dallas

So Wifey and I went to Dallas a week or so ago for a long weekend to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and to see friends Jeremy and Grace Goering. We had a great time, but I have to say that the highlight of the trip wasn't eating out at fun new places, nor was it seeing old friends, nor was it any of the many exciting things that people generally do in Dallas; it was seeing the quite flustered faces of ALL the employees of the quite swanky hotel (the Stoneleigh Hotel) we stayed at, where the valet parking is mandatory (snobs) when they finally broke down and admitted that they could not find my truck keys. Aaaa-hahahahaha!

I had no idea that this place had the mandatory valet service when I booked it through expedia; using my credit card miles, nor was I aware that they would charge me 21.00 a night for the privilege of not having to walk 20' outside the hotel and open my own door. Money well spent, I'm sure. But after I casually dropped it to the hotel manager that the poor chumps couldn't find my keys, (I wish I had video of the blank look, the widening of the eyes, then the flush coming to his cheeks) he solicitously offered us a ride, then a hotel car, then to buy us breakfast at the also very swanky restaurant, and then tore off to presumably chew some butt, vowing "to bring in the guys working late last night and search through every vehicle, one by one" . We gracefully accepted breakfast; (even the wait-staff at breakfast were profusely apologizing, as if they personally felt guilty) that's all we were gonna go do anyway, and the short way of finishing the story is that they finally found them- 2 hours later! And man, were there some red faces! I wasn't mad, I wasn't even upset- they knocked off 2 nights of the Valet charges, we got a free $50.00 breakfast, and I wasn't ever even worried that one of the night shift valets decided to make off with my '07 GMC pickup, rather than steal one of the many Mercedes, Caddies, or Bentleys.

They never did tell me where they had been, or what happened to them; even when I directly asked, but I did put my hand on the shoulder of the guy who lost my keys and asked kinda quiet like: "So level with me- what kind of tip does it take to get my keys back the next morning?" I had to rub it in just a little... Here are a few pictures of some fun we had:

The Girlz: doin' what they love most- LOOKING at stuff

Uncle Dan and Cutie-Cakes-Caris

Brynn admiring an original Mary Cassat painting, one of her favorite artists; we have several of these at our house (um, rather prints, actually, of course)

i'mmmm baaaackkkkk!

For those of you who knew that we were gone, we're back now. If you didn't know that we were gone, we loaded up truck and camper trailer and went to Colorado Springs for a long weekend and also to Denver for me to get LASICs surgery, since it is less than half the price that the monopoly of Greene vision charges in Wichita. Anyway, after watching the hot-air balloon races early this morning, and driving about 9 hours (in 1.5 hour intervals between shouts of "Daddy I got to go potty BAAADDDD!") my fixed eyeballs are about shot, so this may be the shortest blog ever... Goodnight!
P.S. everything went well, but I did dislike the snapping and crackling of the lasers, followed by the smell of burning flesh. Other than that, it was a piece of cake. I do have to tell that they gave me a stuffed animal in the shape of a pig to hold during the surgery, and I asked the surgeon if it was kosher, 'cause I was an Orthodox Jew. After about 5 seconds of awkward silence, I chickened out and told him I was kidding. He breathed a sigh of relief and told me that he at least had it dry-cleaned weekly, but was unsure if that qualified as kosher; so since it was Friday, I threw it on the floor; its getting washed anyway, right?

one last Ozark Adventure posting

I really waffled back and forth about using this, but I really can't help myself, maybe the realization that I am now "socially disadvantaged" made me do it, but this is gonna be a real short one. I just can't figure it out; I've never seen anything like this in Kansas. Maybe the culling process was out of order at the Missouri Department of Tags, or maybe unlike here at the Reno County Courthouse, someone actually has something of a sense of humor.

Anyway, you should have seen the hubbub in the pickup when I saw this in front of me, desperately trying to claw the camera out while staying on the road. I would stand in line all day if I thought I could get this tag: it was my nickname from my family for most of my formative years (might explain a lot) So here it is:

Important Farm News

I got a letter the other day, from the evil, yet saucy bureaucracy of the United States Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) stating that my "farm (#12841) has base acres that might possibly allow you to enroll into the CCC-509, Direct and Counter-Cyclical Program (DCP Contract or Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program for FY 2009."

