Golden Wheat Chapter Fall Meeting

October 16th was the Fall meeting of Golden Wheat Chapter of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. 

Today's meeting was special in that the chapter provided a bierock for each of those attending. 

As always there was plenty of food to go with the bierocks.

The desert table had a delicious selection.

It was a small group...

Everyone enjoyed visiting before the meal.

Karen welcomed everyone and returned Grace...

...then invited the children to begin the food line. 

We also had our bierock fund raiser going on at this time. Money being collected and counted, numbers crunched.

Good company and good conversation.

Karen began the meeting with her report from headquarters then Dennis gave a report from the Kansas Round Up of Chapters. 

Ella read out Mission Statement then presided over the Election of Officers.

Our program was a remastered film on Norka in the 1920's. 

Ella brought a map showing Norka and a village plat map.

Another successful meeting of the 

Golden Wheat Chapter AHSGR

Fall Meeting - Golden Wheat Chapter AHSGR

Most of our meetings begin with our covered dish dinners, and there's always plenty of food.

After our meal everyone moved their chairs to the front to watch the video.

Harold explained that there was a change in video. He had obtained on loan a video from North Dakota University titled, "A Soulful Sound: Music of the Germans from Russia." We would watch the other video another time as that it is in our library.

After the video we had our business meeting with the installation of officers.

Princess Birthday Swim Party

This year the Princess decided to have a swim party and since there were so many pictures taken, I'm just going to insert slideshows. The party started in the afternoon with swimming, of course.

The pool pictures are from both before and after the cake and presents. After an hour of swimming everyone got out of the pool, and after drying for a bit, all took seats at the tables in the studio. First there was cake and ice cream. It was questionable as to whether 12 candles would fit on such a small cake, but she got them all on there. The Princess was certainly ready to blow the candles out when the birthday song was over.

After cake & ice cream is was time to open presents...

The last slideshow has pictures of hotdogs grilled at the firepit, miscellaneous shots and picture after dark when the the movie was showing on the big screen and the glow sticks had been handed out.

The only bad part of the party was the mosquitos. Other than that, everyone had a wonderful time.

Happy Birthday, Princess!

Boy Invasion & Angry Sky

Friday a group of boys took over my studio. The big screen is still set up from SuperBowl and my son came over the other day and hooked up the xbox to all of it. Three of my grandsons...
and three of KMonster's friends came over Friday after school to take over my studio to play xbox and have fun. The two younger grandson's left after supper but the KMonster and his friends spent the night in the studio.

That afternoon dark clouds started moving in. Do you see the angry face on the horizon in the picture below. I didn't have my camera when I first saw the eyes in the sky so they had closed up a bit by the time I took this picture.

In the picture below there's a beam of sunlight shining through above the antenna on the water tower. The beam is hitting the clouds at the top right of the picture making them pink.

It's the time of year for storms again. Today we had rain and this evening there was thunder and lightening. Oklahoma had the first tornado (that I have heard) of the season.

Super Bowl Party 2010

Wish you could have joined us. We had an empty table and plenty of food. It was a last minute throw together party and most people had already made plans for the day so we decided to see how it would work to set the Big Screen up in the studio.
I need a wide angle lens. The studio is small enough that I couldn't get back far enough to get a really good picture of everything set up.

But maybe you can get a pretty good idea. It was like sitting in a little theater.

See the football decorations on the wall? My mom dug those up from a SB party they hosted in 1996. There's a football shaped chip and dip bowl on the table from that party, too.

I did a little online research on the teams and posted the info on my bulletin board. See the ornery look on my son's face.

He had been teasing my BFF. But she has a son, too, and knows how to deal with it.

Here's the food table. There was chili, cheese sauce, BBQ smokies and pizza in the plugged in appliances.

I just hung the white board that afternoon. BFF made good use of it, changing what was written as the game went along.

Just another angle. You can see a corner of the football bowl.

