The Gospel Film

Travel, Oh, no’s, more travel ahead, moment by moment

Our trip over the weekend to Amarillo went without a hitch. Victoria was able to travel with us and Owen and Gailyn thoroughly enjoyed her participation in their activities in those hours we got to spend alone with them, which happened mostly Friday evening between 2 pm and 7 pm. The combined birthday partied took place Saturday at 10 am. They were rescheduled from Sunday to Saturday to allow me and Mama to attend. Mama and I were very appreciative of that. It was not a long visit, but it was a great visit. It was cold, but tolerable since almost all our time was spent indoors. We got a hotel Friday evening which was a disappointment is several ways but having our own beds without Chase and Makaila rearranging their house to accommodate us facilitated the trip.

The hotel was not bad, it was just a little frustrating in a couple areas. Victoria and I made three round trips from our room on the fourth floor to the front desk to get our access card reset because it would not unlock our door. We took the stairs each time which gave us some exercise, but it was frustrating to have to repeat the trip after the second failed programming attempt. Once in the room, a fairly large room, we were comfortable enough with the two queen sized beds and the small sitting area, but I am glad Mama and Victoria did not need to shower Saturday morning. When I used the shower the pull tab on the faucet was broken. Only half the internal stopper was attached to the tab so that when I started the shower only half the water flow came out of the shower head. It was enough water for me, but I do not have an issue getting my hair rinsed when I wash my head. All in all, it was okay. It is a little disappointing to pay as much as is charged by hotels only to find that the accommodations are barely adequate.

This morning I woke to a very trouble stomach. Chase had called to warn us that all four of them had only recently recovered from a stomach bug. It appears that there was enough infectious potential left in the family to affect me. Time will tell, but on the bright side, it was only a 24-hour bug for all of them. It is unpleasant but endurable. It is what the Apostle Paul refers to as a “light affliction.” All things being equal, I should be better tomorrow. Since I have to teach an 8-hour class, it would be better for me to be better by then. That class will be my only class this week since Mama, Victoria and I are traveling again starting Thursday morning.

This coming trip is to visit with Brittany and Andrew and celebrate birthday parties for the girls. In our absence this last weekend, Trace managed the feeding and watering schedule for our flocks and herds. The same will apply for the coming weekend. We will arrive in New Jersey Thursday morning and get back home Monday afternoon. Another quick trip. We are planning on traveling light in the hope of not having to deal with checked luggage. That will avoid the delay in arrival and will enable Brittany to fit us and our luggage into her vehicle when she comes to meet us at the airport. It is my first return trip to New Jersey since we left in late 2010. Going on twelve years now. Mama visited a couple times during the move Brittany and Andrew made a year or so ago, but this will be a first for me and Victoria. I am looking froward to seeing friends and family we have there from the ten years we spent in our church home there.

Meanwhile in Honduras, Cori and Nate continue to struggle to fully comprehend Blake’s insulin needs. We are praying that the newly updated passports get to them this week so that they can schedule a visit to an endocrinologist here in the States. They are wrestling through the administration of life-giving medication with far too many unknowns. For instance, the medical guidance they are currently following limits the administration of insulin to once every three hours, but Blake’s blood sugar ran high all day yesterday. His bedtime reading, which was less than three hours from the last injection of insulin, was over 400. What do you do? No one they currently have access to seems to feel qualified to give an answer. Therefore, it is imperative that they get some help from someone who understands juvenile diabetes and can help them tailor a program, a regimen, specifically suited to Blakes needs using what is available to them in Honduras. A very tall order. Thankfully, we serve a very big God.

Services yesterday were phenomenal. Caleb Garraway preached both services for us. He is a dynamic speaker. For a young man, only in his mid-thirties, he has had a prolific career so far. He has written seven or eight books on scripture, several children’s novels, produced dozens of music and educational CDs aimed at both children and adults. His latest project is called The Gospel Film. A video presenting the Gospel in a very clear way. The project will have the video produced in fifty-five languages in the first phase. Complete with text on the screen and voiceover for each of those languages. So far the video has gone out to over 40 million people in fourteen language groups. It is worth checking out and sharing. You can follow the link or look it up at saved@thegospelfilm.org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbVqFVujkUE  

Walter, Blake, chimney repairs, Senior’s dinner, still Winter

As far as health updates are concerned, Walter is now fully recovered from the illness that had him in the hospital for a couple days. Maggie, on the other hand, is quite ill with ear infections and the accompanying pain and general malaises that accompanies those infections. I am sure she will recover but for the moment she is feeling very poorly. Walter is still required to have an echocardiogram some days from now, so he is not cleared fully by the doctors, but he is feeling mostly normal.

