"My Crazy Kids"

Memorial Weekend By Allan Olson It was a great weekend for outdoor activity – at least every day but Monday, on this long holiday weekend and I like many others spent as much of it as I could in the great outdoors of Minnesota. Our goal for the weekend, was attending a graduation party, fishing, a graduation exercise and all around enjoying the outdoors. We left our home in the sticks of Pennington Friday evening, far later than we had originally planned and finally got to my parent’s home in Lake of the Woods after 9 p.m. Since the daylight is still lingering we found my brother and family all still outside working and playing. Since my niece had rolled up on the three-wheeler as soon as we arrived I decided to take a turn on it prior to unloading the vehicle, I took a quick spin down the dirt road and enjoyed the cool evening breeze before returning to the farm to unload my vehicle. That evening, the kids decided that they were going to play spot and even though the ...

Photo: Alivia enjoyed her time at the Cass Lake fire department open house climbing in and out of each fire truck several times.   Weekend Rains By Allan Olson It’s official – well maybe not but it could be, we went from a drought to a flood in about a week, while we needed the rain it can at least for a few days take a reprieve and let the ground soak it up. This weekend was certainly a good one to stay inside and that is largely what we did this weekend. On Saturday morning, we started the weekend by finishing some painting and began the cleaning process. The kids were all assigned jobs and we all some more quickly than others began our tasks.  The morning flew by and I needed to a quick trip into Cass Lake for the firemens open house. Since Alivia was the only one was working study all morning, I decided to take her with. She enjoyed climbing in each of the firetrucks about a hundred times and pulling on the horn. We returned home and then helped with th...

By Allan Olson This weekend was the counterpart to the previous weekend – no trips out of town no hiking and virtually no sunshine and warm weather. This weekend was also spent mostly indoors – while last weekend was spent largely outdoors. A friend of mine was heading into the Paul Bunyan Forest over the weekend to play   - or in my lingo Geocache finishing up the NSGS series deep in the woods I really wanted to join him. However it was called to my attention all the other work that needed to be done before going out to play so regretfully and perhaps a little annoyed I bowed out of the playing and consented to the work. The work that needed to be completed included staining some windows and painting some walls and trying to get some semblance of order back into our house. After a month hiatus of real cleaning and coupled with some renovation project it was in due order. Friday evening we made our plans and started prepping and staining the areas that needed it or ra...

Hanging out with family By Allan Olson As always – time flies when you’re having fun – as was the case this weekend. We headed north to International Falls on Saturday about noon for what turned out as we had hoped – a fun filled weekend with family. We arrived at our destination at my cousin’s home, somewhere around the 2 p.m. mark, the kids piled out the door and their two kids were looking for us out the window when we arrived and soon the younger three kids disappeared into the depths of the house – often making their presence known by their noise. The adults sat around visiting and then my cousin and I decided to head out in search of a couple caches with our boys– one I didn’t find last time I attempted to find a cache in that area and the other was one he hadn’t found before.   The girls chose to stay at home and Nikolai went to another cousin’s house and we only saw him for a few minutes until the next morning when he was dropped off – the arrangement was perfect ...