- Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling) (gentle music) (upbeat music) - Cruising your way next, "Off 90".

A lemonade Stand in Rochester, an Austin robotics team, the Hormel Historic Home in Austin, and an unlikely cross-stitcher from Geneva.

It's all coming up on your next stop, "Off 90".

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith, thanks for joining me on this trip, "Off 90".

Ben Seger launched his lemonade stand with friends for fun on a street corner in Rochester.

Three years later, the stand has become a business.

While hot weather is good for business, it can also be difficult.

Let's find out why.

(upbeat music) - We just wanted to make money one day and have fun and I came up with this idea and he helped me on it.

- With a lot of the supplies also.

- And stuff.

We did it once for fun and it just became a business.

(upbeat music) The first two times, we didn't make that much money, and now we make lots.

- [Buyer] Okay, it's lemonade and fruit punch and what was this?

- Blue lemonade.

- Okay, well I'll have one fruit punch and one lemonade.

Don't fill it too high unless you've got lids.

- Okay.

- We sold like five, six cookies today already.

- They're a good seller.

Here's four cookies.

- All right.

- Thank you so much.

- You guys have a good day.

- Ben was little, probably three years he's been doing this lemonade stand, so eight or nine, and he did really well.

He did so much better than we thought he would do.

I think he earned like $30 his first day, and I think that was enough to keep him interested, and he's been doing it every summer, probably once a week since.

(upbeat music) - Hy-Vee, we usually walk to Hy-Vee.

- Yeah.

- You know, we just live a few blocks from Hy-Vee.

They'll make a list for their supplies.

They buy their cups, they buy their own pitchers.

Every once in a while they will have cookies that are on sale.

So if they think that they can make money on a cookie, like today they're also selling cookies.

(upbeat music) - They give us the amount of money for the lemonade and sometimes they'll give us more for like tips, and yeah that's how we make most of the money.

- Yeah, they're trying to make money.

One, I think he gets to hang out with his buddies, and two I think he's finding the people of Rochester are just so wildly generous, that like he comes home and he makes money and he spends some, and then he saves most of it, and it's just been such a great learning experience for an 11-year-old.

(upbeat music) Well they're on a busy road so that makes me feel better than a less busy road, actually.

And they have not had any negative experiences.

They've had city buses stop, they have fire trucks stop, they have just, it's really been encouraging to them how wonderful the humans of Rochester are.

(upbeat music) - The hardest thing?

The heat.

- Yeah, the heat, mostly just sitting out in the heat.

- It's hard but it's worth it.

Sometimes I bring a cold towel.

- And sometimes the lemonade can get warm so we need to get more ice, which we have in our coolers.

We don't like it when our lemonade gets warm.

(upbeat music) - My favorite part about being out here is probably having, being with friends and getting money.

- Being with friends and spending a lot more time outside.

- Fun part is watching like what are you gonna do with your money?

It's been fun from like, Dad will talk to him from a business perspective.

- [Ben] It's on the Elton Hills Drive, a pretty busy street, and then they can just turn in and buy some lemonade.

- [Grayson] Yeah, so it's good.

- Ben has a brain that's just kind of built by numbers, and just watching him figure out, I have some money, I'm going to the fair this weekend, but I wanna have enough money to do a lemonade stand next weekend.

So just kind of that process for an 11-year-old is really fun to see.

- Have a nice day.

- Oh, thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - The independent robotics team, the "Microbots," from Austin is all about digital gizmos, STEM education and more.

We take a look at how the four team members combine their skills in competition.

(upbeat music) (people chattering) - We started this team because COVID shut down robotics in the Austin Public Schools, and after communicating with some of the principals, and the old coaches, it just was not going to happen last year.

So we started a team 'cause I saw that my son really needed something.

And obviously, these other kids did too 'cause they jumped on board.

- My name is Megan Grush and I am in charge of the notebook and the notebook is a documentation of what the robot has started as, and what it has changed, and why we've done it, and what we have done to the robot.

