September 11, 2015 - my birthday celebration

This was a great birthday. Even after having so many of them, it was a special day. I was overwhelmed with the number of birthday greetings I got. Thank you!

Here are pictures of  some of my activities of the day. In the morning I went to exercise class (Body Pump)

Meditated after lunch.

Worked on a puzzle

Made some bowls and a castle

I got a couple of great gifts, but this is the one that I had been asking for, and I'm thrilled to have it:

In the evening my daughter and her husband took us out to dinner. There were four couples of people I know at the table next to us, and they all sang Happy Birthday to me.

What a lovely day.

Roller skates

​​

 

​​​

With your shoes on, you put your foot on the obvious place, then adjusted the strap around your ankle and buckled it. The key fit on the little post that stuck out of the side in front of the wheel. Turning the key tightened the clamps around the sole of your shoe, and you were ready to skate. 

You always kept the key on a cord around your neck, because you would most likely need it before you got home. It was impossible to tighten it enough to keep the skates on very long. When they got loose you could slip off the skate and fall. It was rare to skate without scraped knees. 

I got my first pair of roller skates when I was 18 months old. I

​probably couldn't

 actually skate then, but I could stand up in them and

​walk

. 

​I skated a lot when I was in elementary school.​

​Our

 Girl Scout

​ troop

 went to the roller rink on Saturday afternoons. We

​wore

 shoe skates there

​--they didn't fall off. E

ventually I learned to skate backwards

​, stop

​,​

​do various skating steps, ​

and d

​o​

 an arabesque.

​ I loved to skate.​

The last time I roller skated was a long time ago.

​ I learned to ice skate after we moved to Wisconsin, and it seemed very similar to roller skating. There was a short learning curve.  For my 60th birthday I got roller ​blades and learned to do that too. But not anymore.

Radios

In the 1940's, radios were large; the vacuum tubes in them needed a lot of space and needed to be warmed up before a signal could be picked up. Tuning the radio to a station required moving a knob back and forth to find the exact spot where the sound was best, and that spot would vary as the show progressed. The radio might have to be re-tuned every few minutes to hear the show all the way through. Strange noises, whines and static, much like what we now associate with outer space movies, would often emanate from the radio. 

In the late 50's I got a transistor radio. It still required tuning, but it was much more reliable and ran on batteries.

 

Type of radio from my childhood        Transistor radio

About 2 feet tall                                7-8 inches tall

​

saddle shoes

Saddle shoes were the in thing when I was in high school. They were very hard to keep clean. I cleaned off the old, scuffed polish and then re-polished mine every night. But the white parts got black marks and the black parts got a white film, every day. There were a few other kids that kept theirs immaculate all day, but I never figured out how they did it. The other kind of shoes we wore in high school were white bucks, also very hard to keep clean. The white material was like white nubuck that is sold now or white suede. They were also oxfords, like our saddle shoes.  

It was very popular to wear pink and black: a black skirt for girls or black pants for boys, worn with pink blouses or shirts. Calvin, my boyfriend when I was a senior, and I would wear black and pink clothes on the same days. And on those days, we would polish our shoes pink and black, thanks to food coloring in the polish. 

​

Wallpaper

We had this wallpaper on one wall and the soffits in the kitchen of our house on Lorraine Street. It was called Medici. We loved it--the people and their clothing, the busyness of it, and because it had so much for your eyes to see and learn about those times. 

About a year after we sold that house the new owner invited me in to see the changes they had made. The wallpaper was gone. No surprise, I guess. It was not something everyone would like; somebody said it was too many eyes looking at them. But taking down that wallpaper was the only change the owners made that I felt sad about.

​

Grandma's farm

My paternal grandfather was killed while driving a sleigh that was hit by a car. The family lived in the little house behind the barn in this picture. Afterwards, Grandma continued building the white house (behind the tree). There were two bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs was a kitchen, a bedroom, living room, dining room, pantry. and a front porch with windows. There was also a basement, but I never went down there. It was a small house, but the eight of them managed. During most of my childhood there was running water in the kitchen sink and electricity in the house. The outhouse was beside the barn. (This picture was taken after she had a toilet installed in the house. The outhouse is gone.)

  

Grandma had about 5 cows; Daisy was my favorite because she was the gentlest, but I was afraid of all of them. I sometimes had the job of bringing the cows in for milking. I would throw things at those giant animals, much bigger than I, to get them to move, but they would just calmly walk to the barn without attacking me.  I was always amazed. It was fun to watch Grandma milk the cows and squirt it into the mouths of the cats. She would never let me try milking because the cows kicked when someone unfamiliar tried to milk them. I got to drive the tractor one summer when I was around 10, while the grown-ups were haying. 

We lived in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Grandma lived in Ironwood Township, Michigan. Our every other year visits to her farm, playing with my cousins and the two girls who lived nearby: these are some of my favorite memories. 

Trafalgar Square 1974

​

Why is this man surrounded by pigeons?