All posts by reneeinnd

Family

Family Names

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My father’s family is from Ostfriesland, an area of Northwest Germany bordered by Holland and the North Sea.  Their language was Frisian/Low Saxon.  They were the people of Beowulf, and they invaded the British Isles early and were in turn invaded by the Romans, the Franks, the Saxons, the Vikings, Germanic tribes, and so on.  My ancestors were simple, poor farmers, and my did they have funny names.

I have tried to build family trees using the data bases in Ancestory, and I have found the most wonderful and weird names (actually, Wiard is one of their names). I can only imagine the trouble people had to go to to do this genealogy work, since there was a very unusual naming system, called Patronymics, used in the area until Napoleon invaded and ordered everybody to settle on a permanent last name. The system didn’t die out until the 1830’s. According to a German researcher named Ines Weissenberg, this is how first names were derived in Ostfriesland:

The first male child was named after the paternal grandfather.

The second male child got the name of the maternal grandfather.

First and second daughter were named after paternal and maternal grandmothers.

The third son was named after his father.

The fourth son was named after the father’s paternal grandfather.

The third daughter was named after the mother.

The fourth daughter was named after the mother’s paternal or even maternal grandmother.

Then, there were also other aspects of choosing a first name such as reusing a deceased child’s name for the next child of the same sex and naming the first daughter/son of a subsequent marriage after the deceased former spouse. These rules expressed the belief that a person continued to live through the descendants.

Last names were even more confusing, since your last name was usually your father’s first name.  If a man called Harm had three sons named Gerd, Jan, and Menno, their last name would be Harms, indicating they were Harm’s sons.  If Gerd had children, their last name would be “Gerdes”.  Jan’s children would have the last name “Janssen”, and Menno’s children would have the surname “Mennen”.  Last names changed from generation to generation.  The same names were used for first and last names.

One of my ancestors named Okke Poets had a son named Poet Okkens.  Lubbe Habben, a far distant grandmother, had a daughter she named Gretje Lubbens.  Zeede Ecken and her husband Riko Fredrichs name their son Ecko Riken, after her father, Ecko Focken.

Gertien, Taalke, Gretje, Geert, Geske, Mimke, Trienke, Lauke, and Evertje are some of the more wonderful women’s names I have found in my family.  Freerk, Harm, Weert, Wiard, Folkert, Heyke, Okke, Ullfert, Harrameke were some of the men’s names. Ostfriesland is no further than about 50 miles from places like Bremen, where people had names like Otto, Lena, Ernst, and Dora.

My name, using this system, would be Tilla Jacobs. My husband would be Christian Williams. Our son would be William Christians. Daughter would be Evelyn Christians.  How confusing.

 

Go back a couple of generations and figure out some family names for yourself using Patronymics.

History, Stories

Bryce’s Germs, No Returns

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Last week, one of my high school classmates died. Bryce was the second to die in as many weeks, quite a lot for a class of about 110 people. We are, after all, only in our late 50’s . Bryce died in a local nursing home. I have no idea of the cause of death, or the circumstances of his life since we graduated.

Bryce was a gentle, simple soul. He was categorized as “slow”. He wasn’t as slow as the children in the special education classes and he was in the regular classroom full time. I don’t think he could read, though, and academic work wasn’t easy for him.

Bryce was a farm boy who quite evidently got up early to do chores.  We knew this because he never changed clothes or boots before he got on the bus, and the manure still clung to his boots and the barnyard smell followed him all day.

Our elementary school was old, and there were very steep stairwells inside that led from the outside doors up to the second and third floors of the building. Every  time we were out of doors and had to go inside, we all had to line up on the steps. There was always a great amount of jostling, with people bumping into and brushing against each other. Woe betide those who had to stand next to Bryce or any of the other children considered unlovely or objectionable in some way and got touched by them. The only way we found to cope with it was to pass along the experience to the acceptable ones around us, wiping our hands on them and saying “______’s germs, no returns”. Those germs would be passed along until the poor person last in line would get stuck with them. You never wanted to get stuck with the germs.

I am sure that Bryce and the others knew that their germs were being passed along and that they were considered unacceptable by the rest of us. We didn’t exactly whisper. Despite this, I never once saw Bryce upset or retaliate. I never thought much about it until we were in junior high school. I don’t know what the occasion was, but for some reason I found myself in a conversation with Bryce and he thanked me for being so nice to him all the years we had been in school together. I was flabbergasted and deeply ashamed of myself, as I knew I hadn’t been kind to him at all. I was just less mean, I guess.

