Butter Churning, Games, and 1,500 pumkins that needed carving

So... butter churning.
 You might think its boring or old fashioned. I can honestly tell you I had more fun churning butter than I have in a very long time. 
It was in the lower kitchen of the town house, and there were some crackers for people to try the homemade butter on. It was really amusing watching all the different ages of people sharing the same joy of churning butter. From a barely toddler, to a wicked nice older couple, it was really great to get to see all of them having fun and learning about how things used to be done.   Also, I met a few British people. Its a tad pathetic how happy I get when I hear a British, German, Danish, Irish, or Scottish accent. Speaking of that...There was a lovely woman with her son there from Denmark!! They were so nice. It was really cool. 

Another thing? Dangggg dont mess with a dairy maid. My right arm? Quite a bit stronger than it was before, and that was just after two mornings of churning! Imagine most of your life like that!! Yikes!

It was also really cool meeting two new girls and teaching them both how to make butter!! If you have never made butter, if you fill the churn half full of cream, when it gets to the half way point, it becomes almost impossible to work the churn! The intern I was working with and I were both trying...and it took us a while.

Games was fun even though people were rude..... I was with Katie for games both days! Which was AWESOME! Cause Katie is wicked cool and rather an amazing person.  Just saying. 
Schoolyard games, French and English (Tug of war), Baseball., Hoop races, and then the fire balloon!

I salvaged two that were about to be thrown out cause they had a whole in them and were useless....But! Cats use many useless things, and my cat (who is obsessed with plastic bags) will be so happy with them!

Now for pumpkin carving!  I dont want to see another pumpkin for at least a week.  I mean, it was wicked fun, and GOSH I have missed Besty, Fran, Halie, and Sadie!! But there were around 1,500 to 2,000 pumpkins that were carved yesterday. Utter insanity!  I will upload pictures when I get home to put them on here from my phone!

Traces of a life, not long gone, Traces of a life, amidst the heavy throng.

Today walking around the village in costume, I began to cry several times. I see traces of my dear aunt everywhere. So on the way home I wrote this. It WAS really good, but my stupid phone deleted it. So this is as much as I can remember from it.

Traces of a life of one not long gone,
Traces of a beauty, amidst the heavy throng.
Traces of the love, of a woman so kind
Traces of all the people and things she left behind.
Can you see her in the gardens? Tending to her plants?
Or maybe catch a glimpse of her gorgeous hair, reflected in the auburn leaves of fall.
See the lady with the corded hat?
Just like the one she used to wear?
You have to take a second glace, but no.
Its just a trace of a life that touched all.

Loving until the end, she watched out for everyone.
Kind, patient, glowing, there are no words to describe her love.
Few could tell how bad the cancer was, that tainted her life
Did you know how constant the pain or how heavy the strife?
Through it all she remained grace filled and no one will forget
How she touched every single person she ever met.
We will always see traces of that wonderful life.
Both the beauty and the pain of her to short life.

Its hard not to cry when we walk the paths she walked
And the world is not as bright without her unselfish thoughts.
I will always see traces of that dear, beautiful woman.
And hear the echo of  laugh.
I already miss her tender hugs and loving smile.
Can I go back for a minute or an hour?
Before the fall wilted that beautiful delicate flower?
Oh my dear aunt I do miss you so.
Who would have ever thought I would have to see you go?

A post with a lot more emotion then its title.

                                        A lot has been lost lately.

 I lost my dear Matante Rebecca

I am losing friends...because I have realized, a little too late that they are not the people I thought they were.

I am losing faith in myself because I dont know if I can ever overcome my Lyme disease.

I am losing trust in those around me, because I dont know WHO to trust anymore.

              But I have also learned, and gained. 

I have learned I have more people who love me than I thought.
   Dear family members who gathered round after my Aunts death, and people I had not really counted as friends and then they reached out with so much love for me and my family after my Aunt died, that I will never again forget them.

I have gained a wonderful boyfriend who is keeping me sane through everything I am going through.

I have learned,stupidly forgotten, and learned again that, I can pray my way out of anything, because God is always there.

I have gained an understanding of  more simple beauties of life, and learned to pay attention to little things. Never did I so much appreciate the coming of winter, and the lull from the insanity of summer. The simple beauty of someone who will just hold your hand, or listen to you while you rant about your fears..  Even the silliness of some things that used to annoy me...Jenna making snarky comments, or one of my chickens who is clumsy and falls into my feet.



  
People say when one door opens, another closes. And you know what? Its true. If you stop whining about the door that closed for just a moment, you will notice the windows all around you that are letting in a beautiful breath of fresh air. 

 Its terrifying how much I forget that God is always there....I feel...no..I KNOW if i stopped forgetting that, then life would be a lot easier for me to get through.  And maybe if I noticed more of the beauties of the wonderful world he created, I could find joy in things easier and much more quickly.