Blake, along with Cori and Nate, are continuing to adapt to the life-changing condition of Blake’s diabetes. Checking blood sugar, giving injections (shots) of insulin several times per day – at least at each meal – and ferreting out the information required to predetermine, when possible, the dose of insulin based on the carbs ingested at each meal or snack. All are in good spirits so far, but we are only in the very early phase of treatment that will affect every hour of Blake’s life for the foreseeable future. Every bite of food, every drink of beverages (except water), will require the course correction of adding - by injection - the required dose of insulin to compensate for those ingested nutrients. It is not like they can just avoid the “bad” food choices. Every bite of any food must be summed up for the carb content and an appropriate dose of insulin must be put into Blake’s body to control his blood sugar. The constant vigilance of that scope can be overwhelming, so we need to continue to keep them in our prayers as they adapt.

Plans are in the works to get Cori and Blake to an endocrinologist in the United States in the very near future so that they will be able to get prescriptions for some of the more advanced diabetic aids unavailable in Honduras. Better insulin choices and far better equipment for administering the multiple daily doses of insulin required.  Better devices for checking blood sugar. How to arrange that extra trip stateside has not been determined yet, but there is, at least for the present, no urgency. They can keep up the required regimen with what is readily available. It is costly to do so. Potentially several hundred dollars per month, but budget adjustments will be made, and all the family will participate in the ongoing treatment protocols willingly. What else can you do? When needed, God will give the increase and supply the need. A life lived for the Lord has proven that truth to me and Mama.

As scheduled, the repairs on the chimney were completed last Friday. Those repairs included placing a seal on the top of the chimney and adding an external damper to the flue (chimney pipe) so the unusable damper at the top of the firebox in the house could be cut out. That done, Mama and I are going to paint the firebox in the fireplace just to beautify is a bit.

To make the fireplace serviceable, Mama and I bought a pan to put in the fireplace to ease cleaning the ashes out when we do have a fire and we bought a grate to hold the logs as they are added to the fire once we start one. Our first fire was lit today, and Mama is enjoying it thoroughly. Most of what we have available to burn is poor quality logs, but we will exhaust that supply before I harvest more firewood from the properties dead trees and fallen limbs. It is nice to have a fire in our fireplace.  

Saturday was the warmest day of 2022 thus far. Temperatures reached the low eighties. It did not last long, but it gave me time to do some cleaning in anticipation of the cold weather that we knew was approaching. I did not tackle too much because Mama and I were attending a Senior’s dinner at the church in the late afternoon that day. That dinner provided a very relaxing and fun evening. There was so much food brought that the thirty-five or forty attendees could not possible have eaten it all, in fact we barely made dent in the sum total of the offerings. On the dessert side, the same was true. We ate slowly, some played cornhole and then dominoes, but most of us participated vicariously while we maintained long conversations in varying groupings of talkers. Mama and I had a great time. We lingered in conversations with friends. We helped clean up, said some prolonged goodbyes, and we were still home before 9 pm. My kind of party. Clearly, we are not as young as we used to be, but we can learn to enjoy the life we are now able to live.

Monday continued warm but by Tuesday evening the temperatures were below freezing and will continue to stay there until late Thursday. Just a reminder that it is still Winter. Fortunately, overnight Monday night into Tuesday we got almost two inches of rain.

That was a great blessing!

Control, frailty, simple things

After a brief overnight shower, things are drying up quickly thanks to a steady thirty mile-per-hour wind. The high for today has already passed and the temperature is falling in an impressive manner. To think that all these temperatures and high winds are caused by air movement from one area to another to try to find a balance in pressure. That movement is caused in large part by the constant, predictable spinning of our earth in space during the cycle of its annual loop through space as we circumvent the sun. I am constantly amazed by the faithfully executed cycles of our planet within the solar system wherein God placed us. Year after year we know the cycle and we adapt our lives to it as we are completely unaware of the forces that keep that cycle going though those cycles affect every aspect of our lives. Summer and Winter and Springtime and Harvest will always be until God tells them to stop.

