Garden Show

We went to the Garden Show at Harrisburg with Gene and Amy last evening. They were looking for ideas for constructing a pergola over their patio this summer. I went to see the green grass and spring flowers in the displays. They were a welcome sight for winter-weary souls.

 

The one below was a new one to me, called a Lenten Rose.

 

 

A lot of these outdoor living displays were set up.

 

 

And the sound of running water was therapeutic.

 

 

If I can hang on a couple more weeks all this will once again be reality.

Progress Report

I'm getting there. Right after Christmas I started working on compiling a book on the history and development of the Mid-Atlantic Mennonite Fellowship. Things had started coming in during December and I was beginning to get nervous about the size of the pile of work waiting for me. So I dived in and started shoveling my way out from under the pile. Thanks to modern electronic methods of communication, most of it came by email which greatly reduced the amount of work. Copy and paste is much faster than having to retype everything.

I worked diligently for a couple weeks and finally got caught up with everything that had been submitted. Things kept coming in steadily and I was able to keep caught after by doing an update every day. The stream has slowed to a trickle now. I was hoping to get this project done in January and February and I could meet that self-imposed deadline if the rest of the things come in. There are twenty-three churches and as of today twenty-one are completed. That leaves two stragglers who are holding up the works. They are working on it and I hope it doesn't take them much longer.

I kind of expected when I started that there would be a few stragglers but I didn't know who they would be. Now I do. But I'm not telling who they are. I was pleased with the overall response. This book is different than any I've ever done in that I am only the compiler and editor, not the writer. It is a joint effort and takes the cooperation of everyone to make it happen. The level of cooperation I've had is encouraging and tells me a lot of people are interested in the book. It won't be my best seller because it will have a more limited appeal but I thought it was worth doing.

The first congregation in the Mid-Atlantic Mennonite Fellowship was established in 1972. I am a member of the second congregation which began in 1973. The number of us who have been with it since the beginning is dwindling. Every time a person dies their memories are erased unless they were recorded. We need to get at least some of our history written before everyone is gone that can remember the beginning.

At any rate, I feel like the biggest job on my winter list is nearly conquered. I still have a good bit of scrapbooking to do before spring and got started on that last week. But on Saturday I saw a whole flock of robins so that's a warning that winter is winding down and I better stick with it if I want to cross the last job off my list by the time outside work starts.

 

 

How's Your Love Life?

 

Love is long suffering.

Love is kind.

Love does not envy.

Love does not promote itself.

Love is not proud.
Love is not rude.

Love is not selfish.

Love is not easily provoked.

Love does not keep accounts of evil.

Love does not rejoice in iniquity;

Love rejoices in the truth.

Love bears all things.

Love believes all things.

Love hopes all things.

Love endures all things.

Love never fails.

 

 

The Thirteenth Tale

 

"Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born. Yet that is not so. Human lives are not  pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. . . A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story."

"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

February 2 Wedding

The day started out bright and sunny but the groundhog declared he didn't see any shadows and spring is just around the corner. Ha! By afternoon the skies were gray. We left at 1 to go to a niece's wedding. By the time the wedding was over at 3 the ground was white.

Kate and Trent had a very nice wedding. As far as I could tell everything went smoothly. I liked their choice of music and the group who sang had lovely voices.

The reception was a veritable feast. We started with fresh fruit on skewers, crackers, cheese, chocolate covered pretzels, and punch for appetizers. The main course was homemade rolls, ham balls, roast beef, mashed potatoes, brown-butter noodles, mixed vegetables with cheese sauce, cole slaw, and tossed salad. The dessert table groaned with at least a dozen kinds of puddings, cakes, cupcakes, cheesecake, whoopie pies, pumpkin roll, cookies, tarts, homemade chocolates, and probably some I'm forgetting, topped off with ice cream, coffee, nuts, and mints. I was groaning by the time I pushed my chair back from the table. That ought to be enough to last all weekend!

 

 

Trent and Kate (Hurst) Musser

 

The bridal party

 

Our table at the reception

 

One of the dessert tables 

Phase I Complete

This was the coldest week of the winter so far. The temperature was in the single digits in the morning and several days in a row never rose out of the teens. Some days there was a stiff wind added to rub it in. It was a good week to stay inside close to the fire (in the furnace).

While keeping the home fires burning this week, I managed to finish Phase I of converting all my old music to digital files and transferring them to a Walkman. Phase I was the vinyl records. It took me nearly two months to get all of them done "in my spare time."

Phase II will be to convert all the cassette tapes to digital files. I have more tapes than records so that is going to take much longer. I'll be doing good if I get them all done this year. The incentive for this project was the purchase of a new stereo system we got as our joint birthday/Christmas present this year. Record players and even casette tape players are no longer included in sound systems. I had all this music we couldn't play anymore. Now that the records are done we can hear the music we listened to when we were dating and all the records the children played when they were growing up.

I am going to take a break from recording music before I start on the cassette tapes. I need to take care of my 2012 pictures before winter is over. Once I have that project under control I'll tackle the cassettes. It's amazing that our lifetime collection of music can fit on a little gadget I can hold in the palm of my hand.

Digging Out

The year of 2013 is nine days old and I have been digging into my winter job list with a passion. I worked on editing the church book full time last week. I didn't actually count the hours but if forty hours is a full work week, then I put in overtime because some of the days were 12-14 hours.

I have a ways to go but am feeling much better about the status of the project so this week I allowed myself a little diversion. I'm still trying to finish up that revised Burkholder genealogy that was supposed to be published in January and got pushed off until April. I need just a few little things yet to wrap it up. Quite a few of the one family are buried in the Terre Hill cemetery and I suspected some of the others were too. I decided today was the day to make the run down there and see if I can dig out what I needed to fill in the blanks.

I stocked up on my cemetery supplies, backed out of the driveway, and stopped with a THUNK. I forgot there is still a pile of snow at the edge, took the corner too close, and got hung up. I marched in to the garage, got a shovel, and dug fifteen minutes to free the car. Not the kind of digging I had in mind!

After returning the shovel to the garage and washing my hands, I took off again, backing out carefully this time. A half mile down the road I realized I had forgotten my purse and I needed it to make a stop at the post office. Back home I went, retrieved the purse, and backed out carefully again. I was beginning to wonder if God was sending me smoke signals to stay home. But I'm too determined to give up easily. If the message was not to say I should stay home, maybe it was to give me practice in not taking the corner too sharp.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. I found the cemetery and almost everyone I was looking for. I harvested the pictures of the stones and came home to fill in the blanks in the genealogy. It turned out one of the people I could not find is not there because he died in Virginia in the Civil War. Now I just have to look for two estate settlements in the Lebanon County courthouse and six death certificates at Harrisburg. Then I think I can close the book on that project, provided no one else pops up that I need to dig out.