Sounds rather stimulating doesn't it? I have absolute no idea what they were talking about, but I eventually gathered that there was a possibility that if my crop did poorly enough (what crop? Did the satellite photos really show how badly my potatoes did this year? That raises all kinds of questions in my mind!) that apparently I am eligible for loans, grants, etc., apparently to subsidize my poor potato crop.
Then it went though a long list of reasons why I was NOT eligible for these. Toward the bottom of the paper where it gave examples of allowances for the exemptions from the disqualifications of counter-cyclical payments, or average crop revenue election payments. Still quite bewildered, but trying to (probably out of sheer self-loathing) figure out what they are getting at, I finally realize that I don't qualify for any of this stuff.

However at the very bottom of the paper it states that I do qualify "if the farm is owned by either of the following:

• Limited resource farmer or rancher


• Socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher

Being a woman with 50% ownership interest in the land now meets the socially disadvantaged requirement."

Now THAT caught my attention! Sorry to bore everyone to tears with all this bureau-speak excuse for a language, but I was quite disheartened to hear the bad news that I was married to someone (and thereby being implicated as well; as I own half of this farmlet) who is "socially disadvantaged." I was instantly discontent about my relationship with my wife.

You see, the more I got to know the woman who was to be my future wife, the more convinced I was that I was indeed marrying "up." I knew she was full of cultural interests, art, classical music, and was in general one of the most creative people I knew, whereas I pretty much know how to swing a hammer. You see, I thought that I was really getting something special; real grade A, top shelf, quality spousal material here, and then I get this letter saying that my farmlet is demeaned into some sort of a 50-percentile, 2nd-best pariah, just because my poor decision-making process led me to make the poor choice to marry a-a-a- WOMAN! Sooo socially disadvantaged! And for her to drag me and our farm down with it! I am so embarrassed...

You must consider what this has done to my world view. We used to hold hands in public, and walk side by side; but today as we walked across the street today from our office to our bank, I caught myself edging away from her as I noticed people's stares. I admit it is a little intimidating being in public when married to someone on such a list.

I have a dilemma, however. How I can I get myself free of this "being disadvantaged"? I'm sure I'm like everyone else, I just want a level playing field, I don't want anymore disadvantages than the next guy, so what are my options? I guess one option would be a same sex marriage, but I'm pretty sure that would still put me on the same list, even if it were of interest to me and it were a viable option in Kansas. I guess my only option is to break the news to her that she is socially disadvantaged and send her packing.

I guess what I really need to know is the definition of "socially disadvantaged". I am assuming that if being a woman qualifies you, then being any type of minority also qualifies you, even though women make up 154,135,120 out of the 304,059,724 people that inhabit the US, making up nearly 51% majority of our population. Then, if you figure in the fact that there are 242,639,242 of these 304,059,724 that call themselves "white" and that 49% of them are most likely males that leaves 118,893,228. Since there is only 230,117,876 out of the original 304,059,724 that are actually considered adults (just over 75%) we will just guess at there being roughly 89,169,921 adult white males in the US. Then, if I have the good sense to leave my socially disadvantaged wife, so as to not handicap my little farmlet, and noting that 82% of adult men are married (presumably to a socially disadvantaged woman, thereby dooming whatever business they are in) that leaves me in a group of 16,050,585 of single adult white males which would put me in one of the smallest and therefore presumably most socially disadvantaged brackets in the 2008 population estimates, save a few other socially disadvantaged minorities, so I might be back in the same boat, anyway.

Anyway, I hope you haven't been bored out of your gourd listening to all this, but the long and short of it is that I'm really dreading telling my beautiful, creative, and much cultured wife that she is at a real social disadvantage to her lout of a belching, farting, ignorant husband. Somehow I'm not sure she'll be convinced anyway, despite what the USDA tells us. I'm just guessing that she'll just smile and make little affirming sounds to let me know that I did a good job in being able to read the mail...

FYI: all of the actual data came from the US census website, and most of it came from this page:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=PEP_2008_EST_DP1&-geo_id=D&-ds_name=D&-_lang=en

Foster Ozark Adventure; part V

We drove down to the southern part of Missouri, to the little grand canyon; a collapsed cave that’s about 100’ deep. It is now a park, and some good federal employee decided to spend a bunch of money on building stairs all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. A big project, but very nice if you have 4 little kids that you want to get to the bottom; I have mixed feelings about those taxpayer dollars that were spent. The stairs are very nice, and we used them in exactly how they were meant to be used, but since they were federal dollars, I also realize that they could have been built for a tenth of what they cost… oh well.

From there we went on to Arkansas and camped in a very nice spot smack dab off of the Spring River. It was very isolated, quiet, and picturesque for about 15 minutes until a train went ripping by just on the other side of the trees, blasting its horn about 50’ away from the camper. This only happened every half-hour or so, but we were just struck how odd that it was that they didn’t mention that little detail in the website or on the phone when we called. Oh well, it isn’t like it ruined it for us or anything, and we didn’t actually ask. We are just staying here one night.

I was a little disturbed at how UN-affected my children were by the sight of a big black snake in the water at the edge of the bank when we first got out of the truck. I thought they would be all freaked out, but they just changed into their suits and grabbed big black sticks and piled in the river and played “snake” for hours.

The kids loved this river; they collected bags of shells and we saw some people fishing out in the middle of the river at one point when it was just POURING rain. He seemed quite unaffected by it, and we were all very impressed with his level of dedication of killing fish. I find it hard to imagine that much hatred toward any fish, but that’s just me. Maybe he got beaten with a fish as a child.

My family was not sophisticated enough to use poles when I was growing up; we just flipped them out of the river with our bare hands, in fact I’ve never caught one on a pole in my whole wide life. Looking at this misty, peaceful river after the rain almost made me wish that I fished, though. Maybe someday I will be able to work up enough animosity towards fish to go through all the trouble to do some “proper” fishing, but for now I think I’ve got enough things that I wish to see dead. (See varmint blog link below) http://thefecklessfather.blogspot.com/2008/06/rules-of-engagement-on-foster-farm-or.html
And speaking of the un-sophistication of my childhood, it strikes me as pretty funny that people travel around in these “camper” trailers and have the gall to call it camping, when you have water, electricity, full plumbing, (shower, toilet) full kitchen, and of course: air conditioning. Really roughing it, huh? While my folks weren’t into camping at all, my friends and I always thought that it would be a good idea, so we went, and went pretty often. Of course when you are in school, the only times that there really are to do serious camping is in the middle of summer and during Christmas break, so we did both. None of us had tents, but all my friends at least had sleeping bags; I didn’t, but I did have my grandad’s old army cot and a plethora of old quilts to pile up. Once I woke up covered in snow, but toasty warm.
Once during the summer we camped for several days straight and didn’t bring any food stuff, but brought rifles and one guy brought a fishing pole. (Well, of course we brought bacon, but that counts sorta like toilet paper- you cant really go without it!)
Anyway, my point is that I am a little distraught that my kids are growing up thinking that this is what camping is… I guess if I try very hard, that I can inflict enough hardship and misery onto them in other areas that they will acquire character. I know that I can count on my dad to give them “trashy jobs” when they go for overnights there.

F.O.A. Part IV

I have to say that my impression of Missourians is mellowing somewhat; we met some very friendly locals here, and in a tourist area, that can’t be that easy to do. Yesterday we went to the Alley Springs Water Mill, a large three story building that had a water powered turbine that could power any number of different machines, rather than the typical grist mill that had one wheel to the side just rolling around two stones together. It was built in 1894, cutting edge technology in its day, and it still works today. Well, not yesterday, it had a belt slipping, but they claim it ordinarily works. Another great thing about this place is it was right next to a cool spring-pond that had 81 million gallons of water dumping out every day. Pretty impressive to this Kansas boy!

Then we went to Rocky Falls, a beautiful waterfall area with a great swimming area. There weren’t very many people around, and the kids just loved climbing up the falls. Isaiah even got a chance to poop in the woods, and while he’s not a bear, he was wearing a ball cap with a bear on it!
Isaiah has really been more adventuresome than we expected; he usually is a pretty cautious boy, but he was climbing boulders and rocks and getting irritated at momma for asking if he wanted help. Stu is the one to worry about, though. As long as he has been able to walk, he has just been pretty fearless, but out here he has been a little monkey demon climber and risk taker, and crashing and burning does nothing to slow him down. You can actually see it on his face when he sees older siblings doing anything, he thinks: “those kids aren’t a bit better than me, so I gonna do it too!”, and then he does. You can’t take your eyes off of him for 5 seconds!

It has taken us a little time to figure out our “groove” of vacationing. I’m not so much the kind of guy that wants to “just relax”, so we keep pretty busy, but we can’t hardly move fast enough for the kids.

Say we just finish up lunch and are planning to go swimming. Brynn and I have been frantically cleaning up, finding swimming suits, applying sun block, digging up sandals for kids, packing towels, unhooking trailers, finding maps, etc, etc, ETC!!! The LAST thing I personally want to hear is: “I’m bored. I want to go swimming. Can we go swimming? Daddy, I want to go swimming! Daddy! Did you hear me? I want to go swimming!” After about 2 days of this, I was about to leave them there and just start over (can I say; I know what God was telling Moses about in the desert?)

But instead we just had the classic vacation lectures about good attitudes (I guess classic, we’ve not ever really vacationed like this before) and patience and getting along with each other. Emma even lost her marshmallow privileges the other night, a mighty blow to her, who ordinarily doesn’t care a flip about getting spanked (at least she won’t show it). They've shaped up and adapted nicely, though. It has been very enjoyable to be able to be around my kids so much. I don't feel like an absent father most of the time, but this week I feel like I’m actually able to be a father to them. I think that we are all benefiting from a little time of serious together-ness.

Foster Ozark Adventure, part III

Before we continue on from the last post, there are a few things about me that are important to know. I don’t swim well at all, and unfortunately, I can’t even blame the fact that I am too dense to float, since neither my dad nor brother can float, but can swim just fine, so I am just stuck being labeled completely uncoordinated. I can live with that OK, that’s not a big deal anyway; I never had myself pegged as a Michael Jordan type anyway. (I’m no sports guy, but I’ve heard that he’s a coordinated fellow).

The other thing is that I have spent almost my entire life, childhood and adulthood, wearing shoes. I enjoy the security of shoes. I prefer boots, hard-soled, and good for kicking things and people who need it. I've never felt compelled to get a “concealed carry” license for a gun; I figure that I can do enough damage with my shoes/boots if push came to kick.

But since I usually wear shoes, even in the house, except right before I get in bed, I have very tender feet. And since boots in the river don’t really make that much sense, I was bare foot when Gracie started screaming. So I’m stuck with a dilemma; do I slowly dog paddle down stream or do I sprint to the bank through the treacherously sharp, nasty foot puncturing rocks and dive in closer to my eldest child?

Well, since I still have Grace with us tonight, I guess you can figure that much out for yourself, but let me just say I am suffering jokes from my wife about being a “tender-foot” and “pussy-footing” around the campsite. In retrospect, I’m not at all sorry I did what I did, because there was this one redneck about halfway between Grace and I that started swimming towards her when she started screaming/gurgling, and I way beat him to her, but what do you expect? She wasn't his daughter. Anyway, to make a long story short, I pulled her out of the water by her braids and then promptly decided to spend the next 30 minutes shaking violently from the adrenaline rush. Thank you Jesus, Amen. And when I quit shaking, we had a talk about staying close to daddy in the river. Again, thank you Jesus, Amen.

Ozark Adventure; part II

After spending the night in the Norman Bates Motel version of RV parks, we hit the road early in the morning, to go back to where good honest, middle-middle class people park their shiny pick-ups and RV’s. We met the same park ranger as we had seen the night before there, a Mrs. M. Johnson, and asked her the best way to get set up with a good spot. She let us know that she was very sympathetic towards us and if we would just come back at 12:30, she would make a special effort on our behalf, but there was simply nothing to be done until after 12:00, 12:30 being even better.
We killed a few hours by me carrying everyone though the poison ivy, (I’m not allergic, at least yet –more on this later? -I hope not), fording the beautiful Jack Fork River several times, and the kids lugging many pounds of precious, beautiful rocks around. (I told them they could fill up the back of the pick-up with rocks for all I cared, but I wasn’t gonna tote them around, since I was already hauling all the water and Stuart on my back) Then we showed back up at 12:30 or a few minutes before to talk to the very helpful Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson, but couldn’t find a ranger anywhere.
We drove around every campsite for about an hour, then just parked the stupid truck in a spot marked “reserved”, and went swimming. I came back and unhooked, and went ranger-cruising. Luckily, I bumped into one pretty soon, and asked for Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson. He looked at me like I was stupid and said “She gets off at noon, hasn’t worked a Sunday afternoon for the last 8 years. Lucky gal, cause she gets to go to all them there horseshoe tournaments instead of me.” So much for sympathetic park rangers, but this guy was helpful enough, if a little bitter at Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson for hogging all the horseshoe tournaments, and before we knew it, we were set up and had the grill going.

Our swimming hole was a really sweet spot, complete with a little cliff to jump off of. We had a good time there, except just as I noticed that I only had 3 kids within 100 yards of me, I looked around and saw Grace waaaay downstream and as I yelled at her to come back I noticed her braids disappeared, then again. Then she started screaming/gurgling… For the sake of over-writing long boring blogs, tune in next time!

The Great Foster Ozark Adventure

We loaded the camper Thursday night, we loaded the camper Friday night, and we loaded the camper Saturday morning. Finally, at about 8:00 am, we loaded us up in the pickup and hit the road. As we wound our way towards Missouri, I had a bit of revelation. I have long noticed that many Missourians dislike Kansans, and now I think I know why; the closer to Missouri you get, the more the Kansas people act like Missourians. The most notable was in Fort Scott, where just a cursory drive through the town (only a few minutes from Missouri) revealed such interesting business characters as “Judy’s Iron and Plumbing”, “The Wolf’s Den Tanning Salon” (in a dilapidated old block building with no paint and a rusty tin roof), and even one place with a pig on the roof! No wonder Missourians don’t like Kansans, they think we look just like them! What’s to like? (My wife’s family excluded, of course…)
It took us about 10 hours to get to the Alley Springs Campground, only to find that the campsite we reserved lacked about 10 feet enough to accommodate the length of our camper. By this time it is pushing 7:30, but we thought we found the last spot available (without electricity, but at this point, who cares?), so we unhooked the fifth-wheel, and Brynn started supper. As some of you already know, if 7:30 rolls around and I haven’t eaten anything, usually I’m feeling pretty glum, or perhaps irritable is a closer description.
Anyway, to add insult to insult, after unhooking and getting camp started, I realize that there are 2 posts with the same number on them, and the one further from the road shows that someone has already reserved the spot we are in… So… I load back up, hook back up, and drive to the seediest RV park in the western hemisphere, I’m sure. The guy behind the counter could hardly be bothered to put down his PS3 game controller to look up at me, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to take the smoke out of his mouth, nor to put on a shirt. Oddly enough, their prices were higher than the much nicer, much cleaner state park, the only reason I can think of is that the crowd there was willing to pay a higher price in order to not have state park officials looking over their shoulders all the time.
But all in all, we had an uneventful evening; I finally got my supper, and the kids learned all about bikers and marijuana. Oh, and did I mention the RV park apparently featured a BAND!!! Lucky for us, we were the closest camper to the “stage”, so we didn’t even need to leave the trailer to listen to the old 70’s songs howled out by some brave soul determined to please his crowd of about 15 people, even though it was fairly obvious that he should have been lying down and sleeping long ago. Maybe tomorrow will bring better even better luck.

Garden Lore

So in preparation of the Great Foster Ozark Adventure, Wifey suggests that “we” (meaning yours truly) do some stuff in the garden before we leave, like pull up onions, beets, turnips, and dig potatoes. Since I have put off this task until the temps reached triple digits, I am not looking forward to doing it much, but if there is one thing I can do well, it is doing things I don’t want to do, anyway. So I grab my ‘tator fork, my four children, and my innocent bystander sister-in-law, whose only crime was to not having a pressing project at the very moment that this was going to take place.
For some reason, things weren’t that great this year, production wise. Out of close to 100 potato plants, we only harvested about 10 gallons, though it felt like 100 gallons when digging them out of clay dirt and it is 100 degrees. The rest of it did just “OK” this year as well. It comes as some small consolation that I do have one thing that never fails to grow, particularly in the garden when my children and I are working together. My stories!
I don’t know why I do it, its all just baloney to my older kids and it just confuses my younger kids, none of it makes any sense even to me. My sister-in-law thinks I’m demented and that my kids will grow up very messed up, not knowing who to trust, or when, but I’ve seen first hand that they figure out fairly quick when dad is feeding fibs. Like when we kept digging up Toads in the garden, they didn’t believe me that there is a specific Toad that migrates yearly from Canada, one hop at a time, comes and digs in freshly tilled gardens and then out of that buried toad comes a tuber plant… why else would that plant be called a “potatoad”? Seems like good logic to me. I even had my mother-in-law going for a bit later when I went inside about the migratory toad bit.
Other fibs include how we got our pond; a “herd” of geese were swimming up north and it got so cold so fast that the pond they were in froze around their bottoms. It scared them, and they started flapping and just took the whole pond south with them, until they got tired enough they had to land, and that was right on our place.- lucky us!
One time while at the river, I told them about the strange and mysterious “Goodyear” fish, that is round, black and has scales that look like treads in order lure small children into thinking that it actually an old tire so that it can tackle them and drag them into deeper water to eat them.
I do admit surprise, however, at the occasional tall tale that I can actually pull off. Take the other day when I was asked how the GPS worked; I carefully explained how I captured a small British woman (hence the accent) and put her in a box just under the hood of the pick-up, with just enough holes to see the road ahead with binoculars. Oddly enough this was pretty much absorbed and thought of as generally a good idea. I’m not really sure how I feel about that, but on my old truck I had a “self destruct button” that I was only to use when I knew that I was going to be caught by bad guys and had information that I couldn’t let them have. The only disbelief expressed by my girls at this point was that it was right there in the dash, towards the passenger side, and down low so it could very easily could be accidentally pushed, and thereby blown to bits. “Well,” says I “I never said it was a total picnic having a world-famous yet secret international spy for a dad.” It’s true; it isn’t a total picnic, neither is having a pathological liar for a dad, though.

Stuart's new love

Here is a photo of my little boy, Stu. While I have always encouraged my children to try all kinds of food, especially spicy foods, (since it is almost exclusively our western European based culture that refuses to eat spicy foods, thereby negating 3/4 of the world's excellent food that is to be sampled), I never expected to have one naturally born to it. After much prompting and cajoling, my daughters have finally discovered that they enjoy a small dip of the chip into the "medium" salsa. Stu, however, figured it out before the age of two.

Several nights ago, we had "chips and cheese" as a snack, so the girls wanted a bowl full of above mentioned salsa to go with it. Stu loved it so much that when he ran out of chips, he found that a spoon worked just as well or even better than chips. He ate most of the entire bowl of "medium" salsa with a spoon.

Then the other night I noticed him with green fingers, green mouth, and watery eyes. I asked him what he had been doing, and he showed me a small handful of wet peanuts, and only then did I realize he had been into my stash of Wasabi covered peanuts, just sucking the Wasabi off, then spitting out the peanut. For those of you who know what Wasabi is (Asian mustard/horseradishy/hot sauce), you'll know that it isn't normal fodder for toddlers.

So tonight we all went to Carlos O'Kelly's for supper (kids get "Kid's Meals "for $0.99 on Tuesdays!) and Stu was TEARING UP the salsa! The picture above is his most oft found expression, as it seemed his tongue was hanging out of his mouth for most of the evening, presumably to cool it off. As anybody worth his Salsa knows, if its worth eating, it worth spicing it up!

spring of '09

So here's a little of what's been happening around the Foster Farm-let lately. Because I am such a self-less, loving husband, I have decided to split my time between working in the basement finishing a winter project (started too late to finish in the winter) and normal springtime outside stuff, even though every fiber of my being cries out to go outside and plant, build, and... whatever, just be somewhere besides the basement when its nice outside. (As a side note, this basement project started out as a voluntary surprise thing for my wife, I was going to finish ONE WALL(!), and now I have finished 5, built a big closest, and built copious amounts of shelving in that closet, moved all of our junk into it from old storage space, (& much of Wife's sisters' stuff) and now am firmly entrenched in building a whole set of cabinets to cover one of the walls I just finished.

During the winter, I often get emails from Gurneys, (who guarantee their trees for "as long as you garden", a very foolish warranty to offer to people with a brown thumb like me; but they have been as good as their word on it so far) offering trees for half off, free shipping etc, all of which is fine, except I have exemplified a total lack of self control when it comes to purchasing fruit trees online. Anyway, I got 11 of them delivered all at once, and had a heck of a time getting them all in the ground soon enough. I've still about 5 yet coming, but don't know when; they just show up whenever. So far, since I have moved here 3+ years ago we have planted about 150+ trees and/or shrubs. Who knew that Kansas has a department of forestry where you can also get great deals on trees?

Recently, I also had the great joy of helping Andrew Hawkinson, (friend and Friendly Neighborhood Traveling Used Forklift Tire Salesman) load up a used forklift tire upon his Mobile Used Forklift Tire Sales Unit. This seems an appropriate place for a picture:

My guess is he just drives around to job-sites and asks "hey buddy, I got a sweet deal on this here Forklift Tire. And I'll give you an even sweeter deal if you let me use your forklift to get it off of my van so that I don't have to pick it up again!" Go, Andrew, go! Times are hard, anything to make a buck, buddy!

Also from Isaiah this weekend; apparently at some point last week the kids and Mama went to the Wichita zoo, because he was showing how big these animals were by stretching out his pudgy little arms as wide as they could go, saying ..."they were even bigger than this, daddy! They were HUMONGO!!" So at this point I wasn't really sure what he was talking about, I asked him what animal it was again: "The turd-asauras, Daddy!" This was met with much tittering from his older sisters, and not a few snickers from myself, so, either he meant the tortoises, or the zoo got a new kind of reptile that I am unfamiliar with.

And lastly, the big new thing around here is the new furniture arrangement in the living room. Furniture rearrangement is something that happens infrequently in our house, by some standards anyway; but still more often than I care for and less often than everyone else cares for. But as this was done after a carpet cleaning where all furniture was moved anyway, and I wasn't involved at all in the decision process, and it was complete when I came home; so I guess its OK. The girls noted it looked quite a lot like royal throne room and instantly granted me "Kingship". The duties of king-ship weighed heavily upon me, mostly as (oddly enough) I spent a great deal of time being told to get on my knees for His Majesty's Royal Crown Fitting. You will note His Majesty's Royal Crown on the red pillow in his throne in picture. You will also notice His Majesty's Royal Socks, His Majesty's Royal Sneaker, and maybe even His Majesty's New Royal Blackberry. As an aside, being in His Majesty's Royal court apparently requires much curtsying, giggling, and thumping of each other and younger brothers for not behaving well in front of His Majesty. Still, it is fun to wear the paper crown, and to be called Sire, and be served tea and newspaper while my wife wearily toils away at supper, or whatever she does in the servant quarters of my castle. Its good to be the king!

The abstract concept of time

Its hard to imagine that Isaiah's fat four year old head could actually get stuck in between the front door and the storm door, but apparently it happened. After walking through the blistering cold all the way to Gran and Grampa's house, only to find that they weren't there, he turned around and came home. I am unsure of all the details, because I was working downstairs in the basement and therefore oblivious to all that happened upstairs. The first I heard of it was after Gracie went upstairs for something, then came back downstairs and told me that when she went upstairs, she could hear Isaiah knocking and yelling. She freed him and he was most grateful, telling her that the wind blew the storm door shut before he got the front door open.
The funny part, though, was when he came downstairs - (he was quite unaffected, if still a little blue from the cold) I asked him if he was there for very long. His response: "I didn't really look at the clock; I cant tell time anyway."

Dan, Davey, and Johnny.

In our house, music is a big part of our life. We turn music on when we go to sleep, when we wake up, when we clean up, and when we want to have fun. So we sleep, wake, clean, eat, and dance just for fun's sake to music. We listen to nearly anything that we consider well done, be it classical, classic country, rap or rock, secular or Christian; we like music for music's sake, it doesn't even have to make good sense, we just like to have fun. One recurrent theme in the music in our home, however, is "redemption". For this reason, we hear a lot of Johnny Cash in our musical lives. If you don't know, Mr. Cash led a roller coaster life of sex, drugs, and rock & roll (and country). He eventually found his Lord and Savior, and loved to tell and sing about it in his music in his later years. On one of his last albums that he produced before he died is a specific song that my wife has commented on that reminds her of me, and apparently has done this in front of my Gracie. Tonight she asked me why Momma said that.


