Melinda Musil dot Com

Posts Tagged ‘history’

Lazy is how I feel.  I’m sitting around, writing and watching documentaries from the History Channel on DVD.  Dreaming of a vacation to just about anywhere… north to Buffalo, NY, south to Atlanta, GA, or just a hop-skip over to St. Louis, MO.  Shoot, I’d take a room in a nice hotel nearby right now!

It’s been a crazy day.  I’m already sleep deprived and it seems like my world hasn’t done much to help.  Lots of minor catastrophies preventing me from getting a much-needed nap.

Luckily, it looks like this summer will DEFINITELY include a fantastic vacation.  My family will be going on a cruise of the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia.  I’m looking forward to that!  I love to travel, and this will be especially interesting because my family has so much history in Scandinavia.

A fascinating “today in history”:

On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti. Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.

Kinda crazy to imagine the early native Americans voyaging across the ocean on Balsa Wood.  What a fragile existence.

On another note- Most of my family and friends knows that I’m basically a terror to mailboxes.  Admittedly, it has been several years since my last run in with a mailbox.  But we’ll probably joke about me and mail boxes for the rest of my life.

This is a website cataloging all kinds of Web 2.0 services.

A quick congrats to Stump, the winner of the Westminster Dog Show.  Stump, a Sussex Spaniel, is ten years old and is the oldest dog ever to win the Westminster Dog Show.  He’s beat serious illness as well as nearly 2,500 dogs in 170 breeds to become the nation’s top dog.  Plus he’s just awfully cute!

Two fantastic portraits celebrating the 200th birthday of our nation’s sixteenth president: One man is creating a portrait out of sixteen thousand post it notes.  Another man is creating a portrait out of over a thousand Lincoln pennies.

Men are respectable only as they respect.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
-Theodore Roosevelt

I am watching a show in the weather channel about the amazing dog teams who got a lifesaving package of diptherua serum th Nome, Alaska in 1925.

It’s an amazing story- men and dogs who risked their lives to save so many.

Around me, six cats are sleeping.

I am awed by the bravery of these beautiful creatures.

Here’s a bunch of photos from our visit to Fort Osage yesterday.

[Show as slideshow]

These were taken on my camera (not my phone).  Since my phone battery was dead, I used the camera. (in fact, I need to do that more!  Some of the photos turned out nicely!)

There’s a couple of photos in there of me and my sister.  The lighting was very harsh, so I struggled with the shadows all day.

Also, the river in these photos is the Missouri River.  The Fort was built in a spot originally picked out by William Clark (from the Lewis and Clark duo), overlooking the river and providing an excellent defensive post.  However, it was used primarily for trading and almost never for “battle” purposes.

The original fort is long gone.  It was dismantled by 1833 by settlers, who used the wood to build their own homes.  However, a portion of the fort was rebuilt.  These photos are only a small portion of what would have been the original fort- originally the fort had MANY more buildings, both outside and inside the fort walls!

I uploaded these photos from my phone.  I apologize for the quality- I know they are not very good photos.  But I’m still learning about this phone and camera, so that’s okay.

[Show as slideshow]

I’m also learning about my NexGen Gallery plugin.  There’s always so much to learn!

We had so much fun at the WWI museum.  It’s really an excellent collection, and (IMO) should be winning awards.  WWI is such a fascinating point in history, and really still very linked to many other events in history and to us today.  I don’t know why it is minimalized in so many history books.

One of those photos is of the Liberty Memorial above the museum.  It’s a lovely memorial, and an appropriate tribute to all the men and women who gave their lives in that war.

One of those photos is a shot of me and my sister.  It’s kinda blurry and on its side.  My mom took the photo, which accounts for the blurriness, and I couldn’t figure out how to rotate it, which accounts for the horizontal-ness.

One of those photos is of the (fake) poppy field in the museum.  Poppies bloomed in all their colorful glory throughout that war, in spite of all the bloodshed in Europe, and became a symbol of the rebirth after the war.  It’s a blurry photo, my fault, sorry.

