Scenes from an autumn Sunday

Sunny, warm and that autumn feel of drying fields in the air.  After lunch we got into the car and meandered off, randomly choosing roads we didn't know.  We drove through miles of fields ready for harvest, tiny villages of neat little houses and then along the Illinois River.  It was fun to drive with no agenda, follow our whims and see what we discover.  

We followed a sign off the beaten track about 2 miles to a U-Pick Pumpkin Patch (strictly honor system).

Of course a few pumpkins came home with us.  I'm a sucker for u-pick.  This would have been more fun with grandkids but oh well...

The grain barges are starting to move on the Illinois River

In Henry, IL someone must have released some domestic geese by the river.  They have multiplied over the years and now number in the hundreds, a large and noisy flock that dominates the waterfront park.  I asked a local guy what the story was and he just drawled, "Oh, they've been here a long time now.  Sure make a mess of the park."

Goose flotilla on the river.  This is only a small portion of them.

Exploring country lanes.

September

Every fall my mom used to quote the first few lines of this poem by Helen Hunt Jackson.  And every fall the words come back to me as September unrolls her beauties around us.

September

The golden-rod is yellow;

The corn is turning brown;

The trees in apple orchards

With fruit are bending down.

 

The gentian's bluest fringes

Are curling in the sun;

In dusty pods the milkweed

Its hidden silk has spun.

 

The sedges flaunt their harvest,

In every meadow nook;

And asters by the brook-side

Make asters in the brook.

 

From dewy lanes at morning

The grapes' sweet odors rise;

At noon the roads all flutter

With yellow butterflies.

 

By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer's best of weather,

And autumn's best of cheer.

The goldenrod is yellow

The corn is turning brown

The trees in apple orchards with fruit are bending down

In dusty pods the milkweed its hidden silk has spun

And asters...

asters....

And more asters...not by the brookside but making a river of blossoms themselves.

I notice that in many poems about autumn there is a line about the fringed gentian.  We don't have any of that growing around here so that's something I'll be looking for.  We do have sedges in shady spots and there's a wild grape growing on the barn and near the tulip tree.  Now if only they would bear fruit with its "sweet odors" for us!

Signs of early fall around the farm

Berries ripen on the blackhaw viburnum

Red tinge on the hydrangea as day length shortens

The purple coneflowers burst into bloom

Plump milkweed pods ripen their silken seeds

Pokeweed blossoms become berries

Woolly bears on the move!  They will become Isabella Tiger moths next year.

Black walnuts ripening and falling from the trees

Shelf fungus appears overnight on the old maple

Wild sunflower....

...and big bluestem tower over the prairie plants.

Autumn bouquets bring the season into the house.

Evolution of a boxing barn

Back in 1998 we had the farm appraised by an agricultural appraiser.  He looked at the house, then we went out and walked around the farmstead.  To our great surprise when he finished looking at everything he said very frankly, "None of these buildings have any real value.  They are all functionally obsolete."  We love our home and farm buildings so we were slightly affronted at his words but as he explained we did see his point.  The buildings are all very old and for any modern farm operation they would be useless.  Even the house was in need of major renovation.  The newest building on the farm is a pole building machine shed which was probably built in the 1970's and which has it's share of scars and problems.  

Nine years later, in 2007, we were moving to California - but not selling the farm.  Our dream was to return and retire here.  We had a major purge and cleaned out generations of junk in five of the outbuildings.  We filled several big dumpsters and had a burn pile going day and night for several weeks (one of the nice things about living in the country is that you are actually allowed to burn things).  Anything we wanted to save on the farm we put in the old machine shed because it could be locked up.

Fast forward another 9 years - we're back at the farm, along with our daughter Anne and her husband Kenji.  Our son-in-law is a talented guy who happens to be certified to teach boxing and related exercises to people who have Parkinson's disease.  Pete has benefitted hugely from four months of thrice-weekly training sessions with Kenji and I, as his "corner person" have trained right along with him.  Kenji has a desire to offer this invaluable training to more PD patients.  Unfortunately, the gym where he does training doesn't have room for the equipment and boxing ring he needs.  We started thinking about building a gym for him here on the farm.  Looking realistically at finances and talking to our builder/neighbor/friend Steve, he suggested that we rehab one of the "functionally obsolete" buildings we already have.  After looking at all of them he pointed at the old machine shed and said, "This is the best option."  Oy.  We saw his point and captured his vision but gosh, this building was FULL of 40 years of stuff that had been dumped and crammed in there, not to mention old insulation that was falling from the ceiling and walls.  Much discussion and prayer.  Final decision:  Let's DO IT!  

We set aside two days over Labor Day weekend to begin the purge - Saturday and Monday, giving ourselves Sunday to rest and recharge.  It would be a Labor Day weekend in the truest sense of the word.  Here's a picture of the sad state of affairs after pulling down the ceiling insulation.  We'd already hauled quite a bit of stuff out of there at this point but the overall mess gives you some idea of what we were up against:

There was so much insulation and wallboard to rip out to get the old office out of there.  That room has to go completely.  The wood was rotted through from several epic floods.

And at the end of the day today, after two long days of hard labor, here's the state of progress.  Still one corner of the room to clean out but overall, soooo much accomplished! Friends Dan and Kathy came and worked right along with us today - now THAT'S friendship.

Before:

After:

When the space is cleaned out, we'll have four more inches of concrete poured on the floor to raise it above flood level.   A few windows will be installed.  Then the walls and ceiling will be insulated and covered with clean white metal interior siding.  New lights, new heating, a boxing ring, mats, punching bags...and voila, a Boxing Barn in the Boondocks!  It's a venture of faith for all of us and we look forward to how God will use it.  

