To stimulate your thinking on education...

Please click on the pause button on the right of this page to shut off the music to hear this.

Field trip

There have been too many educational activities to check out to get to many academics around here. Last week, a house my brother is remodeling (completely reconstructing?) was lifted up off of it's old foundation and moved to the back of the lot, so we stopped to watch that for a while.The men who were moving it, had dug under it, built the wood cribbings, placed these beams under it and jacked it up off the old foundation. Then they placed it on the "skates". Can you see the wheels on them in the picture below? If not, it will be more noticeable in the video at the end.After pulling it back as far as possible, they build more cribbing. There was a lot of measuring and leveling involved in this step.

They pulled the house with a Bobcat.Here is a short video of them moving it a few inches.

One way to exercise a dog

As you can see by this video, there actually have been a few days when it didn't snow around here in the past 5 months.

Inspirational video

We were challenged at church to invite others this week for Easter, pray for the service, and to welcome visitors at the service.

Here is a somewhat lengthy, but inspirational video, if you can spare the time. (You'll have to click the "play" button to turn the playlist off over on the right, first.)

And it just keeps coming!!!

Taken about 6 o'clock this evening.

Something to think about...

(You'll need to pause the "playlist" on the right hand side of my blog page to watch and hear this.)

Letter to Zac from NewSpring Production on Vimeo.

More Moo

The kids have been having lots of experiences with life here. Here are some shots and short video clips from their first cow showing experience. Both of them did well.

Little G had a yearling heifer (who weighs somewhere around half a ton). He was pretty anxious at first about it all but has gotten more comfortable with practice.The heifer - Cinnamon - had been shown before and was very calm and experienced which was perfect for him. And Grandpa stayed close by in the show ring for assistance and moral support.B held on to hers even though she was being a little frisky. Considering the calf was only weaned and brought out of the pasture a week ago and this was B's first experience they both did great!The girls (of the bovine variety) were exhausted afterwards!

Since we left home at 5am to get to the show 3 hours away, so were the rest of us, but we had time for an interesting detour on the way home, which will be the subject of the next post. Here are a few short videos of them in action...

Last recital of the season

There are some "technical issues" with these videos, but the general idea is still there...

More signs of spring

Sights from our walk yesterday afternoon.

A good belly laugh!

A friend of mine shared this video. It is too cute not to pass along. (Posting it here for those of you who didn't catch it on facebook.)

A little St. Patrick's Day festivities

A brief clip of little G's fiddle class playing at the local Celtic Association event today.

Thought this was a thought provoking (and just fun) little video. Though I am not particularly "artsy," I've asked similar questions with regards to other creative outlets, even with regards to blogging...these are words I write, right? (You'll need your speakers on.)

Seeing something new

A friend mentioned checking out some local sled dog races yesterday morning, and we jumped on the opportunity, especially since B has expressed an interest in being a sled dog handler when she grows up. (Not sure where that came from...reading Balto stories for school? Watching the movie Eight Below, which is a favorite around here?) There are 4 videos at the end of this post, the last one being B getting a chance to try it herself.

There was a weight pulling competition, where one dog was hooked to a weighted wagon and "encouraged" to pull it about 16 ft (I think). It was pretty entertaining. Some dogs just turned around and went the other direction. A couple were very interested in some of the smells on the track. One dog, who had never done it before, had it down pat by the 4th pull.

This is the starting line for the races. Some of the dogs were so anxious to go that 5 or 6 people would be holding them back. It was quite noisy, too! I'll try to include a video in the post of the starting line and the finish line.

Crossing the finish line after the 4 mile race.Watching the teams off in the distance.

We are probably going to pay for this (though, no, we didn't bring it home)...This was her favorite. She probably pet her for close to an hour altogether, and came home with as much hair on the front of her as on the dog!Beautiful animals.The view on the way back home (and here you can see why I asked for lens cleaning input on the previous post...):

The noise and eagerness prior to starting the race (turn your speakers up - or don't...):
A nice start:

Crossing the finish line:

And finally, they gave kids a chance for a short run afterwards. Here's B (with another child in the basket):

Boy having a "blast!"

G won a gift certificate to Bookman's in a drawing at the library for the summer reading program. Besides used books, they sell a variety of other used (and sometimes new) things there. He found quite a treasure today. Just for reference, little G is nearly 5 feet tall. Here is the best video of it (but not the best launch):

Um, those were power lines it bounced off of on the way down...and yeah, it was raining.

Preparing it for lift-off (100-plus pumps) should help out the Popeye muscles he's working on with the wheat grinding:

A view of lift-off:

It's called a Super Soaker Monster Rocket. It took a while to work out a few kinks, but it appears he's got it in good working order now. He discovered that he had to have the rocket fully inflated for it to go up. Geoff declared this was the ideal Arizona rocket - no sparks to light the forest on fire. These videos don't quite do it justice, but maybe he'll give you a demonstration in person if you stop by sometime.