So here I am.  Attempting to make a change.

I will stop and smell the roses....and any other flower that catches my eye.
I will stop complaining about the door that closed, and wait for another to open.
I will be kind, and loving, ESPECIALLY when it is hard to.
I will think of others before myself, and then put them first.
I will stop being so full of pride, and notice the accomplishments of others.


I try to always compliment people on random things, like their t-shirt, or way they styled their hair. And I try NEVER to give a false complement.  
I  try smile at everyone. You never know who will cherish that smile from a stranger.



 So there you have it. I know this was long, but it was eating away at me, and needed to be said. I was in tears before I started writing this, and now I feel a lot better. So thank you to those who took time to read this, if I know you or not. Just remember, you are loved. By a lot more people than you think. And dont forget to take in the simple beauties of life..it will make you a lot happier in the long run.

First OSV day in August!

Wow!!  *Facepalm*  I have not posted in SO long. IM SO SORRY EVERYONE!!  I have been busy, and I have been sick.

   Okay so, my Lyme disease is making it hard for me to form coherent sentences and it has taken me from like 6 to 11 to write this in a way that is at all understandable, but I apologize ahead of time for how oddly it is written. (Side note. Its 7 in the morning on Sunday. I am fixing my post a little because its lack of coherency is kind of scary) (Still editing on Monday. wow)

        On sickness....
I missed last month at Old Sturbridge Village because I was...rather sick. The antibiotics for my Lyme Disease kinda sorta PUT A BIG DARN HOLE in my stomach. Which was rather painful. I spent a month and a half curled up in a ball hugging my stomach and trying not to cry. Occasionally I would leave the house, but I really just stayed in.  Whenever I eat or drink, it still hurts a little, but the medicine I took mostly helped.

      Okay, now for ...bum bum bum....talk about the village and my time there! :-D

  Soooo Memere came and picked me up Thursday morning, and so I was just kinda bopping around the house for those two days but FRIDAY  I was at Freeman in the Morning and Games in the afternoon.

   By the way, the weather is awful. Its wicked hot, and its humid which makes it all the worse. Not only that, but it has been raining on and off, so by late afternoon the light rain became a thunderstorm. So between 1 and 3 the weather was HORRIBLE!

Highly doubting that the non-rainy weather would hold, I rushed my way to Freeman Farm around 8:45. Being the first one there, so I sat in the kitchen for about half an hour studying up on the school packet (Because I had school house after lunch) when finally people showed up. Yayness! Saturday is Bake day, so that means GUESS WHAT..bum bum baa...baking!  I had never actually used the bake oven before and for those of you who have not had to put wood in a bake oven, its like reaching your hand into a small brick box which feels like a million degrees inside with occasional flames licking up and around your arm. When I was putting all of  the wood and kindling into the bake oven, I managed to stab myself with a splinter, and its really odd, cause the rest of the day it was randomly re-opening and bleeding again. Weird, right?  



For some reason I adore washing butter. You are probably like "Wash butter? Why the heck would you need to wash butter?"   Well, the way that butter is stored, is in a red-ware crock full of salty water. To keep the butter under the surface of the water, is a circle of wood and a rock on top of that, and then a lid on the top of the crock. That keeps for an incredibly long time.

Hehe the one problem with working at Old Sturbridge Village is that now I really really want to live on a farm. With just a cow and some chickens I think I could be happy...But sheep would be fun too. 

What did we cook you ask? First, we made Cupcake (Which is my all time favorite thing ever!). It is not like today's cupcakes, but is in fact called a cup cake because all of the measurements are in cups. Wanna know the recipe so you can make it at home? Well, here you go!
     
                Cupcake
(I HIGHLY recommend making this. Its kind of amazing.)
 4 eggs
3 cups of flour
2 cups of sugar
1 cup of butter (Softened)
 Whisk together in large bowl, move to a pan and bake in the oven at 325 for 20 minutes.

  Besides the cupcake, we made a Rhubarb Pie ( I do not have the recipe for that one)
And we also made a bread

Sadly, I have no idea how these came out because, since  I was doing the school house lesson and I had to leave half an hour early so I could take my lunch hour and be there at 12:30.

It was soooo freaking warm all day, and standing in front of a fire got me all gross, so taking a break and walking around with a breeze at my back was sooo nice.

  Not at all surprisingly, as soon as I got into the school house, it started POURING which, though annoying, is kind of a good thing. I was worried there would not be many people there and the rain gave me quite the audience! Granted, a somewhat unwilling audience, but they were interested none the less.
   I always love giving little kids school lessons. Their faces light up cause they are proud of themselves, and they just stare up at you with a kind of little kid awe in their face... 
After a school lesson  answered a ton of questions, and did another random school lesson a few times cause they asked if they could do it again.  Being that the rain was coming down in torrents, Katie (the girl who was in charge of games that day) wisely decided to move the school yard games into the school house. So We had a Jacobs Ladder and a few other wooden toys.