I thought of that conversation this week as I read his death notice.  I am still ashamed of myself. I hope he died easily and I am glad he is at rest. I wish I had been kinder.

How has kindness played out in your life?

Family, Stories

Let’s Pretend

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A couple of years I bought I bought a new, three-story doll house for my play therapy room. My old one was posh and well-appointed, but it had no stairs that led from one floor to the next. This was a real problem for many of the children I see in therapy, as they couldn’t figure out how to get the dolls from one floor to the next, and it got in the way of their play. They couldn’t suspend reality and pretend that there were stairs, or just have the dolls jump up and down. I notice that children who pretend do much better in life and in play therapy than those who can’t or who have limited pretend skills.

The new doll house has two sets of stairs, and the dolls can run up and down at will, and so do, and therapeutic play can go on impeded.  I haven’t read any recent research about the capacity of modern children to pretend in their play. I hope my clients represent a special group not representative of our children as a group.

My nine month old kitten has better pretend skills than may of my young clients. I know Luna doesn’t pretend using words. I suppose she pretends in images or actions, but I know she pretends. She hides from, and then pounces on, unsuspecting foil balls. She knows that the balls only move if she bats them or she carries them to us to throw. She walks away from them when she is finished playing, and doesn’t act as though they will move if she turns her back. It is as if she assigns some temporary identity to them when she hides and pounces, and then thinks about them differently when she walks away and goes on to new activities.  You can see her on top of a cabinet in our living room. She loves to jump up there and pounce on the Tomten figures and attack the Finnish straw goats. They are all in a closet now until she slows down and loses interest in them. I wish I knew what she was thinking about them.

How do you pretend? How do you think your animals pretend?

 

 

 

Baboon Achievers, Business, Stories

Help Wanted

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I really like my job. I have never regretted choosing to spend my career as a psychologist in a very rural area. I work at a regional mental health center, one of eight in my state.  Every center has psychologists and other mental health professionals. At the present time, there are 12 openings for psychologists at these centers, and it is extremely hard to fill positions.  I find this hard to understand, as I can’t think of a better situation in which to practice. One has the support of colleagues, professional autonomy, people who do all the billing, good benefits, and the opportunity to treat just about every mental health condition in the DSM-5.  Heck, at many agencies you can even get your student loans repaid through a federal program to entice professionals to under served areas. We have one opening for a psychologist at my agency. I am the only full-time psychologist there.

Due to historical factors too complicated to go into, the supervisor of psychologists at my agency serves two agencies, my agency  and the one in Bismarck, necessitating that person drive 200 miles round trip once a week to oversee things out here, and spending one night in our town. Several other administrators do the same thing. My supervisor recently quit to move to another center, so my agency and the one in Bismarck are currently without a supervising psychologist. I applied for the supervisor’s job and interviewed for it last week.

The supervisor’s position is mainly administrative.  There are hours worth of administrative meetings at each agency and I would have to go to all of them at both places  if I were in the supervisor’s position. I would have to spend one night and two days a week in Bismarck, driving 200 miles round trip, often in poor weather. I would also not be able to see many, if any, clients, and would have no time to do psychological evaluations. The pay isn’t that much higher. Since I am the only full-time psychologist at my agency, there would be virtually no psychology services there. Why on earth did I apply for the supervisor’s position?

I am at the point where I don’t want someone younger and less experienced than I am telling me what to do. I want to be able to exercise some power in decision-making and policy.  I interviewed in Bismarck for the position last week. Everyone was kind and congenial, all people I knew and had worked with before. It struck me that I was the oldest person in the room.  I was the only applicant for the job.  After a weekend of thinking and discussion with Husband, I withdrew my application.

I decided that power and control are pretty illusory, that I can tolerate a supervisor younger than I am, even if they turn out to be a knucklehead, and that I would go bats sitting through endless meetings. I want to see clients and do evaluations.  The folks who interviewed me were very understanding. It would be endless headaches for  them to make sure that the services I provide now were continued if I had accepted the new position. I noticed an instant reduction in stress and heaviness after I made my decision to stay as I am.  Now if we can only convince young professionals that a rural practice can be even more satisfying than city life with its amenities.

What factors are important to you in making your work satisfying, or at least tolerable?

The Baboon Congress

Encountering the Unexpected

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

Husband dines on Mexican food prepared in back of Pakistani-owned tobacco shop on a North Dakota Indian reservation.

