garykoelling

Dear boys,

My life as a child on the farm and part of a family of 4 brothers and 10 sisters!!!!

I lived on a farm with horses, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats. When I was very young we had horses for the early years of my childhood. We used the horses for a very few chores and of course sometimes we rode them. The horses were replaced with a tractor which could do more farm work and didn’t have to be fed every day. The cows on the farm had to be milked every morning and night. There were also little calves which had to be fed. The farm had many chores to be done everyday. Pigs and cows were fed 2 times a day. The chickens were also fed 2 times a day and the eggs were gathered. As a child on the farm I worked outside helping with the chores and also had to help in the house. With that many in the family there was a lot of cooking, cleaning and washing of clothing.

Dear Boys,

You had asked me to write to you what life was like for me as a child. I grew up on a farm that had dairy cows, pigs, chickens, and geese. Until I was about 9 years old we only had an outside bathroom that was located about 30 feet from the house. We also had a small portable container that we used as a bathroom at night in the winter time and then dumped it the next day. Our house did not have a furnace but instead had an oil stove that sat in the dining room. That stove heated most of the house including the upstairs. The pipe from the oil stove went up through the upstairs to the roof. Our heat upstairs came from that pipe and a small register in the downstairs ceiling. Sometimes the temperature in our bedroom upstairs would only be 56 degrees in the morning when we got up and we would warm our clothes on that pipe before getting dressed for school. Our clothes were washed with a wringer wash machine and hung out on a clothes line to dry.

I just downloaded a Firefox 2.0 widget called Performancing that allows you to blog from a pop up within the browser so you can still read the site you're blogging or commenting on without having to log in to your own blog site.

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It's the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1922). He's the author of many novels, including Cat's Cradle (1963), Hocus Pocus (1990), and Timequake (1997). He served in World War II, and in December of 1944, he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, and he was there when the city was destroyed by British and American bombers. That experience inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Kurt Vonnegut said, "Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers."

Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, and school board members. For the first 50 years of American elections, only 15 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote. To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. In Connecticut, you had to be a white male property owner of a "quiet and peaceable behavior and civil conversation."

It was on this day in 1917 that the Russian Revolution took place. Vladimir Lenin gave the order for the workers' militia to seize government buildings, and the coup met almost no resistance. Then next day, Lenin was elected chairman of the Council of the new Soviet government.