When I wasn't out walking the trails (both human and deer), skipping stones on the lake, or playing with the dogs and cats, I typically holed up in my room. There I would draw, make diagrams of ideas and thoughts I had, or make things. Some of the things I made:

Various stuffed animals and dolls, including a horse with jointed legs and a turtle that could extend or retract its limbs and head within its shell or be taken entirely out of the shell. That was probably my best design, but I made scads of stuffed animals.

A crossbow. I don't think it could actually have killed anything larger than a grouse. I made it with bits of scrap lumber and a springy branch for the bow. The bow was the hard part, because the darts needed to be able to exit the channel they rode in, so the branch couldn't obstruct their path in any way. We also had a longbow, and I braided a thin, very strong bowstring for it.

Rock carvings. I would take a small flat stone and etch into it with a nail until a grooved pattern was deeply incised into the stone. It took days. After the pattern was done, I'd drill a hole into it, again with a nail, to make a necklace.

A simple loom, made of a cardboard box. On it, I made thin woven bookmarks, belts, and other narrow items. I loved weaving. Then I branched out into three dimensional weaving and made a little conical hat.

A pack for the dogs to wear when I went hiking. Poor old Bruno couldn't wear it, though. He could hardly suuport the weight of his own body without falling down every few yards, but he still insisted on coming along.

A frankly awful mobile of woodscraps left over from Don's woodshop, and an equally bad sculpture to match.

I spent a lot of time trying to develop and troubleshoot ideas for more creations. Sometimes the drawings and diagrams were more for the sake of working out a thought than actually implementing it, if that makes sense. Nobody in the family seemed to understand this. They would dash into my room, snatch a piece of paper or a notebook, and run and show the others what absurd things I was trying to make now, and then they would all hoot with ridicule and derision. They'd give it to Dennis and he'd pick it apart in depth, telling me I was wasting my time, why couldn't I come up with something more useful? And all the time, my siblings would laugh and say how stupid and ridiculous I was. I never told Dennis I was trying to come up with a design for pants and shoes that were extremely sturdy, that even I couldn't "nigger up". Thank goodness he didn't get his hands on that paper. I'd have had an hour long lecture about not groveling about in the dirt, about being ladylike like my sister Lisa.

None of them, including Dennis, could break my code. They tried and tried, tried to find the key (which was visual since the code had originated from a type of sign language) but, no success. This meant I could write pretty much whatever I wanted to with impunity and no one could ever read it. Obviously that couldn't be allowed. Mom asked Lisa to inquire of Yahweh about my code. The answer? "Behold, I am Yahweh thy Elohim. The code which thou askest about, the demons didst teach it to Jenny and it beith evil, an abomination to me." That was the end of that. They took every scrap of paper with even the smallest writing in code and burned it, chastising me all the while for bringing evil into the home and providing a means of communication for the demons. Dennis decided that there would be no more codes of any kind, or clubs, or forts. It seemed to me that they sought to deprive our existence of anything that coudl be even faintly pleasant or enjoyable.

The lake was now cold enough that I didn't peel off my shoes and socks and roll up my jeans to go wading in the water anymore. At home, there was a lot of emphasis on saving food up for the winter. Mom was drying prunes, and she was happy when we picked rosehips and wild strawberry leaves for tea. She also wanted us to pick wild blackberry, raspberry, and huckleberry leaves for tea, saying that it would give the tea the flavor of the plant's berries. We tried it, but the tea tasted nothing at all like the berries. We wondered why our herb teas didn't taste just like Celestial Seasoning's.

We went several times to the lumber mills to gather up mill ends for the woodstove. These days, Dennis ordered us to stack them in the back of the truck, even the very short ones, so as to maximize the amount of wood gained for the cost of hauling it. Usually Mike stacked it and I pitched it into the truck from the pile where the machinery dropped it. Once home we had to restack it all over again on the porch. It seemed unnecessary to us, but Dennis still wasn't working, unless you count the meager sales of the Gas Alerts, devices similar to fire alarms but which detected dangerous gases such as propane, butane, etc. Then for a while he brought home parts to rebuild or make starters and alternators and set the whole family up as an assembly line working on them. The idea was to sell these to someone, but I don't know if we ever did. From time to time money would get so short that we couldn't even afford to buy toilet paper. Dennis had some thin paper, the type that come in triplicate, some sort of forms. If you crumpled it repeatedly, got it wet, and hung it to dry over the shower rod, it was almost soft enough to resemble harsh toilet paper. It was certainly better than nothing at all. When we did get toilet paper, we children would pull off a small length, enough to last us if we ran out, and hide it somewhere. We seemed to run out really fast, and eventually we realized that Lisa was hiding an entire roll of each package we got. She heartily disliked having to use the colored paper. We ran short of our food and the dogs ran out of dog food, but Dennis had brought home two 50# bags of lentils. Mom cooked lentil soup for dinner several times a week, and for the dogs, the same thing, lentils. She sprouted the lentils, too. We ate lentils until we were sick and tired of them, and then we ate some more. The lentil monotony was broken only by the boxes from the food bank. These boxes never had stuff such as toilet paper, dish soap, laundry soap, feminine supplies, or toothpaste. They usually had a couple of ziploc baggies with dried milk powder, several boxes of macaroni and cheese, a few cans of vegetables, baggies of pasta, dried beans, and if we were lucky, a can or two of chili or canned pumpkin or soup. The canned soups were usally made into a sauce for the pasta. There was no butter or margarine to make the macaroni and cheese with. Sometimes there would be a box of hamburger helper, but no meat to make it with, either. We relied more and more on the dry goods that Arthur and Caroline had given us. Don and Helen gave us a few large cans of TVP. We didn't know what it was, but Helen explained it all to us. TVP stood for Textured Vegetable Protein. You could use it in place of meat for recipes, or in soups. It didn't taste very much like meat at all, but it was food, and that was what mattered to us now. Our fussy ways were beginning to fall by the wayside.