I am so boring I post about weather (and I've thought a lot about it)

One thing I love about reading Hannah's book (which I'm reading at what you could call a leisurely pace) are the casual comments about the weather. Of course, for farmers in those days the weather was not very casual at all--but the thing I love is that every year Hannah notes that the weather is different. Some winters it hardly snows at all until March; sometimes it's too warm in the spring or too wet in August; sometimes it's oddly warm in January here but there's a historical storm on the East Coast. These things happen. They always have.

Don't you sometimes envision every Christmas of yore to have been white and then for winter to have the dignity to stay snowy until the March thaw, followed by April showers and May flowers? It's a pretty rigid standard to hold our dear old girl Weather to, especially when she's never shown any desire to be strictly orthodox in following the annual guidelines anyway. Let's all give Weather a break, I guess, and let her do her capricious thing.

This picture from Ada Stricklan's collection was captioned, "So, everybody had a bad winter," though I don't know whose house this is or when, or what was so bad about it. This looks like perfect snow for winter fun to me.

"Winter 1982-1983" Such snow is not to be found, at least in these parts, this year

A case for keeping buttons

Every time I take a personality test I end up with the same maddening result: Neither/nor, or sometimes either/or. If a question came up that said, "If you had a chance to take home a collection of buttons, some of them matching but in varied sizes and colors and you had no immediate use for them, would you keep them?"

I would surely answer a scoffing "No thank you."

But then I would keep them in real life, because I did. 

I love throwing old useless "stuff" away or just not acquiring it in the first place--I get a thrill from dropping things off at D.I. But shoot, I love these buttons. Both of my kids are absurdly entertained by them. And no, Norah doesn't try to eat them; what can I say, she's an anomaly. They came from Grandma Stricklan's sewing supplies that I swiped inherited, and although all of my sewing projects with buttons have been furnished from this collection, I just like to keep them around for fun. Stacking, sorting, dropping, throwing (not allowed), and cleaning them up again. 

I still generally throw things away rather than keep them for posterity, but I am extremely thankful that my parents and grandparents and Nate's parents and grandparents didn't do that (or else I'd never have anything to wear on Sundays--about 75% of the time I am wearing something or other that came from the Clarks' basement to church.)

gas prices

When we drove to New Mexico at the end of December, we flipped when we found gas for $1.99 a gallon outside of Albuquerque. Nate took a picture. We bought celebratory M&Ms. It has now gone aaaaall the way down to $1.93 here in Utah, which is actually so low it's frightening--but we are not talking about politics or oil policies or Monopoly on this blog, so let's move on to gas prices from the 1920s. Apparently gas was around twenty cents a gallon back then, which was absurdly expensive for them, rather like the regular $3.50 prices we've gotten used to.

This picture is of George Stricklan, my dad's grandpa and his gas station. Look, his name is on the sign and everything! His gasoline is packed with extra miles, too, so those '20s drivers would have really appreciated a little more bang for their buck.