Wood Clogs and Recreating a Painting

This week has been frustrating for an unusual reason. Clutter. My office at work is filled with projects that I need to do. There is hardly any floor or counter space due to the volume of tasks to be done. 

One of the tasks was finding this pair of child-size wooden clogs that I used as part of a Christmas display. A co-worker had uploaded the information about them into CollectiveAccess and the next step was for me to photograph them so they could be added to the digital record. The challenge: I couldn't find the shoes. 

I searched everywhere in the collections storage area and throughout my office (or so I thought). I finally found them on Saturday afternoon - tucked in a box with the note: Ready to be Photographed. 

Working in such a chaotic-appearing environment has to change. It is known that clutter has a detrimental effect on mental well-being and can lead to feelings of anxiety and overwhelm. Studies have linked office clutter to increased emotional exhaustion, heightened stress, and reduced job satisfaction.

Equally important is that having a disorganized office can create a negative impression on visitors, volunteers, and other staff members. I just need a block of time - uninterrupted - to get things done. 

Anyway...on a more positive note, there was a location scout and film crew who came to the museum this past week with the goal of wanting to recreate a Carl Larsson painting (see below).

Although the building color is different in the back, we did have a birch tree and building from the 1800s that they liked. Hopefully, it works out, and they will return in Spring 2026 to film the scene.

Other than that, it has been raining for the past two days and is smoky due to the Canadian wildfires. Things should dry out by tomorrow and the smoke should dissipate by tomorrow afternoon. 

The irises are blooming - lots of purple irises and two-colored ones (white and purple, and yellow and purple). The yellow irises that my parents had at their home are blooming, and the bleeding hearts are still going strong.

A mother deer and her fawn walked down the driveway yesterday. They disappeared into the pasture before I had a chance to take their photo. Hopefully, they will be back.

Saw a wren and cedar waxwing today. The waxwing was in the crabapple tree, eating the little red apples. 

One of the big rabbits was in the driveway and front lawn. 

I love seeing all the wildlife here. It is one of the highlights of the day for me. 

My Favorite Photos - July 2023

July seemed to fly by...most of spent working, though. So, I am happy to have had at least some quality time with family. The highlight of July was that my niece and her family moved back to Minnesota from North Carolina. 

We were able to have dinner, talk, and play games together in early July.

We've been having a lot of birds at our feeders. The grosbeaks love the seeds.

This is the male rose-breasted grosbeak. He's a lot more colorful than the female pictured above.

The wrens raised a brood of little ones. They have since fledged. I miss seeing the constant traffic and singing of the wrens each day.

We had many orioles this year and went through bottles of grape jelly. This one is a much darker orange than what we typically see.

This is another type of oriole we saw. It is still beautiful, just not as dark-orange as the other one. 

This wren caught a spider to bring back to the babies. The mother and father wren are such hard - and successful - foragers.

 We have a variety of woodpeckers here. This one is about mid-size compared to the other ones we see.

One of my favorite things to see here are deer. These two fawns somehow got into our fenced-in backyard. We found out that even as young as these two were, that fawns can easily scale a four-foot fence. 

This one was more curious and alert of the two fawns.

This fawn liked to eat more than the other one.

The mother was on the other side of the fence and had an eye on her babies until she walked around the corner and then along the fence line. She jumped into the east pasture and later on her two fawns joined her by jumping over the fence. 

This is one of the sunflowers that grew from a seed that fell from the birdfeeder. The birds now - a month later - are eating the seeds from it.

This is one of the dahlias that I grew this year from a root. It has bloomed quite a bit which I've enjoyed.

These little flowers come up every year by the back door. I need to cut the plant back throughout the summer and fall, otherwise it would take over the garden. 

We celebrated Olivia's 20 1/2 birthday in July. We still celebrate half birthdays. I don't think that will stop. 

We scaled back on the number of gifts, though, compared to past years. Two of the gifts we gave her was a Dala horse from Sweden and a silver Dala horse necklace. She really liked both gifts.

During July, we had a Girls & Dolls Tea Party at work. This is one of the dolls in a collection - a Swedish Easter Witch. Girls dress up around Easter as witches and paint their cheeks pink and put a lot of dots on their faces to represent freckles. 

