There Is A Time For Everything…

What a wonderful group of verses from Ecclesiastes. It had special meaning for me this past Friday. It continues…

“…and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him.”

We moved into our Leiper’s Fork TN home in the spring of 2003. The builder hired a group of stone masons to create some wonderful dry stacked stone features around the house. A couple of beautiful floor to ceiling stone fireplaces, a massive stone chimney, and a good portion of the front of the house with a stone wall.

The results of all that stone work, besides the beautiful architectural structures created, lay in piles down by the creek. Mounds and mounds of stone shards and pieces, some piles three feet high, discarded at the creek’s edge. They were the bits and pieces left over as large stones were chipped and shaved to fit just right without grout or mortar. The massive weight of the stones that fit together perfectly create the stability and strength to support each additional stone above.

One of my favorite parts of the stone work is the keystone’s in each of the fireplaces. Loose stones held up by hand in an arch while the master stone mason fits in the keystone (the architectural piece at the crown of an arch which marks its apex, locking the other pieces into position).


Several years ago I found a discarded stone shard half buried in the yard. I was on lawn prep duty the summer after we moved in to remove all the rocks and stones I was hitting with my lawn mower. There was something about it that struck me. It was amazingly well formed, having been chipped away from a larger stone and breaking off in an almost perfect angles. It was a bit larger than an iPod shuffle, and almost as smooth on five of the six surfaces.

I stuck it in my pocket, and later set it down on the brick retaining wall on our back porch.

There it sat for almost six years. I remember seeing it every once in awhile, picking it up and feeling its smooth surface, and then setting it back down. If we had a pond I would have tried to skip it on the water.

A few weeks ago Michelle and I hired by brother-in-law Josh to do some work around our house. Little things have been slowly breaking, chipping or falling apart. We also had a nasty leak in a pipe running down between our closet wall in the master bedroom and the drywall was soft and wet. Time for some fix-it work.

Josh and I walked the house, inside and out, and wrote down every little thing that had to be worked on. Paint chips, dry-wall cracks, loose crown molding, doors that didn’t close properly, window and bathtub caulking, and much more. Amongst the long list was grout/mortar repair work on our front stone stairway.

The stone repair work was the last thing Josh worked on. He found some grout that was close to the original color and set about filling in all the old grout that had disintegrated and fallen away. He did a great job and it looked wonderful except for one spot. At the very top of the stone stairs, in the corner, was a gap where the grout had fallen out. I asked Josh to fill it in, but he said it wouldn’t stay. The gap was too wide and deep, and there was nothing there to support it. He could put some in, but guessed it would come out within a few weeks or months.

He said if I had a rock or something that would fit in there he could make it work, but doubted we would find just the right size and shaped rock to fit in the gap.

It hit me. While I hadn’t seen or touched that stone on the back porch in a year or two, it came to me in an instant. My memory of what it looked like seemed to match the gap in the stairway. I told Josh I might just have the right thing and went out back to get the stone.

I handed it to him and he gently fit it into the gap. If a jeweler had custom cut that rock to fit the gap with diamond cutting instruments it would not have fit better but for a tad bit of extra length. It fit the width and the height perfectly, and blended into the color scheme of the rocks on the stairway- which are slightly different than the rest of the stonework around the house.

The job was done, and I couldn’t help but think about that little bit of discarded stone. Thrown away by a master craftsman because it was useless in his eyes, and picked up by someone else and held, waiting, until the just the right time.

In Ecclesiastes 3:1 quoted above, there is a line in verse 5: "a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them."

As this world seems to crumble and press around us, as we wonder if tomorrow will find us without a job or income, and in some cases, a home, how wonderful it is to know that God has a place for us. A use, in his time. And if we are willing to surrender to Him, to allow Him to fulfill His plan for us, we may find that we fill the gap or complete the work in someone else’s life to His glory.

Before And After: The Garage

9:00AM- This should be fun and interesting. At least to me.