I couldn't get a picture of the whole screen and part of the table in one shot. I could get the whole screen all by itself but then you couldn't get a feel of the size without something else in the picture.

Below is the table no one sat at. I wanted you to see the decorations on it. I had printed up the team logos and cute them out in approx. 1 inch squares. I also printed out two banners. The Princess laid out the little squares on the tables for me. I think she did a wonderful job, don't you?

At halftime my BFF surprised me with a Birthday Cake! Thanks Sis! I really appreciate it.

Hope all of you out there had a wonderful weekend whatever you may have been doing!

I'm Still Here!!!

Have you missed me? I've missed you. You don't have to answer that. :) To catch you up it was a really busy weekend last week and I had a head cold on top of it. Thursday and Friday of last week my daughter and I cleaned out my Aunt's apartment. Mom helped on Thursday and gave us directions on where a lot of things should go and met with friends of Aunt Leta's that came to collect mementos. See the storage containers in the picture below...

I purchased 14 of the large white ones, 13 of the smaller size on the table plus one large flat box and 1 smaller flat box. Every one of these boxes were filled. My Aunt was an artist and a seamstress. The serger sitting on the table was hers. One box is full of nothing but paints and supplies. Several boxes are nothing but material. There's thread, yarn, beads, buttons and all sorts of crafting tools and supplies. In crafting, there wasn't much my Aunt didn't do. She did beautiful work. One of her recent projects was making teddy bears for the Wellington Police Dept. One of the Red Hat ladies told me they had planned on contacting Larry Hatteburg to tell him about her work but she passed before they had a chance. Thursday we got home around 11:30pm and Friday we didn't leave till we were done. All we left in the apartment that I still wanted was Aunt Leta's big heavy chest of drawers that mom said she'd had 'forever', bringing it up from Texas with her when she moved here, a metal typewriter table and an office chair. My daughter and I talked about coming back in on Sunday to get these, but we weren't sure how we'd get them in the back of the truck, her tailgate is difficult to get down. We made it home around 1am and I had to be up and ready to go at 7am on Saturday.

Saturday was the Big Boys Toy Show at Century II in Wichita KS. We were setting two screens up at the show this year. One screen next to the Entercom booth showing the main stage and the second screen at the Roller Derby with the track on the screen. The first event up on the main stage was the Tanganyika Wildlife Demo...

The Tanganyika Wildlife Park is a few miles outside of Wichita. They raise wild and exotic animals.

You'll notice the logo on the shirt above says "Jack Hannah's Into the Wild". Tanganyika provides the cats that Jack Hannah shows on TV.

I had a difficult time getting good pictures of the cats. They were constantly moving.

I had to post two pictures of the cat above. That picture because I thought it was a good shot of it's face and the one below because it's so cute.

The little fella below was the only bird they displayed. With all the animals they gave a lot of information. How they live in the wild, interesting facts that you might not have known and whether they are endangered or not.

We set up our green screen at our booth again this year. There was one glitch though, we couldn't get the picture to show up on the TV we brought for it. With the second projector over at the Roller Derby on the second screen we didn't have a way to present the green screen. So the only time the green screen was available was when there wasn't an event on the main stage. Which turned out to work just fine.

Below is an over view of the show. This picture was shot from the stairs to the balcony where our camera was sitting for the Roller Derby screen. You can see our big screen on the far back wall, right of the big doors and left of center.

I'll post more pictures from Big Boys Toy Show later after I get them all processed. After the show I convinced my son to load up Aunt Leta's dresser and the other things in the equipment trailer, there was plenty of room. This worked on so many levels. The trailer is lower to the ground than the bed of the pickup and has ramps on top of that. So running that heavy dresser on the hand truck down the elevator, out the door and up the trailer ramp was a breeze. Added bonus, I didn't have to go back into town on Sunday! All done, apartment cleared out in three days. Thanks kids, I couldn't have done it without you!!