New Job

I have recently been demoted to Senior Pastor :). You people in ministry know the story more hours, more work, more problems. The position everyone wants at the church till they find out what it takes to hold it. OK so in all honesty I am thrilled and excited to fill this position. I feel it is absolutely a God thing and He is going to do great things in the church and my own life. The stretching has already begone for myself and some of the staff and that excites me even more to know that God cares enough about us to want to move us forward in Him.

Bees in Eves

I got a call from a family in Vinita that had a bee hive living in the eves of their house. Needless to say they did not want it staying there but were not willing to get stung up to move it so away I went to check it out. It was up about 16 feet beside a chimney and it took a few minutes to open the eve up to get a look at them. I had to wait a few days to come back and get them out (I didn't want to work that high up without a ground guy). But we went yesterday evening and vacuumed up the bees and cut the comb out and put it in an empty hive box. We left the bees there to clean up the rest of the mess and will move them in a day or two. All in all a 4 hour job total but a good act to promote the Kingdom of God.

R.I.P.

As most of you now know the little red s-10 is no more. It was a good little truck but it blew the head gaskets and had way to many miles on the old thing. I made the decision to let it dye and move on to something else. So far I have been borrowing my dads truck but I am still looking for my own little extended cab replacement truck that will do what I need it to. I will get pics up when I find the new ride.

Beekeeping

So I have taken up beekeeping with another guy in the church. We have captured two swarms and have cleaned a existing hive out of the wall of an RV trailer. So we now have three hives of our own and are hoping to buy another 40-50 or so. This is going to be a great BIG adventure for me as I have never started any kind of business before but we are hoping to be a blessing to each other, the church, and our community. The plan is over a year or two to build up enough hives to make it worth the trip to California for the pollination fees they pay beekeepers for putting their hives out in the almond groves. I am told when you get to 100-120 hives that it is worth your first trip so we will see. I also did a beekeeping lesson for our church daycare and I think the kids really enjoyed it.

Been Busy

For those of you who do not know my wife and I now have a beatiful little girl. She is Three months old now and has just learned to roll over. She slept the first time in her crib across the house (with the monitors all hooked up and tested) just this weekend. Here are a few pics of our beatiful angel. :)

Cleaning out Ditches

I spent the day yesterday donating some time to help the City of Welch clean out 2nd street canal, which is a drainage ditch for parts of our community. Since the town is so funds limited this ditch has not been cleaned out for many many years and we were working with chainsaws and limb saws to clean it up. We managed to clean up about 70 yards or so of the ditch line which meant 3 large trailer loads of brush to the dump and another pile of brush still to be loaded, but we had some great help from the Craig County Jail Inmates and those guys worked HARD. A Special Thanks to them. The worst part of the day was getting tripped up by a couple vines and letting the chainsaw get against my leg, so I have so scratches that will need to heal up and a torn up pair of pants. If you live in a small community go down to city hall and ask what you can help with there is always something they need.

Todd agnew Concert

I got to hang out with Todd some at the concert that our church put on. Todd is an incredible person who is very down to earth and totally loves God. He did a devotional at the Meet-n-Greet which was a chance for 15-20 people to meet him personally. Totally blew me away that normally where you you kiss hands and shake babies or the other way around, but he took the time for a short devotional and prayer requests. Long story short I would suggest to anyone if you have the chance to bring Todd Agnew in to do it. It was WAY WORTH IT.

Ceramic Tile Flooring? How Much?

I have a great couple of buddies that will do just about anything for/with me even lay 440 sq ft of ceramic tile in 2 1/2 days. These guys do this for a living so that makes it even worse you never want to take time off from work to go exactly what you do at work. However Tweet and Joel are great guys and they really helped out on my grandparents rock house. We layed new tile in the kitchen, dining, back entry, utility, and bath room. It would have gone faster but we had to do some flooring work because the floors were not strong enough to hold the weight of the tile in a few places. Yea I know we are awesome. :) Special Thanks to our wives who helped do the wash down on the tile after it was grouted.

Roofing! Yea

Last fall I got the opportunity to help out Tweet and his little brother with a roofing project. We put a metal roof over the existing asphalt shingled roof. When we did it we added 4x8 sheets of Styrofoam in between the runners we used to screw to add extra insulation. I never did get the pics out so others could see so here they are in all their splendidness. :)

Remodel at the old house

Now that Christina and I are moved (for the most part) we have started fixing up the old house to rent out. This is no easy task as it needed a new tub and surround and a new bathroom sink plus paint pretty much everywhere and a little drywall patching because I'm bigger than I used to be and drywall is apparently thinner than it used to be. :) We still have a ways to go with the painting but some buddies came down and helped me get caught up on allot of it. Thanks guys here's some pics of our adventures.

