I’m tuned in to another episode of Sepia Saturday this week, featuring televisions! You’d be shocked to know this is the only photo I could find with a television in it from my grandparents’ collections, this one coming from that of my grandma Norma (Innocenti) Rachocki who is sitting on the couch on the left with a small dog. In the center, I think, is Nellie Gasparri and I’d be willing to bet that’s John Rachocki’s knee on the right. No kids, so I have to date this to the early half of the 1950s. Television out that way in central PA, at best, is still only about three channels. Most areas don’t run cable for cable TV, so you have to rely on an antenna (Still, I know, it’s crazy). The house is decorated up for what looks like Christmas, and the house has a myriad of clashing prints between the wallpaper and carpet. The TV doesn’t appear to be on, or perhaps the camera wasn’t able to capture the image on the screen in the photo, but Norma does appear to be looking at the television (or just not looking directly at the camera. It’s very unlike the other photos we have, to have such a casual sort of photo in a living room type area – most folks didn’t use film this way and saved photos for special events and occasions, so it’s really rather precious. I suppose I find a way for every family photo to be special because they all are to me anyway!
Short and sweet this week as we take it to the Sepia Saturday commercial break.
I’m a few days late getting my entry together for Sepia Saturday, but better late than never, right? I didn’t have anything quite as lovely as the hotel postcard from the prompt image, but I thought a postcard of a lovely palace in Germany. The Schloss Philippsruhe is located in Hanau, Germany where Gordon Shugg was stationed in the Army. Gordon Thomas Shugg married Alberta “Bessie” Lee Efird December 13, 1952 in this very palace as per the postcard which reads,
19 June
Dear Olga –
Think I sent you a card from Englind. Back in Germany again now. Visited with Aunt’s in England and saw the queen. This is a picture of the castle where we were married Dec 13 “52”
Love
Bess & Gordon
The postmark indicates this was sent June 21, 1954 from the Army Postal Service. Gordon Shugg was in the Army during WWII and afterwards, finally retiring as a CWO4. As for the rest of his life story, he was born to Bessie (Battin, sister to my great-great grandmother) and Arnold Shugg on 10 Jan 1905 in Plympton, Devon, England. In 1911, he arrived in the USA with his mother, brother, and father. Gordon is listed as married and living with Bessie and their 4 year old daughter, Mary, on the 1940 census, so I’m not sure why they say they were married in 1952 in Germany. Perhaps there’s a good story there that I haven’t found yet! Gordon and Bess returned home from Germany in 1955, though their daughter doesn’t show on the passenger manifest. I suppose it’s possible Mary stayed home with other family while her parents were away. Gordon died young, at age 56, on 2 Oct 1961 in Virginia. My postcard from Bess and Gordon isn’t nearly as old as the pictured hotel postcard, but it brought me a bit of genealogical data and a new mystery to work out!
Another Sepia Saturday is already upon us! This week brings us a prompt image of a beautiful beach, but unfortunately I have no family that lived on/near beaches or who took and saved photos from a beach vacation. We’re not a beach/shore kind of people, it seems! However, my husband’s family came to the USA from the Netherlands on a boat in 1951 which fits the bill for at least the “sea” part of the theme. On February 13, 1951, the S.S. Volendam departed from Rotterdam, Netherlands, bound for America. Two families who apparently didn’t know eachother prior to the journey, met and became friends on the 12 day journey, or friends enough to take a picture and share it later on. The photo looks like it was taken on board the ship, on their first day according to the inscription on the back. Google Translate tells me the inscription, written in Dutch, says, “To remember the boat trip to America,” and is signed the Jansens Family. I hadn’t heard the name before, they weren’t family friends that I knew of, so I set out to figure out who this Jansens Family was. By luck, they were listed just above my husband’s family on the passenger list (link). My husband’s grandparents are in the back row, 2nd and 3rd in from the left – Hilje “Hilda” Dijkema (1914-1997) and Doede “Douglas” Jaarsma (1911-1995). The head of the Jansens family was Pieter Jansens and his wife, Janna, along with 10 of their 18 children. I recently got in contact with a descendant of Jacobus (the man in the back row on the far left with the camera bag) who filled me in on some details of the family who ended up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Jaarsma family went to northern New Jersey and pretty much stayed in the area. It’s sweet that the Jansens family sent along a copy of the photo after arriving at their destination, and that Hilda and Douglas kept it all these years. It was really neat to connect with a descendant of the Jansens family and share the photo back with them, and I’m happy to share it as this Sepia Saturday sails off into the sunset.
