Home Sweet Home

Beautiful, isn't it?
This is the culmination of all my grandfather's working years, summed up in one specially built home and property... and now passed on to me and my family!
We hope you'll be able to enjoy it with us when you come visit, that is, once we permanently relocate to Southern Oregon. Until then, we'll all just have to vacation there!
The Lord is so abundantly gracious to provide a home for us in this way. We are so grateful, not only to the Lord, but to my family for passing this treasure on!

Another Birthday!

Yes, Nathanael just turned 14 on Saturday!
We had his party on Sunday after church. Good friends and family joined us and we all enjoyed ourselves! Nathanael chose carrot cake again (no surprise there!) and horses for the cake-topper. I think he might turn out to be a cowboy yet!
Not everyone likes carrot cake, so we made vanilla and chocolate cupcakes too!
And of course we had a pinata! And Miss Christine Cools was the one to beat it to pieces! She was the first to swing, which was appropriate because it was her first pinata ever. Way to go Christine! Good swings!

So much to tell you about...

The Garden:Wow, where did the summer go? I was thinking that it might be back for a little while... until about 4 pm today when it started raining again! That's the story of our entire summer around here - rain! I suppose it wasn't really that bad, but I do know that our cold and rainy June has really wreaked havoc with the garden. On Monday I picked my very first real tomato (I've been getting a few cherry tomatoes for about 3 weeks), and we began eating the very immature corn. The root veggies took a long time, but did fine (except for something totally devastating my beet crop). The cabbage finally filled out, the snap peas are still going strong, and the green beans are coming on slowly. The summer squash has been stop and go, depending on the part of the sun-for-a-couple-days-then-rain-for-a-couple-days cycle we're in. My hubard squash have done well, though I worry that they'll mature enough before it gets too rainy. I think there's only one or two butternut squash that will have a chance to mature - though there are a ton of new baby squash coming on. The real disappointment is the cucumber crop. I've only gotten about 10 quart jars of pickles off my vines this year - just not enough sun! To put it in perspective, I planted the same number of cucumber vines as last year, in the same amount of space, at nearly the same time of year. Last year I canned 37 quarts of pickles, 12 1/2 pints sweet relish, 7 pints sweet gherkins, and 12 pints of bread and butter pickles. Not to mention that we ate bunch fresh and gave a bunch away. Last fall we even finally just pulled up the vines because we were tired of picking the cucumbers! A far cry from this year! Yet, why should I complain? With each new jar of produce that I put up, I see how blessed we are that the Lord should even extend His grace toward us and provide for any of our needs! I can still pray for sunshine, though!
Canning:So far I've canned 36 one-and-one-half pint jars of green beans, 10 quarts of dill pickles, 4 pints of pickled green beans, 37 quarts of peaches, 5 pints of beets, and I have my 19 heads, or a shredded and cored 38 pounds, of cabbage fermenting in a borrowed crock (my 10 gallon crock had an accident!).

The Woodpile:
Thanks to some amazing friends and neighbors, we actually have a woodpile! Well, we had one before, but it was small! Now we have several cord of wood to be stacked! And Charles was so handy and built temporary stem walls under our covered area in order to make stacking so much easier! We spent one whole day cutting wood with friends (on Labor Day) and ended up cutting somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 1/2 cord of wood! Whew! That was some work! And during the course of the woodcutting, Nathanael acquired what will prove to be a manly scar... which leads me to the next section:

