Class, cool morning, guests, grilling and fishing

Class yesterday was an in-person class. When I got to the office yesterday morning, I found the materials for the two classes, mine and Red’s. He was assigned three students in a larger room while I was assigned four students in a smaller room. I switched the lists. Gave him the four assigned to me and took the three assigned to him. It turned out to be a great swap. All the guys in my class were unabashed believers in the Lord. We established that very early in the morning and let that theme arise and express itself wherever it manifest throughout the day. It was one of the best classes I have had in a long time. I enjoyed it. They enjoyed it. I was able to share some things with the three of them that they will be able to use in their work and in their daily lives. Meanwhile, Red had a very engaging class as well. The smaller classes lend themselves to broader interaction more than the much large classes. It is even better when those interactions can be founded on a common faith.

This morning Mama opened up the windows. The outside temperature was 62°. Quite cool for this time of year. I had to wear a light jacket starting off. It did not take long for me to warm up to the point that I had to shed the jacket, but it made for a very pleasant few minutes outside as I helped Mama with the morning feeding. All the animals seemed to be celebrating the cool temperature.  It is not often that we can hear the sounds of the farm, but this morning we can – and it is delightful. The lowing calf, the crowing roosters, the birds singing to the morning. It will quickly warm up and we will have to close off the outdoors, but for now, we are bringing a little of it inside. Something I could not do a the office.

This evening the Miller family is coming over. They are on deputation going back to serve as missionaries in Mexico. They have eight children ranging in age from 18 (just graduated from High School) to 4. Two girls and six boys. the girls are number two and three in the lineup. A fun family to be around. All the boys are outgoing and will start a conversation with just about anyone. A couple of them are real talkers. It is fun to chat with them and after this evening they will have plenty to talk about. I will take them fishing after we eat this evening. The boys in the middle of the pack are very excited about fishing. It will not be the first time they have been fishing, but close to it. They went on the men’s fishing trip a couple weekends back but none of the boys caught anything. I think I can offer them a better opportunity to actually reel in a catch at the quarry lake than where they fished with the men of the church. I have enough poles and lures to make outfit that many fishermen and we have the time to give them to get that experience. Whether or not we catch anything, it will be fun. I, of course, will not be fishing. I will be managing tackle, changing and replacing lures, getting fish off the hooks, untangling lines, etc.

Mama has bought the extra meat items we will need to grill in order to feed our guests. I will once more borrow the pellet grill from Bro Zack to do the cooking. Mama and I are looking for one of our own, but we have not found the one we want to buy just yet. She wants the largest one we can afford. I want to scale it down a bit for everyday use. we will, like always, meet in the middle-ish but more towards her side of the choice. We plan on getting the cooking started about the time I get off work, finish eating by 6 pm and then head to the lake. All of the fishing will be done from the bank. I do not feel comfortable taking anyone out in the boat – although it would be fun to do some boating on the lake with the boys. I am not there yet as far as having the boat equipped with a battery for the trolling motor or having the live jackets needed to take little ones out onto the lake. Maybe by the end of the summer. For now, bank fishing will be enough. We have been wildly successful so far at that. I am praying that everyone gets to reel in at least one fish of their own.

So, today Mama will spend most of the day agonizing over the house – cleaning and straightening up. I asked again why we wait until we have someone over to straighten up the house and clean the bathrooms? We could make it a normal practice. Like most of us, we do not. At least, it gets done at some point. Don’t get me wrong. The house is not filthy. It is just cluttered and disorganized. It is generally clean. we just tend to lay things down and then not move them or put them away until we need the space for something else. Mama wants the house to be “guest ready” clean. Something we do only as required.

I find it both exasperating and rewarding.

