Thursday, January 23, 2014

Snow days

With the windchill at -27 this morning I really did not want to venture out this morning but Chanel 6 KQWC's question of the day - "How will you be spending your day off of school?" got me to thinking about how I used to spend snow days "back in the day" on the farm.

We would bundle up in our snowmobile suits, boots, gloves and face masks and head outside for one or several of the following activities, in no particular order:

1. Building a sled run - we would pack snow on the porch steps and down the sidewalk running into the front yard and then pour water on it to make it really slick so we could sled all the way through the yard down to the road.
2. Building multilevel snow forts and tunnels connecting them in the snow drifts and then chasing each other through them and snowball fights and jumping off of the machine shed or hog house roof onto the snowdrifts.
3. Dad and Mom would pull us on a toboggan or the mini fiberglass boat with "the Bomb" through the pony pasture and the fields around the house. "The Bomb" was an old, green 4 door sedan, I think it was a 4 on the tree - we called it "The Bomb" because we thought it was going to blow up anytime.
4. Riding snowmobiles and often pulling someone on said toboggan or boat.
5. Playing in the haymow - building forts and tunnels with the bales and playing hide and seek or some other made up game that involved crawling through the tunnels and popping into and and out of the numerous escape holes to keep from getting caught.

Sometimes we would just hangout in the house - playing army with Loren's plastic soldiers, building them forts with bricks; the precursor to Legos, Lincoln Logs and empty wooden spools (the kind sewing thread used to come on.) We also played board games and cards - my favorite was War! We might each do our own thing - I'd play Johnny West and/or Barbie or read.

So how did you send your snow days?

Monday, January 20, 2014

Technology and the aging (cluttered) mind

I haven't posted a new blog in several months - not because I was SO busy, but because I couldn't get into Blogger.  I would log into my work Google account and try to get into Blogger - and it would tell me you don't have a blog - do you have another Google account?? I'm like, no.... and would get so frustrated that I would want to spit, so I would give up for a week and say try again later. Somehow, I have more than one Google account for work, I am certain it was user error since I had no idea what I was doing when I set "it" up - and I found out today that I have my computer set to automatically update my IE version - and Blogger/Google doesn't like IE11...  I have tons of patience and a wide/long stubborn streak - I will EVENTUALLY figure things out.

I wrote down which account got me here on a post it note & it is stuck to my monitor. Eventually, after a bit of research, I will delete the "bad" accounts and I think I will try to get back to IE9 since the upgrade to 10 & now 11 have been creating numerous issues - what is compatibility mode? Maybe I can convince one of my kids to do it for me..