Injuries!
The Sunday before Labor Day, Mikael was the cause of a hurried trip to the nearest Urgent Care center! He had been playing in the gym with friends at church when he went after a ball and someone's leg got in the way, so he ended up doing a not-so-graceful nose-dive right into a wooden bench! Well, after we got some of the blood slowed down and had a look at the already turning purple nose that was a little crooked, we packed him up and headed off to Urgent Care! Pretty much, it was a waste of time: they looked at his nose, said it could be broken and told us they would set up an appointment with a specialist sometime during the next week. We stopped at Walgreen's on the way home and got him some Ibuprofen and an ice pack (which he's used almost once). After seeing the specialist on Wednesday, she determined that he really didn't have a broken nose, just tweaked the cartilage where it joins the bone in his nose. Her advice? Apply pressure to the nose at the junction of cartilage and bone, against the curve, several times a day for at least 20 minutes. Number of times this has actually been carried out? Possibly once!And that leads to Nathanael's head injury on Monday, Labor Day. A bit of background: These amazing friends of ours are also rather inventive, and they've developed a rather sophisticated system by which they process most of their firewood. They use a large farm tractor to move the logs onto and up the skids to the saw. The saw is a chainsaw mounted on a spring-loaded slide, effectively making it a large chop-saw. From there the cut wood rolls down a ramp to the hydraulic splitter, and then the wood is thrown over or down into one of the waiting trailers. The system is a great one, and is safer than most free-hand wood cutting operations, that is... if the bolt attaching the bracket on the saw to the spring-loaded slide is tightened after refueling the saw! Well, the bolt wasn't tightened after refueling the saw one time, and Nathanael was getting his opportunity to run the saw. He was making his cut when the saw started cutting at an angle and he was wondering about that when the bolt came loose and the spring loaded slide was free to snap back up to the top. The problem was that Nathanael's forehead was in the way! He was a real trooper - he pulled the chain-break on the saw and calmly shut the saw off and set it down. Then he felt his head and discovered all the blood! He had a fairly deep gash about 3/4 of an inch long, near the hairline on the right side of his forehead. After he was all cleaned up, he was fine. Later that night when some of the swelling was down, we super-glued the gash shut, but two nights later in his sleep he picked the glue off! He's healing well enough, but he'll probably always have that scar! Maybe I should have taken pictures of them both, but... they never really had a great scrapbooking moment. Mikael never really bruised up and his swelling went down, and Nathanael's would have been noteworthy only when the blood was running down his face, and I wasn't there to take a picture then. These wounds will have to go undocumented as far as any digital images are concerned!

Backpacking/Hiking:
Early in the summer, we as a family drove up to near Mosier, Oregon, on the Columbia River, 75 miles east of Portland. We hiked the Tom McCall trail on the Nature preserve there. It was beautiful country and the weather was in the 80's! That point in the background on the left is Tom McCall Point. Yes, even I made it up and back the 4 miles!

Later in the summer, in the latter part of July, Charles and Nathanael participated in a father/son backpacking trip into the Salmon Huckleberry Wilderness. They hiked in on a Friday morning and back out Sunday afternoon, putting about 30 miles of wear and tear on their shoes!


Freeze-dried dinner! Mmm-mmm good!

Camping:
We did manage to get one camping trip in this summer to Diamond Lake, almost 3 weeks into August. Charles' parents, Ed and Rose Baker, joined us there and we spent 4 fairly peaceful nights away from all the demands of our regular schedules. We played a lot of card games and board games, played horseshoes and ladder golf, found time to do some reading, a bit of walking and biking, and quite a bit of fishing! I think Mikey was the fishing champ in our family, though Charles might have been in second place if he'd gotten to go fishing that last day when Ed and Rose took the boys out and they all limited out in 2 1/2 hours! During their fishing fun, Charles and I were on a quest to walk the trail around the lake (approximately 10 miles) when my shoes began rubbing blisters on my feet, just in front of my heel-pad, on the outside bottom edge. In spite of blisters and due to not having a way back to camp at that time (remember: the other members of our camping crew were out on the lake hauling in the fish as fast as they could get their lines in the water) we continued on. Though I will admit that the pain was not something I'd like to repeat, I can laugh now at the rollicking way in which I walked on the toe of one foot and the inside edge of the other and then would switch off after a while. All told, we made it about 7 1/2 miles, at least 4 1/2 of which were after the blisters developed. Eventually the mighty fish-slayers finished catching their legal limit and came and picked us up. For the rest of that day and the next, I spent my time on my feet standing on my toes - it was the only way to keep from putting pressure on the very full blisters that were the size of a silver dollar on the bottom of my feet, and almost a half dollar size up the outside of each foot. I think my calves got in shape on that camping trip!And camping isn't done for the year just yet, as we plan on joining our church for their annual family camping trip near Estacada. We are praying for good weather for the weekend of September 24-26th!

Horses?

Yes, horses and ropes and even a calf or two to rope! Nathanael invested a considerable chunk of change this summer into a roping clinic put on by a friend of a gentleman we go to church with. Nathanael doesn't have a horse or any tack, but Ms. Lawwill was kind enough to loan him all he needed. He had a great time and learned a lot, and even was issued and invitation to join Ms. Lawwill and our friend, Mr. Skarpol as they ride and have a trainer come out every Thursday. So, now Nathanael is taking some riding lessons and doing great! Mikey even got to hop on for a minute!

Losses:This summer, on July 21st, 2010, my grandmother, Beverly F. Maplesden, went home to be with our Lord. She was a woman of prayer and thankfulness, completely devoted to her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, whom she served with her whole heart. We will miss her much over the coming days, but we have a sweet hope and joy in knowing that we will be with her again when Jesus calls us home.

