There’s another mouth to feed in the Runner household!
Belle is a 4-yr old Dachshund/Rat Terrier mix. She loves car rides, barks very infrequently, and is a better fielder than Delmon Young ever will be. And K is already her best friend.
Merry Christmas everyone from the Runner family!
Managed to come up with a Halloween costume this year…
no, it’s not too soon!
Sorry, it would not have been worth it to cut my hair short as well.
With October 31st almost upon us, I thought I’d post a few costume photos from the past, fwiw. These are not highlights (good God, no!) but just pictures I happened to have found lying around…
Halloween 1973
Bro Al on the left and me, just about ready to take to the car and do havoc on the neighboring farm homes.
Halloween 1980
First year of college, taken in Livingstone Lord Library at Moorhead State University. Most all of 2nd floor of Nelson Hall marched through Dahl Hall and other buildings (to Jeff Lorber Fusion’s “Monster Man” blaring on the boombox) squirting anyone with squirt guns if they happened to open their doors.
Halloween 1983
Senior year at college, doing my best D.P. Gumby impression.
Halloween 1985
OMG, how embarrassing! An aluminum bat?!
Halloween 1986
This was just after US News & World Report reporter Nicholas Daniloff was held in Russia on spying charges (notice press pass tucked into hat brim). The key to all good photos is to hold an impressive pose.
Interestingly enough, the hat and trenchcoat have been my typical “costume” for the past several years, mostly because their convenient, warm, and still just as scary!
Enjoy your Halloween night, kiddos…
Posted in flashbacks, holidays
Tagged D.P. Gumby, Halloween, Jeff Lorber Fusion, Moorhead State University, Nicholas Daniloff
On the event of nephew Paul II’s New Year’s Eve wedding to Alyssa in Tulsa, the Runner family joined a mass family migration to south-central US. Besides a beautiful wedding and some great quality time with family, this was the first gathering of all of the grandkids in one place – quite a trick!
ALL the grandkids; K is in the gray dress towards the back, and a dapper Paul II in military formal
Hope you’re all having a great Christmas! After a couple days of rain, we finally got some snow before noon today, so we are having a white Christmas after all.
It’s a tradition at the Runner family to make spaghetti for supper on Christmas Eve, yet our schedule didn’t look too promising this year, so the ever-thoughtful K decided that we would instead go to Fazoli’s for a late pasta lunch instead. We are nothing if not adaptable!
After a busy afternoon of helping out at some of the church Christmas services and singing in the choir, we joined a nice gathering of friends at the Griffiths. We eventually made it home to open gifts and get some well-deserved sleep. It’s been a wonderful holiday.
Oh, and among other great gifts, Mo & K framed this year’s Homer Hanky for me. Looks like I’ll have to update my blog banner sometime.
2009 Homer Hanky
Halloween means, among other things…jack-o-lanterns! I’ve managed to photograph all the jack-o-lanterns carved each Halloween (more-or-less) since our move to the St. Louis area in 1990. Here’s a year-by-year inventory:
1992: well, Mo outdid me with her large jack-o-lantern in the middle
As mid-September rolls around, it brings the advent of…bowling season! No, not the Brunswick/Dick Weber/foot-fault bowling — Osage orange lawn bowling.
At the treeline, in the back corner of our property, stands a tall Osage-orange tree, loaded with Osage oranges.
no, not the small dark red dogwood tree, the one above and to the right of it
Throughout my school years, I grew up on a 560 acre farm 5 miles WNW of Beltrami, MN. The homestead was called “The Ranch,” although it’s been close to a century since there was any cattle there.
We had everything we could want growing up: great neighbors, enough trees and road ditches to house interesting wildlife and hold tree houses of all kinds, lots of lawn for any type of sport, dark night skies, and great farming soil.
“The Ranch”
Many a 2-on-2 baseball game was played between the quonset and the barn. Many an evening was spent in the bedroom (in the top left window in the photo) listening to Herb Carneal call the Twins ballgame while the train whistle blew four miles to the east. Many hours were spent tag-team mowing the yard with my siblings, and just as many hours snowmobiling in the winter. Army men battles raged in the sandbox.
We speared carp in the ditch just to the south, trapped many $$ worth of pocket gophers, shot skunks that the dog had cornered (always in the middle of the night), and even had a moose wander through the yard. After coming off the combines in August, we’d head outside after supper to track satellites and meteors or look through the telescope, with “Mystery Theater” playing on NPR. We rode at least the distance to the moon and back on the school bus over the years. Pulled many a weed (and thrown them at the pigs) but harvested vegetables of all sorts (and rhubarb!!), and had many a crabapple fight.
Yeah, I’d do it all over again.
