Day Trip to Auglaize Village

The smell of autumn is definitely in the air. Leaves are just beginning to turn, and Mother Nature has turned down the thermostat. This weekend, I don't think it got above 55 degrees in my neck of the woods. Even though skies were overcast, it was a perfect day for me and my sweetie Mike to go to the Johnny Appleseed Festival at Auglaize Village, an historic museum just a few miles west of my city.

You can tell fall is here when you see all the pumpkins for sale.


One of the first things I saw was this big red barn. Treats were being sold outside and inside.


If I had need of a mailbox (I don't), I would have been sorely tempted to cart this one home with me!


This little birdbath was cute. I took a pic because I figure that one of these would actually be pretty easy to make.


Auglaize Village features rooms, office, and businesses from days gone by. I loved this door to the little dentist office.


It had the former owner's initials etched into the glass.


Now this dentist office looked pretty scary to me. I couldn't imagine some of those instruments in my mouth...no siree!


Next door was the cobbler shop. I was trying to imagine my big feet in these cruel shoes. They are cool, but Mike remarked that he thought they were children's shoes. I don't think so. People were much smaller a hundred or more years ago.


I am enchanted by windows. I always wonder what is just beyond. Ever see that commercial on HGTV where the couple are driving through a neighborhood at night and looking at the houses? Well, that could be me.


Here was a display of keepsakes from years gone by.


My grandmother had an iron like one of these. And we think we have it hard now if we have to iron something.


I was struck by some of the portrayals of old time kitchens. I know that I complain if I don't have a dishwasher. Think of all the hard work it was to wash dishes in sinks like this! If you didn't have a pump in the house, you had to tote in the water.


I do love this blue stove though.


Ugh, washing day was really a chore! Now all we have to do is put the clothes in, push a button to wash them, push another button to dry them, and then all we have to do is hang them up or fold them. Not so hard really when you consider the alternative.


I would love to have carted these home with me!


Outside, vendors were making caramel corn. Yum! There were a lot of things for sale, crafts and also flea market wares, but my camera was being persnickety and I didn't get pics of all of that.



This was the actual office for an old-time phone company in the county.


You didn't get to talk to anyone until the operator connected you!


Just look at these old phones! I grew up with a phone just like the one on the left. Things sure have changed!


I love old insulators. I like the turquoise color.



Next we went to school!

Love these old school desks! Not sure how comfortable they would have been though.


Can you imagine writing with inkwells and quills?


I must be getting old, because I remember going to school in the 60's and having blackboard like these with the alphabet above.


After that, we went by a blacksmith shop. No one was demonstrating the art, which I think would have been fun to watch. One of my great-grandfathers was a blacksmith.


This bellows was huge!


We then decided to go to church. I love old churches. One of the churches that my boyfriend pastors was built in 1875. I think it is really interesting.



I didn't get a picture of the hay-bale maze, but it seemed to be really popular with children. This display was nearby. Ah...fall!


I have always dreamed of living in a log cabin...the modern kind though! These were fun to go through.


Again, me with the windows.


The fire in the fireplace was welcoming and offered visitors a bit of warmth. We climbed the stairs to the left...


...to discover this upper room!


In a time when we all want a walk-in closet, its hard to imagine even a generously sized armoire holding the clothes for a whole family.


The bed frames were really cool, and I loved the quilts, but they really didn't look at all comfortable to sleep on.


Here is another, smaller cabin.


Yet another window.


Interesting mill stones.


I think these are traps for small game.


Not sure what they did with this wheel.


There was another visitor that remarked that "those were the good old days," when viewing the rustic, simple way of life that people used to lead.

You know, although it seems that way, Mike and I both thought of what a hard life it was back then. It seemed that you'd never ever be warm in the winter, and that you'd have to deal with all kinds of vermin coming in through the floor. Life was not easy. We didn't have modern medicine, and many people died during epidemics.

No, while it was great fun to look back into the past, I wouldn't really want to turn time that far back!

On our way out, I spied this old firetruck. My dad, a former fireman, would have loved this.


Right near the exit were these carriages. Mike thought they were too small for adults, but like I said, I think people were a lot smaller back then. We are not far from Amish country though, so it really isn't all that unusual to see people in horse drawn carriages yet today, but they are bigger.

