If you all haven’t noticed, my output on this weblog has trailed off a bit lately. I’ve been fine. The family is fine. We have just been busy. As you may remember, Mom died just a year ago. She left me with a complicated estate. I have been dealing with the lawyers and the bank. There are still niggling issues, but the bulk of the effort is complete. The result of all of this is that I am able to finally get to work on permanently retiring to the farm with KYHillChick.

The first step in all this is replacing the old curing shed with a new 2-car garage. This will give us all a place to work from in the coming months while the farm house is undergoing major renovation. This shed was never all that sound. When we got the place, it was starting to lean a little. It had been built many years before for hanging salt-cured hams. We still have a few in the shed. I mentioned it to the previous owner. He opined that his daddy would say the 40-year-old hams might just be getting to peak flavor. I did my best to straighten the shed when I re-sided it back in 2005. However, we had a couple of bad windstorms last year that left it ready to fall over. Nothing is really holding it up except the T1-11 barn siding.

My goal is to have the garage finished by Deer Camp this year. From there, it is just a matter of how bad the winter is as to how far we get with the rest of the plans before spring. I will be documenting the progress here.

I Hear Bagpipes

The other big thing that has been holding our attention was Angus going to Scotland to compete in the World Bagpipe Championships in Glasgow. The whole crew went over to watch his band perform in the Grade 2 competition. We then hung out in Scotland for a while before coming back. The whole family is proud of him. I’m proud of him. This was a life-achievement.

I will not try to describe what it was like being on Glasgow Green with hundreds of bagpipers, or to be in a large city where there was a near-constant skirl going on for days at a time. Suffice it to say that after traveling clear across Scotland on a train to a wee village on the other side of the island, KYHillChick and I were still hearing bagpipes. We could almost pick out the tune.

Twenty years is a long time.

When I started this blog, I was a guy in my mid-forties with young kids. I wanted to have a place to get out of town and give the kids something more than an occasional weekend camping trip to stave off turning them into mall rats and computer addicts. The farm changed them, and it changed me. I wanted to write about it. It had been a hard struggle to get it, and I wanted other folks to know. Folks had also started liking my writing for the outdoors. I wanted a repository for the stuff I was writing that folks could access.

The roots of this weblog are surrounded by the trappings of revelation. I make no bones about it. I felt God spoke to me. For those of you who don’t remember, here is how it went down as reported in the About Section.

Other guys get their calling and have really cool verses to guide them– like John 3:16.  Me?  I got stuck with Genesis 9:2-4.  I guess this is kind of sounding like one of those 9-inch man stories you hear, but the point is I am going to stick with it until I get the calling to do something else.

If you want to show up at Genesis 9:2-4 Ministries of SW Bracken County on a Sunday, don’t be surprised if most of the congregation is out hunting.  Go out back to the Thoughtful Spot and hang out for a while. We’ll be back in.  You’ll be invited to a meal.  We do all our best work with food in front of us.  We conduct our service a lot like the Quaker Meeting:  Silent prayer, but if anyone is moved to speak, they are given the floor.

This goes back to 2004.  Mom always kept reminding me that I came from a long line of Methodist ministers.  I think of myself as a good Methodist boy at heart.  However, I never got my calling.  I did not fret about it all that much.  I figured the Good Lord knew my number. If He wanted me, I was there.  For my part, I always made sure I was getting dial tone.  Know what I mean?  Well, I got into my mid-forties and one day I got to thinking about it and one day at lunch I was musing to myself:  How did Jesus Christ know he had his calling?  I mean, there’s a guy who suddenly one day in his Thirties decided he was going to start a ministry.  How did he know?  The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that asking the question itself constituted the beginning of a ministry.  So I went back to work, and looked for some other sign of where I should go with this.  There on my desktop was the instructions on how to start a weblog, and an unfinished piece I was writing for the 24hourcampfire.com on Genesis 9, specifically verses 2-4.

The question after 20 years is do I think this was true revelation? Was I just a bored I.T. manager, or did God really speak to me and tell me to start this weblog? It is, after all, a pretty bombastic story. My answer is yes– to both. It was the Holy Spirit reaching out to a bored bit jockey, and every year the realization burns brighter in my head.

Look, I don’t claim any special knowledge of the Divine. As guys go, I’m not the sharpest on Biblical interpretation. However, I will say that I have at least had the sense to know God is speaking to us all the time. The best analogy I can give you is my father. As a little kid, he became enthralled with listening to the radio. They gave him a nice Zenith floor model and he would stay up nights listening to the brewing war in Europe. If you can imagine that little guy, sitting in the dark, playing with the dials, trying to bring in Radio Berlin, you have a pretty good idea of how I lothe ok at how we all listen to God. God is always broadcasting, but we n,eed to have the set on, our antenna hung just right, and the weather has to be good. Once in a while we get a clear signal, but we don’t know what it means.

Cancer, or more precisely the Chemo, but me in touch with that in a deep way. For over a year there, I was pretty darn sick. Miracles were going on all around me, but I was too sick to feel it. I felt completely isolated from God. The signal had gone silent. I figured it was not on the Sender’s end. It was the receiver. The Chemo had made it impossible to feel God. There was a long silence, and it made me realize how precious that signal was. The signal is back now. I cannot claim I can tell what He is saying any more than you do. It doesn’t stop me from wanting to listen.

Do I believe my weblog is somehow Divinely inspired? Look, you may go through all 1232 posts and realize The Secrets of The Universe. I wrote all 1232 posts, and I never once felt the Hand of God. What I do know is that when I sit at the Thoughtful Spot with a cup of coffee on a frosty Opener +1, and watch the sun come up on the second day of Rifle Season, and listen to all the guns going off and I’m waiting for the dose of IbuProfen to kick in, because I’m taking the day off because of the big buck I hauled out the morning before, I feel very inspired. When I sit at the Thoughtful Spot with a beaker of scotch and watch the last light on the trees the evening before the Opener, I feel very inspired. I know that in an hour or so the whole rest of our deer camp will be showing up and joining me at the Thoughtful Spot, and we’ll be out there until the moon is well up and the fire is starting to die out. Yeah, that feels pretty darn inspiring.

Watching bucks fighting in the field in October? Dang! That is God talking right there. With my granddaughter beside me with her binos up squealing with glee? There’s no better. Hanging out on the one warm night in April when the gobblers are gobbling past midnight? That is as clear a signal as it gets. The same goes for that one night in the summer when the fireflies all get in sync and the entire pasture flashes in unison.

Look, if you want Divine Inspiration, you probably will not find it in these blog entries. However, if somewhere in all this, you develop an itch to go grab some of what I’ve felt over the last 20 years, that IS God talking to you. He means for you to find this signal. Of that, I am sure.

What to Expect

If you have been reading this weblog for a while, you will know that things run pretty much the same. The stories go in cycles. This year, the trip to Scotland meant we had to give up a month’s worth of Squirrel hunting, but that means more in September. After that, there are the sighting-in deer rifle posts, the Muzzleloader posts, and so on. It goes round and round and somewhere in May and June, I take a rest from things for a few weeks. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The next year or two is going have a new thread of stories about tearing down the old and putting up the new. When it is all done, you will get to read about KYHillChick and I moving to the Farm permanently, and after that? Who knows. However, I’m going to have a bunch of new stuff coming. The garage is just a small first step.

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