Stories of family, creativity, and diverse distractions.

Month: August 2022

Individual bowls from leftovers

It’s popular right now to enjoy food bowls. The idea started with Hawaiian poke bowls – fish, vegetables, and sauce. They have recently become common, with restaurants popping up all over the place and options in the freezer and deli sections of the grocery.

Dinner is served!

Happy anniversary David and Bertha Humphries

I try to put up posts that relate to events that happened around the day of the post. Walt’s cousin Bertha got married on this date in 1939. Walt is the youngest of his cousins. I wasn’t able to find any pictures of David in the ones I have scanned in so far.

Taking a recipe and turning it into a casserole

We love to use the poblano peppers from our garden to make stuffed peppers, but sometimes the peppers are too small or tear when I am peeling them. I wrote about that process here. I decided to see if I could change a recipe for stuffed peppers into a casserole.

Image shows a white glass pan with a casserole with cheese on top.
The casserole just out of the oven.

It’s time to go back to school!

This time of year, people are heading back to school, so I pulled a few fun photos of our family’s school days. When we were visiting my folks earlier this year, they had found a bunch of my old school pictures.

Belated Congratulations to Dave Wulatin!

McSweeney’s has now published two articles by Dave. That’s pretty exciting!

It’s Time For The Sweet Corn Festival!

This weekend is the West Point Sweet Corn Festival! Sadly, I won’t be able to get back for it, but the Sweet Corn Festival holds a lot of fond memories, not just for my family but for just about everyone in the area.

We went to GenCon!

One of our favorite events each year is GenCon. We have been attending every year since it moved to Indianapolis (even 2020 when we participated in online events).

There is so much to see and do at GenCon. You can play board, card, and role-playing games. There are seminars and hands-on classes.

Here are a few pictures from this year. The event is spread out across the convention center, several hotels, Lucas Oil Stadium and Georgia Street. There are banners on the light posts and fun things to see outside the convention center.

Image shows a large inflatable robot in grey, green, and yellow. It stand outside the Indianapolis Convention center.
The Catalyst Games robot

A group has “yarn bombed” the event for the past couple of years. They even have a game. This year, they asked for knitted sections of yarn to decorate the giant planters outside the convention center. They put tags on the sections and we saw ones from all over the world.

Walking the halls

The hallways are busy and you get to see all kinds of neat costumes and displays.

The dragon in the background above has a special meaning. The artist who creates these amazing balloon sculptures has been attending for the last several years. This year, he made Genevieve, the mascot for GenCon. He auctions off the chance to pop the creation for charity, one of several events that GenCon hosts to support a local charity or two.

She’s enormous! The grass was about 2 feet tall and the dragon was about 15 feet tall.

In the dealer hall

In the dealer hall, you can find games galore but there are a lot of other things to check out.

Crowning the winner!

One of our favorite things about GenCon is getting to see people at events year after year. We have been playing with a couple of groups including the fun folks at Evil Fleet Productions who run role playing games. The run a game called Can of Whupass and the winner is crowned with silly string.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into a trip to GenCon!

Family bibles as a source of information

On a recent trip to visit family, my dad showed me an old family bible of the Barns branch of the family. Margaret Barns was my great-great grandmother. In the center of the bible was a series of pages to record births, deaths, and marriages.

Family bibles can be a source of information for genealogy research. Originally, people wrote on the inside front and back covers. In the late 1700’s printers started adding special pages for the recording of information. (Read more about this here.)

What Is Your Favorite Outdoor Place, and Why?

As some of you may know, I work at the local REI store, selling camping equipment. When you hire on at REI, they ask you to name your favorite outdoor place, and they have it engraved on your name tag, below your name. The other people in my hire group were naming off all the big-name, big-deal destinations. You had Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, The Smokies, and so on.

When it came my turn, I didn’t have a good answer. I’d never been to the places the other folks mentioned, though I wanted to see them all.

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