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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was the first pup we got to see, a little girl we named Lindor.
