We love you…because you’re YOU!

This is a re-post of a blog I did around my birthday last year, I wanted to move it from yahoo 360 and share it here with ‘yall…

Yesterday was NOT a good day for a lot of folks, I saw the former CEO of AIG say that he’d lost about three billion dollars…A lot of people are having to accept the idea that perhaps they’ll be working past the time they had planned on retiring. We’re all concerned with the current state of the economy, it can get to you if you let it! Yesterday was my birthday, because my mother sent me a check for forty bucks I had the money to put gas in my car, go to West Plains and buy some groceries at Aldi with my food stamps,come home and eat lunch, and then later go to church. I’ve been having an alternator problem with my car lately. Last night after church it was dark and I had to turn on the lights. A few miles outta town it died on me and I was able to limp it into a turn off beside the road. We (my wife, daughter and I) got out of the car and my wife reached into the backseat to grab the ice cream we had bought in town to go with the cake she had made. I questioned her about that, not wishing for her to carry this melting sack for who knows how long it might take for us to somehow eventually get home, she persisted. We took off walking, it was a beautiful nearly full moon lit night but it was still quite dark. Within five minutes a pickup truck drove by us, stopped…came back and asked if we needed a ride (two women) We all loaded into the truck, girls up front and me in the back. These “Good Samaritans” took us all the way to my house which is located two and a half miles off the paved road down some of the worst roads in Oregon county…I’ve never been so thankful to anybody! Driving through the blackberry thickets,the lady driving mentioned how much she liked blackberries so when they dropped us off my wife gave her a couple of quarts out of our freezer we had picked last summer. After a few minutes of letting my nerves settle we had my birthday party…the ice cream was still frozen! Then my daughter gave me my present she had made, here are some pictures of the book she made for me…

this is the cover…

We love you when you’re sad, (notice she has colored me blue) that’s me sitting in my chair.

This is me when I’m mad!

you guessed it! me when I’m happy…about getting a job!

We love you because you’re YOU!…yup, I trained this one!

It’s quite a wonderful thing in these times of upheaval and stress and so much hardship to be able to appreciate how truly blessed I am. I’m so thankful to God that He loves me, a broken sinner! and that He not only has my present circumstances under control but my future figured out too! I’m so thankful that he gave me my family my friends and for the love they show me. and lastly, but NOT leastly, for the kindness of strangers!

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Just Don’t Loose Your Head

Howdy Yall! It’s just me checkin in with ya to let you in on a few of my latest adventures…I’m talkin REAL exciting stuff! First of all, I put all of my 50+ chicks outside in a pen and boy did they LOVE IT! I watched them scratchin dirt and acting like chickens, scuse me for a minute…

These are his feet…check out the spurs on this “bad boy”

I had to go out and butcher this huge domminicker rooster, he was killin the hens he was tryin to do it with so now he’s making a big fine pot of soup! Thats my friend Richard in the background… Well, it’s already been a “wild weekend” like I said I put my chicks outside and everything was “sweetness and light” but would’nt you know something had to screw that up! I walked out there yesterday just in time to see a good size black snake headin for the “chick buffet” I grabbed him by the tail and thats where the fight started. Eventually I persuaded him to leave peacefully, albeit with the understanding that if I EVER see him in my chicken pen again…I’d kill him! Well, of course he DID come back, and of course I had to seperate his head from his body…(heres some pic’s of that)

He was’nt a REAL big snake, and I really hated to kill him, but…I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do, and he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do…and that there’s “what it is’, sometimes it ends like that,sometimes you get killed for “doing it to death,” other times for “doing it” to life! I know…pretty deep stuff huh? It’s all just a part of farm life. Anyway, heres another tidbit you might enjoy, I got up this morning and loaded up the car with a bunch of stuff to take to the local swapmeet. After I got loaded up I started the car and man did it sound wierd! We took off toward the swapmeet and it never got any better (scary with a carload of chicks), when we got to the sale I popped the hood and looked down at the manifold and saw the plug wires had been chewed in two by squirrels! Have you ever seen the plug wires on a toyota? they’re diffrent alright, I could’nt even figure out how to get the wire off the distributer…(duh) Then my friend Richard showed up and I told him the story, he took a look and asked if I had any electrical tape which I was able to borrow from another friend and VOILA!

In the pic below you can see where he had to use a piece of phone wire he picked up off the ground

After he finished I fired it up and to my stunned amazement…it worked! Anything that you fix with duct tape or baling wire will usually last forever, right? You may think thats lucky but I’ve got an even better one! This car (which my pastor loaned me after mine got repo’d) lost a CV joint on the front left wheel last week. Long story short, A brother in Christ of mine from my church went and bought the part that it needed, came out to my house way out in the woods and on his own time FIXED that car sittin in my driveway in about two and a half hours ALL just out of the goodness of his heart!! I was TRULY amazed! It really makes you feel like “payin it forward,” a day or so later I went with our pastor and did some yard work for a church member who was’nt able to do it himself. This is the type of “church body” that they talked about in the second chapter of Act’s, “looking after the needs of each other” it’s really just unheard of these days for people to do stuff like that. I want to start a local “food ministry” using the stuff I grow in my garden. There are a lot of older folks in my church and community who enjoy fresh veggies but are no longer able to tend a garden and since it looks like I’m gonna have a pretty good harvest this year what I don’t eat or can I’m going to distribute on a love offering basis. It’s a great feeling being a member of the body, for He cares for us all!