Hats, Chapeau, Caps, Fedoras, Lids, Babouchka, ...

I've been thinking about doing this posting for some time. Then, once I started, I hardly knew where to stop, because there are so many pictures I like. Anyway, this will give you a taste, and if I left someone out, it was not intentional.

Bird Houses

When I retired (almost five years ago now), Jackie, with whom I very much enjoyed working for several years, kindly gave me a book of bird house plans. She had figured out by then that I liked to build things. Indeed! In the last few weeks, I made nine different bird houses. One was a special Chickadee house for Anders and his mom. Then I made two Wren houses for my friend Dick. Finally, I made six houses for myself to take to the lake--two Chickadee houses, two Nuthatch houses, and two Robin nesting boxes. All were made of cedar.

We are at the lake now, and I brought my six houses here to Wisconsin. Here is one of the Chickadee houses in a red pine tree.

Here is one of the Nuthatch houses mounted atop what remains of a dead popple tree. We have lost lots of these trees, which aren't very resistant to wind when they get old, plus several recent dry years have been hard on them. They are very, very tall and usually snap off about 20 or 30 above the ground, leaving a tall, unsightly stump. The plan for the Nuthatch houses suggested mounting them on a stump, so I cut two of those stumps off at about 14 feet high and mounted these houses there. The stumps will rot and want to fall eventually, but maybe we will get a few good years of Nuthatch residency before that happens.

A Robin has repeatedly built nests just under our deck in spots that made it difficult for us to avoid disturbing it. So, I blocked off those spots, and mounted my Robin nesting boxes a little more out of the way where we can watch them from inside and, I hope, disturb them less. Now if the Robins will only go along with the plan! You can see that these are less a house than a protected place for an open Robin's nest.

Kathie snapped this picture of me attaching one of the Nuthatch houses to a popple stump. We can easily see the new Chickadee and Nuthatch houses from our deck. I hope they find them and find them suitable for nesting.

On a different note, Kathie took the camera along this morning on her dog walk. The weather here has been wonderful during the day, but the nights still dip down into the 20s. She found two puddles in the road with very interesting ice formations on them. Quite the artistic shots, I think.

Today, I got the hot tub put back into operation, so we might try it out one of these cool nights. Otherwise, we have been cleaning up fallen trees and doing other spring maintenance jobs. Hope to see some of you faithful readers here this summer!

Knapp

Early in March, I got to talking with son Will about a kind of sausage (for lack of a better description) that we used to eat when I was young (really! I was young once!). Anyway, it is called knapp, although the actual spelling may vary and alternate names do exist (e.g. grit, though not the southern kind, and head cheese, though not the kind you can find at some deli counters). I hadn't eaten any for years and didn't know where to get it. Dad used to buy it for me at a meat market in Clarence, but that market is no longer in operation. Nearly every German family I knew back in Lowden used to make their knapp from a hogs head (never waste anything when butchering!) and other ingredients, but I didn't have that recipe and wouldn't have wanted to use a hogs head anyway. I knew that what Dad bought at the market was made with pork roasts and maybe beef as well. Will and I couldn't find anything on the Internet about knapp either, in spite of some serious Google searching.

My cousin Phyllis doesn't use a computer, but her daughter Lynn does, and I thought one of them might at least have an idea where I could find a recipe or buy some knapp. An email to Lynn resulted in a cheery reply saying that Phyllis actually makes her own knapp. Yay! In fact, Aunt Irene evidently used to make it regularly. Lynn thought it sounded yummy and suggested we have a knapp party. So, Phyllis invited Kathie and me over last Saturday morning for breakfast with knapp as the featured dish. Here is our host and my darling wife.

Lynn was there too, along with Randy and Mariah. Somehow, I missed getting Bob in a picture.

Randy and Mariah are some of my favorite young folks (and relatives). It may have been a little early for Mariah's usual Saturday morning routine, but she almost always has a smile on her face, and Randy had lots of conversation to share. I think this may have been their first introduction to knapp. They both tried it and thought it was "not bad." I suspect they will be back for more some day.

