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Fall is my ultimate favorite season, and this year we are having a storybook fall so far in regard to the weather and the colors.  The past week we’ve enjoyed mild temps in the 70s and virtually no wind, so the trees are holding their beautiful hues.  Some years we’ve barely had a fall, as the cold weather moved in too quickly, or the wind blew all the leaves off the trees.  After the extraordinarily hot summer we suffered through this year, it’s nice to have some mild temps and an incentive to be outside.

Yesterday was a perfect fall day.  My boys had football games in the morning, so I had the privilege of watching elementary kids play games against a backdrop of fall foliage.

I have an added incentive to walk my Jack Russell, Nick, during these beautifully mild days, as the scenery just cannot be beat.

This is the first fall that I have had Nick with our family, but I think he likes it quite a bit.  :-)

Normally around this time, I’d be heading back to South Dakota to enjoy some of the bounty of my parents’ apple orchard.  However, this summer left no chance that a non-irrigated orchard was going to produce anything, so I’ll have to wait patiently until next year.

This is the season of leaves, colors, apples, pumpkins, bright blue skies, and coziness.  Enjoy it!

I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I lived the first four years of my  life there.  Now, that doesn’t seem like much, but I am amazed by how much I actually recall about those years.  They were formative years, to be sure.  I remember the house we lived in quite vividly.  I remember the console stereo in the living room where I played John Denver records and danced around the living room. I remember the corner by the concrete stairs that I would hang out and play with model train buildings.  The house seemed palatial to me then.  A few months ago, I had the opportunity to drive by it, and it seemed unrecognizable to me now.  That’s what time does, I guess.

I remember my dad watching the Huskers on Saturdays on our high-class “pleather” couch in the basement.  My sister and I would make him plates of crackers and cheese while he enjoyed a much-needed day off.  The Huskers were always a memory of those Lincoln days, and they became part of the nostalgia I felt for Lincoln over the years.

A friend I’ve known for fourteen years has recently become more of a friend. He’s from Lincoln, and we both lived in that town at the same time without knowing anything about the other.  He was older than I was, but when we first met (online via AOL back when AOL was “the thing to do”), we thought it was cool that we both were originally from Lincoln.  Over the years we compared notes and found that our similar histories went a little bit deeper than just living in the same town, which was rather intriguing.  Anyway, this past summer my love and I decided to return to Lincoln to watch a Husker game.

While I don’t remember if I ever stepped foot on the UNL campus “back in the day,” my love went there and played in the marching band, so this was familiar territory for him.  I was amazed at the sea of red — the energy, the crowd, the spirit, the excitement.  My own college football games could not be compared to this by any means.  If I hadn’t known any better, I would have guessed that this was Homecoming, as crowded as the streets around the stadium were with people and vendors and parties.

And it was something very cool to behold when hundreds of red balloons let loose after the first touchdown.  Very cool indeed!

The band, quite simply, was amazing.  I cannot imagine the hours of hard work and dedication it would take to be a part of something like that. Watch the Husker band in action!  

The Huskers won, which was fun to see.  I’m very much looking forward to attending another game next year!

I’ve lived in Iowa for twelve years now, but it took me eleven years before I finally visited one of the coolest retro buildings around: the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Doesn’t sound familiar?  It’s known as the last place that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper played on the Winter Dance Party tour before their fateful plane crash on February 3, 1959.

The building is open during the day for tours, and the tours are totally self-guided.  The first time I was there, my friend and I were the only people there.  We wandered around for close to an hour.  This time there were some other tourists there, but not enough to ruin the cozy feel of being inside the Surf.

The preservation of this building was done with the utmost care, as retro-loving people are struck by all the great art deco and Midcentury elements that the building and decor still exhibit.  Visitors will begin noticing these elements as soon as they walk in the door.

The coat check area has all the great qualities of early Midcentury design.

What’s really neat (and a little creepy) about this building, as I’ve mentioned before, is your ability to wander around the building at will.  No one is directing you where to go.  You can sit in a booth and look toward the stage and try to envision all of the famous acts that have played there over the years.  The ballroom area is kept quite dark save for the lights of the stage.  My camera lends far more light to this picture than will appear to the naked eye.

The booth tables are still sided with aluminum and still have the original reservation instructions.

Visitors are free to roam up on the stage to see what the view has been for decades of performances. (I assume there had recently been a wedding dance here, hence the row of tables and chairs at the front part of the stage.)