I’ve been thinking all day about what to write.  This is such an intensely powerful and tragic day in our nation’s history.  There are no words to describe this day.  All I can say is a gentle promise to those who died, and those who survived: I will never forget you.

It seems appropriate for me to tell you where I was seven years ago.  Like many of my countrymen, I will never forget where I was when I heard about the attack on freedom.

I was young back then, and naive.  I was 18 years old and, just a couple of weeks before, I had moved away from home for the first time.  I lived in a typical college dorm room, in a typical college dormitory, on a typical college campus (in the Central-Standard Time Zone).  I was tasting freedom for the first time- staying up late, going to Walmart after midnight, and packing on the “freshman 15″ in the all-you-can-eat cafeteria.  In spite of all that, though, I was a good student.  I didn’t skip class, I studied, and I worked hard to get good grades.

On this day, my first class was at 10am, but I awoke at 7am to get breakfast and perhaps do some homework or read a book before class.  At approximately 7:50am (CST, 8:50 EST, just moments after the first plane hit the north tower) I was dressed and about to go to the cafeteria for breakfast.  I lifted my right finger and rested it against the “power” button on my television.  Before I could apply pressure, though, the screen changed to the telltale logo, accompanied by the voiceover saying, “We interrupt this program for a breaking news bulletin…”

Naturally I paused.  I’m an absolute news junkie, and of course I was interested in this breaking news.  If it turned out to be a “boring” piece of news- a change in the interest rate, or a new agreement between the president and some other country, maybe a presidential speech – then I’d turn it off and go to breakfast.  If it was newsworthy- a lost child, a found child, an escaped convict who had been captured – well, then I’d watch it for a few minutes, then go eat breakfast.  It wouldn’t last long anyway – they never interrupted the regularly scheduled programming for long.

But as the story of planes and the towers unfolded before my eyes, my hand fell away from the television.  I slowly sank onto my bed.  Breakfast was the farthest thing from my mind.  The story on television looked like a horror movie.  I wondered if this was like Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama, when mass hysteria followed a fictional radio drama.  It must be a fictional story, because what I was seeing was not possible.

As I watched the drama unfold, though, a sinking sensation developed in my stomach as I realized that this was real.  I watched as a second airplane struck the south tour, then a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in central Pennsylvania.  I watched as the south tower collapsed, then the north tower followed suit.  I listened as Peter Jennings, Charlie Gipson, and Diane Sawyer attempted to make sense of what they were seeing and hearing.  At times I changed the channel, but the situation was the same on every channel.  ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN… they were all taping the horror at the towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania.  None of the anchors had any answers.  For a time, they weren’t even sure what caused the attacks.  But knowing what had happened, or how it had been done, or even who had done it, still didn’t answer the one question that loomed over every broadcast: Why?

Seven years later, I still don’t think we’ve answered that question.  We may never answer that question.  We have shown our enemy that we will not submit to their hatred.  We have shown each other the incredible depths of our humankindness.  We have lit the torch of freedom around the world.

The voice of freedom cannot be silenced.  We will go on.

Tonight my friend Abbie and I went to a genealogy class at the local library.  It was SO TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!

I picked Abbie up from her Tae Kwon Do studio (she’s a black belt!), and we grabbed a quick bite at a McDonald’s.  Then we got to the library just as the class was starting.  The class was pretty simple, in a lot of ways- a basic genealogy class.  But, we got a few good handouts, and we learned that our library has subscriptions to websites like Ancestry.com and Heritage Quest.  Learning that fact alone made the whole class worthwhile!

Plus we learned a few more strategies about researching genealogy at the library.  We live near one of the absolute best libraries in the world, and I LOVE it.  I have no doubt that you’ll be hearing much more about my library in the days to come!

I’m debating going to the library to do some work and research tomorrow.  I’m also craving pizza, so I’m thinking about getting pizza for lunch.  It’s been awhile since I’ve had pizza… yumm.