Janet's Blog

March 1, 2012.  It's Nebraska's Birthday--Happy 145th!  And it will undoubtedly go by with little mention anywhere.  But just wait five more years for a real celebration... I remember Nebraska's one-hundredth birthday quite well.  All of the men in town, and perhaps in the whole state, had grown beards and mustaches; the men in Fairbury wore their facial hair well into the next year, too, when Fairbury celebrated its own centennial.  Mom and Dad spent March 1st, 1967, in Lincoln, where Dad rode his horse, Ginger, with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Posse, in the official Nebraska Centennial Parade.  Afterwards, Mom told me that Ginger was more than a little skittish because she had never before been acquainted with marching bands. Dan went to school as usual that day, at Eastward, where he was a fourth grader.  I'm sure that his class celebrated the centennial in some special way that day, too.  Laura, who had just turned five, wasn't qui...

February 29, 2012--it's Leap Year Day!  For those of you who have had your heads buried in the sand for most of your adult life: a leap year is a year containing one additional day in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the seasons.  The astronomical events that cause our seasons don't happen in a precise whole number of days, so a calendar that had the same number of days every year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.  Early astronomers wanted the spring equinox to stay as close as possible to March 21st each year, so the concept of a leap day (or month, in some calendars) was proposed and instituted.  It's amazing to think that functional calendars, including leap days, or even leap months, have been used for more than 2000 years.  Modern calendars have evolved over time; at first every country instituted its own form of calendar, but over the centuries, most countries have gradually come to a consensu...

Alas! and did my Savior bleed, and did my Sov'reign die; Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I? We saw an awesome video, with an updated version of this hymn, in church on Sunday, and it brought to mind a long-ago, Wednesday evening Lenten service at Grace Lutheran Church in Fairbury. I was about fourteen. My friend, Susan, and I were seated together with the choir in the front of the dim sanctuary, singing the first verse of the first hymn, as written above. When we came to the end of the verse, to the words, "such a worm as I," we looked at each other and burst into simultaneous, uncontrollable, (but necessarily silent) giggles. There was no way we could finish singing the song. It took all of our energy to keep from laughing out loud. Now, we had each sung this particular hymn many times, and it had never before affected either of us in just that way. Neither one of us were, by nature, giggly girls. I guess that the image of ourselves as worms was s...

  Mom and Dad talk about the winter of 1948-1949 in Bloomfield, Nebraska, when the snow fell...and fell, and fell, so that it was piled way above their heads, ten or twenty feet or even higher along the ever-narrowing county roads.  If people wanted to go somewhere in town, they walked.  If farmers were fortunate enough to still possess a draft horse or two, they pulled out their old sleighs and harnesses, because travel by car was nearly impossible for a good part of that winter.  Farm kids, like my dad, stayed in town for weeks without seeing their families, so they could attend high school on the days school was open.  Snow shoveling could have been elevated to a new Olympic sport.  Sledding down Standpipe Hill became the most popular pastime. Fifteen or twenty years later, when my family lived in Fairbury, we survived more than one three day blizzard, when the snow piled up to two feet or more, on the level, with much deeper drifts in many pla...