Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Marriage
...Considering all the young men I know who are wanting to take safaris in Africa or trips through the Amazon rain forests rather than engage in the great adventure of marriage. When will they wake up and see what they are missing?
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Blueberries
This has been a crazy year for Rader. Just as the raspberry harvest is peaking, blueberries are starting to come in. Rader did their first full day harvesting blueberries today and several outside growers are starting up too.
We received our first ever tractor load of blueberries. An outside grower with this small tractor pulled off the Badger with a pallet of blueberry flats on forks behind it. It was quite funny. I had Kirk take the picture with his phone.
Hot day
Today was another hot day. I don't know what the high was but it was somewhere in the eighties. It's always a few degrees warmer on the back dock at Rader because of the black top. Today I put my bike computer (which has a thermometer) on the black top to see how hot it was. Around 2PM it got up to 114 degrees F.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Welcome Home Women Folk
The family, besides Dad, Phil and I who were working, just returned from spending a few days at Stephen and Sarah's.
Every day the women do so much for us men which goes unnoticed. At our home that includes meals, laundry, general house cleaning, shopping, help in the garden, their great company in the evenings after work and caring for us in so many other ways.
We sure missed them this last weekend! With the long hours at work I didn't have much time for meal preparation. Left over beef and potato stew for dinner two nights and in a tortilla for lunches. I attempted to make a healthy shake like Susanna so cheerfully does for me but it ended up in disaster being sprayed over the cabinets and ceiling by the blender. It didn't compare in taste either. I think what I missed the most was the cheerful greeting I get after returning from a long day at work.
Guys, we need to show some appreciation for the many little things the women in our lives do for us!
Every day the women do so much for us men which goes unnoticed. At our home that includes meals, laundry, general house cleaning, shopping, help in the garden, their great company in the evenings after work and caring for us in so many other ways.
We sure missed them this last weekend! With the long hours at work I didn't have much time for meal preparation. Left over beef and potato stew for dinner two nights and in a tortilla for lunches. I attempted to make a healthy shake like Susanna so cheerfully does for me but it ended up in disaster being sprayed over the cabinets and ceiling by the blender. It didn't compare in taste either. I think what I missed the most was the cheerful greeting I get after returning from a long day at work.
Guys, we need to show some appreciation for the many little things the women in our lives do for us!
Obama's Lincoln Thing
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
Let’s just hold it a bit on this Lincoln thing. If Barack Obama wants to lead the nation as Lincoln did, we’re in for a lot of trouble.
The man whose Bible he took the oath on, whose memory he regularly invokes, presided over the creation of what can only be called a nascent fascist government led by a party of industrial capitalism that ran roughshod over constitution and custom, encouraged a form of bloody warfare that defied all civilized practice to date, and was the cause of untold misery, violence, and destruction for the next half-century or more. He was the ultimate creator of an empire that, thanks to military might in service to corporate interests, spread across the American continent, not just north to south but eventually coast to coast, and would ultimately go on to impose itself worldwide.
We have now come to the culmination of that empire, whether they know it or not, and the meltdown of the global economy is only the first signal of its collapse. Peak oil, extreme climate, unwinnable wars, social unrest, environmental decay, and the multiple whiplashes of a failed capitalist system will hasten its demise.
We’ve got two choices. One is the Lincolnesque way that Obama seems to promise: government subsidies for the larger corporations and banks (as Lincoln pushed in his day, especially for the railroads), refurbishing of the infrastructure (ditto), nationalization of the financial system and reckless printing of currency, increased centralization of the government and its hold on the economy, continuation and expansion of warfare and the war machine (all ditto). That is a continuation of the past, and it is amazing that the nation largely does not recognize it as a recipe for continued collapse. It is in fact not sustainable, nor is the environment in which it is floundering.
The other way is to rejigger, to dismantle, the entire system.
Abandon the empire (which we can no longer afford anyway, of course) and the war system that was begun in 1861 and has been in effective power since 1941 (of which Eisenhower famously warned us).
Dismantle the government-sponsored and –coddled corporate system of large-scale capitalism (agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Pharm, Big Chem, Big Silicone, the lot), overprotected (to keep the lobbyists in business and overregulated (ditto the bureaucrats), and return to a modern variety of an early 19th-century economy, which means small holders, family farmers, local businesses, individual enterprise, neighborhood artisans, community-supported agriculture and power generation, low taxes, and local empowerment.
Dismember the bloated Washington system as we know it (keep it around perhaps for automated record-keeping, but not defense or diplomacy), discard Congress entirely, and return effective power to the states (or better, in time, to bioregions), keep government machinery small even at that level and amenable to true democracy, and, this time around, create prohibitions against a takeover of electoral and legislative machinery by aristocratic interests and corporate cartelizers.
