Did you grow up in North Dakota, Minnesota, or even Wisconsin? If so, you have to have bits and pieces of Garrison Keilor in your head. I just read Pontoon and found it to be not only entertaining but reminiscent of my youth in Minnesota and North Dakota. Sorry Montana, you weren't even close when it came to stoic Lutherans, Norwegians or even the Irish Catholics who took on the persona of the culture.
How does Keilor know my mother spent a great deal of time feeding sunflower seeds to the birds? How did he learn the off-beat sense of humor we all grew up with? And how did he know Aunt Alice had a tire in her front yard filled with Petunias and Pansies accompanied by two plywood cutouts of fat folks bending over? Thank goodness he has learned to write it down so none of us forget our upbringing and what motivated us to Fly!! Just a few quotes...
“Life is so dear, dear heart, Live it with Gallantry.”
“Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.”

“Don’t sink boy. Fly. That’s an old lady’s advice. Fly.
How many of us flew and left the north country for warmer climes but feel a real loss when we think of the culture?
Of course there are those who stayed and continue the ways of the stoic Lutheran. They are the ones who believe everything they read and only read what is dismal and depressing. For them , my recommendation is read Pontoon and skip snoopes for today. Become enlightened and laugh for that is what makes life worthwhile.
Be sure to visit Chahinkapa.com for fun and fancy gifts from Florida. Also read all the blogs and don't forget destinationsinflorida.com if you want to get away from it all and spend some fantasy time at Disney. I wonder if Disney has every considered a Keilor section for Epcot...right near the Norwegian center. Just a thought for the day.

This was sent to me in email and with just a little editing...it sure applies to how I grew up.
You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I never ate it raw..but my cousins did and they all seem all right. Well mostly.
Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. Well some of us like the pool and became pool rats who lived at the pool. That didn't prevent us from those week-end trips to Fergus Falls where we invaded the Lakes...or a real adventure to Ottertail.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE .. and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors.
I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option . even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel in Cuff's Cement Lot and anything left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.
I recall Hog Helgeson from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive? LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.

Working from home this week. Put in more hours at home than when I am on the road. Working on training documents for PeopleSoft 9.0. Down to St. Augustine today to purchase some shells for the eclectic_doodahs store on ebay. WOrking on learning more about googles webmaster tools at night and trying to get caught up on the web building project I have been working on.