Busy day, acclimating, win-wins

Yesterday was a busy day workwise. I was trying to keep up from the time I signed on until the time I signed off. That made the day pass by very quickly. I even took a very abbreviated lunch. I do not have days like that very often and when I do, I struggle with my connection to the internet, but yesterday it all seemed to work out. From rework on a project I had tested in an 8-hour online class to cleaning up a complicated spreadsheet to make it service a new need as we move our training online. Tomorrow I will be teaching a class all day. This will be in-person at the office. We are still drastically reducing the size of our live classes to accommodate the still touted distancing requirements, so I will have only three participants in my session while Red will have four in his concurrent session.  To think, only a few months ago each of us would have twenty-five to thirty in each of our concurrent sessions. My how times have changed.

The hurry of the day carried over into the afternoon and evening. Mama and Victoria went to look at a small house in Alvord. Victoria is starting to get the bug to get a place of her own, but it is not within her grasp at the moment so there will be a lot of time spent looking. I did not go along for the tour. because my evenings are too short to give up an hour or more on a wild goose chase. Instead, I started building the porch for Mama’s small coop building. I used up all the lumber I had taken from other projects and repurposed it in the foundation of the porch so, I ran out of lumber about the same time that I ran out of energy. I had only been working on the porch for about an hour and a half when I ran out of materials, besides, I needed to leave an access point to the coop for Mama to continue tending the her little flock while I am getting the foundation built.

I will go to Lowe’s at lunchtime today to buy the lumber for the deck of the porch so that I can get it all done at once. I am making a corner step onto the porch so that Mama can easily get onto the porch from the front and get to the yard of the coop - which is to the side of the coop building - without having to exit the front and walk around the corner of the porch to access the coop yard. At least, that is my plan. We will see how that works out. I have laid out the foundation to accommodate the corner steps. As I put it all together, some things may have to change, but I at least have a plan in mind.

The issue with starting something like that in the late afternoon is that it is difficult to acclimate to the heat. By the time I get out – after shutting down work – I have to start in the hottest part of the day. Yesterday, by the time I started, the temperature was 97°. The humidity has been high but not like Honduras. There was no breeze. It was dead still. In the time I spent working I was soaked from the top of my head to the knees of my pants. Those are the times that wearing glasses becomes a pain. Sweat constantly dripping into the glasses as I bent over to build the porch foundation. Sweat dripping from my nose onto the boards I was working with. Sweat dripping from the end of my shirt sleeves. I was wet. At some point I will acclimate to the heat, but I am not there yet. Tonight, I will get as much done as I am able. We will see how far I get. But I know Wednesday and Thursday evenings are taken for church and entertaining a missionary family.

Months ago, I was able to get about 60 pallets from a guy down the road from us. Since I have been very slow to use those pallets, I gave about 40 of them to Daniel Wycoff. He and his son Steven are repurposing the wood into a variety of projects and they had just run out of pallets. I am happy for them to get the stacks off the farm. Those stacks have become a harbor for pest and snake by the wellhouse in the bran lot. Moving them out will allow me to keep that area mowed properly. Giving them the pallets will be a help to them as well. A win-win.

Meanwhile, there has been great progress on the houses in Lawton. we are not sure how long it will be before they are ready to be rented, but it should be very soon. Praise the Lord!

Trade Days, honey, the cover, words

Mama and Victoria set up a table at Trade Days Saturday. They were trying to market Color Street. I do not think they were overly happy about the event. They sold some sets of nails, but nit as many as they had thought they would. Besides, it was HOT. They stayed from about 8 am until 2 pm. It was a great learning experience for them. They learned Sunday evening at church, that another stylist had set up a table in the air-conditioned area just behind where they set up. Just beside Mama and Victoria was a family selling a variety of items but one that caught Mama’s attention was the barrels they offered for sale. When Mama let me know, I took the time to drive to Bowie and buy two of the barrels. We will substitute the barrels for others we can them use as burn barrels. I do not burn items too often but the barrel we had been using for that purpose has disintegrated for what use it has seen. It was long overdue to be replaced. The price of the barrels was not great but buying them there saved me a lot of time and phone calls to find the barrels we needed. As far as Mama going back to Trade Days, she will not go back until September or later when things cool down a little.

