Making Your Own Fun

Cultural Practices and Creativity, Social Activities 2 Minutes

We just spent the past month with our grandchildren, which is the height of our summer months.  They like to eat different foods, so we focus a lot on the evening meal, and the eldest, KDW, has given himself the job of choosing the menus (grilled lamb, lasagne, fried chicken, shrimp fried rice, macaroni & cheese,  and spaghetti).  We try to have one meal with mussels, which is our only granddaughter’s favorite.  All meals end with some sort of ice cream or other frozen dairy product and games, such as Monopoly, bowling, swimming, and movies.  Never a dull moment!

The children have returned to their homes, and we are alone again, naturally.  So now,  we turn our focus to our friends.  My hubby is out of town, so I’ve been seeing our friends a lot this past week.   I just said goodbye, for the evening, to some ladies who came for dinner.  I’ve heard the phrase, “There’s nothing to do around here!”   Perhaps, it’s the non-creative mind that says such a thing.  There is always something to do.  When you’re used to making your own fun, it can be most stimulating.

This weekend has been especially busy for me, in terms of interacting with friends.  Friday, we had happy hour on the back porch.  There was lovely food, conversation, beverage, laughter, and getting to know some new friends.  On Saturday, I went to Lynn’s, house for some interesting fun.  We sat in a stock watering talk, filled with water, which was delicious on a hot, muggy day.

The point is that we can make our own fun.  I have wonderful friends, and all of us are easy “entertainers”.  That is, we fix some food, and have some friends, who usually bring more food, come to visit.  We share these evenings, evenly, among one another.  I suppose it helps that we all like to entertain, we love to cook, and we love discussing our lives with each other.  Half of our group is retired and some of us still work.  That’s another story, however.

The picture that I’m featuring here, is the Saturday afternoon on Lynn’s back porch with her “spa” made from a livestock tank.  We filled it with water, set out the spread of smoked salmon (caught in Alaska by Mark & Kathy), blue corn cakes, cavier, sour cream, hummus (made from scratch with my own cooked chick peas), caprese salad (fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and pesto sauce), and some cut up veggies. Lynn made Moscow Mules, and we soaked in the water, and passed the time.  It was marvelous.  Water is such a healing element.  We put our lawn chairs in the water tank so that we could sit next to the food table and help ourselves.  The afternoon was lovely, and before we knew it, five hours had passed.

Tonight, we had a girls’ night the featured ground lamb kabobs, veggies with dip, Brussels sprouts sauteed with bacon, fresh corn on the cob, and watermelon.  The great thing about summer is that one has access to fresh fruits and vegetables.  Our conversation centered on music and the arts.

I’m not sure what motivates one to be around friends, or not to have those types of relationships.  I realize there are some people who simply do not entertain guests in their homes.  I’m sure it’s a preference that either we have or do not have.  I was raised by a mother and father who fed a lot of people when I was growing up.  Mostly, it was relatives who ate at our house, but I remember the interactions and conviviality with great affection.

What are your thoughts on entertaining people in your home?

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Published by djhbolton

I am a geographer specializing in human systems. My passion is studying underrepresented populations so that I can assist in their integration into the communities in which they live. I studied Human Ecology because it is a wonderful blend of the disciplines of geography, anthropology and sociology. No matter the context in which I find myself, I am an observer of humans in their environments and how the influences in those settings build and nurture sense-of-self, sense-of-place, and sense-of-direction in educational, familial, and community settings. My work focuses on the cross-cultural and intercultural traditions of multi-lingual populations acculturating into their receiving communities and being successful in educational arenas of higher education. This work includes gathering, analyzing, and writing about health, well-being, and environmental/social connectedness in their communities. My research focuses on Minority-majority, rural, Midwest communities. My role as director of intercultural learning and academic success at Kansas State University allows me to discover more about myself as I work with others in their paths to self-discovery in their own interactions with students and families who come from different parts of the country and the world all converging in educational spaces. Recently, I lived, worked and played in Southwest Kansas, a region marked by Minority-majority populations centers (56% – 68%). Some of my research results are used to address poverty, low educational attainment, poor health outcomes, and cultural norms in multi-cultural settings. I work to assure a representative sample for my research, so I engage in multi-lingual research (English, Spanish, Burmese, French, Tigrinya, and Somali). Building trust and relationships is the key to my success as a multilingual researcher. Presently, my research takes me in the micro-communities of populations represented by nine African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Cameroon), seven Latin American countries, and six Asian countries. Yes, it is rural Southwest Kansas, and many of the densely-settled and frontier rural communities act as receiving centers for refugees and other displaced populations, because of the availability of jobs. I am the recent recipient of National Geographic Society’s Research and Exploration grant to introduce Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to females of color. This inter-generational, intercultural class hosted middle school, high school, and adult females who learned the basics of GIS with a variety of applications from remote sensing to city planning to Google Earth, and to Pokémon GO! By the time the young ladies finished the class, they were able to build cities, map their communities, log trips from their countries of origin to the Midwest. I am in the mid-year of the grant funding, and my target for completion was July 2018. I have new funding to extend this work to new cohorts. Currently, I work at Haskell Indian Nations University on an NSF project: Rising Voices Changing Coasts addressing climate change in Indigenous Coastal Communities in Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and the Louisiana Gulf Coast. I am a mother, grandmother, sibling, friend, banjo player, and a geographer dedicated to studying humans in their environments.

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