The Sky Above

I looked forward for a long time to doing star gazing from the farm? Why? Weren't the LA skies clear enough for me? Clear, yes, but also filled with light pollution. Streetlights, car dealerships, hamburger joints ... lots of places have lights that shine up as well as down ... and what goes up also reflects off of layers in the atmosphere and comes back down. We see it as an increase in the sky's background brightness. Based on sites that track the sky's background brightness, the LA location we lived in ranks right up there with the worst in the US. The skies over the farm are two brightness levels dimmer, meaning that dimmer stars would stand out better against the darker background.

Here you can see how I setup my telescope one early summer evening and have a little table next to it with the case I have my eyepieces in. I was setup back between the barn and corn crib, looking north.

Two nights ago the weather forecast said the skies would be clear and I wanted to take some photos looking more south than north. So I setup my 'scope between the old garage and the sheep barn (where we have chickens and ducks, but no sheep.  But names stick somehow and that's where we used to have the sheep.) While waiting for the sky to get darker, I tried to help Anne and Kenji get the ducks to go in to the sheep barn for the night - but as Anne says, the ducks were acting like teenagers and not about to do anything we wanted them to.

I decided to use my Canon SL1 to take astrophotos Thursday night. Instead of an eyepiece I put a special adapter on the camera and then put it into the telescope where the eyepiece would normally be. I usually start out by focusing on the bright star Vega, which is in this first star photo.

Other things that I enjoyed were the Hercules Globular Cluster

which is what appears to be a smattering of stars just left and below of center. That smattering consists of some 300,000 stars!

The Ring Nebula affords another fascinating view. This kind of nebula forms when a star throws off some of its outer layers - like a snake shirking off its skin as part of the maturing process.

Just left and below center you can see the faint blue ring. The original star is still in the center of the ring (though you can't see it in my photo) and it is the power source that illumines the nebula and causes it to fluoresce.

It's hard to see details in the small pictures above. But if you want, you should be able to click on each of the images to see a larger image.

Early in the summer I would have to wait until 9:15 or 9:30 before it was dark enough to really see the stars well. Now by 8pm I can get out and start viewing - if the sky is clear.

First day back in school

Yesterday was my first day back in school after ... how many ... 10 years? I'm teaching a class at Wheaton College called Data Analytics. I hope to impart some enthusiasm for statistics to the people in the class as well as give them access to the tools that will help them develop the skills that enable them to turn enthusiasm into honest answers to useful questions.

I have 15 students and 1 faculty member whom I will share the semester with. They have a variety of hopes for the future. There are a couple from economics, one who is going to be an actuary, quite a number of math majors. It'll be fun having such a diverse group. I'm excited about giving them a way to "think about statistics" that will help them grasp the ideas in an intuitive manner.

I was surprised at how draining I found teaching a two-hour class to be. My Parkinson's affects my voice, so I found as class wore on that I had to work harder to make myself heard and to speak clearly. It was a sober reminder that just because I'm doing what the Father wants me to do doesn't mean that doing it will be easy. I can't let my comfort or convenience be a measure of whether I'm doing the right thing. If anything, the boxing training that has been such a help for my Parkinson's has made it clear that hard work and inconvenience is good for me in many ways.

The College encourages instructors to incorporate some form of spiritual content into their teaching. I am going to begin each class with a meditation on a verse - typically one that I memorized and have lived with for many years. Yesterday we began with Ephesians 2:10: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we would walk in them." I reviewed the different stages in my working career and highlighted how God often prepared me for the next step ahead of time in ways whose significance I was oblivious to at the time. The lesson to draw from that is not to try to become less oblivious! It is to do my best to be faithful to what God is doing in my life today and trust in His Sovereignty, that He is doing today exactly what I will need to be prepared for tomorrow. Both on a macro and a micro scale He has prepared beforehand good works for me to do.

Perfect summer day in the country

A gorgeous late summer morning - the perfect day to get the supers of honey off Janine's five hives.  We've started working our bees collaboratively this year.  Solomon said, "Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil, for if they fall, one will lift up his brother sister."  We're "old ladies" to be doing heavy bee work but we love the bees so we work together and find that having four eyes to look at things, two brains to figure out what to do in situations we encounter in the hive and two sets of muscles to lift really makes it doable for us.  This is the day of the year that requires the hardest work - taking off the full supers of honey.  A full super weighs about 80 pounds and we had a lot of supers to get off.  It's also better if we leave the bees IN the hive and not take them with us when we take the supers to the honey house - not a simple job!  A bee and his honey are not easily parted!  We removed well over 500 pounds of honey today and wrangled about a million bees in the process.  No injuries occurred although I'm sure we will have sore muscles tomorrow.  It was a joy to work with a dear friend, both of us awed at these beautiful, tiny creatures and harvest the fruits of their and our labor.  On a perfect summer day...in the country...

Late yesterday I went out to check the milkweed pods and was thrilled to find two monarch larvae on the plants.  I consider even two as a "successful breeding year", although I suspect there are quite a few more that we don't see or find.  It's good we let the milkweed grow undisturbed!

And there was also an adult monarch sipping nectar on the blue vervain in the prairie plants.

Here's the latest in Kenji's "hot harvest", a ghost pepper - one of the hottest!  Even it's form and surface seem to be warning you that there's fire within!

Late summer caprese salad with balsamic reduction by Anne.  Tomatoes and basil from the garden.  Cheese from the store.  Give us time...we may do that, too.

There's a cicada chorus outside, the sun is going down and the day is winding to its close.  What joys will tomorrow bring?  Thank you, Lord, for your gifts - for friends, for bees and butterflies, tomatoes and peppers, for sunshine and then rest at day's end.