April 28, 2008

Here's the garden in Minnesota after I shoveled off all the snow.

Here's how I planted the potatoes....in trenches...I cover them up with an inch or so of soil, then as the season goes along (and, hopefully, as the greent plant comes up!), I will pull down more soil over them.

This is the first half of the garden planted: potatoes, onions, spinach, lettuce, peas. We'll see what has come up when I return to Minnesota in three weeks. Notice my jim-dandy chicken wire fence to keep out rabbits and raccoons…although it won’t be much of a protection against deer….we’ll see what happens.

These are the tiny buds of sedum just coming up as I left on Friday, April 18.

I flew from Minneapolis into New York City on Saturday, took the bus and the subway to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, then got on the train to New Haven, CT. Walked with all my luggage (about two miles) to the Overseas Ministries Study Center. This is where I will be for the next three weeks, taking three different seminars, starting on Monday.

This is the Yale Divinity School quadrangle, where I attended seminary 35 years ago (yes, 35!!)

A view of the right side of the YDS Quadangle.

This is the Day Missions Library, a portion of the YDS library, and the place where I would usually study....did some reading there this Sunday afternoon Christopher J.H. Wright will be leading a seminar on Jeremiah my second week here, and I have his book on "The Mission of God" that I would like to finish reading before that seminar begins! I have also been reading "The Day of Battle," Rick Atkinsons' second of a proposed trilogy on World War II (this book is on the Italian campaign).

This is Bethesda Lutheran Church, just down the hill from the Divinity School. The mansion in the foreground is their parish house (used to be the Malley mansion, the owner of a department store in New Haven). There were actually some people there this morning who remembered me from 35 years ago!

Posted April 21, 2008

I arrived at the Minnesota cabin at about 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. here you can see the extent of the snow and, of course, the ice still on the lake.

These photos are not in the correct order; maybe by next time I will get the hang of that! This is taken from the hill behind our cabin. You can see the cabin at the lower left.

This shows the sloppy condition of the forest road (1 and 1/4 mile long) to get to our cabin. Murray warned me about this on Saturday before I left, and he met me out at the mailboxes so that we could transfer all my stuff into his truck.

A view of the frozen lake from in front of the cabin.

We transferred everything from Murray's truck into the bucket of his John Deere -- and also pullede some stuff behind the tractor on these two sleds.

A closer view of the tractor.

Murray taking off in the tractor from his place; our cabin is about a 1/4 mile down the hill.

This is a better picture of Murray. Murray Mills and his wife, Carol, live here all year around. Murray is a reitred hardware store owner; he had also owned a Minnesota lake resort at one time. Also, the author of a book, about a Minnesota border agent.

This is a picture of one of the garden beds I constructed out of railroad ties last summer. You can see a bit of the railroad tie in the lower right of the picture. I shoved the snow off part of this bed on Tuesday morning. Then went into town to buy seed potatoes and onion sets, which I hope to plant before I leave for New Haven on Friday.

Murray loaned me one of his four-wheelers to get back and forth to the car, which is still out there at the mailboxes. It's a fun little thing to drive (and this, I know, is where Pete would love to be with me now so that he could drive this!).

April 13, 2008 -- Pastor Tom drove to Minnesota to begin his journey of rest and renewal.