Tag: family

Cupcakes and frosting roses for mom’s birthday.

My mom wanted almond-flavored cupcakes for her birthday, and thus I made them.  I have tidied my way to owning just one muffin tin, so I only made 12 cupcakes.*   So I made a small cake with the rest.  And then got carried away with the frosting part.  Those are the first frosting roses I’ve made since I took the cake decorating class when I was 14 or something.**  My grandmother could make frosting roses.  She was a cake decorator before she got married.  I used her flower nails, which are the base where you build the rose.  Hers are made of wood, not metal or plastic like the ones in the tutorials.  This was also fun, using tools that my grandmother had used.IMG_5039

Overall, the frosting was great.  The cake was a little dense, probably because I had trouble understanding done-ness.

*Plus, what was I going to do with 24 cupcakes? The new workplace really doesn’t eat sugar. Three boxes of Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies stayed on the table unopened for two weeks.  And even then, they weren’t eaten, they were eventually moved to snacks drawer.
**More evidence that I’ve always been a middle-aged woman at heart.

Williams Ave and just one picture from our food tour.

Matt, his mother Linda and I are on our way to a Forktown Food Tour of N. Mississippi Street.  I wanted to update you on the ch-ch-ch-changes on N. Williams Avenue first.  This sign was photographed in January.

Across the street, this building has undergone a huge transformation.  I even have compare/contrast photos for you.  Now:

Here’s what it looked like on 1/28:

And here’s just one picture from our food tour.  That is a huge shelf of bitters.  Read more about it here.

Great Aunt Betty’s memorial gathering.

Here’s Aunt Betty as a younger girl.

Here are the 15 Whitmore children and their parents.  My grandmother, Helen, is third from the left.
(Update!  According to my mother, this was a celebration for my grandmother’s 40th birthday. See her comment below.)  

I love the fact that she still had her War Ration Book (I’ve never seen one before,) but I love even more that she was 4 feet 11 inches and 98 pounds.  I looked up the house address too.  It’s still there.

When you have 15 children, it’s not hard for gatherings to get this big.  My copy is blurry, but I think that’s my grandfather George second from the right, standing next to my Great-Grandmother.  My grandma is in the first standing row, six (!) from the left.  She’s wearing a dark colored dress.

More of the 15.  Not so well composed, as some of them are hidden.

This is a really fabulous photo of Aunt Betty.

As is this.  That’s Aunt Joanne standing next to Aunt Betty. 
(Update!  The problem with having 14 great aunts and uncles is you might have trouble with their names.  Mom says this is Aunt Margaret, not Aunt Joanne.) 

This is a picture of my grandmother and grandfather I’ve never seen before. I particularly love my grandmother’s coat, which I’m willing to bet she made.

A Jantzen Swimsuit!

This is the shirt Aunt Betty is wearing in a really fun photo of (nearly) all the Whitmore girls.  I’ve looked at that picture for years as it’s in my Aunt’s kitchen, so it was funny to see the shirt neatly folded among the memorabilia.

Then I hit gold!  Aunt Betty’s autograph book.  This is from a friend of Aunt Betty’s and I laughed at the saying.

From Uncle Harold.

My grandfather!  I was surprised to see him in this book because it was from 1936 and I didn’t realize he was around then. My grandparents didn’t marry until 1941.

Auntie Bea

Aunt Mary.  (Who is amusingly wicked in her entry)

Aunt Lucretia.

Because Aunt Betty loved ice cream, there was an ice cream shop.

This is Uncle Jack, who was married to Aunt Lucretia (the one from the autograph book).

Aunt Virginia (married to Uncle Harold), Aunt Janet (who was stubbornly looking away from the camera) Aunt Joanne, Aunt Mary.
I waited around until Aunt Janet didn’t notice me taking the picture.

A nice poem about the Whitmore Family.

Great Aunt Betty’s Obit.

This is one of my grandmother’s younger sisters.
Elizabeth Jane Whitmore MacDougall
October 15, 1920 – April 8, 2014
Betty was born in Portland to Helen (Hawes) and Raymond Whitmore, the sixth of 15 children.  Betty is survived by her children Dolores (Woods) Veenendaal and Dwayne Woods. 
To Betty, family was life’s most important gift and she loved them all.  She enjoyed family occasions both big and small.
“Grannie” aka “The Great One” was thrilled to welcome her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
Betty was a retired meat wrapper.  She was a skilled seamstress and ceramic painter.  She loved to crochet, a skill she learned from her mother.  She enjoyed gardening and having flowers in her backyard.  She also grew berries to make jam for her great-grandchildren.
Betty’s memorial will be a party serving her favorite foods, chocolate, ice cream, Sprite and coffee.  All family and friends are welcome.

