Story County 4-H: Barns, Buttons, 'N' Bows event to be November 12, 2011 (Entered: 2011/10/28 12:15:40)

7:00 PM Sat., Nov. 12, 2011 Christy 4-H Hall, Nevada

Advance Tickets: $10 at the Story Co. Extension Office ($15 at the door)

more info: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/NR/rdonlyres/EE9A0CE7-8BB0-4727-B838-0BCBCBCE1E96/154993/BBBs2011posterendowment.pdf

Auction items: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/NR/rdonlyres/EE9A0CE7-8BB0-4727-B838-0BCBCBCE1E96/158477/LarryA.pdf

Burnett Black Belt Food Drive

Burnett Black Belt Service Project (Entered: 2011/02/11 16:24:18)

We are working to earn our Black Belts in Ti Kwan do, in addition to the forms, and testing we also need to do a service project!!!

We are going to be doing a Food Drive for the CAP Agency in Shakopee,MN (http://www.capagency.org/ food shelf info: http://www.capagency.org/pages/foodshelf.htm)

We will be collecting items ourselves at home as well as eventually at Ben's work, and at the ATA Ti Kwan do school in Prior Lake (http://singewaldsata.com/)

Specific food items needed by CAP are:

• Canned fruit
• Peanut butter
• Baked beans
• Black beans
• Cereal
• Canned tuna
• Macaroni and cheese
• Rice

In addition...

Monetary Donations
Form CAP: "Food Shelf donations of money are welcome. In fact, monetary donations go farther than food donations, as the CAP Agency is often able to purchase many food shelf items in bulk quantities."

If you are not local and would like to donate, we will accept monetary donations personally through Paypal (contact me at burnettb317@gmail.com to arrange.)

We will be posting pictures and updates through the next month on this page. I will also be posting updates on facebook, our blogs and my twitter stream (such as it is).

Testing is June 11th, 2011. Wish us all luck and thank you for your help and donations....

Burnett Black Belt Food Drive

Burnett Black Belt Service Project (Entered: 2011/02/11 16:24:18)

Redirect: BensBlogEntry20110211162418

We are working to earn our Black Belts in Ti Kwan do, in addition to the forms, and testing we also need to do a service project!!!

We are going to be doing a Food Drive for the CAP Agency in Shakopee,MN (http://www.capagency.org/ food shelf info: http://www.capagency.org/pages/foodshelf.htm)

We will be collecting items ourselves at home as well as eventually at Ben's work, and at the ATA Ti Kwan do school in Prior Lake (http://singewaldsata.com/)

Specific food items needed by CAP are:

• Canned fruit
• Peanut butter
• Baked beans
• Black beans
• Cereal
• Canned tuna
• Macaroni and cheese
• Rice

In addition...

Monetary Donations
Form CAP: "Food Shelf donations of money are welcome. In fact, monetary donations go farther than food donations, as the CAP Agency is often able to purchase many food shelf items in bulk quantities."

If you are not local and would like to donate, we will accept monetary donations personally through Paypal (contact me at burnettb317@gmail.com to arrange.)

We will be posting pictures and updates through the next month on this page. I will also be posting updates on facebook, our blogs and my twitter stream (such as it is).

Testing is Mar 11th, 2011. Wish us all luck and thank you for your help and donations....

Neighborhood nurtures turtle eggs to hatchlings (Entered: 2010/11/05 15:34:04)

Here's the link (no pics, newspaper scans for pics below) http://plamerican.com/news/general-news/neighborhood-nurtures-turtle-eggs-hatchlings-110

The old lore goes that a black cat crossing one’s path is a sign of bad luck, but what does it mean if someone arrives home to a snapping turtle on the street?

For Kay Pierson and her 11-year-old daughter Sarah, the surprise appearance of a snapping turtle offered an opportunity for them to indulge their love of animals.

As Kay drove to her Prior Lake home one June afternoon, she noticed a mother snapping turtle sitting on the corner of 170th Street and Creekview Circle. As Kay pulled into her driveway, she alerted Sarah, who was playing with her neighbors, brothers Cole and Jared Burnett, ages 7 and 6. The four of them went to watch nature in action.

“We saw her and she was laying eggs,” Sarah said. “We actually saw the eggs come out of her.”