Yet in spite of the unalterable dependability of the forces that govern our yearly cycles here on Earth, our individual lives are far less predictable and far less certain. We generally tend to think of our lives as a constant, but such is not the case. Our frailties as human beings become apparent in so many ways, none of which are welcome in the situation that emphasizes one of those frailties. Such was the case with Walter over the past few days. He has been suffering from an inner ear infection which finally expressed itself in a disgusting discharge from the ear. Several trips to the doctor and eventually the Emergency Room were required to properly diagnose and treat the infection and until the discharge began there was some consternation as to the cause of Walter’s discomfort.

Thankfully, in this age of medicine, there are remedies to battle both the infection and the pain that the infection is causing. Hopefully, it will be cured soon, and life will return to the normalcy that allows us to consider ourselves masters of what we survey. Champions of outcomes over which we have precious little impact. It just makes us feel better to consider ourselves masters of our own destinies, yet even a minor illness can interrupt that confidence. Which is why we have suffered for two years in fear of a disease we could have easily treated at is inception. Nevertheless, God is still fully in control, and He always seeks our good and His Glory in every circumstance of our lives. Romans 8:28. So, hang in there, help is already on the way.

Mama and I have been treating the goats lately for what appears to be lice. We have not done any scrapings on the heads of the bucks– where there is the evidence of continuous rubbing (presumably because the skin itches) to verify that assumption, but we will know if we are on the right track very soon. Again, one of those situations a little beyond our ken for which we do the best we can using what knowledge we have gained over the past few years – limited though it may be. Plus, with the cold overnight temperatures we are limited to what we can apply, since it is in liquid form, to relieve the itching the goats seem to be dealing with. No sense chilling them in treating them. Warm days are ahead soon enough.

I will be teaching a half-day class tomorrow and off for President’s Day this coming Monday. It has been a while since we had a long weekend, and I am looking forward to it especially because of the very warm temperatures forecast for those days. Monday, the 21^st is supposed to reach eighty degrees! That will only last a day and will be followed by some very cold temperatures, but we can make the most of that day since we have advance warning. Sometimes the forecast is actually helpful to us.

Mama is out shopping today trying to take advantage of a sale being offered by a local grocery store. We are especially looking to stock up on meats – specifically beef. The store is offering a buy one get one for one cent. Something akin to 50% off. We were alerted to the sale by a friend at church. She told Mama she had instructed her husband to get a few of the meat items while they were on sale. Without that simple statement to sharpen our focus Mama and I pay little attention to the flyers from this particular grocery store. Mama and I agreed that it was a good idea. It is the little things in life that give us the most occasion for celebration. We need to spend more time looking for those little things, like a timely reminder from a friend.

We may be occupants of a vast, unknown universe, but the simplest of pleasures are what make our lives worthwhile. Loving the Lord and looking for his daily benefits in our individual lives provide mast of those simple pleasures.

The God who controls our universe, loves little ol’ me. What a marvelous thought!

Even baby plants are acute, prep for rain, prep for repairs, early voting

Mama and Victoria are always attracted to and enamored by tiny living things. A little child, a puppy, a kitten, a newborn goat, a small chick, anything young and new to the world. Now I have learned that even baby plants are cute. Mama told me so yesterday as she was looking over our newly sprouted potato plants. To my way of thinking, the little ones, plant or animal variety, are the beginning step in a long process. That beginning is one of the encouraging stages in the multifaceted process that will eventually produce fruit, or offspring, as the case may be.

Baby Potato

I see a good start in the tiny sprout and begin immediately to anticipate the blooms that will indicate the potential for fruit to be set by the plant some weeks from now. So, while they are cute to Mama, they are only at the inception of producing the outcomes I look for from each sprout. I guess it as much the biology major in me as it is the male in me that sets those quantitative expectations, but I am trying to see the cuteness of the little plants as well. Mama perspective is so much more fun than mine.

Yesterday, during my lunch break I walked over a mile in laps back and forth through the yard – front and back – spreading the fertilizer that Mama bought a few months ago at Lowe’s. Those very large bags of fertilizer cost her $5 per bag at the time. The store was trying to clear out the leftover bags which normally are priced a $65 per bag so I had Mama get three bags. Those three bags were enough to cover the large areas we have in our back and front yards. I chose yesterday to spread the fertilizer because there is a strong probability of rain in the forecast for today and overnight.

