"We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of human history: romantic love and gunpowder." - Andre Maurois

And that should be tolerance OF idiots. Just sayin'. 

Yeah, I've been missing here. I think that's going to be more typical than the daily posts that have been my habit.
I'm not sure why. Part of the reason is that I'm too busy with things that must be done. My work load at church has kicked into high gear with two teaching assignments, a writing project, and the fall restart of the small group ministry I oversee.
Fall is also a busy time on Baker Rd. I need to get firewood laid up for the winter and the kindling bin full. I want everything in the barn, coop, and garden up to snuff so I don't have to make repairs in bad weather. (I spent two hours yesterday working in and on the goat barn.)

My efforts at learning Portuguese are going well. My vocab is increasing each week and I'm learning more about grammar and syntax. But if I skip a day's attention on it I sure notice the effects. I drill vocab with my flash cards (I need to make more cards), learn about sentence structure by reading online, and practice putting very simple sentences together with the limited vocab I have. Next week's goal: learning the declensions for all the verbs that end in ___er. After the ___ar verbs that's the second largest group.

Sally is SO close to being back on the road. Later today (it's 6:30 a.m. now) I plan to pull her out of Barnette and install the rocker molding. I can't do that inside Barnette because there isn't enough room and it's been raining every day for the last week. Today is to be overcast but dry.
I went out at 5 a.m. this morning, opened the doors, and aimed the headlights. There's a bit of a slope down into Barnette so what I did is a rough guess; tonight I'll drive it down the hill to the level parking lot of a church there, point Sally at the outside wall of the church, and get a more precise alignment.

As I type this I'm listening to Dolly SCREAM because she wants her morning feed. She's been doing this for the last hour and I've persisted in ignoring her, hoping that she'd eventually tire and give up.
Nope. So, to preserve my attitude for the rest of the day I should go feed the _____ and the four other critters living in that barn.
I'm mulling over taking a break from raising goats. It's a hobby that, while not a huge drain on the budget, doesn't produce income. And it makes it difficult for us to do things like go away for even a few days. Plus the need to do the chores at specific times every day. (As in, have to plan a trip into town around evening feedings.)
I mentioned the possibility of taking a break to Pam the other day and got no response, so I don't know how she feels about it.

Two weeks ago, as part of my mental prep for my Thursday night class I had a thought tht is still rattling around in my head.
Physics tells us that the amount of matter and energy in the universe is fixed. You can change energy into matter and visa versa, and you can change the form of both, but you can neither create nor destroy either one.
That means the everything here now was here when Adam and Eve were in the garden. Everything.
What's in front of you as you read this? A TV? A couch? A cup of coffee? Whatever it is, that thing was here when Adam and Eve lived. It was obviously here in a different form, but it was here.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.

Tomorrow will be our last class meeting for my Sunday morning group. There won't be any meeting on the last Sunday of September, and then we'll start up again the first Sunday in October. This is the class that reads through the Bible in a year. We meet for an hour each Sunday morning to discuss what they've read, and then I give them some historical and literary background on what they'll read in the week ahead. (Like, the book of Hosea is about....) I also send everyone a daily email of things they should look for in that day's assigned reading.
They finish Revelation today. So in tomorrow's class we'll do a debrief and I'll solicit feedback that I hope will help me improve the next cycle.

It's 12:30 and I've just finished lunch (sandwich and chips). The kindling bin is full, a few more repairs on the barn completed, Stella's hooves trimmed (a nasty and difficult job), and MoHo's gutters cleaned. Next up (after a likely nap) - Sally's rocker moldings installed. That's a tricky job so I watched a couple of instructional videos on You Tube. One guy got it all done and said, "Well, that wasn't too bad. A couple of hours' work and the results add a lot to the looks of your Mustang restoration."
This guy had the car up on a lift, knew exactly what he was doing, had probably done it 35 times before, and says it will take me two hours.
Ya' think?

OK, that went easier than I had any right for it to go. I'm so used to everything on this project getting complicate and taking 3x as long as I thought that I figured this might easily be a two day job. Nope! That was mostly because I could reuse the clips that held the old molding on. You're supposed to have to use rivets to attach new clips and that's a time consuming process.

I've got some paint touchup to do and a few small punch list items, but she's ready to meet the public. I was going to drive her to church tomorrow but it's supposed to rain pretty hard and I still have the leak under the cowl. So I'll drive her to work the first decent day we have next week.

This all started out as an experiment I first read about in a Car Talk Facebook post. I didn't keep close track but I have under $300 in paint, body filler, and consumables. I would have purchased the car parts that needed replacing even if I'd have spent north of $2500 for the cheap Maaco paint job.
If I had it to do over again I could do a better job because there's a definite learning curve. But it's a driver, not garage jewelry and I got the 20/20 I wanted.
Sally is a head turner.