The quartet waited and watched for about 10 minutes, until the turtle finished laying all her eggs, a process Kay described as “fascinating.”

Once snapping turtles have laid all their eggs, they bury them, which is exactly what happened that June day in front of the Creekview Circle residents. At that time, construction crews had begun clearing trees to prepare the area for road construction. Sensing the danger, Kay sprung into action.

“I picked up the mama snapper,” she said. “I knew she had come from Spring Lake to lay her eggs. We didn’t want her to get hit by a car.”

There’s some inherent danger in picking up a snapping turtle, due to the reptile’s reputation as an aggressive and defensive creature.

“Normally snapping turtles want to bite to protect themselves,” Sarah said. “But the one my mom picked up didn’t try to bite or anything.”

Kay was no stranger to snapping turtles.

“I grew up with snapping turtle crossings,” she said. “They aren’t the vicious things people think they are.”

After Kay walked the turtle back out to Spring Lake, there were still more than 60 turtle eggs to deal with back at Creekview Circle. Kay sent Cole to get a pail to collect the eggs, which the turtle had started to bury at the site where the major road construction was set to occur. By this time, Cole’s mom, Alison, had joined everyone, and she used a shovel to dig a hole between the two families’ homes. Together, they buried the eggs there. They chose that location, which was in the yard, because it got plenty of sun and was out of traffic’s way.

Then came the waiting.

Kay went online and found out that it takes anywhere from nine to 18 weeks for snapping turtle eggs to hatch. Every day for the entire summer, Sarah walked out to her yard to check on the eggs being incubated in the soil.

“I would check on them every day and make sure there were no dig marks around the area because there are a lot of animals there,” she said. “I unburied them every week to just make sure they were OK.”

Sarah even had to intervene when her own dog, Remi, tried to dig near the resting eggs. Eggs can fall prey to wild critters, being a reported favorite of skunks and raccoons. But other animals weren’t the only threat to the eggs.

“My husband put orange caution tape and orange cones around the area to keep the kids out,” Alison said.

Nurturing comes naturally to Sarah, who loves animals and hopes to be a veterinarian when she gets older.

“Sarah’s very sweet,” Alison said. “Sarah’s someone who’s very caring about other people and other things.”

Sarah, a sixth-grader at Twin Oaks Middle School, is a junior naturalist and likes the outdoors. In her 11 years, she’s had a Betta fish, a dog and two hermit crabs as pets. Sarah has also rescued quite a few animals, including squirrels, a beaver and a duck.

“I love every animal in the universe,” she said.

At one point this summer, Sarah realized that her latest adoptees might have trouble escaping from the clay once they hatched.

“I was thinking clay would be too hard and they might get stuck and die from the sun beating down on them,” she said.

So Sarah mixed the clay with sand, which is “nice and loose and would be easier” for the weak baby turtles to emerge from.

Sarah continued to check on the turtles, and they began hatching in late September. When she found one out of its shell, she carried it around the neighborhood to show off to the other kids.

“I was kind of surprised because none of them wanted to hold it,” she said. “They wanted to touch it, but they didn’t want to hold it.”

So far, she’s seen that six to eight of the eggs have hatched, and Sarah has released them behind her house into a creek that leads to Spring Lake. She’s seen the tracks of other turtles that have emerged, and unfortunately, some of the turtles didn’t survive. But Sarah always knew that was a possibility, and has chosen to look on the bright side, being grateful that her mom paid attention to that mother snapping turtle.

“I was so proud of my mom for finding it and that we could experience this,” she said. “I feel really proud of myself that some of them actually survived.”

Meryn Fluker can be reached at (952) 345-6375 or mfluker@swpub.com.

help 4-H help kids get into Science, Engineering and Technology... (Entered: 2010/01/29 14:33:54)

I'm looking for contacts to pass this on to or ideas of how to proceed...

My name is Ben Burnett I am a 4-H alumni from Iowa. I am an R&D Software engineer and am constantly watching for government RFP to find funding for projects I'm working on. I recently came across a DARPA effort to: "DARPA is interested in proposals with innovative new ideas to encourage students to major in CS-STEM (Computer Science - Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and pursue careers as engineers and scientists."

