Snow Day!

    Church was cancelled this morning because of the snow.  I'm a little embarrassed to report this to those who live in locations more snowy than Western Washington. We didn't have much more than an inch of snow.  However, people here aren't all that expert at driving on snowy or icy roads. Their expertise lies more with driving in the rain. A good part of our ward (congregation) members live out in the country where the roads won't be plowed or sanded. Bishop Nielson didn't want any of his flock ending up in a ditch on their way to church. Usually I spend close to eight hours at church on Sunday.  Between a three hour block of normal meetings, 2-3 hours worth of leadership meetings, one hour for choir practice, and an hour to count tithing, I'm at church a good part of the day. I plan to spend most of today quietly working on my genealogy and indexing, right after I finish this blog post.

View from the front window

View of the back yard

    Linda has been gone for the past 5 days on a trip to Salt Lake City to attend Rootstech, a genealogy conference sponsored by the LDS church. She went with our daughter, Sarah, and two grand daughters, Autumn and Chloe.  Whenever Linda is gone her cat, Little Miss Buzz Saw, becomes very needy of human attention and starts to follow me around whenever I am home.  Just recently she has taken to napping behind my computer monitor while I am working on the computer.  This is actually a big improvement from her wanting to sit on my lap when I am at the computer or playing with the spinning wheel while I am trying to spin.  When Linda is home the cat seems to get adequate "people time" lolling on the bed while Linda sits next to her and works on the laptop.

Miss Buzz Saw's new favorite nap site

    A few weeks ago I attended the Country Living Expo in Stanwood, Washington.  I have taught  mason bee classes at this annual event for the past six or seven years.  My compensation for instructing consists of a free prime rib lunch and free enrollment in other classes during my free time.  This year I attended classes in natural dying, using a green house, and making lefse, a sort of scandinavian "pancake" that is a cross between a tortilla and a crepe. The lefse class was my favorite because we got to eat all of the demonstration lefse sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.  Lefse is made from a mashed potato and flour dough which is rolled out thin, then cooked like a tortilla.  The Norwegians roll it up around all sorts of strange things like pickled herring or lutefisk. I thought the cinnamon and sugar sounded much more appealing. There are a fair amount of specialized tools used to make lefse. These include rather heavy and peculiar looking rolling pins, cloth sleeves that fit over the rolling pin, a special cloth covered pastry board on which to roll the lefse, two separate long thin paddles, one of which is used to remove the lefse from the pastry board and one of which is used to handle the lefse when cooking, a lefse drying rack, and a special lefse cooker.  In the old days, the Norwegians simply cooked their lefse on the top of the wood stove.  Our fireplace insert has a cooking surface on the top, but it is a bit small for lefse. I would be forced to make mini-lefse, which actually might be a lot easier.

An enthusiastic Norwegian demonstrates proper lefse cooking technique