Combining wheat, and STRAW 101

Most combining happens in the fall when the corn and soybeans are ready to be harvested. But wheat and rye are typically ready mid-summer. At this point in life, my dad has someone else do most of the crop farming on his place, and they don't have any wheat out. But the neighbor (about 1/4 mile up the road) had some and is combining it this week. We went to check out the action.

This is ripe wheat.

This is the front of a combine. It has different "heads" that are exchanged on the front of it depending on the crop being harvested. This rotating head is for the wheat and rakes it up into the combine as it is being cut off. This is the back where the stem and chaff of the plant comes out after the wheat grains have been removed, and if you look closely, you can see the wheat piled in the hopper on top.

Then the hopper is unloaded into a truck or wagon and hauled off to an elevator.Little G is still trying to wrap his mind around how a grain elevator works. May have to arrange for a field trip!

STRAW - Straw is what is left after the wheat has been removed - that row on the ground behind the combine. (HAY is usually some combination of grass and/or alfalfa, that is full of roughage and nutrients for animals.) Straw is usually just used for bedding whereas alfalfa is used for feed.

Hay Baling 101 and more

There are various types of hay balers/baling besides what will be described below, but these are the two kinds my dad uses.


The first is a machine that makes big, round bales - 58" to be exact. The machine is hooked up to the tractor - 10 hydraulic hoses involved among other things - and driven over rows of cut hay that has been raked into "windrows" and the machine picks it up and magically makes a bale by chopping and rolling it and wrapping it in plastic netting. Then it pops it out the back end, kind of like a chicken laying an egg. Actually, this particular one is new and extremely fancy schmancy. There isn't a picture of the finished product. Have to get on that and post it later.

Yes, that is the Poster Child running along with them. She will lap the field indefinitely with my dad, her hero.


This is the square baler which makes roughly, 2' x 1.5' x 4' bales that weigh maybe 40-50 lbs. This is an extremely tedious and labor intensive process. It requires strong men with good endurance and in good health, especially since it is often done for hours and hours on the hottest possible days of the year. This one particular farm activity is probably just about my least favorite, and was a frequent summer job of mine (though I got the easy end of the deal - driving the tractor). A tractor pulls the baler and wagon round and round the field scooping up hay, packing it into bales, tying it with twine, and tightly stacking it by hand on the wagon to be taken to the barn where it is unloaded and restacked, in endless repitition till the field is cleared. It is often done in a marathon as one is always trying to squeeze the whole process in between rainstorms. And here is another one of the "vintage" items I mentioned - that tractor. My dad could tell you every detail about it including what year it was made, but it has been here since I was wee little, which was quite a long time ago, nearly four decades, and more than likely wasn't "new" then. Geoff, little G, B and L are riding on the spare wagon.

With either one of these methods, it seems like the baling machine breaks on a regular basis. There are a lot of moving parts that get a lot of wear and tear involved, for example a knotter that ties the twine.

My dad has always raised Hereford/Polled Hereford beef cattle (which is what makes hay baling a necessity). Here are a few heifers and a bull.

Ah, lightning bugs - always a favorite aspect of our visits here.

We have been blessed with glorious weather here so far. It could be in the 90's with 95% humidity, but has been in the 70's and low 80's instead. Wonderful!

Here's little G, delighting in the opportunity to drive the riding lawn mower. He's 8, and driven a variety of things since we arrived here earlier this week.

The girls enjoying a favorite spot from my childhood. Besides swinging, I would often sit there and shell peas, or snap beans. My dad welded that swingset together out of pipe when I was little. Unfortunately, the big, beautiful old maple that shaded it in the afternoon, and was also the anchor for our "treehouse" had to be cut down last year.

I may have to give my parents the gift of a weed-eater before we leave here...

Burma (Myanmar) and books

It is interesting that we just recently read the book I recommended here about Burma. Since we don't really receive any television stations, we haven't been able to follow the tragedy with the kids via that medium at all.



I'm a little behind on blogging due to the recent visit of my family and a couple of full days since they left. I'm about to let go of my inhibitions about posting pictures of the kids. I figured I eventually would. Not as for pictures of myself...I'm NOT over the inhibition of even having them taken, let alone posting them!!!



The kids' recital went well. There was a last minute change of location which was a bit of a disappointment (from the usual stage/auditorium to a classroom), but my parents and Geoff's mom were all here for the event which was festive. I felt bad for B (though it didn't seem to bother her much) because they have had two practice sessions with the pianist and she played her song flawlessly at the practice session, but at the recital got stuck a few times. She still did well for a 6yo.
Here's a brief portion of G's song:



B finally got her teeth pulled (the four lower front ones) Tuesday. For one who is often quite dramatic, she sure does well with situations like that. The dentist said she didn't move while he was working on her and she never cried or whined about it.



Other miscellaneous tidbits...

Last week (which seems more like a month ago) I went out for dinner with a friend to belatedly celebrate my birthday. (Roughly two weeks after the fact we found a time that we were both available.) The night before we went she sent me an email, "Where should we go, the nut house?" Little G, who is becoming increasingly certain that anything that is our (Geoff's and my) business should also be his business (i.e. nosy), was reading over my shoulder and said, "What's the nut house?"