Life on Snow Hill

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.

Lately there are things that keep happening that are inspiring me to try to get back into music a little bit.  For instance, a good while back Becky and I decided we wanted to try to learn a song or two to be able to sing in church.  Mostly if not completely my fault, we haven’t learned anything yet.  One of the new churches we’re visiting has asked us if we sing, so there’s one thing.

I went to my cousin’s house one day to pick up some eggs (of all things, I know).  Her daughter was in her room practicing the piano, and when I came in she asked me to play a certain southern style of “I’ll Fly Away” for her so she could hear it and try to learn that style.  It’s been forever since I played that song, much less that style, so I wasn’t able to do it.

It’s just little things like that.  I’m thinking more and more of needing to get back on the piano, or my guitars.  I also have a mandoline, fiddle and banjo that I can’t play.  I need to learn how to play those.  I love the way they all sound – I just haven’t taken the time to learn to make that sound myself.

So I’m trying to inspire myself even more with this photo I took of the fretboard on my bass guitar.  I’ve also got a music theme background on my computer, so that every time I sit down to use it, I see it.  I’ll get there one day.

Tags: guitar, Music, piano

Today on my lunch break Becky and I went out to the garden.  There were several things that needed to be picked or dug, so we set to work.  We had it all done in about half an hour.

In this photo (You can click it to make it bigger) you can see carrots, squash, zucchini, potatoes and cucumbers.

There were a ton of carrots – all of them that were planted in fact.  We probably dug out about 5 earlier in the year, but we decided these were all big enough.  So we have a pretty big pile of them.  We just need to cut the tops off and clean them up so that we can get ‘em in the fridge.

We’ve been getting squash and zucchini for a while now, so those aren’t as big a deal – they just add to the grand total.

The potatoes are the first that we dug up this year.  They look to be in good shape, but we need to cut into them to see if there are any of those tiny little black worms.  My dad hasn’t been able to grow potatoes because of those stupid worms.  Maybe they’ll be okay in the ground I have.

And last but not least, we have another big mess of cucumbers.  There are probably enough (15 lbs) to do another batch of pickles.  We’ll see though.

We had to use the wheelbarrow to get all of these veggies out of the garden.  Now we just need to get to work on getting them cleaned up and in the refrigerator so they won’t go bad!

Let me back up a bit and start with Thursday.  I mowed the yard for the first time in what seemed like forever.  Some of my grass was at least 6 inches high if not more.  Needless to say, when I mowed that area, I had huge clumps of cut grass all over the place.  Not a pretty site.

Fast forward to Saturday.  I mowed the yard again after giving the cut grass a chance to die, and the rest of the grass a bit of a chance to grow a little more.  It was a little more enjoyable this time (I normally love mowing the yard, but not last Thursday!) because I didn’t have to poke along in the thick areas.  I did, however, have to go over those areas twice so that the clumps of grass would spread out a little more and make the yard look more presentable.  That was what I spent most of my time doing.

The first thing I did, however, was to go out and run the weed-eater.  I really hate that part of yard work, and I conveniently skipped it the last 2 or 3 times I mowed.  Things were starting to look really bad, though, and I knew it really had to be done.  So I got out of bed and started it first thing so that it wouldn’t be too hot, and I’d still be willing to mow later on in the day.  There were 4 flower beds and a strawberry patch that was way overgrown.  Normally I’d blame Becky (:)) but she’s been hurt, and I honestly haven’t been able to keep up with everything outside.  So the weed-eater took care of all of those, and they look at least manageable again.

A lot of the rest of the day I helped Becky out with a few things here and there.  I got some time in on the PS3 as well, but with my help, Becky got some bread & butter pickles done (15+ pounds of cucumbers worth!), got the smaller fish tank cleaned up and a few other smaller things throughout the house.

At the end of the day, we were both worn out, but were happy with the things we’d accomplished.

I went out today and shot some more photos of the garden. There are two or three plants out there that we’re starting to see some food on!

Becky and I have worked pretty hard on our garden this year.  We want to be sure we get lots of food out of it, because we plan to can a lot of it and try to make it last as long as we can through the Winter.  Everything seems to be doing really well, except maybe the watermelon and peppers.  The watermelon is just having a hard time coming in, but there are a few coming up.  It should be enough, anyway.  For the peppers, the bugs are liking them a lot this year, so I’m having to try to keep bug spray on them.  Maybe they’ll make it.

I can’t remember if I said this in a previous post or not, but we’re going to be overrun by tomatoes.  We have 20 plants!  Last year we only had 4, and we had plenty.  But Becky canned some of the tomato juice (about 12 jars) and made tomato soup from it.  She wants that to last longer, so we did a lot more.  I just hope we’re able to keep up with it all!

We also will have a LOT of cucumbers.  She wanted to try making pickles out of them, and they’ll last forever, so we decided to do quite a few of those as well.

We didn’t do any corn, and this year is the first that we’ve done beans, broccoli and carrots.  We’ll see how that all turns out.

We’re really excited about the garden this year.  One concern, though, is thieves in the area.  I just hope they keep their sorry backsides out of my garden.  Otherwise it might get a little nasty for everybody involved.