  After that, Katie and I stood under an umbrella for half an hour with a rope explaining to people why we could not do French and English (Tug-of-war). Why couldn't we? It was raining, and therefor muddy and disgusting. 

   When that was over with, we then went up to the meeting house, and stood with the baseball stuff under the roof explaining why we were not playing baseball.  That was fun though, because Katie randomly started teaching me some German, and we talked in depth about Shakespeare.

 What I love about working there, is that...well almost everyone is a geek. And those that aren't are usually appreciative of YOUR geekyness and will still talk about it with you.

 I think my favorite part of the day though, was taking tea in the parlor of the Parsonage. Also? I got to have a piece of cupcake. *GRIN*  There was quite a collection of people. It was a tad awkward at first, but then we fell into a quiet conversation, so it was nice.  The only thing was, the tea was loose leaf...and I mean really loose leaf. So other than the fact that along with my tea, I ate half a plant of tea leaves, it was lovely.

 We had about half an hour before we started getting ready, so we just walked around the common a few times chatting about Shakespeare! Which was rather fun. Apparently, Katie shares the same favorites as I do, and also thinks Romeo and Juliet is Stupid.  Yayyyy.

The hot air balloons are always really fun, and Katie knows all the history of them, and tells them in such a fun way. A tree ate two of the hot air balloons, but one we were able to set off a few times before it got a tear in it. 

  So yeah. Thats really all that I did...besides be an idiot and stay up late before I went to bed.

First Day at Old Sturbridge Village this year!!!

Well, it was the first day of the year so far, and what a day it was!
I met several new Junior interns, and college interns, who are all so nice!
Today, I was on Games in the morning, and Freeman in the afternoon. Sooo this is how my day went.

I got up at 6:44 (A minute before my alarm went off. The sun was practicing its aim and somehow got around the blind, into my eyes) and ate some leftover maple syrup covered, sticky chocolate chip pancakes from Annie's Diner. (Yummy!) Then I called Daddy and wished him a Happy Fathers day. Had a *bit* of a hard time getting my costume on. I have issues....You would think it would not be that hard, but it is for me somehow. I put my petticoat on and tied the elastic so it would be all puffy and awesome, and then slipped the dress on over my head. Done is done right? No....Not at all. The dress is open in the back with a bunch of hook and eye closures, so you have to do those....Well before I did those, for some reason, I decided to  let go of the top, and somehow got my petticoat mixed in and out of my dress. I dont even have any clue how that happened...Memere walks in on me, spinning around, attempting to reach the back of my dress to tuck the troublesome petticoat back in, and just sighs, so I said "Can you fix my duck-tail please?". What would I do without her?? Oh..yeah...probably walk around looking like a duck-tailed idiot. 

 So anyway, I was up at the top of Bullard Tavern waiting for Sydney on one of the couches, because she was the adult I was with, (Junior interns usually have to be with an adult) and so I was sitting there going over Sindarin Verbs (I am learning Elvish this summer....) and out of he corner of my eye, I see a girl about my age sitting there in a flowered red dress looking like she did not really know what to do next. So! I introduced myself, and turns out Sophie (as was her name) is also on games that morning! And not only that, she is Homeschooled, and almost as insane as I am! It was Marvelous! Throughout the day we were making random Dr. Who quotes, talking about Shakespeare, and making Harry Potter references. It was AHMAZING!  

 Where we do the "Try your hand at fishing" is in the back of the mill pond, behind the bathroom, which, by the way, was built using the blueprints of Freeman farm!  Anywho, we were all standing around in the dappled shade under the trees, watching a squirrel sneak closer and closer, and tossing bread crusts out to the fish who snapped it up. We also tossed a few tiny pieces of gingerbread to the afore mentioned squirrel, who kept creeping closer to see what we had to offer him.  Its really fun fishing in that pond, because you can see the fish and your bait! You would think its easier to know when to pull up on the pole, but more often than not, you get so excited watching their little mouths close around the bait, that you dont wait long enough before jerking the pole up. I think with every person that came down caught at least one fish...there were about 20 or 30 kids I think that trickled down to us throughout the day. It was...interesting!  At 11:30 the three of us headed back up to the staff area Bullard Tavern for lunch. (I was glad for the break..it gave me more of a chance to continue learning Elvish!!)

