Happy Anniversary, Mormor och Morfar!

Today has been my grandparents 61st wedding anniversary.
They are so beautiful!

Happy Anniversary, Mormor and Morfar!

Swedish Princess Cake

Also, check out this Swedish Princess Cake Mom made for Mormor's birthday today. Pretty cool! The flowers are real roses from their garden.

Heritage

Today is my maternal grandmother's 91st birthday.

I am the only person in the world who gets to call her Mormor. My mother's family is of Swedish descent - well, they emigrated in 1969, so really recent descent. In Swedish, the way you refer to your grandparents is designated by their specific relation to you. "Mormor" means mother's mother, and i am the only child of my grandmother's only daughter, so i am the only one who gets to call her Mormor.

Last year, about this time, my husband and i, along with my 15 cousins, 4 uncles, 3 of my aunts, and my cousins' spouses, boyfriends, and children, converged upon my parents' and grandparents' home in Michigan to celebrate Mormor's 90th birthday and her and Morfar's 60th wedding anniversary. We were 40, in all, plus 2 on the way.


I don't think i fully realized, at the time, that this was our last chance to kind of say goodbye to Mormor. Mormor is sporting a stubbornly healthy 90 year-old body underneath a once beautiful mind, now radically limited by dementia to the point that she remembers very little from one moment to the next and regularly expresses her desire to find her childhood home or her baby boys, not recognizing them in their adult form. Today, i realized a little more of the importance of that celebration last year and how God gave us all the opportunity of that one lovely day in which Mormor enjoyed our company, remembered a little, introduced herself a lot, and welcomed us all.

Possibly the only thing about this disease in which i can find any beauty is that Mormor has retained her sweet and kind disposition. The mind may go, but her beautiful spirit remains, kind and humble and welcoming to all these strangers who claimed to be her family.

Also, in her diminished state, the long ago ingrained habit of crochet has not left her. She has produced afghan after afghan after afghan since moving in with my parents several years ago. It's an activity that i think brings her comfort. I share that with her. I learned the skill of crocheting from my mother, who learned it from Mormor, and it's one of the most relaxing activities i engage in - though not nearly often enough.

And thus i found a way to celebrate her on this special day.

There are a couple that are different, but almost all of the afghans i have ever seen that were made by my mother or my grandmother are the same general design. Today, i realized that i never learned how to crochet that design. Check it out...

Mormor made these two:





Mom made this one:


So today, i decided that i would learn to do it too. It will be our family design. And so i studied the other blankets and learned and practiced and completed this one little swatch.


And thus i celebrated a little bitty part of the life of my dear dear grandmother, who has blessed us all so greatly, who has given life and a loving heritage to a great group of viking-Americans - and to me.

Happy Birthday, Mormor! I love you, and i miss you, and when we see each other in Heaven someday, we will know each other perfectly, and i look forward to that day.

Environmental Differences

I haven't written here in a while because i've been considering a ... change in tone and a possible blog remodel. I think i might steer away from politics a bit. But i received an email the other day, and i think i'll share this one with you. I've read about this email at snopes.com and truthorfiction.com, and by all appearances, this is the real deal. Check it out.

House #1
A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400 per month. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home.. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern "snow belt" area. It's in the South.




House #2
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground.

The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.


HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville , Tennessee ;
It is the abode of the "environmentalist" Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford , Texas ;
It is the residence of ex President of the United States , George W. Bush.

Don't believe everything you read. Verify it.
This message has been verified by snopes.com and truthorfiction.com.

best laid plans and separately, dreams

Today, i was going to have the first chance i've had all week to get some real work done around here. I was actually looking forward to cleaning the floors!

Well, i woke up with sort of a head cold, but mostly just extreme exhaustion - the kind that lets you know your body is working on something, and it won't let you wake up. I finally managed to get myself up barely in time to make lunch for my husband and make the kitchen sort of presentable. He went back to work, and i went back to sleep.

Even when i've been awake, it has been sort of zombie-like. I've felt just awful. Well, my husband went to the store and got my all kinds of goodies like fruit and yogurt and juice salad, and i ate some of that good stuff and started feeling a lot better.

Around ten or so, i got up and started cleaning the kitchen, which looks pretty good now. It's 1:20 a.m. now, and i just got out of the shower. I'm all ready to go, but my husband is asleep, and vacuuming seems inappropriate. hmmmh

So i'm blogging to you.

I will also share a picture or two. There is a small piece of property adjoining ours that - if the Lord wills and provides - we may have the opportunity to acquire. Yesterday, we took a little hike on it. It's a small piece of nearly untouched forest with a very deep gully/creek running through it. The land over there is just so beautiful! And i'm a real sucker for a creek bed. And this one is like the big mama creek bed!



James took this picture of me. I was in the dry creek bed, and he was standing up on the bank. It's very steep. Isn't it cool! Oh, and i'm carrying my pvc staff.



I took this picture of James. We were trying to demonstrate how big these tree trunks are! Very old trees. So awesome!


This little patch of undisturbed forest was so amazing! We were a couple hundred feet from a highway in east Texas, but it felt like we were buried miles in the woods in someplace much more tropical. It's too bad pictures really can't explain it.