Jessica’s surprise birthday present for me was, by the way, dinner and tickets to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Fabulous! The performance was inside an Episcopalian cathedral and the sound was heavenly. It was a wonderful evening, but it’s not my birthday yet. I’m not 40 for a few more days.
On the …

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall.
Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.)
Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, and various …

Homemade butter

Friends of ours are now up to four cows and milk hasn’t been selling well for them lately, so their milk is piling up. They’ve agreed to sell it to us for $2.50 a gallon, about what you’d pay at the store. But this is Jersey cow milk, so there’s a lot of cream. …

Doug sings Sm
My friend Drew has been trying to compress this video enough to post on the blog. He finally got it, thought I look a little compressed as well (it feels somewhat squashed). I hope you like it; feel free to pass it along, but include the disclaimer below.
What is going on in this …

Skiiiing. That’s fun to write. Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. It actually sounds like little kids tearing straight down the hill, the way they do on skis. If they fall, they don’t have to worry about breaking anything. They just bounce.
On Saturday I took some of our heaps of extra money and invested it in Memories for the Kids …

Warning: this is a messy procedure. Learn from my woes and surround your interior chimney with an old sheet before proceeding.
Well, since we never actually had winter around here I’ll detail this procedure and post the pictures from when I cleaned the chimbley around Christmas time. The principles are still relevant and I’ll do this …

Every Monday night for a half hour or so we have Family Home Evening, where the family gets together and one of us gives a gospel-centered lesson while the rest of us torture the cat, gaze at the ceiling, tell Sarah to GO SIT DOWN every twelve seconds, etc. Last night Mom helped Natalie (age …

Okay, welcome to The NEW Blog. Many thanks to my friend Gabe whose wizardry brung this to pass … and to WordPress so that I can bring the blog to the next level. One of these days I’ll figure out how to make it so that you can receive posts by email, and do all …

We’re currently in the process of upgrading the blog, but will be fully functional in short order. Thanks for your patience and please come back soon!
Thanks

I have a bad habit of splitting my kindling on the hearthstone, and occasionally the hatchet dives clear through the wood and bounces off the hard flat stone. This is not very friendly to the blade, so every now and then I have to sharpen the hatchet. (The last time I did so was probably …