He tells owner “We make chapatis and lamb curry”, and shows book of Arabic poetry.

Owner translates, then recites poetry in Urdu, and challenges Husband to read the Koran.

When have you encountered the unexpected? 

The Baboon Congress

Waiting

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

Advent is a time in the Christian church year of waiting and anticipating.  Hymns are somewhat mournful and quiet, and  readings deal not only with the wait for the Christ Child but the end time and the crucifixion.  We wait for packages and children to arrive, we wait in line, we wait for bread to rise and for cookie dough to chill. I always seem to need time off from work during Advent to recharge and regroup, and that is what I am doing this week.

Yesterday I made some cookies I have never made before-Nurnberger Lebkuchen and Spekulatius.   Both are German cookies. The Lebkuchen are honey cakes, and the Spekulatias are like the Dutch Speculaas windmill cookies. I have been contemplating my German roots lately, and I would call these contemplative cookies, as they turned out weird (the Lebkuchen), and ugly but full of flavor (the Spekulatius).  They make me contemplate what people were thinking when they came up with the recipes.

The Lebkuchen sound good in principle. They call for honey, flour, spices, citron, almonds, candied orange peel, and butter, as well as a cup of strong black coffee. The sweet honey and the bitter coffee compete for dominance in the taste. I believe the cakes have to sit for a week and mellow. We will see how they progress by New Years Day. The Spekulatius are made by pressing dough into wooden Speculaas molds, intricate woodcuts of old-fashioned figures and scenes. I don’t have any of the wooden molds, so I used a springerle rolling-pin, which has carvings of hearts and other shapes cut into it.

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The cookies look like tiles. The only problem is that the pretty shapes disappeared while baking, and I have these terribly ugly yet great tasting cookies. I know that the honey must preserve the cakes so they last a long time; the wooden molds are lovely and the cookies could be too as long as the decorative imprints don’t disappear. There is something about these recipes that is important to the people who grew up with them.  It is interesting how tastes differ from culture to culture.

Today I will make Spritz cookies and pepparkaker. Husband wants to make Krumkake on Sunday, as we are now waiting for a blizzard on Sunday and we expect to be snowbound. The NOAA keeps putting out warnings and advice to stock up and prepare for a terrible storm.  They have been warning us for days, and now tell us that we will get between 6-8 inches of snow with very strong winds, while others in the central and eastern parts of the state could get up to 15 inches. It is sunny today, with no wind, which is quite unusual here. It is as though the world is holding its breath.  We have been to the grocery store, and husband has filled the bird feeders.  Now we wait to see if the predictions come true.  I am thankful we are all home and safe, and no one has to go anywhere. The air pressure should drop with the storm, so bread should rise well. Husband has mixed up a rye sour dough starter, and I want to make Julekag and Bremen Klaben. We will need to carb up in order to shovel.  For now, though,  we wait for Christmas and snow and wind in the unnatural stillness and sunny skies outside.

What are you waiting for? 

 

Family, Science, The Baboon Congress

The Sly Fox

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Header image by NormaliltyRelief via Flickr.  CC 2.0

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

In the Summer of 1978, I accompanied my mother to Los Angeles so that she could receive treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. I was home on break from college, and my parents let me know in no uncertain terms that it was my duty to go with mom for the treatment. I was miserable, since I knew that the treatment was a sham and a fraud, but they wouldn’t listen, so off we went.

Mom had an initial manifestation of MS when she was 30 years old.  It was pretty typical, with visual anomalies and numbness in the lower extremities. It was quite difficult to diagnose MS in the days before neuroimaging, and she was never officially diagnosed with the disease at the time.  Her symptoms disappeared,  and she had no more signs of the disease until 24 years later. The diagnosis was confirmed at the Mayo Clinic in 1977.  Mom was devastated. She had to quit teaching, but remained able to walk unassisted and drive.  She set out to find a cure for herself, and the treatment in Los Angeles held out great hope for her.

MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body destroys  the lining of the motor nerves so that electic impulses can’t travel down the nerves efficiently. People lose the ability to move their limbs.  There is no cure.

Mom heard from other local people with MS about a surgeon in Los Angeles who claimed to have great success in increasing blood flow to the brain and reducing or eliminating MS symptoms.  It was interesting how the information  about the treatment travelled in the days before the internet and social media. Mom talked to people who either had the treatment or knew of someone who had, and all swore by it. Mom contacted the doctor, who was more than happy to take her as a patient.