It's also part of my job is making sure that we're, during tournaments, we're in line, we're getting like, to our alliances and getting to the field on time.

- I'm Clark Ekins and I'm a driver on the team.

The year before this year I was not a driver, I was a coder, and this year I'm a driver, and I think some of my video game experience has played into this.

- How much time have you spent on this?

- Two much.

(all laughing) - I'm Ian Carolan, I'm a builder and driver on the team.

I've been doing this for two years.

For a builder, the main thing I do is sit in my basement for hours trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

And I take a lot of inspiration off of other teams and see what they do, and try to replicate it and make it better, and make it work for our robot and how we wanna do stuff.

It's a lot of time, and for a driver, I just sit there and practice.

I've always been interested in building and engineering, testing mechanisms, making sure they work.

- I'm Noah Anderson, I'm the programmer and usually that just takes a lot of time.

This is my fourth year, same as Megan, of doing robotics.

I've been coding every year.

So coding is taking the robot and telling it what to do and then the robot will do it.

So usually it takes blocks, usually, so pieces of information, and then it processes it.

If you say go forward 10 meters or 10 millimeters it'll go forward 10 millimeters, and you just slowly build on that to do a certain task.

(group cheering) - So the teams are randomly decided in the beginning of the tournament.

So you can look it up.

They give you a sheet and you can look up what teams you're with, and then you can go look at their robots, and you can talk to the team, and you can be like, hey, I'm really good at this, you guys are look like you're really good at this.

Will this work for us?

You set up and you're working together as a team to get the maximum possible points you can together.

And those points are put onto an average and the person with the highest average go towards the top.

On the field there are dispensers, and the dispensers, they have certain mechanisms, and you use your robot.

We like to put our discs right into our robot because then it's easier just to shoot.

But most teams will end up just dumping them out, and every disc that comes out of a dispenser is a point.

And then you can shoot it underneath a bar and there's point zones, and each of those point zones, if you can shoot your disc into it, you get that many points.

And then at the end game they're talking about is there's one side where where you can reach over this top of the bar and touch on the bar.

Every single disc that's in that zone gets an extra point.

- Yeah, so Ian and I here, we've composed a game plan.

Which dispensers do we get first?

When do we shoot?

Of course we touch at the end.

You also have to learn the controls.

You can program the controls to anything, so basically anything you want to.

You can program this thing to any button you want.

You can program it to two buttons, to joysticks, anything like that.

Game plans also, with other alliances, we kind of have to modify them depending on how the robot works, how they do stuff, and like what the game is, stuff like that.

- Parts, we buy kits used, because the new stuff is very expensive.

And for parts you just have to work with what you have.

If you don't have a part that another team has you have to figure out either how to make it or figure out a different way to make that mechanism, or figure out a different way to manipulate whatever you're manipulating.

- Some things about robotics is that it's not just like competing and getting awards and just going to places, it is helping in our futures, be giving us like a foundation in STEM, problem solving skills, and helping you learn to document things and working as a team.

Teamwork is a big part of it.

- Patience, you have to have with it.

I don't really have much patience, but it just helped me have more patience.

- Take your time, take your time.

- Sometimes things that you think are hard are actually easier than you think if you put your mind to it.

- I enjoy doing this because it's just really fun to have a robot that I can drive and learn how to get better with.

And I also keep doing this because all my friends are here.

(group cheering) - Best thing that I think that has come out of this is the friendships that these four have built, the friendships that they've made with other teams that they see at the competitions, or that they've met at the leagues.

- Probably the most thing I've enjoyed with doing this robotics as a group is just being here with my friends.

It's just really, I don't know how to explain it.

It just feels like a place that I'm comfortable now, I guess.

It feels like a family.

(smooth music) - What's now the Hormel Historic Home in Austin, was built more than 130 years ago and became the residence of George A. Hormel, the founder of Hormel Foods.

The structure is now a museum and a community gathering space.

We take a tour of the building's third floor and delve into the family's history.

(birds chirping) - This is Jay's room when he was growing up.