The volume of rain is not much as far as the forecast is predicting, but even a quarter inch will dissolve the tiny pellets and allow the nutrients to soak into the ground. In this case, a soft, gentle rain will be better than a flooding downpour. At least that is my hope. Nonetheless, the task is done, and the timing should be about right for our area since the days are warming up. We will have a hard freeze tomorrow night, but those are fewer now and the temperatures almost always get well above freezing through the days. Yesterday’s high was in the mid-seventies. Today will be the same. Fortunately, the onions we put out can survive those overnight lows and the potatoes planted in the garden are not yet sprouted. So far, so good.

Through the lunch hour today and tomorrow I will prep the fireplace for the repairs scheduled to be done Friday afternoon. The recent inspection of the fireplace provided the path forward to calculating the repairs and Mama and I evaluated the cost of those repairs versus leaving the fireplace in an unusable state. The cost is not as high as I had imagined, and the repairs are slated to take only one afternoon to complete. Our expectation is that by Friday night, we could actually use the fireplace as it was designed to be used. That will be nice. It is the first of the repairs/upgrades Mama and I will be doing to the house over the next few months. It will not be obvious to the unobservant, but it will be a great selling point if Mama and I ever pursue selling the farm. Plus, I do not like for things to not be working as they should, and it will be nice to be able to have a fire in the fireplace – especially when we lose power to the house in the colder months.

Of being bothered by things not working as they should, I am reminded of the father in Mary Poppins. When the neighbor’s cannon was fired and the father ended up sitting on the piano bench as things in the house were moved in the shaking caused by the cannon fire, the father mentioned to the wife as he struck a key on the piano, “And Madam, have someone tune that piano.” The wife’s response was, “But Dear, you don’t play the piano.” “Madam”, he thundered, “That is entirely beside the point!” I can sympathize with that sentiment.

Today Mama and I are going to vote early for the primaries in our state and local elections. This will determine which Republican will face which Democrat in the November general election. It took me a bit of time to decide on the candidate selection, but I have a cheat sheet prepared for us to use. I am very concerned about the general election this year.

I hope you are as well.

Our normal, gifts, prep for travel

Thing have been quiet and normal at the farm for the past few days. That is a blessing considering what has been going on around us in our nation and in the world. The overlapping stories and rebuttals, the shouting down of one narrative versus another, the lies being exposed and the posturing of those now proven to have lied is enough to put a rational person in a prolonged bad mood. But when I look carefully at our animals there is a powerful object lesson the be learned. Our chickens don’t care about the political turmoil. They still like Mama’s treats and they continue to lay eggs for us. Our goats don’t care. They still want to be fed twice daily and will try to knock you down to be the first at the feed trough even though they know that the feed will be the same as it has been every day prior. The dogs don’t care. They still want our attention and the still work hard to protect our property. Their dependence on us for their daily needs reminds of our dependence on our Heavenly Father for our daily needs. There is a constancy for us.

We still need to do our part to make things right in the world, but we cannot be so distracted by all the hubbub that we lose focus on those things that anchor us to truth and reality. Our garden will still grow in spite of the confusion around us. We will still eat several meals daily in spite of the cost of everyday items rising faster than we imagined possible. I cannot say that we are unaffected by the condition of the world around us, we just get the chance to compare that to something predictable, something reassuring in our everyday lives – more so that many around us who are absorbed in the conflict, wasting so much emotional energy on things that we have little influence to change. Little ability to determine the outcomes for the better. So, Mama and I pray, we plant, we feed, and we stay alert for the chance to make a difference. Limited though those chances will be. We connect with others at the individual level and keep our local connections current. We may not be able to affect the nation, but we can affect the neighborhood.

Mama is on a shopping mission today for one of those individual connections. She bought a Bible for Yilin for her birthday but has not been able so far to get a case for that Bible. Today she hopes to rectify that fault. This has been a several weeks long frustration for Mama. Since Yilin's birthday was last week, Mama decided to make the trip today in the hope of finding the Bible case she has her heart set on so the gift can be completed and given. Mama will make several other stops in her outing, but we are guarding our finances for the trips we have planned for the two weekends coming up after this weekend. One trip will be to Amarillo and one to New Jersey. We are excited about both visits and Victoria has arranged time off for each of the trips, which excites Zoe and Sophia immensely. It cannot remember for certain, but this might the first time Victoria and Gailyn will meet. That will be fun.

