SSDreamin Blessings and curses

[the funny farm6]

yea, they are just like us "english" some are kinder and more outgoing and understanding than others.

our horseshoer (who is more ss than the amish) took his buggy down to an amish guy to have it worked on a year ago. well, theis guy also builds pole buildings and haddnt gotten to it. he happened to be in another town at another place and was talking to some other amish guys when he told them about the buggy not getting fixed and they were shocked! turns out they were WAY up in the community and they went to the guy and told him he was to NEVER put 1 job/custumer before another. and his buggy was fixed in less that a month.

 

[Wannabefree]

Oh yeah, they are very much like that! I know and talk to all the elders here all the time. IF I ever had any trouble out of any of them, I know who to talk to about it.

 

[the funny farm6]

http://amishsurvivalsecrets.com/ami...amish-live-off-the-grid-without-electricity/#

dont know if the link will work but it is on AmishSurvivalSecrets.com

 

[SSDreamin]

http://amishsurvivalsecrets.com/ami...amish-live-off-the-grid-without-electricity/#

dont know if the link will work but it is on AmishSurvivalSecrets.com

Link worked - thanks Funny Farm! Interesting reading!

 

[SSDreamin]

Here are a few pictures for your entertainment

First, we have Sunday dinner, ala the wood stove:
The pork roast (in the dutch oven, to the right, turned out a little drier than the beef roast, but was still delicious. I wanted to try baking the potatoes in the coals, IN the stove, but DH vetoed that. We fit five gigantic russet potatoes, wrapped in foil, in the oven. They turned out perfect. They baked for two hours We found a couple issues with the oven - it was very hard to maintain a constant temperature on top of the stove, it's temp gauge was in celcius so we had to do some quick conversion calculations and I realized it will be VERY difficult to bake bread in there, even in my smallest bread pan!

Next up, this is a kind of before and after close up of my cabinets. The drawers on the left are the old ones, with the old finish. The drawer on the right is one that DH made to match, from a cabinet door we removed to make room for the dishwasher(he is so darn talented! ). It was sanded down and stained with the 'new' stain. I love the way the grain jumps right out at ya with the new one!

Finally, this is the new backsplash! I wish we could've gone all the way down to the counter with the glass tile, but we had to use some old tiles we had around to fill in. We got the glass tile on clearance, and didn't have enough to go all the way to the counter all the way across

That's all for now. I will have to get a picture, close up, of the cool spice cabinet DH built me from the final bit of door scraps - it's awesome! He has also finished up the island, complete with bookshelves for my overflow of cookbooks! Can't post a picture of it yet though, without showing the disaster around it

 

[moolie]

Looks like it is all coming together Pretty tile, and great job by your hubs on the new cabinetry!

Your oven looks a lot like my Coleman camping oven that fits on top of my camp stove, and folds flat to pack away. Mine is about a foot square, but the gauge has both imperial and metric on it. They cost about $40 new (around here, that Amazon link is cheaper) but I got mine second-hand for $10. Works super for anything we want to bake at camp, I'd love to try it out on a woodstove--you've got me scheming!

 

[snapshot]

Thanks for the photos! I love the oven and the backsplash!

 

[ORChick]

The language is Pennsylvania Dutch, and I am learning it, among other languages at the moment. It does have a very Germanic sound to it, but a lot of the words are different.

They ARE just like us, flesh and bone. Their lifestyle isn't all that different. Some families are very different, but it depends on who is in charge. One old man will talk my ear off, and another won't hardly look at me. Several have been out to my place, others wouldn't be caught dead here. As far as I can tell, it's about the same concept of certain people with money think they are "better" than those who don't have as much, and others couldn't give a flip less if we have a pot to pee in or not, they come around anyway. People are people are people no matter where/who they are. I go to one house wayyyyyyyyy back off down a wagon trail into the backside of two wood lots, with 8 kids, and the husband is almost never there. Those folks are some of the nicest I have met and were suprise to see me pull in their front yard because it's so obscure. I think they like that I DON'T treat them differently than anyone else, and they reciprocate I haven't found one yet I don't get along with, even the one who hardly speaks to me. I think his parents were just more strict, and you will run into that in the community here and there.

May I put on my teacher hat for a moment?

Pennsylvania Dutch is German, but rather in the same way that American English is English. The original settlers that came to Pennsylvania from Germany were mostly from the area called Rheinland Pfalz or, in English, Rheinland Palatinate. (Its the German state bordering the state that my DH comes from, to the south, and some of the words are similar to the dialect that he grew up hearing). They brought with them, of course, their language - a dialect of High German - and over the centuries that has changed somewhat, just as we no longer speak the English that the Pilgrims knew. And then, of course, over time the need for new words has come up, and so they have made their own, not having an easy link back to the Old Country to learn what the Germans are now calling what ever the thing happens to be (I have a Penn. Dutch cookbook that has a section with some of these Americanized German words). Sometimes they combine known German words in a way to describe this new thing or concept, and sometimes they Germanized an English word. And the "Dutch" in Pennsylvania Dutch, for those who don't know, has nothing to do with Holland, but rather is an anglicized form of "Deutsch", which is what the Germans call themselves.

SSDreamin - I would venture to say that your DH might not be able to understand the German spoken in the part of Germany these people originated in even today, when they speak dialect. German dialects are almost languages in their own rights, and not just accents, as we have in English. DH and I took our honeymoon down in that area, and when the couple who ran the bed and breakfast were talking to each other even DH couldn't understand them - and he grew up less than 100 miles away!

 

[Wannabefree]

They told me it wasn't German, and I don't know much German, so I didn't argue with them I DID not that about the Deutsch though. Learn something new every day

SSD I LOVE that backsplash just as it is sister, that's GORGEOUS, and knowing it was done on a clearance budget just makes it even purtier to me That is AWESOME Your DH did a good job on that cabinet drawer too...I'd make him do all of them that way

 

[Denim Deb]

Moolie, I've tried the Coleman oven on top of my wood stove and it never got hot enough to bake in. Don't know if it would work on a different stove better than mine or not.

SSD, tell your hubby to bake the taters in the wood stove. I do it all the time. And, they're some of the BEST baked potatoes I've ever had!