WOW

Like everyone else I have gotten sooooooooooooooooo busy over the last couple months. We are still getting settled in to our trailer and we have been hitting and missing working on the garage, but it has been coming along too. I did so electrical work over at my grandparents house and allot of frozen water line work at numerous houses over the last couple weeks. Oklahoma houses were not built for -20 degree wind chills. Now we have made it to the new year. Our plan is to fix up the old house and rent it out. I have a couple buddies coming down this weekend to help with that and we should have allot of fun. I will try to get some pics up of the fun times we have been having lately.

Finaly Made It

We moved into our trailer this last Saturday. I say moved in because we are sleeping there now but we still have about 25% of our stuff at the old house. That's the stuff that needs gone through and some of it thrown away. The trailer is beautiful it has been completely repainted from top to bottom on the inside which took forever to do but was well worth it. We now have a baby room for the little one who's coming at the end of May. We are way excited and although there is still more to do to finish up completely we LOVE our new place.

Almost There

Hey we are almost ready to move into the trailer that was given to us by the church. the city is putting in my sewer tap right now and then some painting on the inside and we are there. I want to thank all my family and friends for helping make this possible and helping do alot of the work as well. Thanks you all are great

B.U.S.Y.

I have heard that being busy mean Burdened Under Satan's Yoke I'm not sure if I agree but I know I have been "busy" lately and it has been allot harder to fit in my bible reading and prayer. I also know feeling busy makes my stress out and my personality changes from being ready and willing to help people to being ready and willing to tell people to shut up and leave me alone. Hey the truth hurts. So maybe B.U.S.Y. does actually stand for burdened under Satan yoke at least in some sense of the term. For me busy is defined as "worried I won't get everything done" and I know that worry is not having faith that God can take care of your circumstance and we are supposed to trust God and give Him our burdens. So there you have it I guess that stupid acronym is right. So whats a synonym for busy that I can use? :)

A little Rain

We got a little rain in Welch around 5 1/4 inches. So as you can imagine we had a little flash flooding to go with it. I grabbed some pics so everyone could enjoy the look around the church and around the trailer.

Blessings

Have I mentioned what a blessing it is to have a nice trailer house GIVEN to my wife and I? I was recently reflecting on the many blessings God has given me. A 1000 sq ft house for 8700 dollars four and a half years ago. Yea it needed work but WOW. We own four paid off vehicles, sure they all have over 100,000 miles but they are PAID OFF. A job to go to everyday during a downed economy. A place on the city council were I can serve him in our community more. A awesome wife, not perfect, but awesome. :) I am surrounded by loving family and friends who will help me WHENEVER I need them. Caring senior pastors who WANT to mentor and train their staff. GREAT neighbors who keep an eye on my home and kitten for me. The list could go on but I think I made my point. God really is good. My cup is more than half full it runs over.

Our new baby

My wife and I got a kitten. Yea we now have a little baby. What a pain the thing whines all the time. Is this normal? But he's really cute I will include some pics. So we get to play with him and hopefully this one won't get taken like the other one we had.

One more Step

Well I worked on my garage last weekend and got more done. I finished the framing, there was more there than I thought, and I went and stated cutting the sheet metal to length for my roof. WOW what a job. I decided to cut it will it was still screwed down to the old building I am taking it off of and there was a tar roof underneath it. So when I was running my grinder with the cutting blade on the metal it was going through and the hot blade was melting some tar and flinging it on me. OUCH. I only wore a T shirt didn't expect to get stuff slung on me. Sorry no pics of it though I was too worn out.

The Weekend is coming.

I am planning on working on my garage this weekend. It needs a few more boards framed on to it and then it needs the metal skin put on. We will see how far I get but I am excited about having a Saturday free to work on it. This will be one more step toward getting moved into the trailer that was given to us. We have gotten the gas line in but that is it so far so there are still a number of steps to go.

The Lake

We went to the lake this last weekend and hung out with my old boss from ORU. He goes out once a year and takes those who want to go from the office there, since I worked there for so many years he always invites us too. Thanks Steve. So we went out and did some tubing and I got totally sun burnt. I forgot how hard it is to sleep with a bad sunburn but I still had fun and a great time of visiting with Steve and Lisa.