Feb, '07 #25

	Greetings to all. We’re finally winding down the busiest time of the year here. Towards the end of Nov. things start picking up and by Christmas we’re at break-neck speed until we crash and burn in late Feb. One son counts 6 days that he was in our house in Jan. I was able to work much of Thanksgiving and even sneak in a few hours on Christmas day and New Year’s was a string of 16-18 hour days. There were no major crises this year, but I got tired of drinking the muddy water we have this time of year and added to the treatment process so that it comes out quite clear (though not perfect). It adds another 12 hours to the already slow and tedious job, but now that it works, I’m trying to streamline it. Massive rains have swelled the river guaranteeing that the reservoir will reach full, but also causing much loss and, if the lake overfills, perhaps even to us. At full, the waves erodes the northeast shore and is too close to some of the camper housing. Brush piles have helped and the lake has at times gone years without reaching the full mark, but as it eats closer to the houses I felt that a better, more permanent solution was needed. My guiding parameters were: no time, no heavy machinery, no money. A piled rock wall seemed to fit the bill so I hired 6 guys and for 6 days we loaded and unloaded 40 cubic yards of rock by hand - some weighing upwards of 200 lbs. That took care of 150 ft. but there’s another, shorter stretch that still needs to be done. It seems we’ve had an unusual number of critter problems recently. Assassin bugs, which are also found in the southwest US, had become a problem on the Island. They are a leaf shaped, blood-sucking, nocturnal bug whose bite can be nasty, especially if you are allergic to its anesthesia. The bite looks to me almost like a spider’s and it sometimes takes me as much as 6 months to heal. The worst is that it can transmit the basically incurable Chagas disease. Then we started finding them in William’s bed here at home - many of them very young. A search of the room revealed no nest. Vampire bats are always a problem on the island, but a colony of bats in my attic (not in my belfry, thank you) became a bigger concern as possible hosts for the assassin bugs. I tried several simple "ecological" methods of encouraging them to move out and eventually removed all the Spanish tiles off the roof so they’d have to leave. The bat "dirt" was several inches thick in places. There were hundreds of bats up there, far more than I would have guessed. The caretaker helped me and we started shoveling the "dirt" into buckets, letting it down with a rope and hauling it off in a wheelbarrow. We ran out of time and had to leave it for another day. Bat manure is an excellent fertilizer because it has a high content of nitrogen, which is also a chief element in ammonia. In fact it’s almost like dehydrated ammonia. Just add water - rain water for example. And what a rain it was. Humongus stains everywhere, "mud" running out of light fixtures, no power (so the place wouldn’t burn down) - and just the smell was enough to peel the paint. . . But that’s another story. As it turned out there were no assassin bugs up there. Another search found the nest in a tote bag William took to the Island. Greyson also has a critter story. He was stung by a scorpion. We were, of course, already running late for Sunday School. It was the largest I’ve ever seen here and got even larger (and thinner) after it tried to catch a large rock that was tossed to it. Ironically, more people die from the wrong dose of anti-venom than from the stings. When he said his tongue was going numb we started to worry. Turns out that’s a typical reaction. Greyson recovered quickly. I think I mentioned a trip to some amethyst mines with a man named Neves (Snow). The boys are really into rocks and enjoyed the trip and we had a chance to build a relationship and discuss spiritual things with Neves. As we walked the narrow cobblestone streets there were chips and chunks of amethyst everywhere. In some places the streets were almost paved with them. The boys were running around like loonies stuffing their pockets full and the residents were staring, wondering why anyone would even want to pick up that "litter" in the streets. I am reminded of how, from our materialistic vantage point, as we think of Heaven’s gates of pearl and streets of gold we tend to be impressed with the value of the material. I imagine that their only value will be the amazing beauty, and if some one were to try to "steal" a gold brick we would wonder what anyone would want with a paving stone. Let us do as Jesus has commanded and lay up treasures in heaven rather than rocks here on Earth. Whether our next meeting be here below or on those streets of gold, we are Yours in Him, The Athas in Brazil, Byron and Michele, and William, Dalton, and Greyson