Wednesday, December 17, 2008

A Long Time Coming

It has been a very long time since I have posted to my blog. I have been busy, but then you probably guessed that. One problem I found was my discovery of Facebook. That can be much more time consuming than my blog was. It is much more interactive and responses come much more rapidly. Once you start in there, its really hard to get away, and stay away.

And then there was hunting season. There was planning, preparation, practice, patience, panic....and then a deer to hang in my garage until it was ready to be prepared for the freezer. We now have venison steaks, roasts, ground venison and venison sausage (both breakfast and hot) in our freezer and we have already enjoyed some venison steaks, stew and mincemeat pie. Below is picture of me with the lady who arrived at our place December 3rd. I didn't get any pictures but our dog loved being able to process some of the leg bones of this deer as well!

My wife has been busy trying to manage our Christmas preparations this year. She works hard to insure that packages are sent early enough to arrive at their appropriate destinations before Christmas. That is no small task with family living in Georgia, Florida and Alabama as well as Canada and China. And then there is the decorations in the house. She retrieves them from the attic, sends my son and I to bring home a tree, has me string the lights, then works her magic and we end up with a wonderful holiday environment. Here are a couple of pictures of our tree this year, along with one of our manger scenes and our dog Rudy taking it all in stride.


As we move closer to Christmas we are really looking forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus! We will not have any of our married sons with us this year, but Barb and Shawn and I do plan to travel up to be with Barb's brother and his family on Christmas day, they live about an hour away, and it will be nice to be with extended family. But what will be wonderful is to have time to reflect again on just what God did for us when he sent his son that very first Christmas day! I have often wondered if the people in Bethlehem even had a clue what had happened in their town that day.