Before I left to meet Mama and buy the barrels, I spent about an hour working the hives. Earlier in the week I got a bee suit I ordered. It was considerably more expensive that the one I originally purchased and have been using but the difference in quality and functionality was amazing. It is made of a special ventilated material that was very comfortable in the heat that morning. It also is quite a bit more secure as far as protection from the bees. I did not even pay attention to the ones that were around my face guard. It was very pleasant to work with the hives in that gear.  Now I need to save up and get Mama one.

While I was working one hive, as I lifted off the syrup feeder, the I split two rows of comb filled with honey that the bees had made on top of the frames. I scraped off the comb and honey and put it in one of the jars I had available from the syrup feeders. The bees were not leaving the comb, so I blew a little smoke into the jar to encourage them to vacate. that was a huge mistake. It made the honey taste like smoke. I allowed all the honey to drain from the comb over the rest of Saturday and all-day Sunday. I hated that I ruined our first honey, but it was a good learning experience.

Later in the day Saturday, I put the metal on the roof of the new covering on the little coop building. It was too hot for me to do too much outside, but I wanted to get that done. As I acclimate to the heat over the next couple weeks, I will be able to do more, but Saturday was a struggle. I soaked two shirts through the day. When one got too wet I would take it off an hang it on the back of a chair sitting in the garage to dry. When that shirt got too wet, I would exchange it with the dry shirt from the back of the chair and repeat the process as needed. Neither of those shirts smell too good this morning. But the roof is on the little coop. Now I will work on the porch. Always something to do.

A quick note about words. The issue with the spoken and written word is that we do not have exclusive rights to interpretation once a word is spoken or written. It can be misinterpreted, misquoted, taken completely out of context, twisted to mean whatever the reader imagines. Some of the ongoing Facebook spats are a case in point. Once you have aired your opinion or “voiced” your grievance, you no longer have control of the message. It is for others to determine the interpretation of your words. They can do so in whatever way they please. You can respond in rebuttal. “That was not my intent.” That is not what I said.” But both what you said and what they said in response become permanent records in the ethnosphere. Too many people have been wounded by a harsh word quickly spoken in the heat of the moment. All exacerbated by our current angry atmosphere.

As I have said in the past, and will repeat, anger will make you feel strong, powerful – but it will never allow you to act or speak wisely. What you say or do in those passionate, angry moments cannot be undone. It will live on regardless of your adamant denials of an erroneous interpretation. It will be used against you. Speak wisely. Communicate your thoughts wisely.

You will be stuck with those ramblings for years to come.

Office needs, Bro Walker

Mama and I went to town yesterday afternoon so that I could go the office and meet our IT guy so he could look at my computer. It is flashing off and on at odd intervals. During those episodes, if I can catch it during one of the “on” cycles and restart it, it has come back to life and functioned properly for a time. With what I am doing in the online presentations that are either four or eight hours in length, I need to make sure my computer is capable of making it through the entire class. Especially since the participants are paying customers. I also needed to see where I was going to be allowed to present the class since my usual perch was taken. As it turned out. The IT guy was not able to meet me, but I was able to find a spot for the class tomorrow. I am not thrilled about the room I will be in, but I will make the most of it. It is only for the eight hours. As our schedule fills up with these online classes, we will have to designate a spot where we can maintain a setup for the presentations. Where they have me tomorrow will work with a few modifications, but I do not know if that will be the answer.

I have to go back to the office this morning to meet with our tech guy. It is a bit like taking your car to the mechanic because of an intermittent issue. That issue never manifests itself while the mechanic is available. I do not know if this is an exercise in futility, but I will give our guy a chance to see if there is anything obvious. In preparation for a complete failure, I copied by desktop – where most of my files are now housed as I work remotely – to a portable hard drive. I can make up for most of the loss if my computer crashes, but it never works seems to replicate the files completely. Something always seems to get lost. This time, I will see if we can preempt this crash.

