It's Another Blizzard!

And not the Dairy Queen kind, either! At 9:30 this morning, the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Weather Alert Siren went off on our little radio that sets on top of the television in the living room. It said that we would have a Blizzard Warning until 9:00 tonight, after that we would have a Winter Weather Advisory. And, it stressed, NO TRAVEL IS ADVISED!!! We need to have a radio like this, because we live (and I quote my mom) “in that GOD-FORSAKEN part of the world where the tornadoes rip through!” Only this morning it was notifying us of a blizzard. This makes the third blizzard that we are having down here this year. We live on the prairie in the southwestern part of the state of Minnesota. It's not the end of the world; you just need to make sure that you always have plenty of food and water on hand, you stay in your house and don’t drive anywhere, and you keep warm with the wood stove and either watch TV, sleep, read, play card games, or sit down in a cozy chair and knit. Which is what I plan on doing right after I post this blog. This afternoon I baked peanut butter cookies and made marinated chicken breasts on the George Foreman grill, and baked some home-made French bread.

Well, here is a little glimpse of the world outside right at 3:00 CST. You are looking at the same view as the picture on the top of this page, only…there isn’t much to see!!!

Life is very breezy down here on the prairie. I simply cannot imagine how Ma and Pa Ingalls, and Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace survived the winters in those days so long ago. Those pioneers were cut from a different cloth than most of us are, these days. They were tough! They HAD to be, in order to survive the untamed wilds of North America. I have been to the remains of the actual sod shanty that the Ingalls family lived in back in the 1800’s in nearby Walnut Grove. The remains of their ‘Soddy’ rests near the banks of Plum Creek. The TV series “Little House On The Prairie sort of ‘jazzed things up a bit’ and made the TV show about the Ingalls’s when they lived in Walnut Grove, when in reality, when they actually DID lived in Walnut Grove, they were On The Banks Of Plum Creek! The actual “Little House On The Prairie” was in DeSmitt, SD.

The view from the malbox. Under NORMAL circumstances, you would be able to see our little Amo Lutheran Church in this photo.

If you want to see an actual video of the blizzard, get on ASH LANE FARM's blog (see my blog list of friends) and watch. So, that’s it. Keep warm, till the next blog…