Also at work is a collection of Charlotte Weibull dolls. These are two of them wearing the folk outfits from different provinces in Sweden.

Olivia entered ten projects in the county fair for her final year in 4-H. She received all blue ribbons and one reserve champion ribbon on the nautilus pictured below. It's a Diamond Dotz painting that turned out beautifully. She paid for the matting and framing which complement it nicely. 

Although she won a trip to the State Fair with this project, she decided not to go because it would be the same project area (Crafts) and with a similar project that she did last year (also a Diamond Dotz, but with a different image).

After the last day of the County Fair, we went to Dairy Queen - our traditional meal. A bittersweet meal knowing this is the last 4-H year and the last County Fair as a 4-H family.

When we came home from the County Fair, the mother deer was hiding behind a tree. She finally came out from behind the tree along with her two fawns. I love knowing that she feels safe here. She and the babies didn't rush away when they saw us. They watched us for a while and then walked off slowly. They know we are not a threat. 

My sister went to an art museum in late-July. This is one of the glass pieces in the collection.

This was a two-dimensional painting that looks three-dimensional. 

I liked this glass and metal piece. The shades of blue were beautiful.

This is a glass and cement piece. The inner part is cement and outer part is glass.

This glass piece I thought was a tube - like the kind that were outside of the Minnesota Orchestra building decades ago. It isn't. It's a solid piece with a light color of glass in the middle. It is probably about three inches wide from the front to the back. Every few steps I took past this piece, it would have a different look to it. 

These pairs look like regular-size pears, but they're not. They are about three feet tall. The subtle color on the side is from sprinkling powdered glass on the sculpture. 

At work, we have ten bluebird houses. This nest was placed well because it attracted two bluebird families. So we had ten bluebirds born this year! 

Here are some baby bluebirds later in the month. They fledged by the end of the month.

One of the projects I'm especially pleased with at work was creating four sensory kits and a box of fidgets for people with autism and sensory issues. These are all the items we purchased.

This is an example of a sensory kit that someone can check out from the museum while they are visiting. They bring it back when they are ready to go home. 

That wraps up July. I'm hoping that as the summer winds down that there will be more balance between family/home and work. Right now, it's out of balance which is challenging. 

My Favorite Photos - June 2023

Many of my favorite photos are of flowers that I took in June. Since I already did a post about the flowers, I will not be including them in this one. 

One of the projects I started at Gammelgården Museum is a new bluebird trail. There are two volunteers who are monitoring the ten nest boxes. Within a few weeks of installing the boxes, we had our first brood of bluebirds! Since that time, all five sucessfully fledged and now there's another brood in the box.

In one of the boxes, there are tree sparrows. What a contrast to the bluebird nest with all the feathers.

Saw this little frog relaxing in the shade.

The bumblebees are around visiting the flowers. Look at how much pollen this one collected. 

In our backyard, we had a nest box with black-capped chickadees. 

The girls are home from college now. Olivia accompanied me to work one day and had the opportunity to learn how to use the weaving loom at the museum. Parts of it were built in 1879 in Sweden and then brought to the United States where it was completed by a new bride and her husband. It was used by her until the mid-60s and then by another woman until 1999. 

 

We have had several deer families at our home. This is the first one we saw. The mother came to our front door one day and set off the Ring doorbell. Nearby was her little fawn. This is a view on another day of the two in the front yard.

This is the mother. She's giving her fawn a tour of all the plants to eat. 

The 6th graders had their class play. It was nice to see the students who I worked with in different roles and challenging themselves to do something out of their comfort zone.

We celebrated Father's Day with dinner at home. The girls surprised Paige the night before with getting a hotel room in Downtown Minneapolis, having dinner, and then the next day (Father's Day) going bowling at a place they haven't been to before. 

The smoke from wildfires has been very thick here. This is what the sunrise looked like one morning. 

On another morning, it was clear when I took the dogs for a walk. The farmer of this field had the hay rounds all baled and ready for transport.

One day, Sophia and I took all the dogs for a walk. Since Father's Day, I've been walking the younger and bigger two dogs early in the morning since it gets so hot and humid by mid-morning.