Last night for our final service of this week, Bro Walker brought out Champ and Dixie. Champ is a 19-year-old registered American Miniature Horse that has traveled with the Walkers for ten years now. Both the animals are trained to do certain tricks that help the Walkers preach. For kids, it is especially effective, but the effect is almost as profound on the adults in the crowds. I did not video the sermonette or the actions of the animals. It was difficult to see all the action from where we were sitting, but the dialogue that went along with the antics moved seamlessly between hilarious and serious as the Bible lesson/sermon unfolded. I can see why the Walker’s have been so successful in their ministries, seeing over ten thousand persons saved through their ministry. We thoroughly enjoy them every time they are with us. This week was encouraging, uplifting, refreshing. Mama and I never regret any extra time spent at the church and the time with the Walker’s was exceptional.

This evening, I have a very long list of things to get done. Most important will be watering the garden. We have gone from being so soaked that we were constantly in the mud to being on the verge of dusty dry once again. I have not had the time to water the garden in the last few evening, but I have managed to keep the plants near the house well-watered. Tonight, I will get to rectify that neglect. Hopefully, I am not too late. I will also take down the piece of metal I installed in the small coop to keep the young chickens from getting under the coop building. When we first put them in the area, they nestled down for the night under the building. It took all three of us to get all of them out and onto the roosts, so I blocked access to that area until they had adapted to the building and the roosts. It has been a week now since they were introduced to their new home. I think they are ready.

Tomorrow, I will be teaching all day.  It will be our first 8-hour online class. I was able to get the room set up for tomorrow as I waited on the repairs to be done to my laptop. I needed to have Mikel, our IT guy, set up a network switch so Red (who will be in the class with me) can connect to the internet via a DSL cable. There is no wireless access in that particular room.

Now I feel a little better about the presentation.

Passing the days, picking, stuck fast

Working from home has its blessings, but it also has its downfalls. One of the things that I struggle with is fitting my work into Mama’s daily life. In Mama’s world being in sight means I am available for chores, for conversation, for company in general. That is not always the case. She has adapted well enough to my constantly being around as she tries to give me space and some semblance of quiet while she goes about her day. One of the primary struggles on my part is having to share her phone conversations – whether I want to or not. Mama never takes a private call. All her calls are taken on “speaker”. The volume is usually maxed out and she responds to that volume in kind during her part of the conversation. With the calls she gets from our children and the calls she has to make for her business, it can be very distracting. She tries to tone things down, but it is still a challenge to work through those conversations. Then there are the times when she starts a conversation with me as I am working, concentrating on the writing I am working on, and I have to stop and find out my part of the conversation. I don’t really mind. Mama is my life’s most pleasant distraction but I still like to focus on the fact that I am actually working.

Mostly though, the days simply pass by uneventfully. As uneventful as things can be at the farm. I help Mama with the morning feeding almost daily. The calf is a bit much for her to feed since she has grown bigger. All bottle babies butt the bottle as you feed them. Our little one does so with a vengeance. I am often surprised that her nose is not bruised after each bottle. We give her only one bottle now. A morning feeding, for which I have been available for almost the entire time we have had her. That has been a blessing to Mama even though it shortchanges her on her steps for the day.

Tonight will be our last extra service this week. Tomorrow evening will be catch-up at the farm. Mama and I have enjoyed the extra preaching. I hesitate to call the extra services a revival. I do not sense a revival within our members, or within myself. Maybe I am not ready or willing to be anything more than is minimally necessary in my service to the Lord. Maybe I am too distracted or perhaps over-committed in areas of my life that make it difficult to allow the Lord to use me as purposefully as He would like, but I am willing to ask where those issues are and corral them to have more time for the Lord. All too often the personal constraint required to pull back from our commitments is emotionally taxing. An uncomfortable rearranging of priorities that displace or entirely replace familiar, comfortable activities. That is where the extra services help. If it is difficult to make the time to go to church for a couple of extra services, it only shows how little I am able to accommodate the things of God in my life. Sad.

