"Hey Foster, remember when we went to the Grand Canyon?" "Oh, yeah," I replied to Panda's inquiry. "That was our first time going on a flying carpet. Didn't we find that one online?" "Yes, I think so," Panda answered. "It was kind of scary, since we had, like, no experience with flying back then." I …
Or is it Tartan? In looking through the fabulous vintage photos on the Swedish Roots website, one thing that caught my eye was the abundance of different plaids, mainly in women and children's clothes. Of course, one of the first things I had to do was look up "plaids in Victorian/Edwardian times", and I found …
This is one of my favorite family pictures. It's Ole and Marie Anderson with their children, (L-R) Lydia, Jennie, Andrew and George. I'm not sure of the date, but George (my maternal grandfather), was born in 1897 and he looks maybe fourteen here? You might remember George from two previous posts, "Oceans of Love" and …
Finding your Swedish roots and more. Over the past few days, I have been enjoying an extremely interesting website (read: falling down a major ancestry rabbit hole). It's in Swedish, at https://www.rotter.se/swedish-roots, but if you don't read Swedish, you can have it translate to English. I had been on the site before but hadn't really …
So the City of Fresno finally caught up with me. Apparently my "landscaping" had gotten a bit out of control lately. Unbeknownst to me, after living here for over thirty years, my front porch had become "so overgrown or uncontrolled as to create a fire/health/safety hazard". Regular maintenance would be required to prevent recurrence. The …
Or, shall I say, "Swedes"? In Acts 17: 25, the apostle Paul, while in Athens, spoke to the Athenian people about their altar to the "Unknown God". (Photo of Athens ruins by Spencer Davis on Unsplash.) Surely everyone has heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (Photo by Philippa Rose-Tite on Unsplash.) If you're …
The trampoline was gone! Panda and I had just arrived at the Australian airport to pick up our trampoline and head back to Fresno. We'd had a fun visit with our penguin friends and helped get them back on the right track to the South Pole. But when we went to the spot where we …
When cacti go rogue. Once upon a time, in 2017 to be exact, Carlos and Kate had some giant nopales, and they gave me a few pieces to plant in my own yard. As the years went by, the baby nopales began to grow. And grow. . . And grow! By 2022 they were starting …
Where have we been for the past eight years? One morning not too long ago, after church, I happened across this name tag, apparently dropped by a child who had come on one of our Sunday school busses. I've heard a lot of interesting names for kids, but this was a first. It was just …
"Umm, Foster, I think you'd better come over here and see this." Panda was looking at a news article on Mom's laptop. I hadn't been paying much attention, so I hopped up onto the desk to see what he was talking about. "Oh, wow!" I said, reading the headline. A king penguin had been seen …
Nana's Whimsical World 