(upbeat piano music) He was eight years old when they moved into this home and he lived here until he went away to the service and then he met Germaine.

(upbeat piano music) And how many of you remember sock dolls?

See, you remember sock dolls.

So Jay had sock dolls like all of us kids growing up.

(upbeat piano music) This was Jay's room.

(soft rhythmic music) We're now entering the servants quarters.

This would've been the servants staircase going down to the kitchen where we came from earlier.

And so they would not have to disturb the family going down to the kitchen.

There's two bedrooms back here.

George and Lillian had a cook and a maid.

The butler lived not on the property.

And so these rooms became bedrooms for when it was the YWCA.

(soft rhythmic music) Interesting is the architecture, the up and down staircase, separate the children's section from the adult section.

(soft rhythmic music) This is the guest bedroom.

Lillian's mother's last three years, this was her bedroom, and Lillian stayed and took care of her.

(soft rhythmic music) Ruth Brill, a famous quilter in Austin made this particular quilt.

They found beds for the women when it became the YWCA.

After it went back to the historic formal home and people started donating items.

(soft rhythmic music) This was George and Lillian's master bedroom.

And this was a sitting room over here.

(soft rhythmic music) I have armoire here.

It's a built in armoire, faces out to what is now Fourth Avenue Northwest, but in those days it was Water Street in Austin.

I haven't seen this one.

There they are in 1918, for some event.

(soft rhythmic music) In 1927, they moved to Bel Air California and built a home out there.

(soft rhythmic music) This is the original bathroom from when it was a YWCA.

I love the pink colors in here.

It shows the era of the 1940s and '30s.

The sitting room.

(soft rhythmic music) I love the brightness in this room.

(soft rhythmic music) Another handmade beautiful quilt in here.

This concludes the tour, hope you enjoyed it.

The Hormel Home is a wonderful place to be.

George and Lillian filled this house with music many, many evenings.

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat music) - As a tax accountant, Tim Gassmann of Geneva understands numbers, and his unlikely hobby of cross-stitching happens to require a lot of counting.

Let's let Tim explain how he relaxes using numbers.

- I have been cross-stitching now for nearly 35 years, about 34 years now.

Well, my name is Tim Gassmann, and I am an accountant by trade.

I first got into cross-stitch when I told my mom when I was 11 years old, I told her I was bored.

She bought me a kit, one of those that had all of the strings already in there, had the fabric, had the needle, had everything in it, and then she's like, "Here, do this."

Never done something like this.

And so we opened it up looked at it together, and she said, "Well here's the directions, you have to go do this, you know, make a stitch like that.

And then you just count and you just follow the directions.

I have come to love this art form.

I've done small projects, I've done big projects.

I have worked on a lot of different things.

I'm trying to test my limits every time that I start a new project.

Probably done maybe 25 to 30 different projects, different scales and sizes.

A lot of the themes that I've chosen, they're more generally a religious theme.

I like "Last Supper" theme.

I've got "Footprints in the Sand," "The Serenity Prayer."

The funnest thing for me is because this is a process-oriented task, I am totally a left-brain person.

I am all about process oriented.

I never really was good with creative side of things, but if you have something and you say I want it to look like this, then it becomes a puzzle.

It's no longer creative at that point.

It's like, okay, I have this, here's the pieces, here's what I have.

You know, I have the pattern, the pattern tells me which little symbols, and it correlates to a particular color.

I got my colors and I take that color out, I put it on the needle and I follow the pattern.

I'm like, okay, I need five of these stitches, or four of these stitches.

And then I'm gonna go down one over one, and then I gotta put more of those stitches in there.

So it becomes a puzzle.

For me that relaxes me, that relaxes me, which some people might stress 'em out for.

For me it relaxes me because I'm a very process-oriented person.

Part of it's already done.

So it's like doing the same things that I like doing but then part of it's done, I just have to figure out the rest of it.

You know, I have a blank canvas and I gotta, you know, figure out where the middle of the canvas is and then count up, count over, and then start working on the pattern.

Finding the time.

