Category Archives: Day to Day

Anything square thing that does not fit in the round hole.

The Grace of the Lord!

It has been a while since I have posted anything here and much has changed. We are once again living in Kansas. In what once was a garage/shop of my Brother-in-Law’s place. We built an apartment in part of that space and downsized ourselves into 386 square feet living space. And it has worked out for the best, for which we praise the Lord for his loving kindness. 

What you are looking at is the Lord’s grace. It is a chicken house, that I built for the McPherson ladies, who also live in this household. They have acquired many chickens and ducks. The Lord has allowed me to become a carpenter, again. He has not healed me, in the traditional sense, but enabled me. 

Back when we lived in Kansas, I had been a been a carpenter, among many other things, and I thought that ship had sailed over the horizon when we had moved back to Minnesota and been diagnosed with ALS.

I gave away all my tools and thought I had a early appointment with Jesus, but He had other plans. Which to me, is almost beyond my belief. We moved back to Kansas in May of 2023. Work on our apartment started in August and finished in August of 2024. A whole year for 386 square feet is, what it is. It’s done and we will move on from there. October of 2024, something happened which changed everything. I discovered that I could walk without a stick/cane.

I had been using a staff, a stick with elegance you might say. I have very little balance when standing. I sort of wave around unless I have something to hold on to. In October one evening, I was going to walk the dogs for last time before dark. As I headed out the driveway and I noticed I had no stick. And as I walked down the road, marveling at being able to walk and praising the Lord, I stopped to take a picture of one lone cloud. The glory of that sunset has remained in my mind. 

From there, I found that my interest in woodworking had started to return so I started to gather tools from eBay. The summer of 2025 found me with everything I needed to work with wood. Then the chickens and ducks started to show up, so I started to build what they need to live in. By the fall of this year, we had been accepted into the Presbyterian church, and we love going to Benton, Kansas, to worship our Lord at The Kirk of the Plains church. 

My Brother-in-Law also assigned me the task of building the chicken house. The month of October has been building this chicken house, in between rain and howling wind. And now with the end in sight, I will praise my Lord for his blessing, mercy and providence. None of this would be possible without His Grace.  To have the God of All, bless you, is humbling and exhilarating.

When I had the walls up and was thinking about how I was going to put the roof on and not really wanting to be on the roof… The Lord knows your thoughts before you know them; our beloved neighbors and friends, the Alquests, Alan and Sherry, saved the day by coming over and putting the roof on. And because the sheathing on the walls is basically wood chips embedded in glue, and will melt after too much rain, Alan said they had enough metal left over from their house build and would be pleased to get it out of their barn, another Grace from our Lord. Another beloved neighbor and friend, Steve Paul, also donated the red metal that has already been installed.

We are surrounded by neighbors who we love and that is another blessing from our Lord. Truly, His mercies are new every morning and have been. 

Now we are waiting for the howling wind to subside, 50 mph gusts for most of the day, to finish this building and the poultry and waterfowl can move in. 

Snow Day

We had been promised a snow storm for the last week or so. It finally showed up about 10AM. The image is of a Morning Dove that likes to perch on that branch in sunny weather. My wife always asks what kind of bird that is because it looks to her as being large enough wonder about it. It looked to me like this bird decided to sit this one out, by hunching its shoulders and scowling a lot.

It was snowing pretty good when I took the picture.

We had a Chickadee show for just a brief moment and that was about it for bird activity. I pretty much just drew the shades, hunched my shoulders and scowled.

Baby, its cold outside

Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by spiffing up our place, so we can sell this dwelling and leave a cold and forbidding land. Since winter is here to stay and we’ve been below zero for almost a week, it has been game on to take care of things up here and move back to our other home, Kansas. Sure, we just got here, relatively speaking, why would we want to go back to where you just moved from, relatively speaking? Well, its not all that complicated, really. Where we used to live, the temperature can be 60 degrees in late December. That and our Son and Grandson live there, so, we spruce up the house, and head back South. 

When we are not painting, or wondering when we will ever have a shower again, long story, I like to take pictures of birds and weather phenomena. You’ll notice the image at the top of this post is from yesterday, 10 below with a howling wind and the sun with a couple of sun dogs. I don’t think I ever witnessed sun dogs in South Kansas.

We gave up feeding seed because it just contributed to about 50 Sparrows freeloading on our seed and getting obese. We also had an issue with Starlings on exposed suet, so I made a little roof to go over the suet and now only woodpecker types get to dine on suet, rather than on our house, which is nice.

Clicking on any of the images will make them full sized.

From left to right, we have a Red-Breasted Nuthatch, a Red-Bellied woodpecker, the same Red-Bellied woodpecker with a female Downy woodpecker wishing the Red Belly would hurry up and get out of the way. The last picture is a male Hairy woodpecker. The look the same as the Downey’s, but are much bigger.

This is a Chickadee and you can tell it is cold by how he is hanging by one leg and warming up the other. It was around -7 below and a 20 mph wind.

 

This video is of the 2 Nuthatches’ we have coming to our suet feeder. The fist one is a Red-Breasted Nuthatch and the second is a White-Breasted Nuthatch.

 

Yesterday, I noticed a squirrel doing something odd. I grabbed my camera, and caught him popping his head out of the snow and then going back under, looking for a black walnut he had buried.

 I switched over to video and it has this neat option of changing over to “shaky cam” without you having to do anything more than try to stand still. For me, that ship has long since sailed out of port. He found the nut and headed back to his place to eat. I asked my video editing software to smooth out my shaky hands and it laughed at me.

You get a brief glimpse of a Dark-Eyed Junco on the Squirrel baffle. They are normally ground feeders, but since it got cold, they have moved up to eat bits of suet that gets dropped from the woodpecker jack hammering on the frozen suet.

Today is Christmas Eve and I encourage you to find a church that preaches from God’s holy word given unto us and has not opened its door to the world. Celebrate the birth of our Lord, Savior and King. 

Isaiah 9:6

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.