Guest blog by tim

its harder sometimes than others to give thanks.

this year the dems took a serious hit and the economy is in the tank and the global warming has us living in san diego mn through mid november (not everyone is with me on feeling this is a bad thing) …but the world just keeps on a turning for the better or the worse and all we ever get is older and around (kris kristoferson)

the blog is a thing i inherited from my dads tendencies i guess. my mom tells me he was just like his dad. they would both be at their happiest just wandering into a group of friends and chewing the fat. my dad would shut off the radio in the car on car trips calling it the conversation killer. my grandfathers wife died in a car accident 15 years before he did so he had 15 years in retirement in a house by himself and his response was to go out visiting. he would go have coffee at people’s houses, he was a teetotaler (son of an alcoholic) so the elks club and the corner bar held little interest but instead he developed a route where he would pop in and stay for 45 minutes and be gone, visit and move on.

my dad joined all the local community organizations not so much to make the world a better place but because the camaraderie was so special to him. the laughter and conversation at these events was wonderful to behold as a kid and thereafter it felt like the way life was supposed to be. i worked with my dad for 30 years and the biggest deal in his day was lunch. he would search out people who like to have lunch and discuss the world and business and the state of the state and after a couple of years i asked why we always went out. we could save 10 dollars a day by bringing a sandwich. He made it clear that some things in life have a value that a dollar amount could not be plugged into the equation on. we formed great friendships with many people exclusively because we had lunch with them 20 times a year for 5 years or more. the conversations always ranged from the state of the world to the state of the business, politics, family, life’s challenges. i was a bystander in many of these conversations but i learned the tricks of the trade.

Conversation… giving a bit of yourself and getting the same back in return. when my dad retired up to leech lake he was a lost soul for the first year looking for a coffee group in the morning and lunch group in the afternoon and a golf group during those summer months we all live for here in minnesota. as his health deteriorated and his brain went off to lala land he hated most of all the loss of his drivers license and his ability to get to those coffee groups. my mom would take him but my mom runs late and has errands to run that mean when she drops you the return may be in 40 minutes or 3 hours and 40 minutes. not the same as controlling your own destiny. he was put in two different nursing homes before he passed and his only comment about either was how nice the people were. you would always find him in the lunch room having coffee or in the tv room chatting.

so I come by my social blogging honestly. this group seems stronger today than when it was when it was tied to the morning show. the conversations go on into the day and night regularly instead of being done at 9am. i have great new friends and i keep learning more from and about everyone as we go along.

so on this thanksgiving day/week i want to give thanks for the people of the world that make you look forward to getting out of bed, our friends here and gone, and the ones yet to come. there are pluses and minuses to a blog. i can get up in midsentence and handle something that needs to be taken care of right now and i can also check in at night before the end of the day.

i laugh and cry and get to feel the pain of the season changes with clyde and jacque and the pain of having your husband laid off before the joy of the new job comes around (long wait joanne we are all elated) and bens trials with the sets and barb and Barbara, mig and jim and krista and elinor and kays return, tgith chitrader alanna and sudbury are always special to see on the good lol blog when they stop in, mike from albert lea, , joanne, and all. steve gives us a deep reaction tounge in cheek or heartfelt, dale keeps messing with us, i am amazed at how clyde keeps it all sorted out he remembers the little details of everyones lives.

and the world just keeps on turning for the better and the worst and all I ever get is older and around. words to live by. happy thanksgiving,

Guest Blog by Joanne in Big Lake

Growing up in a large family comprised of 6 girls and 1 boy, each of us has a dish that qualifies as a catastrophe for our initial forays into cooking for the family. My specialty started innocently enough. As I was the only child in public middle school while my siblings were still in the Catholic school system, I was home first. It seemed like a reasonable and grown up thing to start supper since Mom had started working fulltime by now.

My mother’s cooking consisted mainly of bland meat, overcooked frozen vegetables and plain boiled potatoes every supper, which just seemed sooo blah, I wanted to try something different. She was a wonderful, gracious, loving mother in so many ways, but the woman could not cook.

Pork chops came in big packages and they seemed fairly easy to prepare. Searching through all the exotic spices in the cupboard, I would read “good on pork” and slather that spice on the chops. Well, if a little is good, more is better, right? After exhausting all the spices that were “good on pork,” I proceeded to cook the chops as my mother had done.

After serving this inspired, savory dish to my family on several occasions, I was dismayed to learn that I was banned from the kitchen, much to my shame and dishonor. I still like to think of my special pork chops as a precursor to Cajun blackened meats cuisine – but whom am I kidding?

My other sisters’ flops included Apple Boilover, Bird a la Grease, Cake Catastrophe and others. Not to mention some of my mother’s signature bad items. Pie Crust. She made the worst piecrusts ever, but she continued to make them by hand. The extra dough she would give to us kids to play with, so we made extra special “cookie” treats for our dear father. We rolled them up with our dirty hands, decorated them heavily with Christmas toppings and presented these treasures to our father (because we wouldn’t eat them). My father, God bless him, had a stomach of iron and ate anything put in front of him. He would eat those horrible pie dough cookies (with lots of coffee as I recall), as well as anything else Mom or us girls served up. The man was a saint in that regard.

