Hello Blog!

You'll never believe it.... 
but I deleted my facebook account. After 6, almost 7 years I figured it was high time I had a change of scenery. It feels so good to not spend hours reading about what people ate for breakfast, look at "duck-face" pictures and be inundated by everybody-and-their-brother's view on life.
Refreshing.
One thing facebook subtracted from was my time for writing and blogging. Now that I have some free time I might do more writing on here. No promises of course, but we'll see what we can pull out of the hat. :)

Anyways, that's all for now.

"The Milk House: A manifesto on fire"

An article by Ryan Dennis

Thursday, 21 February 2013 15:45

"Several years ago, my friend brought me to her house in the suburbs. I can’t recall the rows of houses we passed to reach hers, only that it seemed indefinite because I couldn’t tell them apart. Her car navigated the streets like a mole through rows of corn, and even from the passenger seat I had a sense of the rectilinear arrangement around us. We pulled into her driveway and her family greeted me with handshakes and questions, leading me in a procession behind the house. My initial impression was that these are some great people. I looked around me, at the grass at my feet, and expanded my reaction: These are great people with a nice lawn. It was dark and unburdened by dandelions or tree debris. It was groomed, tidy and closely cut. Here, at my friend’s house, I imagined a suburban father loosening his tie after work in the office and circling the lawn with a Cub Cadet – worse, a John Deere lawn tractor – and making a point of calling it a lawn tractor. There comes a point when I’m not sure what I imagined, what my friend told me and what I remembered from prior conversations with other city people. Somewhere I heard that the quality of a lawn is a state of grace, that cutting grass on the weekend, even if it has barely grown, makes for relaxation. That the smell of cut grass gives them severe pleasure. I concede that the smell of grass is nice. But why does it bother me when it means so much to others? They brought me around the corner of the house where they told me there was a campfire. Without seeing it, campfire seemed like the wrong word for what was going to be a small, calculated pit in the corner of a manicured lawn. It is natural to compare every macaroni salad to the ones you grew up with. The curved, inlaid bricks around the fire were more stylized than the tractor rim at my family’s pond. They used fire-lighters and lit them under carefully teepeed blocks of wood they bought at a gas station. They stacked small twigs and called it kindling. They poked at it with concern. This is what I measured it against: broken-up slab wood, old two-by-fours and splits of locust we chunked up after milking and threw in a pile. “I am a master of the fire,” someone at the party told me. “I am too,” I didn’t say. “I dump diesel on it and drop a match.” It is my understanding that man was quite elated when he discovered fire. It changed his world. Yet, what he has done to it since, with his grooved bricks, seems terrible. It’s a condemnation on himself. It’s a violation of an old metaphor. Even fire, it seems, has been urbanized. My friends are good people, with a nice lawn, and they treated me well. I make the distinction between farmers and city people and talk about the latter in tones of judgment. I can’t find a better term for them than “city people.” I have no doubt that such prejudices originate in fear. The pressure of the urban lifestyle encroaching on agriculture is felt in many ways, but it is certainly felt. Residents of Buffalo and Rochester buy lots around our fields and slowly build cabins and garages. Hills that were quiet with narrow dirt roads now have steady traffic climb them. Every time another field gets a house or another farm disappears, even though I am already born and my childhood is in the past, it feels like one more chance that I might not have been born on a farm, and that I might have driven a lawn tractor instead of a real one. I might have talked about wholesome ways of living and not known the irony.  PD Dennis is the son of a dairy farmer from western New York and a literary writer. The Dennis family still dairies and maintains a 100-plus cow herd of Holsteins and Shorthorns." copied from Progressive Dairyman

The Last of January!

And so it is the last day of the first month! Nuts! And how exciting at the same time. So much fun to look forward to this year.
...anyways, I thought I should jot something down before the opportunity has escaped me.
Tomorrow is my brother Isaac's birthday. He'll be 19. Which is actually good because up to this moment I seriously thought he was turning 20... which is impossible considering he's two years younger than me.
OH, of course, how could I forget?! I turned 21!!! .....legal to buy alcohol and hand guns! Haha! I did NOT go out and party, or get wasted or any such retarded thing. I did have a small glass of Merlot with my parents. (Psalm 104:14-15)
I went skiing and snowboarding the other day. Skiing was a cinch! So much fun! Snowboarding? ....I cannot wait till I get it down. I'll be lucky if all my bones aren't broken before I get to that point! It's quite the humiliating sport to learn.
Whether has been very ridiculous. In the 30's one week and -0 the next..... and back and forth again! Such extremes! As I always say.....  this is Wisconsin. Anything can happen.
Anyways... that's all for now. I'll write again next month, Lord willing!

