Garden Hands

This is not a photo of my hands but the best one I could find of what soil staining does to my flesh. And this is with gloves. I wear nail polish to hide the nails. But my fingers tell the tale of working in the gardens. This year I have green beans, cabbages, tomato, 3 kinds of cucumbers, 4 kinds of pumpkins, basil, potato and okra. Thanks to pigweed I have many small spikes I have to pull out of my leather gloves and flesh. But I have fresh veggies anytime I want. I grow what I eat and can or freeze the rest. I share what I have too much of like basil and radishes.

It is hard work, sweat, mulch,dirt and pain but worth it. I get to spend time outside with my animals. My husband has to find me to remind me to eat lunch or dinner. Most nights I am outside watering after dark or re-potting seedlings. So grateful to have the strength to do this and the energy do do this. Life is hard but wonderful.

Behind the Scene at Church

We have a very small Ozark church that we have attended since moving here seven years ago. And it has gotten smaller in attendance (30). But when it was built in the 1980's there were over 300+ active church members. So the large building has four air conditioning units, four different makes, filters sizes and locations within the building, offices, classrooms and chapel. We used to pay for a local AC company to maintain them when there was income and interest. However that AC company was not doing its job and cost hundreds of dollars for doing nothing. When the man who oversaw all the building maintenance work died we sought volunteers to take over this enormous task. Since we live in the Ozarks we are blessed with many skilled DIY type of people. We volunteered to clean the air units and replace filters, even ones in the ceiling. This is my husband pulling down the filters, cleaning the coils and looking for leaks. None of the air units have any water catch pans under them.

How fun is this replacing monthly AC filters in the ceiling. Can you say stupidly built?

Cleaning coils

Hot sweaty mouldy work

Since I have fallen through 3 ceilings I no longer go up into ceilings of any kind.

Putting in the new filters in unit one.

Unit two was on the ground, with the wrong metal filters on it.

Coil cleaner and cleaning the intake.

Headlamps come in hand not just on the farm.

Dirty filters on unit three.

We ran out of coil cleaner on unit three and used Simple Green instead. Much cheaper and got most of the caked on dirt of the filthiest unit so far. Have to order yet a third size filter set for this unit as well.

Unit four was behind a ton of classroom clutter. It cools the offices. The problem is that you can't get to any of the coils to clean them. We will have to find someone we can trust to work on this unit. It was out of our skill set.

We now rely on volunteers to take time to fix things at our church. Along with a full time job and a farm that is hard to do for many. Also, our volunteer pool most are over the age of 80. They still work and volunteer but can't climb up into ceilings nor do heavy lifting. It is a lot to ask of people trying to keep their church open and running. The diocese gives nothing to keep up the church, that is our parishes job. I think it has always been that way. But when people die, move away to be closer to their families, lose interest in the church that pool shrinks. Many of our church members wear many hats. I clean, do the bulletin, e-mails, phone calls, keep up with the church members, settle in the new priests and sing in the choir. My husband fixes the computers, piano, plays the music for the choir,  and fixes any broken machines. And somewhere in there we remember to pay attention to God's message, love your fellow man and pray.