Archive for April, 2008

Observations of Small Town Living (OOSTL)

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I’ve been privileged to facilitate a men’s fellowship group at church called “fellaship”. While it does have a spiritual component, the other purpose is to build relationships and encourage men in the church to get involved. Thankfully, I don’t have any instructions. The result is anything goes (relatively speaking). Here’s a shot from the last meeting. Yes, those are guns being worked on by Jess, one of our elders. No we’re not a gun toting group but many members are hunters. Here Jess, a former Marine, is sharing his knowledge on cleaning your gun. Not something one can do without raising an eyebrow or two back in Chicago suburbs where I grew up.

gun cleaning

Next month, we’ll hear the testimony of the CEO of Quest Aircraft (a local manufacturer that originally designed their airplanes for missionary bush pilots) before we tour their factory.

Wildlife

Friday, April 25th, 2008

While repairing our window well we found this little creature. It’s a baby salamander! I haven’t seen one of these since my childhood when my bother Ray found some. Even the locals I’ve asked about these haven’t seen one in quite some time.

salamander

We’ve had some trouble lately getting the newspaper. We have to walk about a 1.5 miles round trip to the newspaper box and we’ve had to turn around at least 3 times so far because mooses along the way. Here’s a shot of a cow protecting her calf (not in image). Today I was walking down the drive, I looked up to see a moose drinking from a spring at the end of the drive. Thankfully, I noticed her at about 75 yards.

mooses

Our first power outage

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

About 10:45 a.m. *blink* the lights go out. My three uninterruptible power supplies start screaming, letting me know that the power is out even though my computers are still humming along on battery power. I wait 15 seconds and the sound of an engine starting up outside brings the lights back on as the house goes on generator power. Alarms stop. Our first official power outage turns out to be a success. It lasted about 30 minutes.

Here’s the funny part. Just “knowing” that the power was out brought Jenny and I together in the living room even though most of the circuits in the house are live. I guess it’s all those years of conditioning. When the power goes out, you gather in the living room. Light candles and reminisce about the times the power has gone out in the past.

April 23 – More snow

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

It’s official we have broken a 90 year record with over 130 inches of snow this season. Even today is snowed. I’m writing this so that next year when I’m looking back at this I can look out and see spring where as now it’s just more winter. Some good news, we should be in the 60s by week’s end. Temperature swings are below freezing at night and then into the 50s during the day so the snow melts quickly.

Observations of Small Town Living (OOSTL)

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

The Panida Theater is the local “arts” type theater where you can see many live shows, non-syndicated, foreign and independent films. This week we saw a movie called, The Great Debaters, starring/directed by Denzel Washington. This 2007 film finally made it to our small town. Prior to the movie are some trailers for upcoming movies as you would expect. But prior to those trailers is a woman, without a mic, who stands up and announces the movie trailers as if they can’t speak for themselves. The most heartwarming observation though is that we live in a place where people clap after a good movie. (By the way, this movie gets 5 out of 5 stars from Leo and Leo which is why, we suspect, nobody has ever heard of it.)