Very quickly before church last night I picked the ripe blackberries from the wild bush in the fence line along the driveway. It was too loaded to let the opportunity pass. I was able to fill a bowl with the ripe berries. For now, Mama and I are freezing the berries to save them for cobblers or smoothies. So far, we have seven quarts of blackberries in the freezer. It has been worth the extra effort. In only a few days we will be picking peaches. Our little tree is loaded to the point that some of the branches are bent down dangerously. I am not sure if they will make it to ripening but there is no way to help them support the weight of the ripening fruit. I will prune the tree heavily this winter to see if I can get the tree to thicken those branches in case the tree does as well next year.

On the way home from church, we got a call from Alex. He and Leslie and their friend Andy had gone fishing at the quarry lake yesterday evening. Trying to find a more accessible spot to access the small upper lake, Alex had driven into a ditch and was stuck fast. He sent Mama a picture of the truck. Since my tractor is not operational right now all I had to offer was the truck. Unfortunately, he was stuck so badly that my truck could not budge his truck. As I looked more closely, I found that his truck was sitting with its frame on the ground because the ditch he had driven into was that deep. The sides of that ditch were straight up and down. I am not sure my tractor would have been able to pull him up and out of that situation. Darkness was falling fast so we abandoned the truck and I took the three fishermen home.

Mama called Ricky, the property owner, to let him know we had left the truck on his property and he offered to pull Alex out in the morning. He has two large tractors available to get the job done. Hopefully, they will work out the timing this morning. If I had know last night that the tractors had the keys in them I could have used one of them to pull the truck out, but it is better to have that done in the daylight in case there are issues in putting that much strain on the front end of the truck.

We will know how it all worked out later this morning.

Uploads, services

Last night was revival service at church so we had a short evening for a Monday. It was made even shorter by the need to upload some items to the company server. Victoria needed some good internet as well. So, Victoria, Mama and I went to my office to use the internet before church. On the way we stopped at our favorite Thai restaurant and picked up some food to eat while we worked on the electronic projects we needed to finish. One of my bosses was at the office when we let ourselves in but left soon after, I am not sure if she knew Mama and Victoria were in the building with me, but it did not seem to alarm her if she did know. Right now, I am not sure what is acceptable or not. It all worked out as far as I know now. Neither Victoria nor I were able to complete our projects. Mine was an upload to the company server. Hers was a download from the cloud to her computer. Both of us left our computers at the office as we headed to church, planning to return for them afterwards.

We had a great service. Bro Walker preached on prayer. Serious, submissive, specific, and steadfast. That was his outline of the passage in 1 Samuel when Hannah prayed for a son. Most of us are only serious in our prayers when there is an urgent personal need. There is nothing wrong with that, but we can pray urgently about so much more. One of the things that soured me to the charismatic movement was their insistence that God was bound by His word to the point that we could force Him to do our will by claiming His Word in prayer. God is perfect. Holy. He will not do that which opposed His Word or His character. How could we possibly understand His will to the point that we could “bind” Him to do our will?

The un-submissive nature of that approach to God was anathema to me. How could I order about my Creator? No one in that church seemed to understand my concern. And though I loved some of them dearly, I had to leave. As far as praying specific, many of us do not. It is too much trouble to pray specifically when we can often provide for ourselves what we need in one way or another. Rarely do we pray specifically for others. Erring on the side of generality, we ask God to bless, to help, to direct, etc., versus asking for specific help, blessings or direction.  Few of us are steadfast in our prayers – unless the need is urgent and remains unmet. we get distracted, discouraged when the answer to our prayers is delayed (in our way of thinking). It was not a guilt producing sermon. It was simply an outline on how to accomplish what we need to do to pray effectively. Mama and I certainly took it to heart. we have been praying together before bed almost every night. Those times of prayer have gotten more and more specific as we practice what we have learned about prayer.

Once we were out of the service, we went back to the office and checked the computers. Mine had finished what I had set it to do. Victoria’s had not. From what we could figure out, I had gone to sleep fifteen minutes after we had left it. Once we woke the computer, it started the download again. I sent Mama and Victoria to Braum’s to get the ice cream Victoria wanted while I stayed at the office and monitored Victoria’s computer. It was still only half done by the time they got back to the office, so we will have to reset the program tonight at church. They have good enough internet there to finish the download. If we start the download before the service begins, it should be done by the time we are out of the service. This is one of those times that we are disappointed not having internet at the farm, but these times are few and far between. The ongoing expense of installing and maintaining internet at the farm is not an expense I am willing to stretch our budget to cover at this time. When I no longer have the option of working at the office for those times when I need internet, we will have to consider signing a contract with a provider, but not yet.

