Life on Snow Hill

Wow, where did the Summer go? It seems like just last week June bugs were flying all over my yard and I was trying to keep weeds out of the garden. I gave up on the weeds, by the way – they finally took over.

It’s nearing the end of September, and the weather is hinting at turning a little more cool. I’m finding myself surprisingly ready for cold weather. I usually dread it. But I’m looking forward to the fireplace being put to use again, and eating a nice hot bowl of chili while watching the Colts beat up on whoever their next victim happens to be.

I’m looking forward to working with the youth on the next Christmas program at church (We need to get rolling with that by the way!) and bringing in yet another new year. 2009 hasn’t quite gotten out of our grasp yet, but it’s quickly rolling on by. What will we do with the rest of this year?

It’s been a beautiful (but hot) last several days, and that has allowed Becky to get outside and work in her flower beds. I’ve done a little bit in the evenings after I’ve gotten home from work, but this week has worn me out. We’re short one at work, and it’s been one of the most busy weeks we’ve had in a long time.

Hopefully today when I get home from work I’ll get outside and cut down another tree to use for firewood. I’ve been needing to do that all Spring, and Spring has gotten away from me. I really want to try to have enough this coming Winter to last us all Winter long so we don’t have to run our electric heat any more than we have to.

There’s always work to be done in the garden. I’m actually kind of proud of it this year. Becky and I have been able to get out and keep it pretty clean from weeds and everything this year, so it looks much nicer than it did last year. We’re already getting some squash and zucchini out of it, and Becky has eaten a few cucumbers that have come in. Soon we’re going to be covered up by a lot of this stuff and we’ll be scrambling to get it canned and/or frozen.

Yard work never ends either. It seems like the yard was just mowed yesterday, and it needs it again. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take care of that this weekend sometime as well.

Yep, we’re staying busy. I mostly enjoy it though. I don’t enjoy being worn out from it, but I do enjoy the good sleep I get as a result.

Can you believe it’s already May, 2009?  It seems like just last week it was New Year’s, and we were thinking about what all we wanted to get accomplished this year. My WAIT program failed miserably because I wouldn’t stick with it. I haven’t stayed all that organized, either. I haven’t gotten any new firewood in a good while, either. It won’t have time to dry out by next Winter if I don’t get on the ball.

The faster time flies, the more things need to get done, and the less time you have to do it. Do you see a pattern here?

I suppose that the biggest reason I haven’t been able to get a lot accomplished lately is because it seems like it has rained non-stop. My garden is loving it, but I can’t give it any attention because if I try to walk through it, I’m up to my knees in mud.

My yard desperately needs to be mowed. I can’t, however, because, you guessed it – it’s raining! And the more rain it gets, the more (and faster) it grows.

Overall, I’m thankful for the rain. The last couple years were a little dry and the garden needed to be watered by hand. So far, there’s no need at all for that!

I’m looking forward to things drying out, though, so I can get back outside and take care of some work that really needs to be done.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed. Not in an “I’m so stressed out I can’t take it any more!” kind of way at all. Maybe it’s more of an “I’m so busy lately that I sleep much better at night!” situation. It’s true, actually – I’ve been getting such good, sound sleep lately. I just wish I could get more of it.

Things have been picking up at work, first of all. We have 9 servers that need to be rebuilt and reconfigured. These servers are what our virtual infrastructure runs on. “What’s that?” you may ask. I’m so glad you asked! In a nutshell, a virtual infrastructure is a set of servers and network configurations that run on other servers. This is a good thing, because on these 9 servers, we have over 100 virtual servers running. So rather than having over 100 physical, real servers sitting in our datacenter, we only have 9. But we still get the benefit of the power these 100 servers offer us.

At home, well, the weather is changing. Spring is here and grass is growing. Along with weeds. Flowers too. This means mowing, weed-eating (Gotta get that weed eater fixed!) and gardening. I’m honestly excited to start the garden again this year. It just needs to dry out long enough to be plowed and tilled really well so that I can get some seeds in the ground. Spring means it’s also time to start working on getting firewood for next Winter. I’ve blogged about that in the recent past, so I won’t say much other than that I’ve gotten a pretty good start, but there’s a lot more to do.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we’ve been busy at church. Becky and I are, as most of you already know, teaching the teenage Sunday School class. I’m also in charge of the youth choir. We’re also working towards getting a teen visitation program going, as well as other youth ministries. I’m not sure I knew exactly what I was in for when I became the Youth Director, but the Lord had it in His plan, and Becky and I have been reaping blessings from it already. We’re thankful the Lord is using us, and praying that He will continue to do so, doing our best to stay in His will. These youth are a great bunch to work with. Our prayer is that they’ll have such a desire for God that we’ll be the ones trying to keep up with them!

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.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve blogged about anything. After thinking about it for nearly two weeks, I’m still not sure if it’s because I’ve been lazy, or if it’s because I haven’t had anything to write about. Honestly it’s probably a little of both.

Christmas is coming up really soon, so Becky and I (mostly Becky) have been doing as much Christmas shopping as we can. I’ve noticed that as I get older, Christmas gets here faster and faster. When I was a kid, it took forever to get here! Becky and I are also heading up the Christmas play at church this year, so that has been an added, but welcome challenge as well. We’ve really enjoyed working with the youth and hope to be able to do more with them in the future.

