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We hunted for something like this for years, and finally realized that the only way to bring him into our Thanksgiving display was to make him ourselves!

Eeyore and Pooh were both made from one single sheet of exterior plywood.

I had thought about doing something larger, but discovered that using the half-sheet is as much weight as I can maneuver for painting. Even as a half sheet, it was still pretty heavy for me to lift.

In order to keep the plywood from scratching my table, I used an old afghan over the table to provide a cushion layer between the two flat pieces of wood.

This little scarecrow girl was the very first one we purchased for our autumn yard.

She still makes me smile.
She has held up very well over the years, as the November weather in North Dakota has plenty of extreme events. She has encountered wind and rain, ice and blizzards, sun and snow…but she keeps smiling!

Pooh was the other half of the plywood sheet.

He started out as a four-foot-square piece of plywood.

Now everybody knows how **I** spent my summer vacation!

 

Turkeys and scarecrows and big smiles galore!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The lights are on at the House on Pooh Corner in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, and the radio station is playing the Halloween Pooh mix.

Winnie the Pooh on the porch, hiding in a pumpkin shell.

Perhaps he really liked the Mother Goose rhyme about Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater?

 

We had the photo op with Santa at Christmas last year.

It got a great deal of traffic, so we added a photo op for Halloween this year.

The skeleton is for adult-height people and the pumpkin person is for shorter people. However, we saw several taller people bend down to be pumpkin girl!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the front, at dusk. Have not got out to try to take after-dark pictures yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My swingers.

The scarecrow couple on the swing have been enjoying Halloween and Thanksgiving for many years now. One of them has still not located his trick-or-treat bucket — hopefully he will find it soon!

 

 

 

Indiana history gets turned on its head in a new book, Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving at All.

Mark R Hunter of Albion decided to celebrate Indiana’s bicentennial, and enlisted his wife, Emily, to poke some fun at Hoosier history and trivia. The result is a tongue-in-cheek romp through the state from prehistoric times on, covering everything from rotary jails, locks of Elvis hair, and even where the name “Indiana” was stolen from.

“When Emily didn’t roll her eyes at me, I knew I was on to something,” Mark says of the idea. The pair previously collaborated on two local history books: Images of America: Albion and Noble County, and Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department. They also put together a collection of Mark’s humor columns, Slightly Off the Mark.

Mark R Hunter is also the author of three novels and a short story collection. In Hoosier Hysterical, he riffs on everything from early American history:

“Some say Columbus actually got here hundreds of years before 1492, on a Viking River Cruise.”

To ancient American burial mounds:

“The purpose of those mounds remained a puzzle, until a twelve year old boy from Clarksville pointed out the natives seemed to have no outhouses. This came as a tremendous shock to archeologists of the time, who were known to be very hands-on.”

To the origins of the nickname “Hoosier”:

“Indiana flatboat crewmen … were called “hoosa men” after the Indian word for corn, “hoosa”. This theory fails to account for the fact that the Indians never called corn “hoosa”.

And even how the Indiana state flag ended up in a Batman movie:

“Some brave souls talked of sneaking into Gotham to steal our flag back, but … you know … Batman.”

Along the way, Hoosier Hysterical covers wars, economics, sports, and politics, as well as everything from weather to famous Hoosiers. But the authors are quick to point out that, despite doing a large amount of research and trying to stay true to the facts, their main emphasis was on humor. “The problem with history isn’t that it’s not interesting,” Mark points out in the book’s forward: “It’s that it’s not made interesting.”

He quickly adds, “So sit back and learn something fun about history. When you’re done, read this book.”

Hoosier Hysteria and all the Hunters’ books can be found at http://markrhunter.com/,

And on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO.

Mark R Hunter can be reached by e-mail at markrichardhunter@gmail.com.

He can also be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter/, and on Twitter at @MarkRHunter

We have started working on some new additions for the 2016 holiday decorating season.

Because  the “photo op” was incredibly fun last Christmas, he is adding one for Halloween this year as well.

I kept watching the book of face to find pictures, but I never spotted any. Yet there were “new footprints” by the Santa photo booth several times daily, and we did spot it in use many different times.

While new outdoor Christmas decorations are easy to find, Thanksgiving is always giving us a challenge to find new outdoor decorations. From what we can see, the more common practice is to go directly from Halloween to Christmas in outdoor decorations. We take down the outside Halloween display when we close our Trick-or-Treat for the night, and then on the next available day, we put up Thanksgiving for November. We do not light the Christmas decorations until after the turkey is eaten, but it does take the entire month of November to get  them all set up! We actually begin setting up all of the Christmas lights as soon as we turn on the turkey lights!

Since it is so hard for us to find the Thanksgiving decorations to fit our theme, I have been talking for several years about the need to paint one.

This is finally the year to begin that project!

We primed the wood on both sides to help protect it from the weather. Outside décor in North Dakota needs to stand up to the elements!

From a single 4×8 sheet of plywood, we were able to make two Thanksgiving-themed characters. If we made  them any smaller than that, they would not be easily visible for people driving past. Anything larger than that would be too heavy for me to maneuver for the painting — I seem to spend as much time picking it up and moving it as I do actually painting. I have to keep turning it, or else I would be putting my arm into wet paint.