In other words, let’s try it all over again, having learned the lessons from a disastrous experiment in Romanesque empire that we might have learned long ago, had we any sense of history. No point in trying to put bailout and stimulus fingers in these broken dikes, no point in trying to hold on to and restore an economy built on nothing but growth and consumption, and the concomitant exhaustion of resources, befouling of environments, amassment of wastes, and emiseration of masses.
Let’s try something new. In fact we have to.
Let’s just hold it a bit on this Lincoln thing. If Barack Obama wants to lead the nation as Lincoln did, we’re in for a lot of trouble.
The man whose Bible he took the oath on, whose memory he regularly invokes, presided over the creation of what can only be called a nascent fascist government led by a party of industrial capitalism that ran roughshod over constitution and custom, encouraged a form of bloody warfare that defied all civilized practice to date, and was the cause of untold misery, violence, and destruction for the next half-century or more. He was the ultimate creator of an empire that, thanks to military might in service to corporate interests, spread across the American continent, not just north to south but eventually coast to coast, and would ultimately go on to impose itself worldwide.
We have now come to the culmination of that empire, whether they know it or not, and the meltdown of the global economy is only the first signal of its collapse. Peak oil, extreme climate, unwinnable wars, social unrest, environmental decay, and the multiple whiplashes of a failed capitalist system will hasten its demise.
We’ve got two choices. One is the Lincolnesque way that Obama seems to promise: government subsidies for the larger corporations and banks (as Lincoln pushed in his day, especially for the railroads), refurbishing of the infrastructure (ditto), nationalization of the financial system and reckless printing of currency, increased centralization of the government and its hold on the economy, continuation and expansion of warfare and the war machine (all ditto). That is a continuation of the past, and it is amazing that the nation largely does not recognize it as a recipe for continued collapse. It is in fact not sustainable, nor is the environment in which it is floundering.
The other way is to rejigger, to dismantle, the entire system.
Abandon the empire (which we can no longer afford anyway, of course) and the war system that was begun in 1861 and has been in effective power since 1941 (of which Eisenhower famously warned us).
Dismantle the government-sponsored and –coddled corporate system of large-scale capitalism (agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Pharm, Big Chem, Big Silicone, the lot), overprotected (to keep the lobbyists in business and overregulated (ditto the bureaucrats), and return to a modern variety of an early 19th-century economy, which means small holders, family farmers, local businesses, individual enterprise, neighborhood artisans, community-supported agriculture and power generation, low taxes, and local empowerment.
Dismember the bloated Washington system as we know it (keep it around perhaps for automated record-keeping, but not defense or diplomacy), discard Congress entirely, and return effective power to the states (or better, in time, to bioregions), keep government machinery small even at that level and amenable to true democracy, and, this time around, create prohibitions against a takeover of electoral and legislative machinery by aristocratic interests and corporate cartelizers.
In other words, let’s try it all over again, having learned the lessons from a disastrous experiment in Romanesque empire that we might have learned long ago, had we any sense of history. No point in trying to put bailout and stimulus fingers in these broken dikes, no point in trying to hold on to and restore an economy built on nothing but growth and consumption, and the concomitant exhaustion of resources, befouling of environments, amassment of wastes, and emiseration of masses.
Let’s try something new. In fact we have to.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Her Hand in Marriage by Douglas Wilson
Biblical courtship provides a wonderful freedom. It involves familial wisdom and godly protection. Grounded upon the involved authority of the father, courtship delights in its public connection to the lives of families. Sexual purity is a great inheritance for a marriage, and part of a father's job is to guarantee and protect that heritage.
Biblical courtship is a humble affront to the sterility of modern relationships. And as a new generation rejoices in this ancient wisdom, the current waves of broken relationships will begin to recede.
Douglas James Wilson (born 18 June 1953) is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and prolific author and speaker.
Douglas James Wilson (born 18 June 1953) is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and prolific author and speaker.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
What I've been up to...
I don't have much planned besides chickens coming the beginning of August. I will also be helping another friend process their chickens. I'll post on that later.
Bye for now.
Happy 19th Birthday Hannah!
Wait...my little sister is nineteen?! Wow, time flies!
The gals had a tea party and dance with their friends to celebrate
The gals had a tea party and dance with their friends to celebrate
Independence Day Celebration
I was instructed to take lots of "cute" pictures so I started with this cute gal
Old fashioned relay race:
Pouring milk
Peeling carrots
Pounding nails
Sewing buttons
Folding towels
Running with a bail of hay
Rebekah and Kelsie. They look like sisters, don't they?
Processing Our Chickens
The W's vehicle full of ice
Catching chickens
The team, thanks everyone for the help!
Laura gutting her first chicken
The small chickens were difficult to fit your hand into
Thank you to Mrs. Weese, Kelsie, and Rebekah for the pictures!
Sunday, July 4, 2010
A Call to Prayer by J.C. Ryle
Helping Friends with Chicken Processing
Thanks Kelsie for taking all the pictures! (except, of course, the last one)
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