I guess all of the Christmas preparations are what has been keeping us busy, but we’re also having to take care of all of the normal day-to-day stuff at the same time. Last year I think I let all of that turn me into sort of a Scrooge – just ask Becky..she’ll be honest with you. I’m determined not to let that happen this year though. I’m trying to stay full of Christmas cheer. See?!

Something else that’s cool is that this entire post has been written on my iPhone. This is the best gadget I’ve ever owned, and probably the most useful as well.

This is the time that everyone carves up a turkey and visits with family.  It’s a great time of year.  We all usually eat way too much, and sit in front of the TV way too much watching football.  We enjoy our day, and enjoy being with our family, but we forget what the day itself is all about.

It’s not about family, football or turkey.  (I have a peeve about people calling Thanksgiving ‘turkey day’, by the way – we can have turkey any day of the year.)  It’s about being thankful.  But not just about being thankful – being thankful to God.  That’s why the day was set aside as a holiday in the first place – to give thanks to God.

• I thank God for my family, and I will be spending time with them during this holiday.
• I thank God for my church – He has richly blessed my life I believe as a direct result of following His leadership.
• I thank God for my health.  I don’t always feel that great, and I’ve been getting headaches lately (I need to get off caffeine), but there are people all throughout the world in much, much worse shape than I’m in.  Actually, I don’t have to look far at all to find someone in worse shape than me.
• Last, but definitely not least, I thank God for my wife.  We’ve only been married for 3 1/2 years, but she’s stuck with me during times I’ve been a real grouch, and any woman that can do that is truly great.

I could go on all day, but these are the things that are the most important to me.  God has richly blessed me, and I fail to thank Him as I should.

Well, the best part about cold weather anyway.  Today Becky and I built our first fire in the fireplace for the cold season.  I walked outside to help her with something really quick, and when I came back in, I could smell that distinct wood-burning smell.  I love it.  Even on really cold days, our little fireplace can keep it quite toasty in most of the house.

The other best part of cold weather is a nice, hot bowl of chili.  We’re getting ready to have some of that in a little while, too.  Nothing beats chili to warm you up from the inside out.

Hello again, loyal readers.  I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything in so long – the last date I put anything up was the 4th of August.  I don’t have much excuse for the rest of that week, but all of last week I’ve been gone on vacation.  This will be a long post, so hang on!

Becky and I went up to Ohio to see my sister and her husband, and then on to Michigan to see her grandparents.  On our way back south, we stopped back in Ohio to visit some more and then went to a Reds game.

When we first got to Ohio, it had already been a hard day at work.  I had to work on Saturday the 9th for maintenance – that’s a time when we can do work on servers that can’t be done during regular hours.  My job was simple that day – cable up the new storage to the SAN, and update the patches on our VMware hosts.  We ran into a small issue with the SAN, but it took us a while to fix it.  The VMware stuff went just fine.  But I didn’t get out of the office until about 2:00 in the afternoon, and it was too late to make it to Ohio for the main purpose of our trip in the first place.  My sister’s husband was being ordained as the assistant pastor at First Baptist Church in West Union, Ohio.  We made it to their house around 8:30 that evening I believe.  We went to church with them and several other family members on Sunday.  My sister’s father-in-law preached both services.  We all stayed with them again on Monday night, and went to the Creation Museum near Cincinnati the next morning.  I’ll blog about that trip in a different post since there is so much to tell.  After that, Becky and I headed straight up to Michigan.

Becky’s grandparents live in Lexington, MI.  It’s a small town right on Lake Huron.  This photo to the left is from the ‘Rock Wall’ that extends out into the lake in this small harbor.

We stayed with them for three nights and had a great time overall.  We were also able to visit with some of Becky’s other family members – cousins, aunts and uncles.

While we were there we also drove down to Port Huron to see the sights there.  Becky’s grandma (Oma) wanted so bad to take us ‘across the bridge’ into Canada.  I honestly hadn’t been crazy about the idea at all from the start, and then one of Becky’s aunts told us about how she was detained one day when her name/age/description was flagged as someone they were looking for.  That was enough for me – I didn’t want to spend any extra time with the authorities than I had to.  Going through customs was going to be bad enough for me – I hate subjecting myself to searches, etc.  Not that I have anything to hide, just that it violates my sense of privacy.  Anyway, we did go to the river and look across at Canada.  In the photo here, you can see two land masses – the one of the left is Canada, and the right is the good ole’ USA.

Lastly, on our way back home on Thursday, we stopped back by my sister’s house.  We got there around 8:30 again I believe.  They made home made chocolate ice cream for my birthday and we watched a movie.  Well, we tried anyway – we were all really tired.  We got up the next morning and headed to the Cincinnati area.  Our main intent was to go see the Reds play, but we did a little bit of shopping before game time.  At the game, we started out in the very top of the nosebleed section behind home plate.  I’m serious – when we looked behind us, we were looking at the outside of the stadium.  After a few innings, we headed down to the right field corner where they had a mostly empty ‘family’ section where alcohol wasn’t allowed.

The entire trip was a lot of fun, but there was a lot of driving involved so that was a bit tiresome.  We really enjoyed getting away, but we were glad to get back home at the same time.  Now it’s back to the daily grind of the job, and taking care of things around the house.