I will attempt to motivate and amaze myself as I tackle, with the help of my lovely wife Michelle and four wonderful daughters K, L, A & R, the cleaning and organization of our garage.

Our builder went a bit crazy on the garage. To say we have good storage space is an understatement. The garage has 4 bays for cars, a door to the patio, 2 large storage areas, plus a safe room/space if we have a really bad storm/tornado. All in the space is about 1500 square feet. Immense.

The work today will be exhausting, but I hope very successful. I am writing this before we begin. We shall see how it goes and what I write at the end of the day.

Here are the ‘Before’ pictures:

7:50PM- It is done.

My entire married life Michelle has teased me and given me a hard time for the way I organize a space. I learned it from my mom- take everything OUT of the space, throw it all about somewhere away from the space, then clean the empty space thoroughly, and finally, start to place the stuff back IN the cleaned space in an orderly and organized way. Michelle has always thought this was insane and added time and effort to the job. We have argued it many, many times, and Michelle always dismisses me as crazy for doing it my way.

Until today.

As we prepared for the task ahead I of course told her how I wanted it to go down. We would all work together to empty the ENTIRE garage of everything that is on or near the floor, dump it all into the driveway, clean the garage and spray for bugs, install the new shelving units I bought this morning, and then move everything back in. While doing the last part, separate out stuff for the dump and Goodwill.

She agreed and thought it was a good idea. Why? Was it the years of arguments, influence and her love for me and belief that I really do know best? Nope. It was a show called Mission: Organization on HGTV she recently watched. Seemed the organizational expert on the show said the best way to organize a space is….exactly the way I do it. But because some lady on TV said it, Michelle believes it now. So much for my influence.

Here are the after pictures:

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Land For Sale

Hey- So a couple days ago I wrote that one of my obsessive thoughts is to acquire more land to add to my 11 acre mini-nation here at DigitalRichLand. A lovely 39 acre lot with a 100 year old tobacco barn and gently slopping pastures just went up for sale yesterday next door. Is that timing or what? I could annex the site and instanty increase the size of my retreat 3X.

I have put the call into my realtor. I want to at least imagine I can afford it for the couple of days it will take for him to get back to me.

I get about 30-50 visitors a day here at DigitalRich (that I can see- the ones that have cookies turned on and allow SiteMeter to peek at them and visit directly versus blog readers). If each one of you were to donate, say, about $20,000, I could easily buy the land.

I'm thinking about adding a PayPal donation button to get things started. Let me know if you're in. Even like $5,000 would be welcome.






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DigitalHome

I am moving closer to my ultimate digital goal: Being able to consume the media I want, when I want it, where I want it.

Music
All 10,000 or so of our CDs are now digitized- not once, or twice, but three times. Each time I got a better digital music player, and increased the volume the music played on external speakers, I could hear more of the hiss present at the lower rip rates- so after moving from 128kbs to 256kbs, I then made the ultimate leap to Windows Media Lossless (essentially, the same quality as a CD). Each time requiring me to open up and re-rip each CD. Insane. I store it all on an external drive/media server connected to our wireless router. By the way, you can set your WindowsMedia Player to rip at this level by clicking Tools/Options/Rip Music.

Photographs

Now, almost all of our family photos are also available on our home network, accessible anywhere in the house (via laptop/desktop, tv). All that is left is to get our old photos converted from negatives to digital files (about 75 cents a strip at Wolf/Ritz Camera).

Video

The final frontier (at least as I can see for the time being) is to get our video content digitized. The goal is to move the cases in our family room that currently hold good old-fashioned plastic discs with movies on them to a final resting place in storage next to the dusty cases of CDs.

I have been able to get our home movies onto the network- the ones from the last couple of years were recorded on a Sony Handycam DVD recorder. The older ones were a bit harder. $30 a pop at Wolf/Ritz to convert our old Sony Handycam 8mm tapes to DVD. It only took a couple days, but with about 20 to convert, was not cheap.

