Diary of my Great Grandma Part 1

The following is written by my Great Grandmother Irene Redfearn. You can find all the posts I will make about her here. She was an amazing woman and the below is what she wrote at the request of her family.  I will post the entire letter in intervals as it is quite long.

My Grandma Collum was one of Great Grandma Redfearn’s children, born over 10 years after the coal mine incident. She is the one that gave me a copy of these letters. I have cleaned up the writing to make more sense, but I’ve tried to keep Great Grandma’s writing style as intact as I could. Please read and enjoy!

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I’m Irene Hazel Reese. Born May 11, 1905. When I was 1 week old my parents named me my first name after Dr Walter’s daughter Irene. Dr Walter was our family doctor for years. I was the 9th child of 12 children. When I was a week old Dr Walter came back and thought I had pneumonia so put a mustard plastic jacket on me. I often wonder if I had a heart effect then. Doctors didn’t know babies were born with heart problems then. My parents bought prairie land and built a small home in 1880. Mother came to USA at 9 years old on a ship with her aunts and kids. My father was born in Iowa by green island in a log cabin near Clinton, Iowa.

NaNoWriMo

So this year I'm going to try the National Novel Writing Month in November.  For those of you that don't know, it's a month where you are challenged to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month.  Dang that's a lot of words!

I'm doing this mostly to have fun, but also to see if I can get something written.  It doesn't matter as much the quality, as long as the writing just gets done.  So I have an outline, character sheets, and a world and plot to go off of and in a couple of weeks I'll be cranking out as many words as I can every day between work and home life.  Whew!  We'll see how well I do!

Pumpkin Festival 2011

Every year we go to this pumpkin festival at Washington Park, here's some of the pumpkins.  They were some really good ones, here's the best ones we saw!

Spiderman!

Mr. Cupicake gets no frosting

Here's a comic I decided to make because it was funny, probably funnier in my head than on paper, but enjoy!  Mr Crabbypants suuuure has big pants.

 

Large version

Cheri the Book Licker

Cheri is our resident weird cat.  One of her strangest and sometimes most annoying habit is her love to lick.  And slobber.  This cat loves, I mean seriously loves to lick our monthly Game Informers.

 

She loves to lick books too.  We had one of those fancy type books that I picked up because it had red tipped pages, you know, like how bibles have the gold edging on the pages.  Well, Cheri found this book and decided she really, really liked the taste of the red dye.  By the time we found out, her tongue was bright red like a kid with a cherry Popsicle and the red on the book was all streaked from where she'd licked it off.

Serious, this cat has issues.