Monday, August 29
Aug. 29th, 2022 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
My Sweetie got more done with the wiring.
He also tinkered with the horse waterer again. There his been something leaking. We already adjusted the float etc. Today after taking everything apart he found a pebble where there logistically should not have been a pebble, and that might be what was going on.
We also got some fluffy insulation moved out of the basement. We were using it to insulate an area under a deck that is hard to explain, but it's directly over the basement and is kind of like the roof there, but otherwise not weatherized for cold. We removed the fluffy insulation and will be putting in a spray foam insulation.
We've been chasing this pile of insulation all summer, as my husband moved it here, then there, but never OUT of the basement.
The contractor wanted it all out of his way, and I told my Sweetie that if WE didn't get it out, the contractor would move it, and we'd end up paying him for an hour's work doing stuff we should have done.
Alas, he was so flustered with everything that he forgot his work laptop here. He says he can likely fake his way through work tomorrow, but I will have to meet him half way after work tomorrow, about an hour and change for each of us. I might miss my riding time.
I went to pick up a set of what looks like wooden Ikea shelves that a neighbor was giving away. It is also a horse breeding facility, so I chatted with the owner for a while (I've been there a few times now, she's really nice) and looked at a couple of her foals from this year. They are just old enough to be weaned from their Moms.
I folded clean laundry, washed some more, and then tried to have a nap. I didn't really nap, but rested.
Then I talked with my Sister E for a while. No one has heard much about how Sister S is doing. The conversation drifted around for a while, and she was talking about how there is kind of a destination area that was one of the homesteads for the Ingalls family, or at least the real family that the books were based upon.
My sister, and lots and lots of other people, really LOVE the whole mythology of the gritty pioneer who came to tame the wilderness, etc. etc. She was getting into that a bit, and I said "I read those novels as an adult, and I couldn't see it like that anymore. The way the Ingolls family in their wagon were passing all of the native people who were likely moving as a nation to a reserve in the other direction. It really glossed over the whole murdering a nation of people so they could come and have their gritty little adventure."
My sister responds with impatience "Well, that isn't what the books are about! They are about Laura and her family making a start in the New World".
Well, that does kind of sum up the colonial mindset, doesn't it? Yeesh.
I wonder if we shouldn't be writing a companion novel to the "Little House on the Prairie" books that at least describes the other side of that narrative, from the perspective of the remaining people who were being moved onto reserves? What THEY thought as they watched the wagon trains arriving, the land being tilled, the houses and the railroad and the end of their freedom? Something written at the same level for young readers?
I used to love those stories, and others like it. There is something very appealing about people with a dream, coming to a land of endless possibility where they could escape the hierarchies of the old world, where a common family could own land and have equality. Everyone except for the people they stole the land from, of course. They don't frame it like that. Those people were "dangerous savages".
Anyhow.
Today I learned that humming birds are the only bird that can fly backwards.
My Sweetie got more done with the wiring.
He also tinkered with the horse waterer again. There his been something leaking. We already adjusted the float etc. Today after taking everything apart he found a pebble where there logistically should not have been a pebble, and that might be what was going on.
We also got some fluffy insulation moved out of the basement. We were using it to insulate an area under a deck that is hard to explain, but it's directly over the basement and is kind of like the roof there, but otherwise not weatherized for cold. We removed the fluffy insulation and will be putting in a spray foam insulation.
We've been chasing this pile of insulation all summer, as my husband moved it here, then there, but never OUT of the basement.
The contractor wanted it all out of his way, and I told my Sweetie that if WE didn't get it out, the contractor would move it, and we'd end up paying him for an hour's work doing stuff we should have done.
Alas, he was so flustered with everything that he forgot his work laptop here. He says he can likely fake his way through work tomorrow, but I will have to meet him half way after work tomorrow, about an hour and change for each of us. I might miss my riding time.
I went to pick up a set of what looks like wooden Ikea shelves that a neighbor was giving away. It is also a horse breeding facility, so I chatted with the owner for a while (I've been there a few times now, she's really nice) and looked at a couple of her foals from this year. They are just old enough to be weaned from their Moms.
I folded clean laundry, washed some more, and then tried to have a nap. I didn't really nap, but rested.
Then I talked with my Sister E for a while. No one has heard much about how Sister S is doing. The conversation drifted around for a while, and she was talking about how there is kind of a destination area that was one of the homesteads for the Ingalls family, or at least the real family that the books were based upon.