New Glass!

My Aunt Carol has been on a clean and purge streak and boy, did I win.  Do I want the cactus glasses that were my Great-Uncle Tom’s?  Yep.  Do I want the cocktail glasses that were my grandmother’s?  Yes ma’am.
Uncle Tom’s cactus glasses. There were 12, but I’ve learned that they don’t stack well, so now there are 10.

Grandma’s cocktail glasses, which would be even more amazing if I had put them against something white, so you could see the fabulous color.

They have these pretty roses etched on them.

And this is fabulous.  It has a glass stir stick and I love the shape.  Plus, the cups stack.
And now I must purchase something to contain all this glassware.

Dead Relative’s Tour 2013

Yes, it’s that time again:  time to put flowers on the graves of the dead relatives.  You can come along too.

In Rose City Cemetery I snapped a picture of this gravestone because someone I know has this same last name.  And Joshnston-with-a-“t” is much less common than Johnson.
 

I strode far away from the family grave to see who this large stone belonged too. From the space left on the stone, it looks like Rudolf was expecting company who never arrived.  Gravestones like this leave me a little sad.
 
I love headstones with photos.
 
A little something for the fans of the Waldorf method.  Plus, look at that great detail on the top!
 
(Argh. Didn’t rotate this one)
I was intrigued because it had fresh flowers, so someone is still coming around.  But it’s in a section of 1930s era deaths and has no headstone.  There’s a story here.
 
Basil and Basiliki are bedecked for another year.
 
The tools of the trade.  Also, this is the first year we haven’t gone in the Jeep Cherokee because my aunt has a new car.  It’s a silver car.  I can’t remember which kind.
 
That is so meta.
 
This hedge was gorgeous in color and undulated marvelously.
I wish I’d taken a bit more time to properly capture it.
 
Much speculation ensued about the family relationship here.
 
I love this epithet.  You go, Tyyne, with your double “y” in your name and all.
 
Working on Grandma and Grampa’s grave (with the new car in the background)

This year we learned that the cemetery is not providing the green vases to stick in the ground.  I flagged down a maintenance worker to ask him for one and got an earful about how the cemetery is now cheap and doesn’t want to give them out anymore because it just causes more work to pick them all up.  Then he gave me one on the down-low.  Thanks guy, you are awesome.  We will bring our own next year.

Decorating is fun

I enjoyed decorating at my Mom’s house this afternoon. Mostly because last year she had handily taken pictures of each part of the house and included them in the boxes so all we had to do was find the object in the picture and put it in the proper place.

As there were a lot of boxes, this was a very good thing.

Afterward, we had delicious pulled pork sandwiches and potato salad. Yum!

Highlights from Dead Relatives Tour 2011

Fun to say:

Another picture of a German grave just so I can hear Matt pronounce it.

As usual on the Dead Relatives Tour we visited my great-great grandparents (my grandfather’s maternal grandparents) and my grandparents’ (my mother’s parents) graves. New this year we bumped up over the hill from my grandparents’ cemetery to visit my great grandparents (my grandmother’s parents) graves. My great grandparents are buried at Skyline Memorial Gardens. We had to stop and get directions to the graves because the MAunts hadn’t be there in awhile. Although their remembering of “down that way” turned out to be true. Much to my delight the sections of the cemetery were named. The names were fabulously retro: Last Supper, Terrace of Serenity, Mediation, Prayer, Old Rugged Cross, Sermon on the Mount, Devotion, Gethsemane (I had to ask what that was) and Apostles, as well as others.

My great grandparents were thankfully not buried in Atonement (I’m betting that section had slow sales, except when purchased by long suffering wives as a good place for their not-so-great husbands to be laid to rest) but in Everlasting Life!

With the help of our handy map, we found the graves, and were sad to see that they had been neglected, apparently for several years. Both of them had sunk a bit and most of my great-grandmother’s was obscured by a thick coating of dried mud. We didn’t have anything to clean the gravestones with, so Aunt Pat arranged the flowers and we took leave. Next year we will bring some broom/mud scraping objects.