2005, March
New year arrived without our assistance. Well, we did stay up until midnight but
we were watching a movie and sort of lost track of the time. Certainly didn't want to watch the revelry, a.k.a. drunken party, in Times Square. What have we come to, half of the country watching the other half party on TV? We had Shirley Temples (ginger ale with maraschino cherry juice) and some eggnog from Kroger during the evening.
No big adventures for the first half of the month, except the usual late-night and early-morning preparations for the semester's classes. Once they were done, it was all over but walking to the campus and teaching. Oh, and some paper grading also, of course.
Middle of January, about 16 degrees outside. It was 21 when I got up, which was the high for the day. Burned lots of wood. Two days before, it was 50, shirtsleeve weather almost, and the snow was all gone. Overnight low of 9 and snow. Really glad for that woodpile.
Had a reporter from the Grace Brethren paper come over and interview us about the Musical Christmas Tree. Article will probably run next fall sometime, actually. It will seem like they're ahead of everyone else in the fall. We won't tell that the interview was in January.
That ... CAT!
That was an, um, "exciting" night, though. After the reporter left, at bedtime we noticed that the "kitten" was missing. ("Inky"/"Tinky"/"Stinky" is about a year and a half old now, and still very playful.) We figured she had gotten into a room and the door was shut "against" her as often happens. We checked every room in the house and I even pulled on my outdoor gear (about 10 above zero out there at the time) and looked around to see whether she had gotten stuck outside. Well, one would *think* that a black cat on white snow should be able to be seen, even by street light. So with a "lost" cat on our minds, we went to bed having left practically every interior door in the house ajar, just in case.
About midnight, Little One, the old cat we inherited from my mother back in '98, roused us, "Meow, meow, meow, meOW, meOW, MEOW!" We both thought, "Omigosh she's discovered Tinky's dead body somewhere!" Kathy stumbled to the bathroom light so as not to blind us totally, and there is a strange object in the middle of the bedroom floor next to the cat. Well, she had brought us a dead mouse, mousetrap and all! (Kathy was glad she didn't step on it in the dark.) By our leaving the doors ajar, Little One was free to prowl through the garage and was able to snag mouse and trap from the nook where it is normally armed and dangerous, next to the big garage door where mice sneak in under from time to time. So I praised her for being a mighty hunter and all that sort of drivel and even though she now wanted the mouse for a midnight snack, I threw it in the trash. (Along with worms, fleas and who knows what all!)
Reminds me of a story. (Everything reminds me of a story!) Back when we lived in Knoxville, TN, we had a cat named "Lottie". She was what some folks call a "blue cream", which is a calico that has faded in the wash, i.e. sort of white, beige and grey. She and her orange-striped brother "Boo" would hunt all the time and bring their, um, prizes to the back door and we would praise them. One day we were on the way to church or work or something and ignored the prize that Lottie had left on the back step. When we got back, it was on the front porch. No praise at the back door, we'll try the front....
Oh -- Tinky? She got shut into the room where the computer stuff for the Christmas Tree resides, while the I was giving the young reporter a tour. She (Tinky, not the reporter) went to sleep on a black shelf. Black cat, black shelf, we couldn't see her at all. I was in the room the next morning getting an extension cord and saw two eyes looking at me, and that was that. Stupid cat didn't even come when Kathy called them for breakfast. The lost was found. At that moment, Kathy was over at the neighbors (Hispanic) telling them about however you say "lost gato". (Ich spreche etwas Deutsch, keine Spanisch!) After Tinky showed up, Kathy went back and told them now she was going to kill the gato for worrying us so much, and they got a big laugh out of that. Nice folks. Remind me of my grandparents in their struggle to learn English and eke out a living in this great country of ours.
Mildly Interesting:
Got a Christmas letter from a German lady who stayed with us for a couple of days a little over a year ago. I remember that because we had talked about the "new" kitten and stuff like that. We're thinking about going to Germany if and when we can afford it. (United had a last-minute roundtrip fare of $179.00 Chicago to Brussels one week but of course we couldn't go then.) Will try to brush up on my German. Even signed up for the "Survival German" class here at the college. Turns out I remember more that I thought I did but forgot a lot more than I hoped. "Auf Wiedersehen" and "Guten Tag" I remember, but "Tschüss?" Was ist das "Tschüss?" I guess Mrs. Birnbaums never taught us any slang or colloquialisms. "Tschüss" is a greeting or goodbye or something like that.Wrote a letter to a young lady in Pottsville, PA. She is collecting "journals" from people all over the country. I posted it on my website, http://www.members.hoosierlink.net/rdbarnhart/blogs/brianna.htm in case you're mildly interested in knowing where we live and what folks do for a living here.
