Life on Snow Hill

Hey, everybody! A little while back, I bought myself a Macintosh. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time, and I was finally able to get one. One of the things included on every Mac is iLife.

I’ve been playing around with iPhoto for the last few days, and it is actually fun to use rather than tedious like other photo management apps I’ve used. You can geotag photos and display a map with all of the places you’ve taken your photos. You can also use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition and tag people’s faces in photos, sort of like Facebook’s photo tagging, but better. It recognizes the same faces in other photos and tags them appropriately.

The feature I want to talk about here, though, is iPhoto’s Flickr integration. As I understand it, it’s been an included feature in iPhoto for a while. But since this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned, it’s new to me.

I’ve played around with Flickr before, but never really gotten into it for different reasons at different times. I used to host my own gallery using Coppermine Photo Gallery, but didn’t keep up with it very well. It has great features, but it was another place I had to keep up with photos.

With iPhoto’s flickr integration, you can publish an album or set right from iPhoto. All in one place. Nice.

And others have said I needed more photos on my blog. Well, I’ve killed two birds with, well, 1 1/2 stones anyway. I added a Flickr widget to my sidebar over there on the right. So as I take more photos and import them into iPhoto for organization, I’ll publish them to Flickr as well for your viewing pleasure – they’ll show right up in my sidebar. Spring’s arrival has inspired me to get the camera out a little more than I have in the past, so I’ve added a few photos in the past few days.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails in my sidebar will open it up on my Flickr page. There you’ll be able to browse all of my uploaded photos.

A few days ago I planted some seeds in potting soil in some containers in the house to prepare for warm weather for my garden. I planted tomato seeds, pepper seeds and broccoli seeds. Nothing has sprouted yet, and I’m impatiently waiting for that first something to come out of the dirt. These tiny plants will require water and sunlight to grow and become strong. Then once they’re moved outside they’ll require even more water, which we hope will mostly come in the form of rain. They’ll still require sunlight, of which they’ll have an abundant supply. One thing that requires hard labor, though, is keeping the weeds out of the garden. If the weeds are allowed to grow at will, they’ll choke out the plants that have been put there and they’ll not bear much fruit.

Beginning in the last week of February, we had a great youth revival at our church that lasted for two weeks. During that time, there was some hard preaching and some encouraging preaching. Each night, however, caused us all to search our hearts and draw a little closer to the Lord.

During those two weeks there were some seeds planted in our hearts. In some hearts those seeds even already began to sprout. The preaching we heard is what planted those seeds, and even provided the nourishment (water, which is a type of the Word of God). We were even exposed to a little bit of Sonlight when the Lord visited with us during the meeting. These were all of the requirements for those seeds to begin to grow in our hearts.

Now the revival meeting is over and we’re out in the ‘garden’ of the world. These tiny little plants still require a lot of care, and always will as they grow. The only difference between these ‘plants’ in our hearts and the ones in a regular garden is twofold:

1: The rain (water, again a type of the Word of God) isn’t going to always come all by itself. We’ll have to manually water those plants by getting in the Bible ourselves and saturating ourselves with it to get that same nourishment.

2: The Sonlight is always readily available, but we have to be sure we’re in a position to receive it, and let it shine on us. We have to always be willing and ready to let the Lord work in our hearts and lives.

The third thing again is that there are ‘weeds’ that we’ll have to deal with. There will always be things in our lives that try to spring up and take away from what our purpose in life is – to bear fruit in God’s service. We have to always be on the lookout for these ‘weeds’. Some of them look like real plants and look like they’ll be ok if we leave them alone and let them grow. Others are more obvious, but it’s tempting to leave them alone because it’s such hard work to get them out of our way.

All of these things are necessary if we want the great revival meeting we’ve just had to do us any lasting good. For all of us, no doubt, God showed us some specific things we needed to do – that is the seed. The preaching we heard continually watered that seed, and God confirmed it in our hearts when He made His presence known in the services.

Now it’s up to us to continue to seek God and keep giving those plants nourishment as they grow. If we ignore them, they’ll die and it will have all been in vain.

In the same spirit of my last post, Becky and I have been getting some things done around the house to prepare for Spring, and even next Winter! Becky has been doing quite a bit in the house getting things more organized and all that kind of thing, while I’ve been outside getting ready for next Winter.

In my last post I talked about how hard I worked for about 3 hours cutting and splitting firewood. Well, yesterday I did some more work with firewood. How exciting.

First of all, I woke up feeling like garbage. I really felt worthless, no joke. I was sick at my stomach, my head was all clogged up and I was still sore from the work I’d done on Saturday. Ashamedly I stayed in bed until 12:30 yesterday afternoon.

So once I woke up and got a little something to eat, I got a little strength and decided to do something useful. Last year I built a little shed on the end of the house to keep a decent amount of firewood closer to the house so we wouldn’t have to go halfway through the back yard to bring another load of it inside in freezing temperatures. I finally got the shingles put on it yesterday. I still need to trim the edges, but at least the rain won’t leak through the roof on it now.

I did a few other small things around the house after that, but nothing major until the evening. I used my dull chainsaw to cut down a very big oak tree to be cut up for firewood. It fell across the road, which was the plan, but it also tore up my yard in the process. It shouldn’t be too bad to fix up.

We (my dad and I) had to cut the tree in half for his tractor to be able to pull it on up into my yard. My goal this evening is to get my chainsaw sharpened and at least get started on cutting the tree up – I’ll probably focus on the top half for now so that I can avoid splitting more for now. Maybe this weekend I can do some more of that if it stays dry enough outside.

So yes, I’ve been taking advantage of this warm weather. It’s supposed to turn cool again this week, but at least it won’t be freezing outside the whole time. I’m ready for Spring to announce itself boldly and get things rolling.

Today was the first day I’ve really had in a while to get things done around the house that I’ve been needing to do.  Our church has been in revival for the past 2 weeks, which has been great.  The Lord has been working in my heart, as well as many others in the church.  Things around the house, though, have suffered.  I’m fine with that, I’m just saying why things have piled up.

The task I focused on today, for as long as I could, was to work on getting some firewood cut up and split.  There was a log in my yard that had been cut down at the beginning of Winter sometime, but I had never done anything with it until today.

So I broke out the dull chainsaw and whittled away at the log with it.  I finally got it cut up into several pieces and went to work splitting it.  I probably worked for about 3 hours on the whole thing.  My body isn’t used to hard manual labor, so that’s about all I could handle for today.

Oh!  I can’t forget to add this.  Someone told me recently that I needed more pictures here on my blog (you know who you are).  So I thought I’d add a boring picture to represent my boring day.  What is stacked is what I worked on today. What you can see in the background is what I still need to do something with.  I’ll split what I can, but the huge knots in some of them are more than I usually feel like dealing with.