I mean, I try to give myself at least a couple of hours a week of sitting down just like decompressing and working on the projects that I'm working on.

And that's probably the the biggest thing is just finding the time to work on it.

I don't look like a big needle pointer.

I can see that as this is, you know, maybe an arm wrestler, a football player, or something like that.

But I look to Rosey Grier.

Rosey Grier was a needle pointer and he did that.

So he was a football player, and he was a needle pointer.

So I say that, you know, Rosey Grier used to do this.

I tend to surprise people more than anything else.

It's like, oh, I like cross-stich.

Oh, you know, they don't think, they don't think, well, someone like you, they're like, maybe you're a, you know, like to draw.

I'm not a very creative person.

I don't do a lot of, you know, from my mind creating things.

I rely on the software to take a logo, like what I did for the TV station's logo.

I took that logo, I put it into a piece of software, and then it told me what colors to use, and where to put 'em and, and to lay it out and pattern it out.

It can get expensive.

I mean, granted, these little floss things, you know, buy 'em at different craft shops.

They're about 50 or 60 cents each.

It's about nine yards worth of floss.

And depending on your fabric, you're dividing it, there's six strands of floss, you're either dividing it in three, three pieces, two strands each, or you're dividing it in two pieces, which is three strands each.

Depends on how big the, how far apart the holes are on the canvas that you determine, you know, how many strands you do.

And then the time that it takes.

Finding the time to do it, but then the time that it takes to see the fruits of your labor, because you know, when you get to look at, you know, look at one of the projects that I did and I say I did 500 hours on one of those projects, 500 hours, that is a full-time job for a couple of months.

The only reason that someone would do this, knowing that, the only reason that someone would do this was because they love doing it or they loved just the fact it relaxed them, it made them feel good, you know, made 'em feel creative.

This particular form, if you go to an art fair, or an art craft fair, stuff like that, you probably don't see a whole lot of cross-stitching pieces, simply because of the time that goes into 'em.

And to make it worth a value, you know, I mean, to be able to sell something like that, if you're gonna represent how much time it took to do it, it'd be out of many people's price ranges.

So these tend to be more of a kind of thing where, 'cause I've done a number of projects where I would work on it and then I would give it as a gift.

When you go to a craft store, it's the one section kind of that they have all of the floss fabrics and stuff, the flosses and stuff like that, they usually carry all of the, that brand, and there's some different fabric choices and they would have so many options for that.

And they would have a wall full of different books, and magazines, and stuff like that, had all the different patterns and things like that.

That's where I got most of my book patterns that I got.

I would buy 'em at different times from those craft stores.

And now it's kind of gotten a lot less.

Kinda lucky if you got half of an aisle on both sides devoted to cross-stitching.

Plus those of us that do cross-stitch, we don't go to the store nearly as much to buy stuff, because we're still working on the projects that we set up you know, five, six, eight months ago, or whatever the case is.

I'm still working on some of those projects now.

If I run out of a particular color of fabric, or a floss, then I'll have to run in and grab some.

But then I'll just usually go through my inventory, I'm like, okay, I need five or six things.

And yes, I have run into the store 20 miles away just to buy $2 worth of floss just so I could continue working.

Probably had a little bit of a break, probably about a three or four year break where I did nothing.

And then I started back up again, and then over, off and on.

And then over the last six years I've done a lot of bigger projects that I've been doing.

And really just growing and continuing to grow, and challenging myself, and making my, making something that, you know, that looks good, good to hang on a wall, and it's a conversation piece.

My wife and I have eight kids.

Three of them love cross-stitching.

My son has just finished up one of his projects and it's a little dragon thing that he got from one of my pattern books.

But he just likes to sit and cross-stitch and he's getting better at it.

He started earlier than me.

He started at the age of nine, he's 12 now.

And so I just, I think it'll be a good thing, you know, for him, and a couple of my other kids, they enjoy doing this too.

So I'm just passing on a little bit of a legacy.

- We've reached the end of this trip.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time, "Off 90."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling)