Friday, August 5, 2016

Catch up January 2016-July 2016

Hello everybody! I have decided to go ahead and try to do the blog again. We have felt much lack in our communication with everyone. Obviously the newsletter fell through, we absolutely loved putting it out, but trying to get it all put together, printed out, and sent to everyone in a timely basis was proving impossible. Our internet problem hasn't changed much, so this will by no means be a extremely regular blog, but I hope to at least give a highlight of what's going on when I get the chance. I am going to highlight all that we have done this year in this post.

January 4:
The community we live in is very closely knit, it is so hard to explain what kind of people we are around. For example, when we first moved in, we had our first week of dinners provided to us by the ladies that went to the church in the nearby town, and get this, it is an Assembly of God church, I had never set foot in a church of that denomination. Every single person we met was friendly and welcoming, there was no pressure to join the church, only amazing love and kindness to us! And they don't just do that for Christians either, our local Apiary (bee keepers) is run by a young couple who are devout atheists, when they had their baby earlier in August everyone at church sent them a meal, even though several people had to travel over an hour to reach them. All that said, one of the things that the families of the church do every year is a wood cutting. A couple of the deacons of the church will go around to each of the widow, senior, and disabled homes in the community several times each winter to see how their supply of fire wood is coming along. Then they organize a day to cut wood. Everyone comes with their big ranch pick-ups and we load as much as we can into as many pick-ups as show up. The wood cutting in January was our second time in going to one.

Normally this is a Dad and Kid job. While the ladies are making a fine meal back at the Rock (a local community center/jym in the town run by the Assembly of God church) all the dad's and children load up into whichever truck they can fit in and head up the mountain. Most of the ranches around here are owned by people who aren't around very much, so they hire people to manage it for them. So the manager has picked out a spot on his respective ranch where he needs some wood cleaned off. The main source of wood around here is Juniper, and there is an abundance! If you follow this blog long enough you will see that. The manager, usually with some help from one of the neighboring managers has quite a few trees cut down, decked and started cutting into logs.

The men with chainsaws start in right away, some cutting down more trees, and some cutting the trunks into logs for splitting. The kids all split off, everyone with a chain saw gets a truck and some kids to get the smaller pieces stacked, and to get the larger pieces to the splitter. 
The splitter is almost always one of the bigger boys, of which there are plenty. It is quite a job keeping up with them. And the stackers, who load up the trucks, are usually the older girls.

In this particular wood cutting we filled 9 good sized trucks, 3 smaller ones, and one large trailer...all before lunch.

Everyone works hard and this is an event that our family looks forward too! There is a lot of laughing and joking going on. Everyone from the smallest one there on up has a job and works it well. Whether that's picking up the small stuff or cutting down the trees no one is left out or feels inferior. The accident level is amazingly low, there has only been 1 somewhat bad one in the 4 we've been to. Everyone had each other's back. If a log is a little heavy for a younger one one of the older ones will make sure both log and child get to the truck safely. 



By the time lunch comes around everyone is ready to sit down and eat. The Ladies always make a spectacular meal. The men having a planning meeting to decide where each truck should go and who should help unload it. After lunch everyone is given the instructions on which truck they are riding in and off they go. It is so amazing to be apart of helping the community like this with these people


January 15 - 18:
As you might have seen on the blog, my grandpa on Mom's side had written a seminar on the story of the Bible. He and my grandmother came up to teach it. Our family has gone through it once already, but there is so much to learn that it was like going through it the first time again. We had a wonderful week. Every evening we got to do some music playing, or played games.


We removed all the furniture out of our living room, except the baby grand piano (for obvious reasons) and packed the room with tables and chairs. This was the largest Bible Story Seminar yet.







February
In the little town near us, Basketball is a big deal. For someone who wasn't fond of the game, to say the least, I had so much fun at the many home games we went to, hopefully I will be able to learn the game eventually.


The local cheer-leading team, had a really cute human pyramid at half time.

Our beautiful mansion on a hilltop is located on a small ranch, the rancher and his beautiful wife and 3 kids have invested so much into us. Even though we didn't know much about ranching when we first moved here, they were still willing to let us help out where ever we could. We finally got to a point that we could actually be of help. Right before calving season started the rancher and his family had the leave town for a while and asked us to do his chores for them. Thank God we only had one calf born and the mamma had it in between the times we checked them. Zach and I had so much fun playing rancher for a week or so.



February 14
We had a lovely evening with our cousins, their parents were on a date, so they came on over for a game night.




Zach and his cousin got into a game of Stragiteo which was a lot of fun to watch.
 Quincy gave us a wonderful Valentines gift, she had 8 beautiful, chunky puppies. I was pretty sure we would have pups soon so I left my male out of the pen for the last week or so, She had dug her birthing den under our dog kennel, and went into labor about 10:30pm. I didn't want all my cousins down there for a couple of reasons, one she likes to do this part on her own, like animals do. It was very dark down there and she had dug herself so deep that I had to reach in arms length to even feel her. So I didn't tell anyone until after they had left, let me tell you that was the hardest kept secret.
This was the first pup we got to see, a little girl we named Lindor.






 Well I probably ought to wrap this up and get it posted. It is so nice to be back, and I hope I can post regularly.




1 comment:

  1. Nice to here from y'all again! I hope to here from you guys as well!

    ReplyDelete