Instead of my usual tactic of avoidance of the subject of my "crazy days" (as J. R. Cash puts it), I decided to open up with her some and tell her that years ago I didn't know the Lord and that I was one crazy dude. Her response? "I BET SO!, WITHOUT A WIFE TO CONTROL YOU!!!" I of course informed her that without the Lord controlling my life first, that all of Mamma's efforts would be in vain anyway, even if they weren't already. She was still curious, so we just had a little impromptu bible study and I turned to Psalm 34 and read to her (don't really know why, except it had been on my mind) the first 8 verses, and explained how the Lord responds to people who cry out to Him, and fall before him. And I told them (all of them by this time, as you cant sit on the floor without being mobbed by all in my house) that I had decided to "taste" (see vs 8) and I decided that the Lord was good, and encouraged them to take refuge in the Lord when struggling with things they were sure that were impossible to do on their own. "Taste" I said, "and see that the Lord is good."


For I have tasted; and if you don't already know, the Lord is good. And let us exalt His name together. If you seek the Lord he will answer you; you will never be ashamed.

And interestingly, I noticed only now in verse 11 it states "Come you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord".


Has my prayer not continually been that I could teach my children right from wrong, that I could guide them to fear of our Lord? I do pray that this psalm, perhaps written to "Davey's" own children originally, would have an impact on my own.

Big Chicken Business

So, today I measured a metal building that is squatting upon well over one million square feet of floor space. This building (already two years into its construction) is to be used for egg and chicken production, and even while still under construction, just got its first batch of baby chicks this week.

Raising chickens must be "Big Business"; but apparently, spelling is NOT. I love construction! It makes me feel so smart! A little bit added sweetness is that it isn't even the right address.

This made me reflect back to my Spanish classes I took from Señor Schmidt, that at times ran a little long when he had to stop teaching Spanish in order to teach basic English to many of the adult students, including obscure and complicated sentence structure topics like: subject, verbs, prepositions, and most complex of all, the adverb. At the risk of poking a "bête noire," I'm just saying that it seems that our public education system could use a little tune up. Then again, I'm glad that there is still a place for us bad spellers to work at! (I put that preposition on the end of that sentence on purpose just for a little pithy irony. Did it work?)

on genetics

My head is still spinning from an earlier conversation with my kids over supper tonight. My 2nd child informed me that I was the oddball of the family because all the kids have blond hair and blue eyes, and I don't. She also informed me that I more closely resemble the family dog "Sam" than any of the kids, because he at least has green eyes and facial hair, unlike any of the kids. Kinda disturbing, huh?

on one's own helplessness and John Milton

I don't normally have weighty matter on my mind, mostly because I have in my mind a long list of stuff to get done, and I am always slower than I think I should be, so my concentration is always upon "The List". Living like this lends itself to a nearly self-absorbed, shallow life, but that's OK, because mostly I'm a self-absorbed, shallow guy, and I don't feel much missing. In other words, before I go too much further with this, I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression that I just sit around and contemplate 17Th century British poets all the time.

However, I recently came down with the nasty, nasty "crud" that the rest of my family got and nearly made me extinct. That's no big deal, I do some of my best work when I feel the worst, I always figured I'd a lot rather be doing something when I felt lousy than sitting around feeling sorry for myself and thinking about nothing but how bad I feel. But add to that a nearly crippling back injury incurred last Monday, and it pretty much wiped my "List" clean. Wednesday, I worked through the pain and cut firewood when I came home, then woke up around midnight new years eve (real party animal, I know) with such excruciating pain that I made my first new years resolution in years; that I would really take it easy Thursday. So with as much self-control as I could muster, I did nothing all day. It isn't as easy as it sounds.

But I had nice time anyway, and read something by John Milton that really struck me. If you didn't know, he was probably most famous for his book "Paradise Lost", which he dictated in iambic pentameter to one daughter or another after he lost all sight. However, this poem is about the loss of that sight and his feelings of helplessness (which I happen to relate to lately). It is called "When I consider How My Light Is Spent"

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

If any of you are like me, this will go straight over your head unless you happen to be laid up for a day or two, and don't like watching infomercials. But if you have several minutes, read it again.