We don't write papers, we build scrapbooks
We don't write papers, we build scrapbooks
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I subscribe to a magazine called The Progressive Farmer. On the last page of each edition the editor prints a bunch of quotes from people, mostly of whom I’ve never heard of, but some of them are famous people from the past or present. The following quote by self-proclaimed radical atheist Douglas Adams (1952-2001) caught my attention. He said: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary a...
About three weeks ago we had 15 inches of snow. As I type these words, we've now had a week of 80 degree weather. Looking ahead to what is now this week, it looks like the temps are going to drop about 25 degrees. I even see snow in the forecast. So, we go from 85 degrees to snow. Some people say, “what is going on with our weather. We’ve never had weather like this before.” Ah, but we have. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the great outdoors and who has any kind of memory, can attest...
I recently watched the Jesus Revolution movie in the theater. It’s a good movie about the Jesus movement and is set in the late 60’s at the height of the Hippy era. It’s a story about a young man in search of meaning in life who first reached out to drugs, and then to Jesus. It’s a very worthwhile movie to see if you get the chance. I don’t know how they did it, but “they” assembled a whole arsenal of cars consistent with that period of time. I was just a young lad then - about 8 years old, but...
As a child, my parents rarely missed taking me and my siblings to church on Sunday morning. By rarely, I mean, I don’t recall ever missing a single Sunday. We always dressed up in our Sunday best which meant our shoes were polished on Saturday night, mom laid out our clothes for Sunday morning, and after chores, we jumped into our best duds and rushed off to church in our family station wagon. On Easter, we dressed just a little nicer with perhaps a new pair of socks or a necktie. There’s a fam...
It seems like election season never ends. A few decades ago, when my wife and I first reached voting age, we were living in California and the voters in our precinct voted in our neighbor’s garage, which was the official venue. After we got home from work on election day, we took a stroll down the street, chatted with the neighbors, flashed our driver’s licenses, cast our ballots and walked back home. I suppose, there was a lot of emotion and rhetoric somewhere during the candidates’ campaigns,...
Last week my wife and I were on vacation in Florida. Our daughter who lives in Tennessee joined us and we made a week of it. The first thing we did was pick her up at the airport and then we went straight to The Melting Pot restaurant. The Melting Pot is not only good eating, but it’s also entertainment. It starts out with a bowl centered on top of your table with a stove burner under it. When the waiter comes, he turns on the burner and pretty soon it’s sizzling hot. He then dumps some shr...
Several years ago, I needed a rim for one of my old tractors. It’s a 1958 IHC 330 loader tractor. After I bought the tractor, I took the loader off and it (the loader) has been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since. We were busy restoring the old gem when we noticed it had a cracked rim on the right rear. I called a place a few miles up north in Wisconsin and they had one, so I made the trek up there to pick it up. I’ve done business with these guys before, and I like them. It had bee...
Random Thoughts - Part 2 Time - It’s that time of year again - Daylight Saving Time (Saving - not Savings). The clocks go ahead in order to give us more daylight. But we all know moving the clocks around doesn’t add or take away any amount of time. We also know there is no such thing as making time or losing time. Time is constant. There are only so many hours of daylight in a day no matter where the hands of the clock are. Everyone has exactly the same amount of it. It is a resource the gov...
February 17 found me and some friends in Louisville, Kentucky at the National Farm Show. I was there with the Fellowship of Christian Farmers International (FCFI). This is the largest indoor farm show in the United States. It is held every year during the second week of February. FCFI had rented a room where we invited people to come and hear speaker, Ron Miller, talk about farming and the struggles farmers are facing today with, not only the economics of farming, but the mental stress that...
Some random thoughts … Taxes and Family - Every year our accountant painstakingly reviews every check we’ve written in the last 12 months. Every expenditure has to have an explanation. We must have a paper trail for every deduction and every write-off. I really don’t care for tax season. It’s usually cold, wet, and messy. She told us that she can tell our whole life story just by looking at our checkbook and credit card statement. They tell her where we went on vacation, what restaur...
Subjectivism and Objectivism in a culture of relative truth ... Digital communication has its advantages. Text messaging is easy and convenient. Convenient because you can choose to answer when it’s convenient for you to answer. Of course, anything can be read into any text message at any time. It’s difficult to show emotion and sarcasm in a text message and it is quite easy to unintentionally misrepresent yourself, which seems to happen to me fairly frequently. Of course, sometimes when you don...
I was on an airplane a few days ago flying home from Florida. My seat was a window seat in row 7. I’m never in a hurry to board the plane because once you get on, you are stuck in there for the next three or four hours with hardly any room to move, walk or stretch. By the time I boarded, the aisle and middle seat were already occupied so those two people had to get out and let me in. As the guy in the next seat was sitting down, he leaned over and said to me: “It’s this guy’s first time flying....
