Charge of the happy birthdays
Draco sums up this late fall season well--time to find a box and curl up, awaiting the heat of a warm fire! We started the month of November with big Thanksgiving plans, including a road trip to Wisconsin to visit my folks and see Kenny, who would come down from Houghton for the week...
Until then, we were satisfied (well, not really, but had to live with) connecting with Kenny via his participation in some Zoom calls we've been on (that's him in the center of the image below):
I was also able to take advantage of some nice weather on Halloween and Veteran's Day to make a couple trips to western Arkansas to look for an old experimental forest on the Ouachita National Forest that's been closed for decades. If you look closely in the picture below, you should see a small concrete structure called a "weir" that is used to funnel streamflow through a measured opening to gauge how much water is flowing down that channel. There is also some stonework along the banks in the background done by either CCC or WPA relief labor crews in the late 1930s:
Expect more on this experimental forest in the coming months; I am planning to return later in December or early January with Kenny and the rest of the family to look at these sites some more and document these as archeological sites. Some really cool stuff!
This part of rural Arkansas has many other remnants of a more active past. So much of this state used to be dotted with small farmsteads, such as the decaying one in this cow pasture not far off of the old experimental forest:
Unused for decades, you could just imagine the family (or families) that scraped a living together on these rocky hills...
But back to our current household. As you may imagine, the growing cases of COVID-19 finally forced our hand, and we canceled our travel plans to Rhinelander for Thanksgiving week. Between having to do a brief quarantine of our own (due to a close exposure of one kid in class; thankfully, no illnesses from that exposure) and Michigan Tech sending students home for remote learning for the rest of this semester the week before Thanksgiving, it didn't make any sense for us to travel, risking exposure and possibly bring COVID with us to my parents. So, we arranged for Rick Pruden to pick Kenny up from Houghton and bring him to Monticello (good thing Rick likes to travel!).
This allowed us to have both Kenny and Rick for a visit. Below, we celebrated Rick's birthday with him, and Hope put together a delicious early Thanksgiving dinner (the Sunday before Thanksgiving, so Rick could get back to Michigan:
We did the best thing possible for Thanksgiving day--the Bragg family far and wide connected via Zoom for a couple hours that afternoon. Below, Beth gives her brothers an earful, while her mother chortles:
...and the scattered siblings and spouses and grandkids across the country:
As much as we'd rather Kenny would be able to spend his first semester at Tech completely in-person...we've really enjoyed having him back in the house (look at his mother below):
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