What a fun day we had at Auglaize Village! Mike wants to take his kids there next spring when it's warmer.

Even though it was a chilly day, Mike and I were tempted by the pumpkin flavored flurries offered at the dairy bar behind my apartment. It was raining, so we sat inside his car. I love that they added a little candy pumpkin, whipped cream and cinammon to the treat!


Mike liked his too!


Hope you enjoyed sharing the day as much as we did!

So what do you think...would you trade today's conveniences and go back in time?

Spiritual Sunday/eDevotion -- Crush

Yikes, I didn't get up any other posts this week! Well, this week coming up, I will be doing a product review, will post on some unexpected nature that I found in my yard, and hopefully, will get around to doing a Pink Saturday. For today, however, I'm participating in another Spiritual Sundays.

I am again sharing an eDevotion written by my boyfriend, Pastor Mike. He writes weekly (sometimes every other weekly) eDevotions that he sends out. I love these! I like his folksy way of telling a story and making me feel things on a personal level. The eDevotion that I am sharing today is called "Crush," and it is my favorite that I have read so far.



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Crush

"Is not Ephraim (Israel) my dear son, the child in whom I delight? Though I often speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I have great compassion for him, declares the LORD." Jeremiah 31:20

I get a lot of prayer requests, as you might imagine. A recent favorite came from one of our Cub Scouts. He crept up to me on the sly and said, "Pastor Mike, there’s this girl that I really, really like – could you please pray that she will like me too?" I could tell by his face that he was as serious as poison oak.

Now, if I were a good pastor, no doubt I would have gently explained that that’s not the sort of thing one prays for. God doesn’t manipulate people for our benefit, so He’s probably not going to turn up some little girl’s thermostat just to warm her up for you. But I forgot to say that because, well, I just sort of felt for the little dude. He had these big droopy eyes that said, if this girl would just like me all of life would become Wonderland. If she doesn’t, well then stop the world because I want to get off.

You’re going to think I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but that boy is a picture of God. I think God pines for us like an aching puppy lover. What God wants more than anything else – more than he wants us to behave ourselves, more than he wants us to feed starving kids in India – is just us. Our love, our affection, our company. The number one promise in scripture is not "I will forgive you" or "I will help you" (though those are both in there plenty), but it’s "I will be with you." Hoping, no doubt, that we will return the favor.

Pastor Mike, there are these people I’m just crazy about. We’re talking head over heels. I think about them all the time – I can’t even sleep at night. But it’s hard to tell if they even like me. They seem interested in other things. Will you pray, Pastor Mike, that they will like me back?

I’ll give it a shot.

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One of the things I loved so much about what Mike wrote here is that for me, it made our Lord so much more real. It made me feel the love that God has for us and His longing for us to be with Him. It touched me in a way that nothing else has.

When I found this picture, it seemed perfect for this post. Look how much He loves us! Look how much He craves our fellowship!

He can't wait to pull us into His embrace!

Spiritual Sundays/An eDevotion -- China

I am going to venture out into something completely different for me and am going to be participating in Spiritual Sundays this week, and maybe every Sunday that I manage to get around to it.

You see, this is a really new thing dating a man of the cloth. I never, EVER pictured myself dating a minister! I mean, I haven't even been a church-goer for well over 10 years. Though I have always been a very spiritual woman, and have told people that I am a Christian, I described myself as a "disillusioned, disenchanted Christian." I have encountered a lot of weirdness in the body of Christ. Sad to say, some of the biggest hurts I have ever received in my life were at the hands of those who called themselves Christians. People have said some of the stupidest things to me, feeling that they were sharing through Christ.

It was enough to make me feel like I never wanted to go back to a mainstream church ever again. Still, I longed to be part of a church again. I have longed for that fellowship. But I just didn't know if I could do it.

One of the things I really like about my sweetheart is that he writes eDevotions. He recently even had one published in the Upper Room daily devotional! When I received the following one in my email, at first I wondered if he was purposely stepping on my toes. Read on: and by the way, these are copyright per Pastor Mike, but if you want to use it or share it, I would be thrilled to pass on a message to him so that you can get his eDevotions in your inbox too!

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This one is titled "China."



"Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world." 1 Peter 2:12

I’ve never been to China, but I bet it isn’t anything like Chinese restaurants.