Everything is on hold at the farm while we spend our evenings at church. It is a good tradeoff.

Dead as she sits, Declined, new porch, church

Early Saturday morning, I went to the equipment shed where we had the tractor parked and climbed into the seat, put in the key and turned it. Nothing. I checked the placement of all the gear shifts and the brake. Tried again. Nothing. Then I started to really troubleshoot. As I did, I found two groups of wires in the wire harness for the safety switches had been chewed through. I tried to repair one of the two breaches, but when I finally looked at the second, I discovered there was no way to repair it. It would have to be completely replaced. The rat or squirrel had chewed it through right above the connector. I gave up hope of any immediate repairs and called the tractor service center near us. They have to order the harness; $140. Not overwhelming in price. It will be overwhelming in the work required to install it. Hopefully, Grandpa can help. But it will be Thursday evening at the earliest before we can work in it. So, the tractor is dead where it sits. I told Mama I have had two bad experiences when parking the tractor under the equipment shed. I will not do so again. I feel badly leaving it out in the yard, but I have far less issues when I do.

With my plans for the morning shot, Mama and I headed to Costco. We had nothing particular to buy there but it has been a while since we had been in the store. There are a few items we knew were available there, but nothing urgent. Of course, it was very crowded when we got there. Saturday morning, just after opening. We ran into an issue at the door. Costco was not allowing anyone in the store without a mask. To be fair to Costco, everyone was required to wear a mask. No exceptions. Fair enough. It is certainly their prerogative to do so. I immediately turned back to the car. I had had a bad morning and did not want to say anything to the persons at the door to voice my objections. There is nothing they can do  and everyone else was complying. Mama, however, was not going to leave without saying something. Fifteen minutes away was Sam’s. They are not requiring masks to be worn to shop in their store, so we shopped there. You may ask why we did not comply? Not only is there no efficacy to wearing a mask, it is actually harmful for healthy people to do so. That truth will slowly come out over the next few months, but it will be hidden for as long as possible. It is a symbolic gesture. Nothing more. If Costco had required me to put on a red arm band in order to enter the store, I would not have complied. Sam’s has everything we need without the imposition of restrictions. It is like a fancy restaurant requiring a certain type of clothing to admit a patron. I have no issue with that, but there are lots of other places to eat if I do not choose to meet their demands.

Once we got home, I was not immediately focused on what to do. My tractor was down and all the plans I had for that were shot. So, I wandered around the shop looking at what materials I had. It dawned on me that I had enough pieces to start the porch on our little coop building. Since it is permanently (at least as much as we do so here on the farm) set, it needed a porch. I had a choice of facing the coop building either East or North when it was built several years ago. I chose North. It made the building more accessible and easier to watch relative to the house. The little coop was set to match, but since many of our storms come in from the North, it needed a porch with a cover to block some of the rain that will surely come. I got to the point where I needed more materials to complete the project. That will happen later in the week because we have church every night through Wednesday.

The Walker family is with us for the services. Yesterday’ services were great. We met in the fellowship hall, properly spaced out to maintain our imposed distances – sort of. It all worked out. DW, the eldest son gave a Sunday School lesson yesterday morning. It was as humorous as it was impactful.  Aimed at the children but speaking to the adults some Eternal truths as well. We sang one congregational which I was asked to lead. But after the first verse I had to ask those playing the instruments to lower it because it was way too high for me and singing it an octave lower would have been too low for the congregation. I found it is a bit harder to find my starting note when singing with instruments versus hearing the piano. No one minded the hiccup. In each service the Walkers sand a couple additional songs and Bro Walker preached. It was relaxing, enjoyable and uplifting. It was reviving.

Tonight, we will go back for more.