The day in review

The roofing continues.

The crew is working steadily. And I believe they are working safely

They put in ten hours today. It drove me nuts. I felt pinned to the house.

They left at 7:52PM and at 7:54 I was in the truck heading to Burchfield Park for a run.

I knocked out a 3.5 mile run with the last quarter-mile being the walk-down to work the lactic acid out. Bella is trying to be a good influence on me. I did ten push-ups at each mile mark.

Gobs of deer running around at that time of the evening.

The crew will be back tomorrow. It may be the last day. Sorry, no pics for OPSEC reasons.

Calves

The calves rotate back to the beginning of their paddock rotation tomorrow. That is the one they first hit in early March.

A high of 80 (F) is expected tomorrow.

Scion

Today was the last good day to collect scion wood. I expect the 80F temps to blow out the buds tomorrow.

I got lazy. It is easier to graft a few scion on to a well placed oak tree (for instance) than to dig a five foot tall tree and transplant it.

A friend in Kentucky, Lucky P, sent me some hybrid oak acorns several years ago. It has the quaint name of Q. X  humidicola. You cannot make this stuff up.

Three seedlings did very well and have exceeded my stamina and motivation to dig them up. Hence the graft onto wilding rootstock strategy.

Never underestimate the industry of a lazy man.

A moment to pray

Belladonna has had two unshakeable friends in her life. She met both before she was six and they stuck with her through thick-and-thin ever since.

One of them lost her younger sister, age 16, a couple of days ago. Her younger sister took her own life.

This is one of those topics that is right on the margin of what is appropriate to share in a public blog. Please understand if I am vague regarding the circumstances.

Nothing is ever simple or straightforward when this kind of thing happens. In retrospect, there seem to be dozens of off-ramps before the bridge-out event.

Sometimes random events collude to produce an unhappy ending. I would dearly love to lay this at the feet of Gov. Whitmer's closing of schools but know in my heart this is a minor factor.

I ask those of you who are the praying types to pray for the deceased girl's mother, that she might not be crippled with guilt and "would have, could have, should have". I ask you to pray for Belladonna's friend and her friend's younger brother. I ask you to pray for every sixteen year old who pushes away help and is sure they are alone in their pain and that things will never get better.

If you had to disappear...

Where would you go?

One contender would be Wasagaming, Manitoba.

The key to winning at the disappearing game is to seed so many possibilities into your back-trail that they never think to look at Caribou, Maine, Pineville, Louisiana or Green-Eggs-N-Ham, South Dakota.

Sadly, Canada has standards and I am not sure they would let me in.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder if I have any readers in Manitoba.

Book Clubs

I happened to be looking at the statistics for my blog and noticed that three consecutive selections from the Quest series each had exactly 14 hits each in the previous 24 hours. That has the feel of a book club.

If that is the case, thank-you for choosing one of my stories. I hope you enjoy it and maybe even glean a bit of wisdom from the adventure. I make no claims of writing great literature, but God can turn coal into diamonds. Maybe my story can be the catalyst that triggers some latent gestalt in the reader. If so, it is not me. It is God.