About the middle of February, we went with some others from church to the University of Chicago Oriental Institute where we saw many relics that pertain to events related in the Old Testament. Probably the most impressive item was the winged bull statue from the palace of Sargon, picture at http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/GALLERY/MESO/Meso_Gal04_72dpi.html
75 channels and nothing to watch...
Finally got disgusted enough with 75 channels and nothing worth watching, that we cut our TV cable back to basic service. We'll rent DVDs to watch on our fairly new TV set. It worked out to $35.00 a month for the Weather Channel and HGTV, which was all we regularly watched with the extended service. We still get Fox news and the Discovery Channel and a couple of others Kathy watches. I'd been sort of wanting high-speed Internet for a while now, but not wanting to shell out $50.00 a month. Well, with this change in the cable and an introductory special rate of $40.00 from Sprint, we went
ahead with it. We can now listen to our favorite classical radio station from Germany (http://www.klassikradio.de). And not just in the computer room, either; recall that I built this dandy little FM transmitter we use at Christmas. We just rebroadcast to the stereo in the living room, but don't tell anyone.... Oh, and for the Internet business we got a hardware firewall/router/wireless modem so we can connect with my laptop when I bring it home. And I can keep the Weather Channel (dot com) on my computer screen all the time if I desire. And, with the transmitter, DSL "modem", and firewall/router, we have about a dozen blinky lights up on the shelf above the computer. Very impressive if you're a computer geek. Each of these items is about 6-8 inches long and an inch and a half thick. It's amazing to me; 15 years ago a "router" was a big heavy computer thing on wheels that you would strain your back trying to lift.
Our 15-year-old Brother printer, an HP-IIP clone, finally went kaputt for the last time about last September. It would cost more to fix it than a new laser printer. But, praise the Lord, a friend was getting rid of some "junk" the other day and had a genuine HP-IIP printer he was going to send to the landfill. I brought it home, put our toner cartridge into it, and it prints like new. V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y but the quality is the usual for old HP printers, i.e. excellent. It's about the same vintage and the price was right. The HP 1220 color inkjet is now going to go back to its use for special things only, since it's much more expensive to run. We use it for special jobs like printing out our music with the chords in red and special notations in green.
"Mommy, where did I come from?"
"Seattle, silly! I told you that!"
On the family/genealogy front, a "new" cousin named Andrea (4th cousin or so) contacted me through the Barnhard/t genealogy I have posted out there in Cyberspace. She's descended from a sister to my farthest-back member of the Barnhard family, David, which puts it back to early 1800s. She also has the will of a David Barnhart, who had a son David named in his will -- the David that I have! So "my" David was a "Junior"! Evidently, she can't push it back any farther than that. Well, she has tons of documents (death certificates, marriage licenses, etc.) on the family, much of which is summarized at http://www.members.hoosierlink.net/rdbarnhart Click on Family and follow your nose. One distant cousin, about thrice removed, is in the History of Morrow County, OH. Herod Barnhart -- what a name! And even with that name, he was a preacher for over 30 years. I'm in the process of rewriting great-grandpappy John's bio, since I now know that his dad, David, followed his (David's) brother Jonathan to Ohio, and he had a passle of cousins living nearby. David's wife Margaret was sister to Jonathan's 2nd wife Catherine. David and Jonathan also had a sister Catherine (confused?), who married Jesse Walker, Catherine and Margaret's brother. One big happy family! I'm still scribbling diagrams on paper to figure out who's related to whom and how. Census seems to indicate that this whole crew migrated to Knox County, OH. I've heard of "double" cousins as they call them down in Tennessee. Are there some triple cousins in this mix? Is there such a thing? All I've figured out for sure is that at least the marriages weren't immoral in some way. Disclaimer: Because I'm still sorting this out, I may have misstated something here. Go to the Web page for a more careful analysis, in about six months.
And 4th (or so) cousin Jane has sent me a bunch of Lambert material as well. I pray many blessings on both of these wonderful ladies! And now Michael Barnhart, Keeper Of The Barnhart Lines, dimly suspects I finally have enough info that David, Senior's dad may be the immigrant Anthony Barnhart, in which case Mike and I are about 5th cousins; and Mike says do I want to undergo a DNA test to show relationship? Hmmm. Sounds expensive....
