Sandi Chats

Pinterest ..the idea website!  Back in the "olden days" you had to strain your brain to come  up with creative ideas, now you go to Pinterest to find inspiration. If you are not familiar with Pinterest, let me explain.  Say you want an idea for a crocheted baby afghan (a recent search of mine).  You can log on to Pinterest and type in a search term "crocheted baby afghan" and 1000+ webpages with patterns will show up for you to scroll through.  You can then "pin" the pages you find to one of your "boards" which you have labeled according to category, such as recipes, household tips, afghan patterns, etc. This allows you to store all the ideas you came up with in one place where you can find it again easily. It also allows other people to "follow" you and for you to "follow" other Pinterest users so that you can gain access to their ideas and pins. I signed up for a Pinterest account about 5 years ago, and in all that tim

I have lived in Nebraska all of my life, so the weather shouldn't really be holding any surprises for me.  I have lived through (though not necessarily enjoyed) droughts, wildfires, hurricane-force winds, rain of Biblical proportions, 110+ temps, subzero temps for days upon days, and enough snow to satisfy me and then some.  I even lived through a tornado when I was a kid. On a positive note, I have also enjoyed some beautiful days with the warm sun shining upon my life and making me happy from the inside out. The snows from the last month are not record-breaking blizzards by any stretch.  We've probably totaled less than 20", which for Nebraska is not anything to write home about.  And now that we don't have livestock to tend or cows to milk, we should be able to sit inside and enjoy the snow, right? NOT! Living in town right across the street from my work makes it hard to have a snow day...although during the storm a month ago I found it impossible to walk to wor

As we left Mackinac Island, this pretty much completed the planned activities.  From here on we are just following our noses toward home. One last view of Mackinac Island After warming up in the hot tub, getting a good night's rest, and stopping by the laundry mat for some clean clothes, we headed toward home.  It is Monday morning and we don't plan to be home until Thursday, so we have a few days to see the sights on the north side of the Upper Peninsula as we meander home. As we drove toward Lake Superior, we made several observations. 1. Michigan is like a negative of Nebraska...they have as many unforested acres as Nebraska has forested acres.  Open areas were few and far between. 2. The same type of trees do not grow in Michigan as we see in Nebraska. Most of them were evergreens but we couldn't identify exactly what they were without a tree book. 3. The land is rugged and beautiful. 4. This is just what we've been told...winters are a beast in the UP, lo

The wedding bells have finished ringing, the merry-making is over, and it's now the day after the wedding. And we were departing Charlevoix. We ran by Connie and Tracy's, said our good-byes and headed out. Our group for the tour of Mackinac Island...Mike, Zak, Nancy, Jessica and Stan It was Sunday, and the chilliest day we had on our trip. We teamed up with sister Nancy, Stan and their kiddos and headed out to Mackinac Island . I always heard from everyone who went to see Connie that there was always a trip to Mackinac Island on the agenda, so I figured it must be worthy of a visit...and is it ever! From Charlevoix, we headed north where we once again crossed the Mackinac Bridge. Once again I had to put it out of my mind how deep the water was in that area (I have checked, and it is about 400 ft. from the deck of the bridge to the lake floor!) Anyway, we finally arrived on the north end of the bridge and drove into a little town called St. Ignace where we co

When we left off last blog we had just survived a trip over the big and awesome Mackinac Bridge. That was on day 3 of a 9-day trip so there is plenty of adventure left to blog about. The wedding was to be held in Charlevoix, Michigan where Connie lived.  While we usually travel without hotel reservations, we knew that we had better have some reservations while we stayed in or near Charlevoix. I spent some time checking out the available accommodations and we came to the conclusion that most of the hotels were too high priced. We began checking bed and breakfast establishments to see what was available...and we hit pay dirt! Horton Creek Bed and Breakfast We chose Horton Creek Bed and Breakfast about 10 miles from Charlevoix.  They had a beautiful website and making reservations was so easy.  We chose the cheapest room, $135 per night, which undercut the prices of hotels in town by at least $50 per night! Our room was the "bear room".  Each room was decorated in its o

When I began this blog I mentioned that I would be posting about some of our trips.  We are not world travelers but do occasionally manage to get out of town for a few days or a week.  We always have a great time on our trips, but as of now one trip stands above the rest. In 2012, on the heels of the big wildfires in north central Nebraska, my sister in Michigan was getting married.  We had never been out to see her in Michigan since she had moved there 20 years before, so this provided a great opportunity to get out for a visit and to help her celebrate a new life. We planned this trip for a couple months.  One thing that we decided immediately is that we would drive...and we would not drive anywhere's near Chicago!  This left either a big loop around Chicago, which was not really feasible, or to travel by way of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.   A little geography lesson is in order.  As you probably know, Michigan could easily have been two states as the Upper and L

Technology!  You can't live without it but it is tempting to try some days! First I had to tackle the computer.  When we got our first computer back in the early 1990's it was fun to learn to run it and see all that it could do.  It wasn't windows-based nor was it dos-based, so I guess I don't really know what kind of operating system it had...we were that uninformed about computers. We got it over Christmas vacation while the kids were home, and that was a good thing.  Poor Heather, the only child in high school,  couldn't even go to the bathroom without being summoned to the computer to help Mom or Dad out of a jam.  The one thing I still can't figure out is why there was a key on the keyboard that said "print", but it was not the way to get the computer to print.  The computer came with a dot-matrix printer that used continuous feed paper.  It's funny now, 25 years later, how up-to-the-minute we thought we were!  I am happy to report that we h

Well it's Monday morning.  After a busy and hectic weekend of shooting in Valentine, we are attempting to return our lives to the normal routine.  Time to throw off all the indiscretions of the past weekend (those scotcheroos just taunted me all weekend) and get some good habits back in force. A couple weeks ago my sister Patsy sent an invitation to join the Nebraska 150 Challenge.  The goal is to log 150 miles of activity (walking, jogging, running, biking, kayaking, etc.) this year in honor of Nebraska's 150th birthday.  Truthfully for anyone with an ounce of dedication, this is not a high goal. Governor Pete Rickets has already more than tripled his goal, and it's only early February!  So far our team has only picked up three committed members (but would accept more) and have logged 28 miles of activity in the last two weeks. In our defense, the weather has not been ideal for getting outside to walk with all the snow and ice around. My knees just won't stand