"Have you ever noticed how many fences there're getting to be? And the signs they got on them: no hunting, no hiking, no admission, no trespassing, private property, closed area, start moving, go away, get lost, drop dead! Do you know what I mean?"
This is my daughter as Kirk Douglas, and Askur playing his poor horse. Lonely Are The Brave was one of the first westerns to be set in the contemporary (early ‘sixties) West; it’s a movie with a great tear-jerker of an ending where Kirk Douglas’s horse gets hit by a truck. I know I cried. I haven’t seen it for thirty years, I hope it’s still as good.
A Bad Guide 
Looks more like “One if by land and two if by sea” , with your daughter as Paul Revere. The name of the horse may have been “Brown Beauty”.
http://www.paulreverehouse.org/bio/faq.shtml
Here’s the cover of “The midnight ride…”
http://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Ride-Paul-Revere/dp/0792265580/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260157171&sr=8-1#reader_0792265580
…and if you look at the silhouette on Revere ware cookware,
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoywo4/theshineshop2/id10.html
… with the right hat, she could play him, no problem. Like so many other things in the blogosphere, it all comes down to the hat.
Do you think Alma’s too young to have her own brand of cookware? I don’t want her to be spoilt.
You worry about her getting spoiled after you buy her a horse?
How could she ride to school? Snowscooter?
When I was her age I walked a mile to school in forty-below weather. (Fahrenheit) My parents, by their own description, walked twice as far.
My grandmother however did ride a horse to school. The horse had its own parking space inside a small barnlike structure (is that what you call a stable?), but the son of the school superintendent thought it was for his car instead. I don’t have to tell you my grandmother won, even though she wasn’t Scandinavian, and continued to park her horse in her parking space.
Forty below is forty below in both Fahrenheit and Celsius (do the calculations if you don’t believe it) . Forty above would be quite different.
Snowscooter: I think it must be the same as the Canadian snowmobile. I like “snowscooter” better.
She’s right. Well, that’s pretty darn cold. You wouldn’t catch me outside in that weather. Forty above is about 100F.
I hope I didn’t invent snowscooter. Maybe it’s the Norwegian word.
You mean snowmachine – though that’s Alaskan.
I knew there was something familiar about forty below. It does actually get that cold where I grew up, but something that cold would probably be an official or unofficial snow day, with not even a third of the students showing up for class. (Bedouins in Jordan keep their kids from school at the slightest sign of cold, not even snow, but of course the country schools are not heated.)
In Wobegon, exaggeration of coldness and distance traveled to school in one’s youth is considered to be poetry rather than mendacity. My desire to be transported to school was generally ignored until about 10 or 20 below. Then, at the age of sixteen I was able to get a learner’s permit and transport myself to school in my mother’s car.
What about your dogs? Have you heard of the Iditarod?
Your father was a pilot, he should have let you parachute to school.
Alma’s best friends, the twins, have dogs that pull them on skis. An elastic rope goes around the twin’s waist and then to the dog’s harness. They’re proper dogs and they took lots of classes to learn how to do it properly. Our dogs are very athletic, but they aren’t cut out for that sort of thing. Alex couldn’t even pull Topsy on skis.
When my father met my mother, he decided he could afford a girlfriend or an airplane, but not both. He sold the airplane and never regretted it.
But he could have had all those little airplanes.
He does, indirectly. My brother and his wife are pilots.
People who parachute are also much different from people who fly their own planes. The later tend not to understand “why someone would want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”
That’s right, I’d forgotten about your brother. I don’t think IKEA sell planes in Europe, it must be something they developed specially for the N. American market.
IKEA??!?
Oh, did you see their black goat?
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60156649
Wow, Nijma, thank you for mentioning it. I had no idea how the Iditarod has changed. My brother-in-law was in the “first” (1967 – Centennial – evidently nothing like it is now!) Iditarod race but now I see that was very small beer indeed. (We had a dachshund who could pull a proper dogsled – as long as one ran alongside – his body was long enough to fit the harness.)