At the beginning of June, the 6th grade class at the elementary school where I worked had their last day and graduation ceremony at Gammelgården. Two of the students wanted to take a walk with me to the pond. We saw this female redwing blackbird in the reeds.

The students stopped on the bridge and we watched the birds and other pond life for a while.

There was cake afterward the DARE ceremony and 6th grade ceremony. This student made me laugh. He chose not to use a fork and dove right into eating the cake. Later he came back - slightly panicked - when I showed him all the cake on his face. It took lots of paper towels to get the frosting off his face. 

The trees at our home are getting taller each year. 

This is the house from the driveway. The peony bed is to the right. The peonies were here when we moved to the home in 1995.

This is a view of the pasture. Most of the pond has dried up now because of the hot weather and lack of rain. 

In early June at work, a children's choir that sings Swedish songs and wears traditional Swedish folk outfits came to the museum. These two were the youngest ones in the choir.

This is the full group - children and adults - including the musicians. 

One of the folk dresses hung in the hallway at the museum while the group had lunch.

I've been enjoying the sunrises when the dogs I go on walks around 5:30-6:45 a.m.

In the middle of the month, we hosted Dalapalooza. One of the activities was painting cookies. 

The participants also painted wooden Dala horses. These are some that had received two coats of paint and were drying outside during lunch.

These were six of the 16 Dala horses that were made by children and adults.

Sophia and I went to Duluth on a Tuesday that I had off of work so she could take her driver's test. We stopped at Tobie's - the midway point between where we live and Duluth. This is a place where my parents stopped when they took the family up north. So, it is full of memories. 

Sophia passed her driver's test (and needless to say was THRILLED!). We celebrated with lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was really good! 

Towards the end of the month, one of the museum's supporters, Eleanor, came to the museum. She is 91 years old (the same age that my Dad would have been had he been living). She came to see the Midsommar decorations and the current art exhibit. Enjoyed talking with her and her aide over dessert and lemonade.

For Midsommar at the museum, I wanted to have a floral crown/headdress made. However, when I went to the florist I found out it would be about $75 because of all the handwork involved. Choosing flowers (like the ones I selected below) still would have cost about $50. I opted not to wear a floral crown this year. Maybe next year. 

On June 24th, there was a major event - Midsommardagen - at the museum. One of the vendors was a tintype photographer. He did old-fashioned photographs of people dressed in traditional Swedish or pioneer clothing. 

This is an example of a tinytype. It is of the American Swedish Institute (ASI) Cloudberries. 

This is a picture of some of the choral group in color.

This is the museum's intern. He has been incredibly helpful with event set-up and management, and painting/refreshing the museum's children's wooden games and objects. The pails are used with the yoke to show children what hauling water was like in the early-settler days.

 

One of the items that was refreshed was the Dala horse croquet set. 

At Midsommar, people wear flower crowns. Some of people made them at the museum with flowers that the intern and director cut the day before the event. 

  

At Midsommar, there was a group of youth dancers. The girls are wearing the national folk dress of Sweden.

  

I've enjoyed seeing friends and neighbors at events at the museum as well as at the farmers market where the Lions handed out free native wildflower plants and activity kits focused on creating native wildflower seed balls.

  

On my birthday, I put together a "Mystery Trip" - only I knew where we were going. We made many stops including going to Downtown Minneapolis. We walked near the place where my parents had their wedding anniversary (the light-cream brick building). I believe it was the women's club in 1964.

We went to the Foshay Tower to go up to the 30th floor where they have a museum and observation deck. Even though the website says the observation deck is open, it isn't. So, that was disappointing. The museum didn't have any lights on and no light switches could be found. We ended up walking through it with our phones' flashlights. 

 

The next day at work, I was surprised by a party that the director had put together for me. The museum's intern, who enjoys baking, made this three-level cake. The bottom level is actually 2 levels and the top is a cake-topper that is filled with fresh-picked strawberries. It was amazing!

The 30th was Sophia's 22 1/2 birthday. We still celebrate half-birthdays. We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie which we enjoyed.

When we came home, we gave Sophia some presents and a card. The wool fox purse matches a bag she got overseas that has fabric with foxes on it.