For one thing, eating at Chinese restaurants you’d think that a nation of a billion people had only managed to come up with three kinds of soup. Also, fortune cookies aren’t Chinese. (True story – when fortune cookies were first marketed in China they were advertised as "Authentic – just like in America!") And they probably don’t really number all their food like that over there. And anyway, most "Chinese" dishes we see have been mutated into more American-type vittles. I bet when folks from China come here to visit they go to McDonalds, where at least they’ll have some idea what the heck they’re ordering.

What I’m trying to say is, you’d be nuts to make any judgments about the country of China based on your local neighborhood noodle house.

It’s no less crazy to draw conclusions about the Kingdom of God from your experiences with some church. But people do that all the time. Because they have found some congregations to be narrow, bigoted, insensitive, judgmental (you know this list as well as I do) they deduce that they are better off without the whole shebang. They can be "spiritual but not religious." OR, equally erroneous, because some churches have rubbed them that way at a particular time and place they conclude that they all must be that way. Listen, there are many, many churches where the love command is still on the books – where people who are different are welcomed, generosity is practiced, the sick and poor are treated with dignity, and folks are encouraged to use their brains. They just don’t show that kind on TV very much.

And while we’re at it some of those eggroll joints aren’t bad either. At least they’ll get you by until you finally get to make your big trip to China.
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Like I said, at first this eDevotion kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I thought, "well, I'm not going to like them all." I also wondered if he was quoting me with the "spiritual but not religious" part, since I say that a lot. Turns out that he wasn't.

It still got me to thinking. Maybe it's time I put aside some of the hurts. As a counselor, I had a whole lesson on Forgiveness. Though I thought I had forgiven all the hurts, I was still letting them affect my life today.

Time to put it all in the past. Time to move forward. Time to stop letting what stupid things other Christians have done to keep me from getting with others and worshipping and praising my Lord again in a church family.

So I am not yet going to my boyfriend's church. For him, it will be a Really Big Deal for me to hear him preach. I'm happy that he so highly values my opinion of his work, and that he wants to be impressive. I've decided to start attending my son's church in the meantime. It still feels a little awkward, and I feel like a little bit of a fake after being out of the loop for over a decade, but the people are warm and welcoming. I feel fed. I feel accepted.

And I feel pretty darn good about it. Hallelujah!

Tablescape Thursday/Everyday Tablescape

Welcome to another Tablescape Thursday! I haven't participated in quite a while, but I felt it was about time that I shared my every day tablescape with you. For the last few months, this is what my table has looked like. Nothing fancy this time, just giving you a glimpse into how I like my table looking all the time...at least for now.



But before I start, how many of you have thought about the most basic element of tablescaping...the table on which your pretties all sit? I have a table that looks very similar to this table, except my chairs are different.

In fact, my chairs don't even all match, though they did when I first bought them. I found many more beautiful kitchen tables, at Dining Rooms Direct,a division of CSN. Yes, this is a teaser for an upcoming product review that I will be doing! Anyhow, please do check out that site for all the gorgeous dining sets they have there.

It's true though. The table on which you set your beautiful things is important to setting the mood in your dining room or kitchen. I LOVE my table, and have had it for years now.


My current tablescape all started with this pretty placemat. I found four of these at Walmart on sale for $1.50 each. I love the warm reds and golden yellows. It went really well with the table runner that I had purchased online a few years back on eBay.


I had purchased the goldent yellow tablecloth for $5 at Wally World last fall and used it at Thanksgiving. To this, I added my white Gibson dishes, and dark red salad plates, also from Walmart for about $1.50 each. I used my everyday eating utensils.


I have used my grandmother's milk glass glasses for many tablescapes.


I got the iron stars at a home party years ago. I don't know where I would get them any more these days. They are designed to be candle holders, but were originally architectural in purpose. I love stars, which are a big theme in my decorating.


I didn't get elaborate with the tablescape, but felt that I needed a little something extra. I added a red candle with an apple scent, and this little yellow duck that I found at Goodwill. It was originally part of a set that was sold through Home Interiors. I found it for much cheaper at GW!

He makes me feel that this tablescape is just "ducky!"

Ok, I'll stop with that for now!

Please do check out other tablescapes, hosted by Susan at Between Naps on the Porch. This is such a fun weekly event!

Perhaps one day soon I'll get a little bored with this table setting and do something new. Until then, see you!