Okay, now that I’ve set up this silly blog thing, I find I have to actually update it periodically. And why? Who on earth is going to have any interest in reading this, besides me? I write in my journal all the time, but I know no one is going to be reading it. And although I am fairly certain no one is going to be reading this, there is still the possibility, the chance, that someone is going to stumble across it and say to themselves, “how boring can a blog possibly be?” Well, this is how boring a blog can possibly be. Boring Boring Boring.
I took the kids downstate to see Amish country yesterday. A lovely (okay, boring as all get-out, straight down 57) three-hour drive. And once you get there, you have to be careful not to run down all the Amish people riding around in their horse-and-buggies or on the side of the road on their bikes. We spent several hours in this bizarre “theme park” called Rockome Gardens, the point of which I didn’t quite understand. The “Amish home” that you could self-tour (for a fee) had a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and light switches in all of the rooms. So much for “historically accurate” 1950’s Amish home. Light switches my ass. It was just somebody’s old house that they threw some old furniture in and called it an attraction. Weird. The best part was that the kids could sit on a horse attached to a harness and ride it around in a circle while it operated a buzz-saw, which a decidedly non-Amish man used to cut a slice of wood from a log. Then we took the wood slices and trotted across the path to the blacksmith’s shop, where Patrick the blacksmith, whose specialty is cursive for $1 extra, burned their names into the wood with a red-hot piece of metal and displayed (quite prominently) a wood-burned sign next to an old coffee can that read “Help me go to college. Tips are appreciated.” There were a few genuine Amish people working there, but mostly the people seemed to me to be out-of-work carnival workers. They could at least dress like Amish people, for christ’s sake. Jeez. However, I suppose it is different than a living-history farm or museum like the ones we’ve visited. All these pioneers and farmers are gone, as is their way of life. So it is interesting, and not insulting either, for people to dress like them and pretend to be them. But the Amish are still around, are a huge presence, actually, in the Arcola/Arthur Illinois area, and anybody dressing up like them would just be insulting them. But they could HIRE real Amish people to do these things. It was just weird. The few Amish people we did meet, like to woman working at the side-of-the-road quilt shop (which featured some absolutely stunning (and stunningly expensive) quilts), were just regular people dressed plainly. I really did feel an overwhelming desire to sell all of my expensive clothing, shoes, and other accessories, sell my house, my car, and head on down to Arthur Illinois to buy a farm, a horse, and a buggy and wear a prayer cap and a baggy homemade dress and do a lot of chores. But I got over that.
Well, gotta go.