Billy & Eliya Elmquist's Wedding

What a wedding!! On January 12th, 2013 Billy and Eliya were married. The wedding was beautiful, sweet and sincere. I don't think I've been to a more God honoring wedding. The congregation joined with the families in singing hymns during the ceremony, Billy gave an incredible salvation message and Eliya's grandpa said the most precious prayer.
It was a wedding to be remembered.

All but one of the Forster sisters, just before taking pictures. 

They took all of their family pictures before the wedding. 

It is a very smart thing to do while everyone is still fresh and awake!

 What a beautiful bride!

In front of the incredible lodge where they had their pictures taken.

I was putting a corsage on Eliya's grandma.... 

one of the many little tasks I had the privilege of doing throughout the day. 

 Eliya's sisters made and decorated the wedding cake 

and the gingerbread bride and groom cake topper!

 Billy and Eliya had so much help from friends and church family. 

It was truly enjoyable to see (and be a part of) everything be so organized 

and working like a well-oiled machine! ;)

 

After the crowd got to clinking on their glass cups 

the bride and groom shared a smooch behind the privacy of a napkin! 

 

 The boys did a good job decorating Billy's truck!

 I got a picture with Billy & Eliya Elmquist 

before they skedaddled at the end of the evening. 

We were all quite exhausted at that point 

but rather happy and joyful nevertheless!

 Here's a little video I took at the beginning of the day... on my way to Eliya's house to do her hair.

 

2 Timothy 2:22 

Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, 

with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Inspirational

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson

Rehearsal

It's Friday night. The past few days have been busy! I've been baking and cooking and frosting up the wazoo!!! I'm quite glad that I decided to do things ahead of time because the cake turned out to be harder to make then I thought. Well, it was more of an issue of technicalities and human mistakes.... like using 1 teaspoon of baking powder instead of 1 Tablespoon. It really pays to read the instructions thoroughly before baking!!!! Nevertheless, I'm sort of glad I ended up making 5 sheet cakes instead of 2 because I got to make a crazy, triple-decker, frilly cake for church on Sunday!

Needless to say, I got a little wild with my new Wilton piping supplies!

I frosted the fancy cake first and that came in handy because I was able to determine what not to do on the two white sheet cakes I made for my friend's wedding. I didn't take pictures, but the wedding cakes were simple with a small trim on the bottom. Boy, does it kill the hands to frost cake!!!
Summery: I have a new appreciation for bakers.   

As I have mentioned, my lovely friend Eliya is getting married tomorrow to charming Billy! ;) QUITE exciting!!! I feel very blessed to help out in the wedding. Tonight was the rehearsal. Rehearsals are soooo essential. I don't understand folks who don't have rehearsals... or who have a rehearsal an hour before the wedding. NUTS!!! It all went well though and everyone had a lovely time (though I think a lot of us were frazzled).
 

Billy and Eliya have set a wonderful example of purity, honoring their parents, and are officially excellent courtship role models. 2 Timothy 2:22
....but more on that after the wedding in the 'official' post!!

Skiing Into A New Year

Happy New Year!!! It is finally 2013. Time sure seems to fly but I do not regret that it does when the days are so full of productivity and happiness. ...then again should the days be full of unpleasantries it is also nice if the time flies for who likes to dwell in such an unfortunate state?
Time is an interesting thing. On one had you look back and think, "that happened only 5 years ago?!" and on the other hand to say, "2 years? That is a long time!" I suppose part of growing up is learning to be more moderate about the passing of time and the future to come.

On December 31st, after a fun church party and milking cows, I came in from the barn and my brothers Channing and Patrick and two church friends who were spending the night, Mark and Malachi, put on layers of clothes, strapped on our skiis and ventured out into the moonlit night with a temperature of -12 degrees! Chilly! We skied around a small block on the farm. There had been a fresh snowfall a few days before so the snow was sparkly under the glow of the moon. Our feet were FREEZING by the time we arrived home. And we got back just in time to watch the clock turn from December 31st, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. to January 1st, 2013 at 12:00 a.m.!!! It was quite exciting!!

We of course made sure to document it all:

 The New Year... Right on the dollar!

 Ready to go on our ski!

Proof!

And so it is the new year..... which means... well, that work continues and so does the rest of life. I'm looking forward to a dear friends wedding this month. Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures of that too.
And now I'm off to milk the cows. =) Cheerio!