We arrived in LA and spent the first night in a residential hotel that the doctor had arranged for us. Mom had an initial examination at the doctor’s office. He declared her a perfect candidate for the procedure, and she was admitted to a private hospital in the Century City area of LA.  The doctor was a vascular surgeon. He claimed that the medical establishment and insurance  companies wouldn’t accept his treatment as legitimate for MS, (although he and his patients knew the truth of the matter), so it was billed as vascular treatment for clogged arteries. He reamed out his patients’ carotid arteries, thereby increasing blood flow to the brain. That was it. No repairing of the nerve linings, an impossible task that is the only thing that would have made a difference. He  just removed what little accumulation of fat that lined the carotid arteries.  His patients stayed in bed in the hospital for a couple of days after the surgery. By the time they were ready for discharge they were quite well rested and of course told the doctor they felt better.  They were discharged home and never saw the doctor again.

I spent my time hanging around the hospital talking with other patients and their family members. They came from all over the US, from Florida to Illinois, to Nevada. All were so hopeful, and talked of the doctor as a misunderstood saint. I slept on a cot in my mom’s hospital room.  Somehow I found that a nearby theatre, the Century City Shubert Theatre, was putting on a production of The Sly Fox,  a modern adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, with George  C. Scott in the title role. He had initially done the play on Broadway. I managed to get a ticket to a matinée. I had never seen a professional production like this before. It was wonderful. It was so ironic to see that play about a con artist when I knew my mom and the other patients were in the hands of such a sympathetic and sincere con artist. I knew he was a fraud, but how can you dash people’s hopes.  He had set up a perfect scam, founded on the hopes of desperate and trusting people.

We returned home after a week.  We heard several years later that the doctor had lost his medical licence due to insurance fraud. Mom had very little to say about her LA experiences, but eventually agreed with me that the doctor was a con artist. She lived to be 91, still living at home, able to walk using a walker, still a fighter.

What are your experiences with sly  foxes? 

The Baboon Congress

Irrational Grocery Shopping

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

We have had really bad weather the past two weeks. It started out with 14 inches of snow with tempestuous winds, and now we are dealing with really cold temperatures and wind chills as low as -35. I don’t have such a hard time getting around, although I find I am more fatigued than usual at the end of the day. Husband has a harder time of it, since he has to drive 100 miles north every Tuesday to work on the Fort Berthold Reservation.  The road there is curvy and remote, and fills in easily with snow the minute the wind gets above 20 mph.  The water pipes have all frozen up in the small trailer the tribe provides for him to stay in when he is there.  He has been quite stressed, even when he gets back home, and he is driving me crazy with unnecessary grocery purchases and compulsive baking of rye bread.

I would describe his mood as panicky, and he is even more fussy and particular than usual. He acknowledges how silly he is being.  This is also the time of year when our freezers are all full of this year’s garden produce, and our goal must be to eat out of the freezers so that there is room for more produce next fall. You can see from the photos that we have very little room in the freezers  for more food. I admit that two people do not need to have three freezers (four if you include the freezer that is part of the fridge in the basement. I admit it, we have two fridges, too).  I should add that we gave away pounds and pounds of produce this summer, and we still had too much to put up. The minute we take something out of the freezers, it seems we put more in because we bought bulk ground round, or we baked, or we made too much soup. I refuse to disclose how much butter I bought for Christmas baking. We needn’t discuss that here, but I admit it is substantial. After all, Family Fare had Land O’ Lakes butter on sale for $3.00 a pound!

Husband stored the beets from our garden in coolers packed in sawdust. He decided yesterday that we needed to use the beets, and he wanted to roast them. I love roasted beets, and would be content to eat them, all by themselves, with sour cream and butter. Husband insisted that we had to have them with salmon fillets and russet potatoes. That meant buying salmon. I reminded him we had good sea bass in the freezer, so why buy more fish. He insisted, since that was just how it had to be to fulfill his notion of how to serve the beets. Then he double checked  everything I told him we needed to buy at the store.

When we got to the grocery store, he said that since we had too much cheddar cheese in the fridge, he was going to get some apples so he could have cheese and apples. He insisted they had to be Haralson apples.  There were no Haralson apples to be had, and he wouldn’t consider any other apple. He noticed that the pears looked good, so he decided to get pears, which meant we had to buy Brie, because that is what you are supposed to eat with pears. Now we have too much cheddar as well as Brie. We arrived home with Brie and salmon, and announced he was too tired to cook.  He had microwave popcorn for supper. Then he mixed up a rye sponge, and went to bed.  We’re glad we have a strong marriage.