To the side of the stage is a little room for bands to get ready for their performance.  The walls are covered with signatures of all the people who have played the Surf over the past few decades.

Even the bathrooms are cool!

The more you wander around the building, the more your mind starts to work overtime to imagine all the scenes that have unfolded on the dance floor, the stage, the booths, and at the bar.

The best part of about the tour is noticing the little architectural and decorative detail.

The Surf also has a hallway of pictures that is rather fascinating.  It contains pictures of the various bands who have played there over time, along with some of the history of the Surf Ballroom itself.  You can read more about the Surf and its history here.

A few months ago I received some pieces of Mar-crest Citation flatware as a gift.  I had fallen in love long ago with the starburst pattern on the handle, but I figured that actually finding a set of such flatware was going to be nearly impossible or ultra expensive.

Oh, how wrong I was.

It started with that set.  I noticed some other small bunches of starburst flatware on eBay or Etsy, but being the impatient person I was, I wanted a full set instantly.  There were a few auctions for brand new boxes, but you can imagine how much THOSE went for.  <sigh>

Fast forward to last Thursday, when my significant other and I went thrift shopping for the express purpose of finding some good retro stuff.  What we found were a whole bunch of pieces of starburst flatware, and by the time it was all said and done, I had a pretty good set of it going.  At ten cents per piece, it was a bargain!

I took a brief glance at the flatware in the store, but I was just so excited to find this stuff that I just instructed my significant other to grab all the pieces he could find and call it good.  It wasn’t until I got home — no, wait … it wasn’t until I started to write this post — that I realized how many different pieces I actual had.  What I thought to be two different patterns going on actually turned into seven.  Yes, really.  How many different styles of starburst flatware can there be?

A lot, actually:

The more I looked at these patterns, the more confused I became.  The pattern on the left was what I was sure was Mar-crest Citation, but the the one second from the right looked like the same thing.  There was a subtle different in the style and placement of the starburst, but neither one was marked.  And what about the others?  None of them had distinctive markings except for a couple that just said “Japan Stainless Steel.”  Doesn’t help me a out a bunch.

After some research, I’m fairly certain that the second from the right is indeed Mar-crest Citation, and the one on the left is an imitation. I thought one of them might be a pattern by Wallace called Bright Star.   Here’s a page from a 1958 catalog from John Plain & Company.

Four stars on the handle.  But once I started looking at all the patterns on the knives, none seemed to match exactly.  So no Bright Star.  <sigh>  So I try to identify each piece individually.  There’s what I think is the Citation:

Then I have a smattering of others.  This first one I have found identified as Utica Silver Sheen:

This next one is Everlasting EV2:

The next one I found some pieces of from an Etsy sale, and that information identifies this pattern as Americana Star.

I think I’ve given myself a headache from squinting at pictures on the internet trying to identify these pieces.  Anyone know what these are?

So I dropped by my blog today to check something and noticed my headline from yesterday: “It’s never to early to think about Christmas.”

To?

TO?

Did I really commit one of the most annoying grammar errors ever?

I flog myself even as I write this.  I should know better than to write a post when my two boys are chasing each other around the house, one wielding a Star Wars light saber and the other screaming, “Give it back to me!  It’s miiiiiiiiiine!”

This continues my perusal of the 1955 American Home magazines. I have been delighted by some of the finds, aghast at some of the decorating ideas, and plain ol’ astounded by some of the products.

I have always marveled at the need for hiding our basic entertainment components. I grew up in a house with this feature; one did not see a TV in any room but the basement, which usually wasn’t occupied by guests. No TVs existed in bedrooms, either. TVs were essentially out of sight, and possibly out of mind. I always found it a curious habit, as if families were content to live in denial: nooooooo, they didn’t watch TV! How preposterous that you might think so!
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I know. I know! It’s been a week (or two) since I last updated this blog, but once you hear my tale of woe, I think you might feel a twinge of pity for me.

Seventeen days of school left, and our internet at school has been on and off for about three weeks now. Mostly off, which means that all those internet-related duties that are now associated with my job are impossible to do: entering grades, lesson plans, and grabbing videos, etc. for content enhancement. Email is also down, which means that communication has been sporadic and sluggish. How did anyone pass information along “back in the day”? I know the answer, of course, but it’s interesting how a disruption in technology can make one ponder how it’s changed the daily chores of this profession. Read the rest of this entry »