The nurse came in and said "Doc, there's a man in the waiting room who thinks he's invisible." The doctor said, "Tell him I can't see him today." We are in the gray, dreary days of winter. My dad always said the third week of January is always the worst of winter. As I write this I am sitting poolside in sunny Southwest Florida. It’s 72 degrees. The locals call this a cold front. Usually the pool area is packed with sun worshipers but as it turns out, I’m the only sun (and Son) worshiper her...
A few weeks ago, I went on a one-day road trip to Kokomo, Indiana. I don’t follow a map anymore - just my GPS. The beauty of GPS is that if you take the shortest route, you usually end up on the backroads somewhere. Such was the case on this trip. It was early in the evening on the way home in gray, post-dusk December darkness. I was driving through Indiana on narrow roads that I had never been on before. On the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere, a railroad crossing gate went d...
I grew up a farm kid. My folks started out in Indiana as grain farmers and eventually became dairy farmers. That’s just the opposite of most people in the farming business. Usually, a person dairy farms first, sells their cattle, then becomes a grain farmer until they retire. When dad first started out, he worked an off-farm job in the winter in the steel mills on the western shores of Lake Michigan just east of Chicago. He’d work there all winter and farmed in the spring, summer, and fall. But...
On Thursday, January 5, 2023 my dad woke up in the Land of Glory! This is from my journal from last week ... My dad is in the last hours of his earthly life. We got him home from the hospital on Monday evening. Since then, we’ve been gathering around his bedside day and night. One or more of us is with him 24/7. The Hospice nurses believe he has a few hours to as many as a couple of days to live. But Dad’s a tough old guy and he may surprise them. Regardless, God has given us this time with him...
Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope your Christmas is great and memorable. What would a perfect day look like? This past Sunday turned out to be a pretty great day in my life. It started at about 6:45 a.m. when I arrived at church. Several of us get together every Sunday morning about that time as we prepare for our Sunday services. One gentleman in particular, arrives 15 minutes before any of us, and unlocks the doors, turns all the lights on, gets the coffee pots fired up, and sets the...
Christmas is weird. What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your sock A few weeks ago on a nice, warm fall day, my wife strung Christmas lights up outside on the trees and bushes near the house and shop, then ran extension cords to the nearest outlets. One thing about outside Christmas lights is when it’s time to go to bed at night, they need to be turned off. The catch is, I hate going outside to unplug them. It’s worse if I have to bundle up and go o...
I have never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they're home they like to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat. Our refrigerator went on the blink a few days ago. It all started when we decided to defrost it and give it a regular cleaning. Everything went fine at first. We loaded all the food and frozen items in coolers...
With the rise of self-driving vehicles, it's only a matter of time before we get a country song where a guy's truck leaves him too. As I write this, my wife and I are in southwest Florida where Hurricane Ian struck in late September. They say it was the worst hurricane in Florida’s history. I guess I wouldn’t argue that much, except, how do they know? The earth has been around for some 6000 years and the indigenous people who lived here before us, didn’t have ways to track the storms like we do...
When my boss asked me who is the dumb one, me or him? I told him everyone knows he doesn't hire dumb people. My first paying job other than working on my parent’s farm was working on our neighbors’ farm. I was just a little guy, only about 10 or 11 years old at the time. My brothers and I got the job of picking up rocks in the neighbor’s field for 50 cents an hour. That was real pay that we were real happy with. One of us would drive the tractor pulling the wagon between the young corn rows...
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. There are several reasons, but one of the main ones is that growing up on the farm, Thanksgiving always was a celebration of the end of the work year. All those long days and nights in the field working, all the effort spent worrying about the weather and the crops and walking the fields. All the work it took to gather in the harvest – it was always a celebration when we got done. I remember one year, Dad finished picking corn on Thanksgiving m...
Being in the profession that I am in, when meeting strangers, their reaction to me can be all over the board. My profession can either be a conversation starter or a conversation killer. When hearing that I am a pastor some people clam up and hardly say a word. One time a young couple showed up at our front door on a blistering winter night after having car trouble. I offered them a ride to their destination where they could get the necessary help they needed. It was about a 40 minute drive....
“Signs, signs, everywhere a sign, blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” So say the vocals to the song “Signs.” According to YouTube, “Signs", by Canadian rock group The Five Man Electrical Band (formerly The Staccatos), was written by lead vocalist Les Emmerson. It was released as a B-side single in 1970 from their "Good-byes and Butterflies" album and then re-released as an A-side single in 1971 where it reached #3 on the US Billboard Hot...
A few months ago, somebody sent me an anonymous package in the mail postmarked from Tinley Park, Illinois. I was most curious about this package, because I don’t know anybody from Tinley Park, Illinois. When I opened it, I found a 4” x 12” wooden plaque with the emboldened words on it in all caps: WORK HARD STAY HUMBLE. I’m not sure why this was sent anonymously, apparently somebody sensed the need. Although I don’t care for anything anonymous, this saying has captured my thoughts lately - mainl...