And here is the pièce de résistance! One prepares knapp in advance in largish quantities, freezes it, and then uses it from time to time. To serve, it is first fried, and one is required to press it down, maybe to a 1/4" or so, to brown it on both sides and make it quite crispy. Then at the table you pour syrup over it before eating. Phyllis also had a nice fruit mix and made coffee cakes and zwieback as well. (You can find zwieback on the Internet, if you are interested--this is another delightful food item that I rarely see anymore and that Mom and others used to make regularly to keep my young appetite going. Their versions involved covering halves of buns with sugar and cinnamon and maybe butter and then toasting them lightly.) What a grand, memory-filled breakfast this was and with such good folks with whom to enjoy it.

To top the day off, Phyllis then taught us how to make knapp. Here she is mixing the oatmeal into the ground, roasted meat. She said she usually does this in the winter to make a quantity for use during the entire year.

Phyllis even sent a couple servings home with me. In turned out that Paula and Ron were visiting us briefly the next Monday, so I was able to serve some to her as well. She hadn't had any for years either.

Now, I know all you faithful readers are dying to have the recipe, so here goes. You will note that some free-lancing is required in terms of ingredient quantities and taste. Both these recipes are courtesy of Phyllis.

"Original" Knapp from 1946 Lowden Community Cookbook

1 hog head, if too fat remove some

4 pounds beef

1-1/2 cups steel cut oats or a box of pearl barley

Allspice

Salt

Pepper

Boil meat until tender and chop. Cook cereal in the broth. Mix meat and cereal, add allspice, salt and pepper to taste.

Aunt Irene's Version of Knapp

Equal amounts of pork and beef roast

Quick oatmeal (about 1-1/2 cups per 8 pounds [total] of meat; adjust as desired)

Allspice

Salt

Pepper

Roast meats together, adding some water before putting in oven so as to have plenty of broth. When done, pour off and keep the broth, then cool and grind the meat to a coarse texture with meat grinder. Skim any fat off the broth and discard, if you wish. Cook quick oatmeal in the broth, and mix into ground meat. Add additional broth, if needed, to keep texture something like thick oatmeal. Add allspice, salt and pepper to taste. Put in oven at 350º and bake until heated through to mix flavors, stirring occasionally. Cool. Separate into meal-sized servings in bags, pressing flat. Freeze.

Notes

Paula and I remember that our Grandmother Hasenbank may have made her knapp with both barley and oatmeal. She may also have added a little clove. So, one could experiment a bit. Something I intend to do in the very near future. Mom used to serve knapp for breakfast or sometimes for supper, usually with waffles or maybe pancakes.

Reno

About a week ago, we visited good friends, Cheryl and Gerry, in "The Biggest Little City in the World" or Reno, NV, as it is otherwise known. I thought Reno had lots to offer beyond its gambling and quickee divorce reputation. The casinos and shows are fun, of course, but the region is beautiful and is close to lots of historic and scenic sites. So there is plenty to do.

Cheryl and Gerry moved there about 2-1/2 years ago into a beautiful retirement community just outside of the city in an area known as the Truckee Meadow. Here is a view from the community lodge looking to the south. The weather was wonderful while we were there. Temperatures were near 80º the first two days of our visit. They said that the weather is relatively moderate all year round in this high desert region of the country.

In nearly all directions from their home, you can see mountains, which are foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. The homes are very nice, and the residents seem to be seriously involved with each other in recreational, hobby, and numerous group activities. For example, while we were there, a Johnny Cash/Patsy Kline tribute band played a concert for all of us at the community lodge--that was lots of fun (Anders would have loved it).

On Friday, we drove up to Donner State Park in the mountains just west of Reno. This was only about 35 miles away. Of course, this is the site of the famous Donner Party, which became trapped there in the 1840s while trying to emigrate to California. The park is just alongside Interstate 80, which now allows travel over the mountains (via Donner Pass) nearly all year round. This year there was a total of 68 feet of snowfall at Donner Pass, and we saw huge amounts of not-yet-melted snow near the park and around Donner Lake, where the snow reached the roofs of two-story homes there.

