Can you hear me now?

Can we have some spring already?????

It's been a rough and busy week so far with my brother on his way to Iraq and the passing of my husband's grandmother, but we've made it to hump day!

Thought it was time for a Minnesota joke, just to lighten things up a bit.

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After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, New York scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed, California scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters, and shortly after, headlines in the California newspapers read: " California archaeologists have found traces of 200 year old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the New Yorkers."

One week later, "The Aitkin Age", a local newspaper in Aitkin, Minnesota reported the following: "After digging as deep as 30 meters in peat fields just north of Palisade, Ole Johnson, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing (he had help digging from his buddy Sven). Ole has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Minnesota had already gone wireless.

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The irony...
My husband's family used to live in South Dakota, but great-grandpa heard about some great land in north central Minnesota in Aitkin. Sight unseen they bought 40 acres. The family packed up everything from SD, took a ferry boat up the Mississippi, then got verbal directions to their land, which was something like walk two miles down the country road until you come to a stump (or some other natural marker) then proceed a few miles into the woods until you come to a big tree, then go west a certain distance until you come to your land.

Amazingly with these crude directions, they found their land, which was basically in a swamp, and homesteaded there. It wasn't until recently that the county came along and told them that the house they built was actually two feet over the property line and on the county's land. They never had electricity, running water, phone or heat. Great-grandma canned things like beaver. The family lived like this until fairly recently. Great-grandpa died in 1951, great-grandma in 1969, and an uncle who never married and stayed on the property, died in 1999. (Hubby's grandmother who just died wasn't from this line...this is grandpa's family).

The home in the 1950s