Travels:

We didn't do a lot of traveling this summer, other than several trips to Southern Oregon. Early in June my father called to say that he thought Grandma was in a very fragile state and that we might want to come soon in order to have real interaction with her. Charles immediately sought time off from his boss, which was given, and we traveled to Southern Oregon to spend 5 days visiting with Grandma and my parents. Grandma was indeed frail when we arrived, but perked right up and seemed to be on the mend before we left. It was a good time to have had before she went Home.
Our next trip south was right after Grandma passed. Charles once again got time off, this time a whole week, so with weekends we had 9 days in Southern Oregon. During that trip we built Grandma's casket, participated in her funeral and graveside, for which I was a pall-bearer. I was left to plan the after-service fellowship time at Grandma's home. I had many, many wonderful helpers get everything ready for a houseful of family and friends, and feed them all too! Charles was my steadfast hero! He scrubbed walls, toilets, windows. He watered flowers and laws, weed-eated a ton, and mowed too! More than that, he was my dependable helper and strength when I was all done in. The boys also did so much in getting things ready - quite the troopers! Cleaning, working and weed-eating was not exactly how they would have liked to spend a week of summer in sunny Southern Oregon! Charles' parents were of invaluable assistance in pulling off the whole fellowship event, and there were many others who helped as well for whom we are all so very thankful! After our week of work, work, work and then Grandma's services, we headed home on Sunday in order to get Charles back for work on Monday.
It was pretty hard on my Dad for us to go, so after getting our yard and garden in order through that next week, the boys and I drove back down for another week of visiting. This time the boys got to do more summer activities and enjoy the warm sunshine. Dad needed help with the business, having taken the week off before Grandma's services, so I worked during the week. Though we didn't ever just hang out and visit, and we did do a ton of work, it was a good week, especially for my father to have us around again for a while.
We are planning on spending another week down there in October, settling more things with Grandma's estate, taking some time to hunt, and maybe even do a batch of apple cider! We might get a 'vacation' yet!

Here are the boys with their cousin, Sydney, at my Dad's house in Sams Valley.

Leaven

So, I've been up to my elbows in bread the last two days, and it gave me some time to ponder the New Testament teachings on leaven. I sat down here to write about them and decided to look up the exact verses I was thinking of in my E-Sword program, and then I thought maybe I'd better read a few commentaries on these verses, and now... well, it's way more complicated than I have the time to relate here!
So, use some good Bible software (or several Bible commentaries) and look up a couple verses like Matt. 13:33; 16:11, Luke 13:21 and Galatians 5:9. Then, after reading several great thinkers' ideas about this, you can edit my blog and leave all the notes! No, really... it's not just as simple as "let a little of the bad in, and you'll get a whole bunch of bad." I like cut and dried, I like rules and regulations (as long as they make sense). I think I'd have been a good Pharisee. But really, as I always find, that's not how God operates. He's about our heart attitude, not only our outward appearance. So... long story short, let's allow Christ to be the leaven in our hearts, bringing about His will, permeating all that we do and say and think and feel by His Spirit.

And send me your notes after you've studied this a bit!

Today I re-read one of Charles H. Spurgeon's "Morning and Evening" devotionals that I had marked, it struck me once again as something I needed to hear. I thought I'd share it here and maybe the Lord will speak to you from it as well.

Continue in the Faith. - Acts 14:22

Perseverance is the badge of true saints. the Christian life is not only a beginning in the ways of God, but also means continuing in those ways as long as life lasts. It is with a Christian as it was with the great Napoleon: He said, "Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me." So under God, dear believer in the Lord, conquest has made you what you are, and conquest must sustain you. Your motto must be, "Aim higher." The only true conqueror who shall be crowned in the end is he who continues until war's trumpet is blown no more. Perseverance is, therefore, the target of all our spiritual enemies. The world does not object to your being a Christian for a time, if she can tempt you to quit your pilgrimage and settle down to trade with her in Vanity Fair. The flesh will seek to ensnare you and to prevent your pressing on to glory. "Being a pilgrim is weary work and makes me wonder: Am I always to be mortified? Am I never to be indulged? Can I not have at least a holiday from this constant warfare?" Satan will make many a fierce attack on your perseverance; it will be the target for all his arrows. He will strive to hinder you in service: He will insinuate that you are doing no good and that you need to rest. He will endeavor to make you weary of suffering; he will whisper, "Curse God, and die." Or he will attack your steadfastness: "What is the good of being so zealous? Be quiet like the rest; sleep as others do, and let your lamp go out like the foolish virgins." Or he will assail your doctrinal sentiments: "Why do you hold to these doctrinal creeds? Sensible men are getting more liberal; they are removing the old landmarks: Fall in with the times." So, Christian, wear your shield close to your armor and cry earnestly to God, that by His Spirit you may endure to the end.