This monument was dedicated around 1914 to honor the many emigrants who passed this way, especially those in the Donner Party. It is said that the snow at the time of their entrapment was as deep as the base of the monument. Three of the children who were part of that unfortunate incident were still alive at the time of the dedication and were present. It is a sad, though interesting, story. Three good books that I have read about the incident, if you are interested, are: Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, Ordeal by Hunger, and Impatient With Desire. The latter is an imagined journal of one of the women in the party, a journal known to have existed but which was lost. The first book listed is a very recent publication.

Gerry and I also visited the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City, also about 35 miles from Reno to the south. They have lots of equipment dating back to the 1800s with some of the nicer units having been restored and used by the Hollywood movie industry for westerns and other period films. Below is a Baldwin 4-4-0 engine, followed by a McKeen interurban unit (the only one still in existence).

We did a little gambling, of course, and enjoyed the historic downtown area. The Truckee River rushes and tumbles right through the town and is a favorite place for kayakers, one of whom is transporting his dog to the opposite bank of the river, if you look closely below.

Mostly, we had a wonderful time catching up with our friends.

HERO Robot

Years ago (circa 1983), when I was still working in the Department of Computer Science, I assembled a robot for our laboratory. It was a Heathkit HERO robot, and it was capable of motion, motion detection, voice synthesis, distance detection, sound detection, and probably some other things I don't recall. The machine also had a head that could rotate. An arm was connected to the back of its head, and this arm could be positioned through pivoting, rotation and extension so that its gripper could be operated to grasp things. Faculty and students used it to study a variety of interesting issues in robotics, including programming and scene manipulation.

Here is what HERO looked like while I was in the process of assembling it. It is naked, and those are its guts you are looking at, but don't be squeamish!

And here is what I looked like, while I was assembling it. My grandmother used to say I looked like "one of those old guys in the Bible." You would think she would have liked that, given the reference and her religious leanings, but I think she thought I looked scruffy or something. I used to be able to grow hair--dark hair!!

Here is a top view of the finished HERO with its arm, programming pad, and teaching pendant displayed.

The cool thing, though, is to see how far robotics has progressed. Kathie's investment club owns some stock in a company called Intuitive Surgical that makes medical robotics. Here is a video of a doctor in Seattle using some of their technology to make and throw a paper airplane. It may not seem like much at first, but be sure to watch all the way to the end. You'll be surprised. You couldn't do this with HERO!

Weekend in Minneapolis

I recently spent an extended weekend in Minneapolis with Will, Sandy and Anders. Naturally, there were lots of activities with Anders, beginning with a walk. Anders rode his bike.

Sandy and I walked along. They are taking care of Jean's dogs for a spell, so Zeke and Gracie were along for some exercise.

You may know that Anders absolutely loves Johnny Cash, especially the songs Ring of Fire and I Walk the Line. Using "his" computer (an old Mac that his folks no longer need), Anders navigates to YouTube and finds videos of Johnny singing these and other songs. Then, he plays along on his guitar. He is very serious about this, but we are going to have to restring his guitar for left-handed playing, if he wants to keep using it this way.

Sometimes, he prefers to look for Johnny on his mom's iPod or his dad's iPhone, or he might play a game or two.

Bath time is a very involved process, with lots of water and suds and toys and singing and other loud, joyous noises.

After the bath, he dons a favorite special towel.

Later that night, we found him zonked out as seen below. He had taken his doll to bed too, after carefully undressing it. Puppy is there with him too, of course.

While I was there, Will and I celebrated our respective birthdays. His was actually yesterday! I failed to get a picture of him cutting cake while I was there, but here is another just for the record.

My birthday isn't for awhile yet, but Will was very thoughtful about his gift for me by suggesting I come to Minneapolis to hear, with him, an interview of John Thorn by Garrison Keillor. We had dinner together first and then went to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul for the event. You can read about it here. John Thorn has written a new book about the early history of the game of baseball, which is my favorite sport. I intend to read the book in the near future.