I thought that maybe using this to help expand the current 4-H SET (http://4-h.org/programs_mission_mandates/set.html) program would be useful. If you are interested, you could find more information here:

• https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=2a67e7531df7c0e5f98c67897c8b2aef&tab=core&_cview=1
• http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=51079

Why we should not "reform" health care (Entered: 2009/09/15 09:42:13)

1. Although efforts have been made to reform the healthcare industry since 1912, we should not be too hasty in enacting change.

2. The federal government has no business interfering in peoples healthcare decisions, unless a woman is trying to terminate a pregnancy, or the patient's last name is Schiavo.

3. The government is incapable of running anything efficiently, and if allowed to offer a healthcare option, will run it so efficiently that it will put private insurers out of business.

4. We are a Christian nation, and we don't believe in helping the least among us. Some people just don't deserve healthcare. Getting sick is God's punishment for doing something wrong.

5. The current system, with 47,000,000 uninsured, a million medical bankruptcies annually, and 18,000 deaths annually due to lack of insurance, is working just fine. In fact, we have the best health care system in the world!

6. Even though many older couples are forced to divorce in order to avoid catastrophic financial losses due to medical expenses, it's the homosexuals who are destroying families.

7 A conversation with your doctor about end-of-life issues is an opportunity for your doctor to convince you to kill yourself.

8. We can afford to spend more on our military than all other nations combined, but we can't afford universal health care.

9. Single-payer, government-run healthcare is good enough for our men and women in uniform, but to offer the same to the general public would be socialism.

10. Pooling our resources to provide roads, schools, clean water, military, police, and fire protection for each other is not socialism. Pooling our resources to provide each other health care is socialism.

11. Socialism is bad. Very bad. Bad!

12. Health care is an issue best handled by individual states; like slavery.

13. We can afford to subsidize Israel , Iraq , and Afghanistan , all of whom have universal healthcare, but we can't afford it ourselves.

14. Money and corporate profits are more important than peoples' health. Sure, reforming the insurance companies would save thousands of lives, but shareholders' portfolios might be damaged.

15. Freeing people from holding on to their dead-end jobs for the insurance and allowing them to become entrepreneurs would bankrupt our country.

16. Someone like physicist Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die under the British healthcare system. Oh, he's British? And alive? Never mind.

17. We already have universal health care: it's called the Emergency Room. Uninsured people can go there for all their health needs (checkups, cancer pre-screening, chemotherapy, etc.), and it only costs the taxpayers a few thousand dollars per visit.

18. The Obama healthcare initiative is part of the liberal-communist-Nazi-socialist-Islamofascist-gay-atheist-zombie-transsexual-cannibal-sociopath-evolutionist agenda to take away your freedom! If this plan is passed, abortions will be mandatory, schoolchildren will be raped by their teachers, and Negroes will murder your Grandma with her pillow!

Work around for LinkedIn Group Managers to send messages to new members (Entered: 2009/03/25 15:43:12)

As a work around for the "e-mailing new members" problem, I have a solution that I use, it is a bit more time consuming, but it works....

from the "requests to join" page before you approve the users, highlight the list of users, then copy and paste into notepad, this strips all html and other formatting characters, save the file as a *.txt file. open excel then open the txt file, use "|" as the column delimiter, then "finish" once imported you should have a column of e-mails. I then use the excel function "=trim(B5)" and copy this down the entire list of users..... then copy the column of e-mails into my e-mail program (g-mail) and then send my welcome message to new members. I do this in a separate g-mail account for each group. gmail saves a list of all addresses e-mailed, so this has the side benefit of creating and keeping a mail list as well (doesn't sync back to anything to update when users leave though).

I Hope this helps everyone. --Ben

Cool portable fire pits! (Entered: 2008/10/31 14:30:31)

http://johntunger.typepad.com/artbuzz/2007/07/the-beach-burne.html

Chili and Chocolate? (Entered: 2008/04/02 17:24:16)

We do a chili cookoff/bonfire every year in Oct, I'm always trying to come up with a new chili twist, Lately I've also been interested in mixing chocolate with Chili, the aztecs started it, it must be good right? (ChiliChocolate) I've started a new page to try to find a good recipe and explore these options so that I can bring a new treat to chili cookoffs with me (see my past Chili Concoctions)

autopost test (Entered: 2007/11/15 15:30:53)