Another catch-up post, and I’m a week behind on posts! Getting caught up (again) though – it’s crazy how summer can just fly by like this. Husband is away and I decided to try out a few new things. I know he’s not a big fan of fennel or farro (really, wheat berries in this case), so I decided to go crazy and combine the two! I found this recipe (Roasted Fennel & Farro Salad) and went for it. The wheat berries came from North Star Orchard and we’ve had them hanging around in the freezer for a while. They do take a while to cook, but the results are absolutely worth it. Combined with the fennel and peppers, it made for a dish that was great warm or cold. The simple cucumber and tomato salad was a recurring theme for the rest of the week too. Drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar, it made for a great afternoon snack, and there’s just something about fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. The cucumber is an Armenian cucumber and something I’ve never had before. It has a soft fuzz on the outside that I scrubbed off with a vegetable scrubber brush, and I found it a little more crisp and less acidic than a regular cucumber.
Also on the plate are peaches with blue cheese, another summer favorite, and beet chips which didn’t come out all that well. My slices weren’t uniform, so they were too crisp on one half and just barely baked on the other. That didn’t stop me from eating the whole beet though, and I really like how they taste when roasted. One final piece of the plate was another new recipe I tried called gougères – it’s a fancy french savory puff pastry made mostly with flour, butter, eggs, and cheese. The recipe was part of the Birchrun Hills Kickstarter campaign rewards and I was really psyched to try something new. It was easier than I thought and I sort of felt like a super hero having produced results that tasty and perfect on the first try!
Altogether a delightful dinner and really rather filling!
A challenge this week indeed! The prompt image for Sepia Saturday (shown below) featured a butcher shop and I knew right off the bat that I had absolutely nothing like it. Luckily, we get a preview a few weeks in advance and I managed to remember the photo above. Picutred is a man who I believe is Waldo Orvis “Jack” Powis (1905-1981), brother to my great grandmother Olga Powis. He’s standing with a dead bear who was probably hunted in Pennsylvania. Jack didn’t live in PA at the time, but he may have been out visiting his family in central Pennsylvania and posed with the bear for a photo. It’s not often that a person can safely get within any distance of a bear like that, so I’m sure it was quite the novelty! It’s not a butcher shop, but I have to imagine that the hunters used the bear meat for food since the presumed area where it was shot wasn’t in great shape economically (and still isn’t). There’s no date or inscription on the photo, but I’d guess it was taken to be somewhere between 1950 to 1960.
This is now my second Nerd Makeup box as part of Beta testing from the Kickstarter Campaign. I had initally only signed up for one month as part of the campaign, but they had a call out for extra testers after the first month and I was happily selected to be part of the super special group of testers. The box costs $25 plus $4.11 shipping and handling for a grand total of $29.11. The value of the nail wraps alone totally makes up for the cost of the box and everything else is a bonus!
Nerd Manicure Humidor – $7.50 – I already have one from the original kickstarter campaign, but hey, another one can’t hurt! I already know this is an awesome product to keep around and the card that came along in the box gave some great tips on how to use it. I had just been stuffing my extra nail wraps into the humidor, but it’s a better idea to put them back in the original sleeve and then in the humidor to keep them from sticking. It’s basically a waterproof, airproof bag to keep the extra wraps fresh before using them up. Works great!
Nail File – $.50 – Who can’t use an extra nail file?! Always happy to have more of these since they tend to go rogue, sprouting legs and wandering off to the nail file disco, getting all wild and crazy with the other nail files, never to be seen again. Or so I imagine anyway.
Batty Nail Wrap – $10.00 – Clear and Glows in the Dark! NEAT! I almost want to save this for October, but I sort of want to use it NOW because it’s awesome! I’m thinking maybe a coat or two of RED nail polish underneath would be pretty wicked.
Pirates, Ahoy! Nail Wrap – $10 – Glitter and Glows in the Dark. A super neat glow in the dark feature on top of the glitter compass on the treasure map design. I may have to bust these out for the renaissance faire pirate day.
For Science! Nail Wrap – $10 – One of the original designs in Glitter. The design has a really fun story behind it, and they’re colorful and interesting even if you don’t know the story.
Metal Man Nail Wrap – $10 – Another original design in Glitter. Pays tribute to the man in metal himself, Iron Man. Love the transition between red and gold, and these will be a slightly more normal wrap, but they’re still glittery and made of awesome.
Overall value is $48 for the box which is more than the cost, so that works out for me! Plus, fun nail wraps to keep up with my addiction habit. 🙂
This is the last week of catch-up posts, I swear. Well, at least for now. I can’t make promises about future weeks, but I’ll try to get them posted on the actual week that they’re made this time! I’m back by myself for this week, and went a little crazy with the vegetables. A neighbor had let his zucchini plants go a little wild and had a few baseball bats sitting on the vines. I graciously offered to take one off his hands so he didn’t have to ding-dong-ditch zucchini all over the neighborhood. It’s hard to tell underneath all the other vegetables, but I spiral sliced the zucchini with my new slicer and made zucchini pasta! I cooked that quickly in a big pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, just enough so it still had a little crunch to it, but was warmed thoroughly. In another pan, I had onions, fennel, and tomatoes cooking together to put on top of the zucchini pasta. The sausage was pan seared, carrots steamed, and potatoes roasted. Then the peaches! Oh it’s peach season and these are particularly perfect, eat-over-the-kitchen-sink-because-they-drip-everywhere, juicy and delicious peaches. I smothered them in blue cheese and baked them in the oven and they always make a perfect sweet and savory dessert. The plate is incredibly full this week, but it’s 90% vegetables, so I don’t feel bad about it, not one bit.
