Saturday, January 12, 2013

Story Telling - a Must!

Hello All,
We have had a busy but productive week.  Mostly involved with things like building a children's wing, figuring pressures based on flow and head changes, designing houses, looking for flooring for houses, overseeing excavation (no digging involved for us!), organizing 68 kids to work preparing and serving food, but that's all!

I found these pretty little birds on our porch eating some rice that was for the cats.  They are weavers.  The second is a black masked weaver but I am not sure what the first is:

 
Some kind of Weaver bird
 
 
Black Masked Weaver
 
 
I have noticed that it is the first picture that appears in my blog that shows up when it is posted to Face book, so I try to make the first one something nice.
 
Now, below is something not so nice, but some of you (on the sick side) might find it interesting.  Apparently, some of the septic pumping companies around here don't really know how to pump a septic tank!  Look at all the sludge left on the bottom of this tank and they took 5 truck loads out of it!
 
 
 

 


No, Jim did not get into the tank to take these pictures.  I think he just lowered the camera (I hope).  This is our worst tank around the hospital campus and is the only one we are going to keep in operation with our new tankless sewer system.  We are still waiting on a contractor to be hired to do the oxidation pits, but the cost for that is somewhere in the $600,000 range!  So, we may be waiting a while.

Jim spent some time this week doing flow calculations.  The contractor for the Children's Wing had a run of supply water pipe put in that is a different variety then what used to be there and a different diameter.  The pressure in the pipe upstream of this is now higher, and hence causing problems with breakage, and the local workers were thinking that it was the contractor's fault.  Low and behold, the locals had also added some supply tanks and rerouted things a bit, which was really the culprit because the tanks are about 140 ft higher then they used to be!  That is about 60 lbs of pressure.  Anyway, hopefully, calculations and not emotions will prevail in this discussion!

The poinsettia trees bloom here starting just before Christmas.  Yes, the poinsettias are trees here!  Below is one up by the maternity wing:

 
Beautiful!
 

Our friends from Care of Creation are finally getting their house started.  They are just now getting the land excavated.  The local tracker is broken (again) so they were frustrated at having to start late (problems from the get go)!  But, our Children's wing contractor has an excavator and they were able to hire them when they are not using it on the project.   That and about 20 guys with shovels will get them dug out soon.  Here are a few pictures:

 


 

They have a few large boulders to deal with and a pretty steep slope but it is going to be a beautiful spot.

I was listening to a podcast of David Platt this week about telling stories.  It is so important to instill in our kids the stories of our history;  Family, and the bible.  Psalms 78 talks about .....teaching their children so the next generation would know them, and even the children yet to be born and they in turn would tell their children.....
I would love to know the complete story of my ancestors.  They came to America a very long time ago and settled in the south.  I have heard that some even owned slaves.  I have 4 great, great..... uncles who were in the Civil War.  Three of them died and the 4th became the commander of his regiment at a very young age (14 I think).  But somehow this kind of information gets lost and muddled with time.  What were they like?  What did they think of life in the south?  Did they know God?  I would love to write down my history someday so that my grandchildren can answer these questions about me!  Does thinking about these kind of things mean I am getting old?  If so, that is fine with me!  I love how the Africans' tell their stories.  It is mostly with song and dance.  David Platt was here in Kenya one time and he said that when he gets to heaven he wants to sit on the Kenyan side because they worshipped God with song and dance so well!  They are so used to telling stories based on a dance with the whole tribe.  And these dances get passed from generation to generation.  That is just cool and a shame we have lost that in our culture.

Hope you have a wonderful and blessed week and please make time to tell some stories to those kids!

In His Hands,
Jullie T.


 

 

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