 

 

After he cut it out, I was able to start painting!

 

I am not a speedy painter, but I am enjoying the process!

 

 

As it is an outdoor decoration, it requires using exterior paint. So I paint a bit here and I paint a bit there  and then I have to let it dry. While this might not be the world’s largest paint-by-number project, it is certainly the biggest one that **I** have ever attempted!

 

Summertime is a great time to visit the local public library and bring home a stack of new books to read. Grab a big stack, so if one does not catch your fancy, it is easy to put it aside and grab the next book! If it is more interesting when you come back to it later, great. If not, that was why you grabbed a big stack of books in the first place.

Two winners I will recommend:

Shepherd’s Crook by Sheila Webster Boneham and An Amish Year by Beth Wiseman

Very different books indeed, but I loved them both.

An Amish Year by Beth Wiseman

An Amish Year is a collection of four stories – they call them novellas. I am pretty sure that the publishing world has a great long list of rules for each of their categories, but here in redneckville, they are all called stories. There is one story for each of the four seasons of the year, different characters in each one, but a similar locale.

I was surprised? shocked? amazed? to discover that the Amish teens are really no different than my own kids. In my brain, I always picture the Amish teens as being part of the same Walton’s Mountain Norman Rockwell picture perfect world my mom grew up in, where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Not a bit. These kids (and the adults) are real and honest and human — and it was very hard to put this book down.

Shepherd’s Crook by Sheila Webster Boneham

Shepherd’s Crook is a mystery. It seems to be the second book in a series, so now I will need to hunt down the first book. It is set in a world filled with dog training competitions and agility trials, sophisticated adults, protesters, questionable politicians and messy puppy antics  — aside from the hilarious displays of brattiness on the part of the puppy, the world shown in this book is just as foreign to my life as the Amish culture in the first book. Bratty puppies that  destroy a full week’s work, however — **THAT** is something that I have experienced.

Two thumbs up.

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While we were in Des Moines for the 65th National Square Dance Convention, we visited the Iowa State Capitol. Iowa has the most beautiful capitol building!

 

 

The library is clearly an occasion of sin, because it certainly made me covet!

I think that Belle and the Beast just might sneak in here to visit after hours…

The spiral staircases leading up to the bookshelves are incredibly tempting. Even a firmly-professed “non-reader” would have their mind changed about loving books, if they could use such a wonderful library!

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

     

 

 

 

 

I spent half of the tour looking up, as the ceilings in here are amazing, but even the floors in the capitol building have intricate detailing.

  

  

 

 

The walls that appear to be wallpapered are actually stenciled with paint, our tour guide explained. They just renovated the Supreme Court room, and put everything back to the way it looked originally. It is no longer actually used for Supreme Court proceedings — they do that someplace else now. While I did not see the “someplace else” the Supreme Court meets now, I am positive it is not nearly as pretty!

The woodwork is hand carved – she said one single carver had made all of those carvings on the front of the Supreme Court bench.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a doll collector, the display of the Iowa first ladies dressed in their inaugural ball gowns captured my eye.

I had to keep my hands pushed firmly into my pockets to resist the urge to touch!

  

I was greatly amused by the idea that all of the dolls were made with the same face mold — modeled after the first lady who had commissioned the original project.

 

 

 

The picture of the “doggy bags” on the sidewalk post was because I have never seen such a thing before, and I found it to be a wonderful idea. While I was not personally walking a dog, I did see others walking along with puppydogs on a leash, and having those bags and trash cans readily available is a brilliant idea!

 

The cable is my friend.

Not sure **he** agrees with that assessment!

Before I can even think about getting a new puppy, he is carefully checking out all the escape routes so I can re-seal them. Thirteen years ago, this yard was well sealed against a tiny puppy, but wind and rain have moved the soil in places. Personally, I suspect there was some “paw power” involved in moving the dirt here as well…

 

This is this point where I ought to have my weekly update ready to go, but as it is not ready, there will be a tasty tidbit of silly stuff to fill in here instead.

I am trying to figure out how to add a photo…

Minot currently has a city council, made up of two representatives from each of the seven wards. The original intent of the Make Minot proposal, as **I** was given to understand it, was to “bring more people and interest into the Minot city government.”

Yes, I agree that more voices need to be heard, but I think their plan is totally backwards. Instead of bringing in new voices, cutting the size of the city council guarantees that they are limiting new voices from having any say in how the city is run.

Instead of limiting the size of the city council, we need to expand it. The original seven wards need to be redrawn into fifteen new wards, because the city of Minot has grown and spread out. If they do not want to increase the size of the council, they can elect only one representative from each new ward. In order to get some “new blood” into city government, electing two from each new ward would be a better choice, but then the city council would lose the ability to look down on the plebian crowd from the raised dais in that fancy council chamber.

Arguments that we need a smaller city council “because Fargo has a smaller one” are ludicrous. There is no reason why Minot needs to do anything to “be like Fargo.” Yes, this is a common argument in almost every topic of daily life in Minot, but it makes no sense whatsoever. If one feels “Fargo is better” for whatever reason, then one should really consider moving to Fargo. This is Minot. We need to involve the people of Minot in making the decisions of our city government, not look to Fargo for their answers.