In our absence from the farm for each of those trips, Trace will take over the feeding and care of the flocks and herds. Both he and Mama are fretting about that, but Trace, to his credit, has gone with both me and Mama multiple times to see how things are done in all the areas where feed is put out and water is provided. He is learning all the hidey holes our chickens seek out to lay eggs when they do not want to make the trip back to the nesting boxes in the coop. He has taken a good deal of time to try to learn all the nuances of Mama’s thinking for providing treats, keeping our two roosters apart, and looking for stragglers every night to ensure all the chickens have come home to roost. Something we definitely think of in a positive way. Barring any unusual circumstances, he will do fine. My only concerns are with the weather and that he knows what to protect from overnight freezes. Ultimately, we will deal with what we find when we get back, but I think Trace has a good enough handle on the major needs of all the animals. All the idiosyncrasies of Mama’s logic are still not fully known to me.

Trace will certainly not master them before we leave.

Class, planting plans, heating

Yesterday’s class was a great class – at least from my perspective. I had nine participants in the class and all but one commented or interjected a thought or question into the class as we paced through the seven hours of material. It is not unusual for a disparate group of participants to get along with each other as the group did yesterday, but it is does not happen in every class. It is certainly fun when the classmates (typically total strangers) banter and joke with each other through our time together. Yesterday was such a class. I need one of those fun groups interspersed through the mix to keep me encouraged as I present the same material twice per week through the year. The one commonality fir the classes is the industry we all work in and the understanding that we are all in this together. The participants seem to always be able to rally around that common interest – especially when I keep it foremost in our minds.

Since we are currently warm and dry here, Mama and I are going to plant potatoes in the garden this evening and tomorrow afternoon. It may actually be the first time we have gotten potatoes plants on schedule. Today will be far warmer than tomorrow so I will try to get the bulk of the planting done before dark today. That should be doable since Mama got only five pounds of seed potatoes. It is possible I will have time to till a row or two during my lunch hour but my priority during the heat of the early afternoon is to open the hives and see if the bees need more feed. We will cool rapidly through the night and start back with the overnight freezes again.

Fortunately, most the days are now well above freezing which allows us to move forward with some of our Spring planting. I am anxious to see how differently the potatoes in the garden grow and produce (hopefully) from the ones I have started in small pots currently placed in the sunroom. That planting idea came from an online video of gardening hacks. It cost us very little to try it out, so I am tracking the experiment to determine whether or not to repeat it. The biggest challenge will be finding a place for the pots to sit through the entire growing season.

Tomorrow is Trade Days. Mama is definitely going but I am still undecided. I do not get much pleasure from seeing the same vendors hawking the same wares every time I go, but Mama likes the outing. At least we get to visit with friends who are there every month. Tomorrow we need to deliver some boxes from our garage to a friend from BBTI who sells at Trade Days every month. We have stored dishes, kitchen utensils, specialty kitchen appliances we no longer use and several other mostly forgotten items that I want to eliminate from our storage and give to someone who may be able to use such things in the many houses they outfit for students at BBTI. I believe we have at least four or five boxes full of such items. It will be nice to move those along since we have had no use for the items in the past four of five years.

Also, this weekend I will begin to transplant the seedlings that have sprouted in the tea bags I used to germinate the seeds.  I have two cherry tomato plants to repot and one strawberry. The flower seeds I planted have not sprouted yet, but I need to give them a bit more time. If I do not see any growth by the end of next week, I will discard the plate and tea bags and start a new set. It is far too early for the tomatoes to be outside so they will be replanted into small paper pots that will allow them to mature to the point that we can plant them in the containers that will house them through the growing season. It is fun to see things grow knowing that Summer and Winter and Springtime and harvest will not fail because of the process that is continuously maintained by our Heavenly Father. Until this earth ends, it will always be so. Every seed that sprouts is a little reminder of that grace and providence.

Our electric bill for the past month reflects the extra heaters we have been using in the sunroom, the wellhouses, and the garage. We have also had heat tracing on three yard hydrants and a stock tan heater in the water trough for the female goats. All of that adds up to about $150 more on this month’s bill. Not horrible but with the furnace working overtime to warm the house, we have quite the bill to pay this month. It is worth it since we have managed to keep all the waterlines from freezing and keep the temperature in the sunroom warm enough to enable out tropical plants to thrive.

Hopefully, this bill will be the highest for the Winter, but that is not a certainty.