Sundays at Freeman, we do a sit down dinner at 1 or 1:30, so you can see how, and what was eaten in the 1830's, which is actually pretty cool. Of course, I did not get to do the sit down meal, because I got there just as they were getting ready to sit down, so I offered to do the dishes. And OH! there were a LOT of dishes!  I like to wash when the water is scalding hot, so I could not feel my hands for a while after that...As soon as I finished up all of my dishes, they finished with Dinner, which gave me several more washbasins worth of dishes. I am gonna just sort of sum up the rest of the hings I did at freeman... (and by sum up, I just mean not write a gigantic huge paragraph on each tiny detail....)

 I did munch on a few things as I was cleaning though. I had a piece of Apple pie, and a tiny slice of the cupcake (which is sort of a pound cake....its called a cupcake because all the measurements are ascending cup measurements)  and some ham. The ham, I just kind of sucked on a piece, because the piece I grabbed was rather tough. Also, it was very salty, (because it was soaked in salt brine, then smoked, and rinsed before use to get some of the salt out....but a lot is still in it) so it was rather like sucking on a piece of tough beef jerky..But not as tough.. I also picked some Currents with a college intern and a 4-h intern, though half way through, I had to go scrub a cheese press.

When I was done with that, I rushed across the path to the barn to watch Ryan milking the cow, and got there in time to carry the bucked back to the farmhouse while she cleaned up. I found it really cool, I was watching the milk as I was walking...The sweet, frothy milk splashing around in the wooden bucket as I held the handle with my skirt, shooing chickens as I went. (Its moments like that I feel like I have been flashed back to the actual 1800's!) And ending the day, everyone picked the tiny stems out of as many currents as we could get through in half an hour...Which was no much. Maybe about 3 cups of them. They are tiny though! Okay, well my sentence structure is slowly decomposing, so I am going to go to bed now! I will probably blog tomorrow!

Catching up!

Oh my goodness, it has been a while since I last posted. I realized this when one of my friends put it oh-so-delicately "Come on dudette, I like reading about your life!"

Since I last posted, I have dyed my hair red (thats gone now...) and have had several different streaks of color in it.  I have pierced my own ear (Left ear...I had a second piercing on the right and wanted one on the left)
I have been Helena, Lady Macbeth, and the female version of Don John in 3 different Homeschool productions of Shakespeare, all of which were so fun, and I miss the class already.   I got to be stupid, evil, mislead, and downright villainous, while having an amazing time with some dear friends.   Wednesday was the last play, which was Much Ado About Nothing. Not only was this the most fun to put on, but we did a full version of it, and it was the best of the plays we have done. (Though, Macbeth was incredibly fun. I like being evil....)
  
  Here is a link to a practice scene from Macbeth. (Thats me with the red hair...second to the left) (My Mom's YouTube channel)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kQIV4a5ymU&list=UUO4RlcAO-ofFpIzjDOdEgOg&index=8&feature=plcp

Also, during Much Ado, we all had to learn the stroll! Which was so fun!!!! (My 3 favorite things are singing, dancing, and acting, so you can imagine how fun this was for me!!)   Here is a video of Crystal teaching us the stroll! (Me in the black "love" shirt and the overly drawn on jeans) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze_PIL9hcU0&list=UUO4RlcAO-ofFpIzjDOdEgOg&index=6&feature=plcp  

I also did a biology lab with my friends Thomas, and Kevin, and Nathan. We dissected a worm, crayfish, perch, and frog.   Our teachers were my Mother, and Thomas's mother MaryEllen Oliver, who was also our Shakespeare teacher. (We watched a video, but the dude was totally creepy, and really was not that helpful anyway.)    Perch Lab where we are trying to cut into the brain, and Kevin is trying to shove a spoon down a "baby alive's" throat   and then Reinflating a frogs lung!!

Also, before all that, I did an offertory song at the church which mom recorded. I am not proud of it, and I am going to regret putting the link up, but I love the song, and so here we are. Does not really matter how you sound so long as you are praising God yeah? Me singing Hallalujah, what a savior

All, in all, I have had a pretty fun time, expect for my Lyme disease which is making me miserable. I am going to a Lyme Doctor on Monday in Boston to see if he can help me. I am off medication right now, and have been for a few days, because I was laying around barely moving with a combination of nausea and pain. Not fun..... But! It could be worse. I am not like that all the time, and usually am able to bop around without anyone even guessing I am in pain SO we are good! :-)

Wednesday, my Memere is coming to pick me up, and I am going back to Old Sturbridge Village. Costume fitting Thursday, and I will be at the village Friday! I can't wait, I love it there so much. I will miss my friends like crazy though.    

Tomorrow we are having a movie night The Oliver's after church and the service on the beach. (I AM SO GLAD THESE ARE HAPPENING AGAIN I LOVE WORSHIP ON THE BEACH!!!)  We are hopefully watching Men in Black 2, but we cant find anyone who has it, and neither of us do, so we are probably watching Galaxy Quest. (I have never actually heard of it before....)

Well, so long for now, I am going to see my cousin Samantha to celebrate her graduation!