My sister, and lots and lots of other people, really LOVE the whole mythology of the gritty pioneer who came to tame the wilderness, etc. etc. She was getting into that a bit, and I said "I read those novels as an adult, and I couldn't see it like that anymore. The way the Ingolls family in their wagon were passing all of the native people who were likely moving as a nation to a reserve in the other direction. It really glossed over the whole murdering a nation of people so they could come and have their gritty little adventure."
My sister responds with impatience "Well, that isn't what the books are about! They are about Laura and her family making a start in the New World".
Well, that does kind of sum up the colonial mindset, doesn't it? Yeesh.
I wonder if we shouldn't be writing a companion novel to the "Little House on the Prairie" books that at least describes the other side of that narrative, from the perspective of the remaining people who were being moved onto reserves? What THEY thought as they watched the wagon trains arriving, the land being tilled, the houses and the railroad and the end of their freedom? Something written at the same level for young readers?
I used to love those stories, and others like it. There is something very appealing about people with a dream, coming to a land of endless possibility where they could escape the hierarchies of the old world, where a common family could own land and have equality. Everyone except for the people they stole the land from, of course. They don't frame it like that. Those people were "dangerous savages".
Anyhow.
Today I learned that humming birds are the only bird that can fly backwards.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 05:45 am (UTC)When she was very old and had forgotten who she was with, she enjoyed talking about life on the farm as a girl. Too bad I didn't think to ask more about the adventures she must have had in that small window of opportunity.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 06:14 am (UTC)It isn't easy to sit comfortably on a farm, and also know where you got the land from. As a kid, I had a very vague notion that maybe what we did wasn't quite fair, and that feeling only gets stronger as I get older.
Little House on the Prairie feels more and more like a fairly tale, with all of the original grim bits taken out to make it nice for the kids.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 08:52 pm (UTC)Ancestry.com is helpful in piecing together the narrative.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 05:32 am (UTC)Over the years, she's told me a lot about how things were done. Like how to get by without a refrigerator, they sometimes killed chickens over the summer because they could be consumed in one meal by the family. The other thing they did in warmer months was have slaughtering of larger animals, with enough people involved that they all took home a smaller portion of meat that they could consume before it went bad. They could can it, salt it, or cook it and store it in lard and so on to keep it from rotting for a while. Each family in the "pool" would take turns providing an animal.
There was one family too poor to contribute an animal, but they were given the head for helping with the processing.
She also told me that when they were building the farm house, they used bricks for the basement walls. They had to drive the team about half a day to town (across various properties of known neighbors, shorter than taking the official roads) and could only bring back a small amount of bricks each time because of how heavy the loads were. She and her Dad made many trips, and would get the bricks directly from the train yard in town.
She had stories about the hired hands that slept in a tiny shack, and how one man babied his dog by putting an unheard of luxury of a bit of sugar on it's oatmeal every day.
How she and the other kids ate lard sandwiches with a bit of sugar on them, or would bring potatoes that they would set on the wood stove in the school to cook for lunch.
She talked about the big crews that would do harvesting for hire, with many migrant workers, lots of teams of horses, and horse-drawn machinery.
They walked/rode ponies to a one room school that years later she and my Dad bought to live in one winter with four (of nine) kids because their house burned down. They moved the school onto my Uncle's land and lived in it one winter.
Stories about Halloween, where the young men would play terrible tricks on each other like take apart someone's wagon and put it back together in the loft of the barn, or move the outhouse a couple of feet back (so that you would walk over the original pit, seeing the outhouse ahead of you).
How people in town didn't have pits under their outhouses, but a wooden box that the man with the "honey wagon" would pull it out and dump it in the wagon (likely a wagon with a big metal tank for holding the sewage that would be emptied on a field somewhere). Not sure what happened in the winter time. A giant ice cube?
Lots of wonderful stories.
Mom did a lot of research as far as where our family got started in Canada, and a bit more from the Old Country (Ireland on Dad's side, Belgium for Mom. It wasn't too tough on Mom's side, as it was her Grandparents that came to Canada from Belgium). It's all in that box of stuff I need to look at.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 05:58 am (UTC)I've found cousins, most importantly the daughter of Lois's closest sibling. She says there are a lot of family photographs scattered around in the many relatives' possession. I have seen two or three so far. It's peculiar to look at them and not connect to their history.
Ancestry has connected me with far-flung cousins on my paternal grandmother's side, the side that connects us to Robert the Bruce and William Wallace (Braveheart). I'm still trying to connect the dots and see if Braveheart was an ancestral great-grandfather or an uncle.