monday was Labor Day, so there was no school. My folks hosted a get together of the circuit pastors, Fieges from Langdon, Kiefers from Cavalier, and Allens from Niagara.

On Tuesday Mrs. Hollis (7th -senior math, junior class advisor) had us writing letters for computer class to her daughter Heidi, who had graduated the year before and joined the navy. All the classes had class meetings. Terry was not in school that day. We started the meeting before Mr. Dick (superintendent, US History, HS boys Phy-ed, senior class advisor, track coach) showed up. We had made most of our decisions before he arrived in the library where we were meeting.

When He came in he asked, "so what have you done?" and Margo said, "well, we've decided a lot of things."

"Nonsense," he said, "You haven't decided anything until I've told you you've decided it."

Margo listed our votes and he approved all of them, even complimenting us on our class motto, saying, "that's not bad." I wrote the motto and originally had credited it to one of my numerous pseudonyms, but in the end we decided to just not mention where it came from at all.

What we decided that first meeting:
Class President: Peter
Vice President: Jason
Secretary: Margo
Class nominations for homecoming king & queen: Peter & Peggy
Float theme for the homecoming parade: Can da Cubs-the float would have a trash can filled with teddy bears. We were playing the Cando Cubs for homecoming that year.
Class colors: emerald green & silver-the same colors we had for prom the year before.
Class flower: white rose
Class motto: Life has many wonders in store for he who looks at every finish line as the start of the next race.
Speaker for graduation: We all agreed that we wanted Mrs. Hollis.

Mr. Dick left before the period was up and we were to sit in the library until the bell rang. But then, without permission, we all daringly decided to venture to the math room to ask her right away. We knocked on the door and Mrs. Hollis came out. We asked her if she would speak for our graduation and she seemed taken aback, "You guys will make me nervous for the next nine months."

Kevin put his arm around her shoulder, "It will be just like having a kid."

We all laughed and she scolded, "Don't joke about that with a woman of my age." In the end she told us she would think about it.

On Wednesday I wrote in my journal, "Marty said the football team was going to nominate me (Ya, right; I believe it when I see it)." In PDP we finished reading Lutefisk Ghetto and in Phy-Ed we golfed with waffle balls outside.

On Thursday I had one of the most surreal days of all my time in St. Thomas. The Football team did indeed nominate me for homecoming queen. Mrs. Barker told me the first hour of the day. In choir that day I had the underclassmen girls hanging on my every word regarding what I was going to wear and how I planned to do my hair. For a person who generally felt invisible this was like venturing into the Twilight Zone. Friday I predicted in my journal that the king and queen would be Jason and Junior Stephanie.

The fact that I was nominated for Homecoming Queen by the Football team is something I enjoy telling people after they get to know me a little bit. It just doesn't fit their perceptions of who I am. It's sort of like learning that my Mom was a track star in high school, even getting a city wide trophy for running in Winnipeg. But she got her award by talent, I got mine by default. Jaci had been queen the year before, and my class had already nominated Peggy. That just left Margo and me. Margo had been nominated the year before. Maybe they were just trying to be fair.

At home I attended a Sunday school teachers meeting. I had wanted to call eldest sister Rebecca in Hong Kong to tell her I was nominated but Mom wouldn't let me. She did let me call my sister Sarah at the University of North Dakota. I was also upset that the Grafton FM station switched to an all country format, so I changed my listening habits to CKY out of Winnipeg. Sunday I taught Sunday school. I had the first grade class made up of Troy and Kayla. That afternoon I went to Grand Forks for a Lutheran Youth Fellowship Zone planning meeting. There were representatives from St. Paul's St. Thomas, the church in Niagara and the two Grand Forks churches. We planned our zone rallies for the year & nominated officers, I was asked to come up with some written structure for the zone that we could vote on at the first rally. Once home I was made president of St. Paul's Lutheran Youth Fellowship group at our first meeting of the year.

Class of 1990

2009-08-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago today I started my senior year at St. Thomas Public High School, St. Thomas, ND. In those days I was quite the writer and I pretty much have a journal entry for everyday of that year. My plan is that on Fridays I’ll sum up some of what I did that week of my senior year.

For those who don’t know my background that well, here are a few points to remember. Our class had 8 people: Peggy, Margo, Jaci, Kevin, Jason, Terry, Peter, & Ruth. I came in the 3rd grade and thus was the “new” kid. One thing our class was known for was that we could work well together and make decisions pretty easily. Later in college I took a class in group dynamics wherein I learned that the ideal size group for problem solving has between 5 and 8 people. Any less, everyone runs with their own agenda; any more, you don’t have full participation. So our harmony as a class may not have been a matter so much of personalities as it was of size.

Also, being a small school, the teachers were pretty much one person subject departments, many reaching below the high school level into the junior high. So for six years I had the same math teacher. For five years the same social studies teacher. For all my years in St. Thomas starting in the 3rd grade I had the same music teacher, who also taught all the instruments and directed the grade school and high school bands. Others taught diverse subjects and levels which led to some interesting interpersonal dynamics. The school librarian had to put up with me for six years in Phy-ed, and was tasked with the near impossible duty of trying to teach me to spell for two years. Since this blog is public I will make reference to this after my first mention of each teacher's name.

The class of 1990 blog posts are about memories. In writing this I have no desire to bring up old grievances or embarrass anyone. The past is made up of only two things: memories and regrets. It’s the present that lets you know which one is which. After 20 years I can say that my days at STHS are made up almost entirely of memories. For those who were there, feel free to add your memories and make comments, I only ask that you be charitable.

Week 1

The first day of school we spent a lot of time listening to Mr. Hanson (principal, business teacher- 3 levels, 5-8th grade boys basketball coach, HS girls basketball coach, HS baseball coach, school athletic director) explain school policy. I did have some fun that day hanging out in the library and talking to Mrs. Barker (7&8th grade Language Arts, 7&8th grade boys and girls Phy-ed, HS girls Phy-ed, student council advisor, cheerleader advisor, HS play director and librarian—library served K-12) .

My big debate was if I was going to take Shop or fork out some of my own money to take a correspondence course. The year before I had taken both Basic Drawing and Calligraphy by correspondence as a way to avoid both Shop and Book Keeping and have enough credits. If I took shop I planned to make a bookcase that I could take to college. I was considering taking German if I did the correspondence class, or as I put it in my journal , “I need to choose between a set of shelves or a shelf of knowledge.” I chose the set of shelves. Wednesday of that week all the seniors spent a day out of the school to go soliciting for year book ads. Peter and I went to Cavalier. I was driving, but didn’t want to be. My mom made cookies for the car. It rained and we gave up going to grain elevators after two turned us down. Mrs. Kappel (HS English, Home-Ec 2 levels, yearbook and newspaper adviser, sophomore class advisor, volleyball coach) had a “few” questions for us about that. On Thursday it was finally a normal school day. In PDP (Present Day Problems) we had to write an essay in class describing St. Thomas. After that we started reading Lutefisk Ghetto. In shop we endured safety film strips.

At home, Mom and I went shopping in Grafton for clothes that I could wear for my Senior pictures. I had a quiet weekend that involved reading, mowing the lawn, watching TV and Church & playing cards with Mom. There was a note stating I was already feeling like I had been in school for a month not just one week.