The high temperatures this week are predicted to range from 4 to -9.  I don’t want to think about what the wind chills will be.  We certainly have enough food to eat. We won’t starve. I just hope the freezers don’t break down.

What’s in your freezer?  

 

Food, The Baboon Congress

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.

103 Comments

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

We have five grocery stores in our town.  We gained one large Cashwise during the oil boom, along with a brand new, bigger  Family Fare that joined the two smaller Family Fares we already had. Walmart  was already here. It really is too many stores for a town our size, but none have closed since the oil bust.

20161205_124833Daughter chose recipes for Thanksgiving this year that called for lots of fresh sage, rosemary , and thyme, as well as parsley. I waited until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving buy the last  of the ingredients, certainly not the last minute I thought, especially with so many grocery stores in town. Well, daughter and I searched all the stores for the herbs, and came up empty except for some limp parsley. We were told at each store “we might have a truck in tomorrow night, but we’re not sure  if they ordered more herbs. People just snapped them up last week as soon as we put them  out”.

20161205_124722This called for some creative  thinking.  I knew we had a large Lemon Thyme plant on the south side of the house that was a little ragged but still greenish, and a smallish rosemary plant in the front that might not have quite froze, but what about the sage?

We were in the Walmart produce section after one of the produce workers made an unproductive search of the back cooler for errant herbs, when I saw them–four medium sized pots filled with fresh sage and thyme plants, each at a price identical to one of those  plastic boxes fresh herbs come in. This was true serendipity if not Divine intervention.  We bought two, and only used  the sage in one of the pots.  The extra pot is now in my office, along with the much pruned rosemary plant from the front yard.

What did it take to find your missing ingredient?

 

The Baboon Congress

Creeping Perfection

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Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

Early in November, Husband and I spent a Friday in our church basement making lefse. We were there for about 7 hours rolling and frying. In addition to sore and tired backs and arms, we took away a strange new sense of perfectionism that I hope ends soon.

It is exhausting us.

I am not a perfectionist, not really, especially when it comes to housekeeping and baking. As long as it tastes good and there is nothing for the cats to eat off of the floor, I think I have success. I have learned since the new DSM-5 has come out that people like me,  who chew their nails,  have an official diagnosis of Other Specified Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have to think about that more carefully regarding my own psychological makeup. I don’t know if I accept it yet. I fear that it is true.

20161202_160925Now, the lefse ladies in my church basement are perfectionists! We were set at different stations around the kitchen, and the lefse manager had the nerve to tell me that my first lefse sheet wasn’t thin enough. My standard for lefse thinness is that you can read the words “Bethany Pastry Cloth” through the lefse before you take it off the cloth and fry it. Her standard is that you roll the 1/2 cup of lefse dough into a round that is at least 12 inches in diameter. All the other lefse rollers were doing it, so I swallowed my pride and rolled thinner. I also was put on notice that I was far too splashy with the flour, and that I had better sweep up the flour I got on the floor before someone slipped on it. My lefse didn’t stick as I rolled it out, but no one had as much flour on the counter, the floor, and themselves as I did.  My critic also complained that the flour on the edges of the lefse was going to make edges lefse hard. Well, we can’t have that now, can we, so she made a point to brush the flour off the fried lefses as they came off the griddle. We rolled almost 700 sheets of lefse that day.

20161202_161019Ever since we had our lefse day, Husband and I have been cleaning the house in strange and finicky ways. We spent the whole day after lefse Friday cleaning out all our kitchen cupboards and cabinets, meticulously wiping down the cabinet fronts and interiors and every spice jar and objects contained therein.  It wasn’t planned. We just started to do it at 6:00 am and didn’t stop until nightfall.  The next week I cleaned the basement carpets with vinegar water, and we washed windows for the first time in two years. All our stray papers and mail got sorted and put away. I have been dusting like a fiend.

I think we caught the Creeping Perfection Virus in the church basement. I am hopeful that it will start waning now that we are doing our Christmas baking, but I still wince every time I touch a cabinet front with floury hands, and everything that comes out of the cabinets gets wiped off before they go back in. I never realized how addicting perfection is. After all, how can you argue that something is too clean?

What symptoms indicate the onset of YOUR Creeping Perfection Virus?