Nowadays, I can cook a decent, simple meal following a recipe. My siblings are all quite good cooks now. The oldest sister is a truly outstanding cook and does occasional catering. Cathy jokingly says that she learned to cook out of self-defense. My mother evolved into a much better cook without having to feed 7 kids on a shoestring budget everyday, but she was still a high heat cook. I never knew what eggs sunny side up was like until I met my husband (whose mother was a great cook). I guess I never recovered from my first flop and am still not confident in the kitchen.

Share your first memorable cooking catastrophe or culinary masterpiece.

Guest Blog by Madislandgirl

I love digital cameras, because you can just shoot and shoot and not worry about wasting rolls of film that when developed show a nice out-of-focus art shot of the back of someone’s head. My son prefers taking shots of interesting images as opposed to the documentary shots I grew up with (“here we are at Mount Rushmore!”).

A little while back, discussion on the Trail was about wabi sabi. There had also been a bit of talk about old barns and how they are disappearing from the landscape. This got me thinking persistently about what once was my grandfather’s farm.

And so it was that one weekend, the son and heir and I headed out to Scott County with the express purpose of taking pictures of my grandpa’s old barn. I figured this might be our last chance, as the family who currently own the place will be selling in a year, and I feel certain the barn will be coming down at that point. An electrical fire destroyed the farmhouse about 5 years ago, so this abandoned barn is what remains of “the farm” as I remember it.

The teenage son of the current owners was in the yard when we got to the farm, which solved my quandary about asking for permission to roam around the barn. He acquiesced to our request to take pictures in a way that made it clear that he thought we were nuts, but probably harmless.

I was seldom allowed near the barn as a child, I’m sure it was considered too dirty and dangerous for a “town girl”. My son wanted to go inside. It looked pretty stable, so I let him. We both managed to resist the siren song of the ladder into the hayloft, barely.

We had a great time shooting that barn, trying to figure out how some of the old equipment must have functioned when this was a working farm. My nostalgia for a past I could never recover lifted. This was An Adventure!

We were on a roll, so I decided I would try and find an old family cemetery on the other side of town. It is a corner of a cornfield and completely unmarked. I had been there exactly once before, 10 years ago with a toddler and I was not driving. Still, I was feeling cocky.

We headed out-of-town on what I thought was the right highway. I kept scanning the landscape for something that “felt right”. We came to a little town that I remember hearing of as part of the family lore and took it as a good sign, but had we gone too far? Kept driving. As we were driving, I thought I saw a little gravel track at an odd angle to the road-maybe? I decided to turn back and give it a try. The track was pretty well washed out. I parked near the highway and decided to hike in. If I got stuck out there on a fool’s errand, I would never hear the end of it.

My son elected to stay in the car with the cell phone to call the authorities if the farmer who had posted all those No Trespassing signs decided to mistake me for a pheasant-I had 20 minutes to get there and back or he was calling 911!

I hiked around the bend, thinking this was nuts, when I saw up ahead a small grove with something in it.

I had found what I was searching for.

Where are the places that hold your family’s history?

Guest Blog by Sherrilee

Most of my growing up years were spent in a big city in the Midwest, where the wildlife consisted mostly of squirrels and sparrows. So it was a big deal when we vacationed every summer in the northern part of Wisconsin at the family homestead. We saw deer from the car windows and even the occasional black bear at the town dump. When I was seven, an animal park opened up in St. Croix Falls, which was along the route my family always drove to get to Wisconsin.

Fawn Doe Rosa was (and still is) a place where you can feed and pet a variety of animals, from deer to ponies to geese and ducks. Always looking for a way to break up the long drive to and from up north, I’m sure my parents were delighted to find anything to get us girls out of the car and out of their hair for awhile.

That first year, when I was seven, my sister and I wandered all over the park. Except for dogs and cats, I had never had any interaction with an animal before and was a little leery of the deer, some of whom were bigger than I was. So I opted for the smaller and safer geese and ducks that abounded at the park. At one point, as I was feeding some geese along the little pond, a young elk spotted me.

Clearly understanding that I was the repository of food, he headed right for me, although I didn’t notice him, so intent was I on my task. My father, who was capturing our day with the camera, snapped a shot as the elk approached me, but didn’t feel the need to warn me. Of course, even though the elk was quite small (as elk go), he did scare me out of my wits and I stepped into the pond and got my feet wet.

It took my mother several minutes to get me to approach the poor elk, who was probably as scared by my antics as I was by his, but was willing to forgive me for my outburst, since I still had food. Within a little bit, I was petting him and feeding him, like he was no more different than the family dog.

I think about this day often, as the teenager and I still visit Fawn Doe Rosa at least once a summer. What would have been a scarring experience that scared me off animals for a lifetime, turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong love of creatures great and small. We trek out to our two zoos here several times a year, love the Wolf Center in Ely, visit any animal park we find along the way and I believe my love of animals may have rubbed off; the teenager has expressed an interest for a career with animals, although it’s still a little too early to tell.

Has being afraid of anything ever led to something good for you?