I had no idea when we got a
horse how many children she would bring into our lives!  She had
five visitors today, ranging in age from 2 to 13.

Erika and Katherine spent the afternoon here.  A perfect day for playing in the creek:

Erika and Toady

How to eat a chocolate chip cookie

I was studying some verses
tonight on the gentleness of God.  Jesus describes himself as meek
or gentle and humble of heart (Matthew 11:29).  I decided to look
up “meek” in W.E. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of NT Words
and see how he defined this quality.  His description is so
rich!  Here, in part, is what he says about the noun “meek”:
…it consists not in a person’s
outward behaviour only; nor yet in his relations to his fellow-men; as
little in his mere natural disposition.  Rather it is an inwrought grace of the soul; and the exercises of it are first and chiefly towards God.  It is that temper of spirit in which we accept His dealing with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting; it is closely linked with the word humility.  It is only the humble heart which is also the meek, and which, as such does not fight against God and more or less struggle and contend with Him.  This meekness, however, being first of all a meekness before God, is also such in the face of men, even of evil men,
out of a sense that these, with the insults and injuries which they may
inflict, are permitted and employed by Him for the chastening and
purifying of His elect.

It must be clearly understood that meekness is the fruit of
power.  Described negatively, meekness is the opposite to
self-assertiveness and self-interest; it is equanimity of spirit that is neither elated nor cast down, simply because it is not occupied with self at all.

How far I am from that
kind of equanimity of spirit, that restful acceptance of all He sends,
that lack of being occupied with self!
These words remind me of the last lines from a favorite poem:

Held without restless longing, or strain, or stress, or fret,

Or chafing at Thy dealings or thoughts of vain regret;



Be restful, calm, and pliant, from bend or bias free,

Permitting Thee to settle where Thou hast use of me.

Live out Thy life within me, oh, Jesus, King of Kings;

Be Thou Thyself the answer to all my questionings.

I’m repeating a life lesson
I’ve learned before, namely this:  in situations where I really
and truly just want to run away and hide from some problem (often a
person), the thing I really need to do is stick it out and let the Lord
use the person as sandpaper in my life.  My desire is to get away
from the friction.  But it’s not about making life easy – it’s
about me becoming more like Jesus.  It’s too easy to waste time
wishing the problem would go away rather than looking for where I need
to change.  There’s no fast track to endurance. 

Rows and floes of angel hair


And ice cream castles in the air


And feather canyons ev’rywhere


I’ve looked at clouds that way
  (from Both Sides Now)

Praying Mantis egg cases found on the raspberry bushes while pruning.

The infamous nettles of Nettle Creek.  Dubious harbinger of spring.

In our family most of the
humor revolves around words – puns and the like.  For me though,
the most delicious form of humor has always been the spoonerism -
transposing the initial consonants of two words.  For instance,
“tea pot” becomes “pea tot”.  I have no idea why this is so funny
to me but it never fails to
amuse me.  My mother always used to say, “It doesn’t take much to
amuse a weak mind” and perhaps that is true in my case.  At it’s
root, though, I think it has something to do with absurdity.  I
find the absurd highly amusing. 

Oftentimes spoonerisms are made involuntarily.  One morning I
intended to remark to a friend that the “birds are chirping” but what
came out was that the “chirds are birping.”  And one day in a
solemn assembly one of my colleagues was reading the story of David and
Goliath.  When he accidentally made a spoonerism of “weaver’s
beam” I could not repress a yelp of amusement.  No one else even
seemed to catch it but for the next 15 minutes, much to his intense
irritation and my acute embarrassment, I giggled uncontrollably. 
To this day I cannot think of that incident without dissolving into
laughter.  I have no idea why it is so funny.

So let me know if you come across any particularly absurd spoonerisms.  I can always use a good chortle. 
 

Not to give myself too much credit, but basically there aren’t too many things that really
get on my nerves.  Apart from the usual stuff like bad drivers on
the Stevenson Expy at 6am that is.  But today I realized that
there is one thing that fits in that category of real irritants for
me. 

I was sitting in the waiting room at the dr. office and a couple walked
in and sat down.  It was their first visit to the office so they
had the usual reams of paper to fill out.  The woman read every
question on the endless form to her husband and they deliberated each
answer out (“Do you have diabetes M-E-L-L-I-T-U-S?”  “Have you
ever had genital problems?”  I was hoping they wouldn’t go into a
long detailed discussion of that one.)  I would have been able to
tune them completely out and enjoy my book except for one thing. 
The woman had this high, thin, piercing voice that had the same effect
on my auditory nerves as fingernails on a chalk board.  I don’t
know how to describe it but there was absolutely nothing pleasing or
soothing about her voice. 

I suppose a person has the voice they are born with but it seems to me
that you could train yourself it lower it a pitch or two if it occurred
to you that your voice really has a nasty timbre.  How would a
person sense that, though?  I guess you’d really have to be aware
of your effect on people.  If she was aware of it, there were
waves of irritation emanating from me this morning.  Bad, bad
me. 

Julietwaite asked for a photo
of goose eggs.  Here’s one of the nest, taken this morning (you
can see she’s been busy since Monday):

Here’s one of a goose egg, a large chicken egg, and a chicken egg laid
by a menopausal chicken (I really don’t know what her problem is but
she is getting up there in chicken years):

Here’s a pic of our little old tractor that we finally had fixed so it
runs again.  Look at those snazzy new tires!  We really don’t
use it for much but it’s nice to have one around.

Cute, isn’t it???

Mama Goose made a nest and put the first egg in it this morning.  Goose eggs are enormous. 

I was just walking back to
the house from doing the evening chores.  Trilling across the
alfalfa field was the unmistakeable sound of spring – the frogs in the
creek and the neighbor’s pond.