We are grateful

4/19/10 Monday
The start of another week and it promises to be busy. Ron Charles will be flying in Wednesday night to tape 24 sessions for GLC. He’ll be so busy with that that there will be little time for visiting or much else. I look forward to seeing him and will be blessed to serve him in anyway I can, in addition to learning from his teaching as he tapes the programs.

Cherie and I went to the master gardeners’ sale Saturday and Cherie bought three rose plants along with several other plants. Yesterday I made this bed for the rose bushes on the north side of the house. Little by little we are creating a home here.


You can see the little ditch I dug in back to run the drip irrigation to this area.

After days of rain we had our first sunlight and break yesterday. It didn’t rain Saturday but by the time we got done doing everything we had to do it was getting dark so I wasn’t able to work on the farm. But there’s things that won’t wait so we didn’t go to church Sunday and I went straight to work. One of the important things is to till the soil while it’s still damp so I got on the tractor at about 7:30 yesterday evening. I ran it hard but noticed that one of the front wheels is wobbling real bad, a sign that perhaps we lost a bearing. Nuts. I’d done 2/3rds of the disking but decided I’d better park the tractor till I can check it out. Last thing I need is to have a wheel fall off in the field. Looking at that is high on the agenda for today.

There’s always a lot to do and without Alan here to help it makes things a lot harder. Yesterday I bought fence posts to use with the 800 plus feet of field fence we bought to enclose some of the plots. I’ll need to build gates for this project as well. I saw landscape timbers at Lowe’s while looking at fence posts and they are much cheaper so picked up 20 of them. They will work very well to hold up the fence in between the areas I put telephone pole posts in and it saves us a few bucks. I need to hurry up and dig the postholes while the ground is still wet. It turns brick hard when dried out.


That money we got from selling the stock won’t last long at all. In fact it’s already dwindling quickly and we’re being careful, buying only things we need, with one possible exception. That would be a copier/scanner/printer we picked up at Best Buy. One of the important things we are doing is trying to get the office organized and set up for this first year in business as a farm. We have three printers and a scanner floating around the office that are adding to the clutter. With the way we reorganized the furniture to accommodate the file cabinet we were blessed with the cords aren’t long enough to hook them up. Plus our Mac is wireless and has Bluetooth so we decided to take advantage of that. This HP unit came wireless ready so now we can print from our laptops and the Mac anywhere in the house and there are no wires to run. We consider this a long term investment that will see a lot of use as the business grows. It whips out copies in seconds, (like 2 seconds for a full sheet of just type) so when it comes to making flyers it will be nice.

We still have created our website. We got the domain name for it a couple of years ago, knowing it will be a vital part of the business. But neither of us are really savvy when it comes to designing websites, plus we haven’t had time with all the other things going on. But it’s getting to that time where it needs to be done.

Unfortunately none of this will matter if I can’t get our water problem solved. The central ingredient to farming is growing crops and the water has gotten so bad that almost none of our seeds germinated. I have barrels placed under roof eaves that filled with rain water during the storms we can use but that won’t last long. One of the investments I must make with the stock money will be for the water. I’m just not sure what to do and must study on that more. Putting in a rainwater harvesting system is a goal. That requires installing rain gutters and piping all the run off to a large tank that holds perhaps 6,000 gallons or more.



This picture shows the sand and then mud that came in through our windows in the office. This sand gets everywhere, including in our computers and printers. There’s no question it will, or has, caused harm to the equipment. So I caulked the windows shut. If we need air we will open the door. Caulking all the windows unfortunately won’t stop all the sand as it blows in even through the baseboards along the walls and we can spot every pinhole in the wall by the read streak left from the fine sand that is forced through.



Our strawberries are doing well and survived from last year. We picked some of them and they are much sweeter than they were last year, and bigger to. I presume that’s because the plants are established now and not stressed because they were just planted last year and struggling to survive. I hope to propagate as many as I can. This variety is advertised as able to produce in hundred degree weather. The other varieties we tried didn’t make it at all.

That’s it for now. I’ve got lots to do so have little time to spare writing though there is much more to say. Mondays are the days that have some of the highest numbers of readers visiting this blog so I want to make sure I let y’all know what’s going on. I appreciate all of you visitors and am often encouraged by your comments and emails. There is so much I don’t write about that I should to give a better picture of our life.

This picture is from our first wedding.
The biggest part of that is the love that Cherie and I have for each other, how we complete and support each other. It doesn’t matter how hard things sometimes are, with my seizures and coping with the effects of this damaged brain, with tight finances and dreams that seem just out of reach, and everything else, because we have each other. We often talk together about that, about what a miracle our lives are. And the question comes up “Where would we be if we hadn’t gotten back together?”. Cherie one time said that she didn’t think she would still be alive, and I suspect that I would have returned to drugs and drinking, not caring about my future and where I would be. So we are acutely aware of God’s grace and His hand in our lives, of the miracle and wonder of our being reunited and the difference it has made in the quality of our lives. And we are grateful, grateful for life and the future we are able to work towards.




Like it says on the plaque I carved while recovering after the wreck “Love Life. Live a life you can love. Become a person you can be proud of. All things can teach wisdom, If you look for it. Money and things can vanish in a flash. What has real lasting value is the lives we touch.

Y’all have a good day.