Ingredients:
Zucchini – Neighbor’s Garden
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Carrots – Clover Hill Farm
Tomatoes – Clover Hill Farm
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Onions – Clover Hill Farm
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue and Equinox
Sausage – Canter Hill Farm, South African Borewors
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper
Because we needed another hobby to add to the list, this year we became beekeepers! I’ve been chronicling the whole journey on Google+ in a collection but thought I’d do a post here to catch the blog up to speed. We picked up our nucleus or “nuc” box from Swarmbustin on May 20th at 7pm. Why so late? So that all the foragers were back in the box and we brought home most if not all of the bees belonging to that hive. By the time we made it home, it was dark, so we took off the protective screen across their entrance and let them hang out in the nuc box that night. Prior to pickup, we had bought all sorts of boxes, frames, etc and had those prepped and ready to go. The next morning, we set up our hive and transferred the frames over. It was our first real experience working with bees, so we were a little bit nervous, but the bees turned out to be a rather docile sort that wanted precious little to do with us. We located the queen, snapped some photos, and set them up in their new home. Later on that day, we caught them running orientation flights, flying back and forth in front of the hive to memorize their new home, and they were returning later that day with pollen and nectar.
Beautiful, healthy larvae
Since then, things have gone really well! The four original frames expanded and built out comb to fill the 8 frame deep box fairly quickly. We added a second deep, checkerboarding out the filled frames with wax and wire foundation frames in early June . In mid June, we noticed some peculiar behavior that we later identified (thank you, YouTube!) as washboarding. The bees stayed out all night doing their weird little dance across the front of the hive. The hive got a name, Hive Hyrule, and Queen Zelda was working hard laying eggs EVERYWHERE. The hive expanded pretty quickly, and we freaked out a little when we caught them building empty swarm cells at the bottom of a few frames. We later found out that’s pretty normal, they keep them around as insurance, and if we destroy them, they’ll just build them again, so it’s best to let the swarm cells stay, but keep an eye on them.
The queen and her court
Just last Monday (early July), we split the hive, taking two frames of eggs, a good frame of capped brood, and a frame of honey/pollen storage over to a nucleus hive in an attempt to rear our own queen. We thought we had Queen Zelda locked in on another frame in the origin hive, but she somehow got onto one of the frames we transferred, leaving Hyrule queenless. Well, they wasted no time in building out 5 queen cells! By the time I checked, a week after the split, the cells were capped and due to hatch in about 8 days. This means we ran a successful split, and it actually turns out to be a happy accident since it allows the nucleus hive to build up faster with an existing queen instead of having to wait on their own. Hyrule is packed with bees and they have no problem getting by with a gap in queen activity.
Queen cell “peanut” hanging off the frame (bonus bee butt)
And on to now – we have one hive, Hive Hyrule, with two deeps and a medium honey super which I’m not sure we’ll actually get honey out of since they had to build out the comb first off wax foundation. The second hive, Axiom, with formerly Queen Zelda, now Queen Eva, is standing in two deep nucleus boxes, running regular foraging missions, busy all day long. We’re feeding the nucleus sugar syrup to get them to build out their comb faster, and we’re hoping Hyrule fills up that honey super before fall. They’re packing the rest of the hive with pollen and nectar and capping honey, but there’s not a lot of activity in the honey super. For our first year, things are going VERY well and I’m terribly smitten with the girls (and the dozen or so boys they keep around). It’s been a delight to stop by the hives in the morning and evening and watch them fly in and out, hard at work. We’ve had a few stings, but they’ve all been our fault (bees getting stuck in clothing/shoes or where they shouldn’t be and then stinging when they get pinched/stuck). Turns out neither of us are allergic, and while it’s not fun, it’s not terribly painful, but really itchy for a few days afterwards. I end up with what looks like a bruise for about a week afterwards too. It’s worth it though to be giving them a home and helping out honey bees. I know a lot of our neighbors have small backyard gardens, so the bees are kept plenty busy and haven’t been a bother to any neighbors that we’ve heard of so far, except for one who noticed them drinking out of his bird bath and was curious as to where they were coming from.
I do plan on keeping the blog updated on bee stuff from now on out though, but the best place for updates is the collection on Google+.