Our DVD collection is next on the list. I have found a simple tool (and free as well if you use it right) to rip all our DVDs called MagicDVDRipper, so the only issue I can see is storage. Each DVD when ripped will take up about 4.7-15.93 Gig (depending on if the disc is single or double layered, has extra content, etc)- so I will be able to place about 30-60 movies per 300GB external drive (the size I use now).

I will likely wait a bit longer before ripping the full collection- maybe until something in the 5-10 Terabyte storage range if affordable so that I will be able to get all of our films on one drive- important as the new formats coming out (HD DVD, Blu-Ray) have much larger capacity for content.

File size will only get bigger- One hour of uncompressed Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV) consumes approximately 11½ terabytes of data. Can't wait.

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Rain In The Middle Of The Night

It has been raining constantly since yesterday afternoon- about 15 hours now, at varying rates. An hour of light rain and then 20 minutes of torrential downfall. Rinse and Repeat. Even now, when it rains in the middle of the night, I wake up suddenly with fear and concern before remembering that all is alright and fall back to sleep. Allow me to explain.

We moved in to our new home in the spring of 2003, and prior to that created a “punch-list” of the things that needed fixing by the builder before work was complete. There were the standard things like patches of drywall that needed to be smoothed and painted, the odd closet door that didn’t close right, and many other small fixes. For the most part, the builder and his team did a good job getting these things done in a timely manner (measured in “home builder time” - one human year equals 1 day for a builder). Except for one HUGE problem.

Our back patio, with a 4 foot retaining wall on three sides, floods every time it rains. The patio was designed to have a slight slope towards the back and 3 drains were installed into the brick retaining wall that allows the water that falls from the deck above, and from the 3 gutters running from the roof, to gently drain out into the yard. Interesting plan…but it didn’t work.

The first storm we had after moving in- more than a month later- turned our patio into a lake. The drains didn’t do a darn thing. The water just rose and rose, and finally when it reached the door jam of the 3 doors that open to the patio I took action. It was in the afternoon, and I rushed to Home Depot. I bought a sump pump, plugged it in, hooked up the drain hose and plopped it right in the middle of our patio. Within an hour the lake had become a pond, and the wood floors on the basement level were saved. Thus began a 2 ½ year epoch that we called "the great flood years".

I soon graduated to two pumps, and then upgraded both pumps to the ones that automatically turn on and off. On many occasions storms arrived in the middle of the night, and I awoke with a start, threw on shorts and grabbed rain boots and umbrella, and stood in the pouring rain setting up the pumps, plugging them in, and muttering a half-awake prayer to God to keep me from getting electrocuted or badly shocked. If I fell down unconscious I would surely drown on the flooded patio. If I did, Michelle would be really bummed when she got up in the morning. The wood floors would probably be ruined.

All this time we are arguing with the builder (I will call him Mr. B from now on) to get this fixed. His solution was to dig two trenches through our backyard out to our creek (about 100 feet away), connect them to two of the drains on the backside of the retaining wall, and allow gravity to drain the water out to the creek. Great idea. He just never got around to doing it. I would call him and leave a voice mail (I stopped trying to E-mail him since his AOL account reported back that his inbox was over capacity…for two years!), and he would call me right back (about 2 weeks later…in builder's time that is 8 hours later) when I wasn’t home. On occasion when we did talk, he said he couldn’t get the work done because it recently rained and the equipment would damage the yard, or the crew he used was busy on a job on the other side of the county, or whatever. This went on for years. By the summer of 2005 I gave up. I stopped calling him, and he stopped calling me.

Leverage is a BEAUTIFUL Thing

The story is not over. There are two very important things to understand before I conclude. When we moved in to our home Mr. B left his Yamaha 9’ Grand Player Piano (worth about $40k) in one of our first floor rooms that came to be known as the Piano room. Mr. B wanted to store it here because it added a nice touch when prospective home buyers were ushered in by their real-estate agents. At closing, he asked us if it would be ok to keep the piano in our house for six months or so until he finished building his own new house. We said ok, and promptly put our two oldest girls into piano lessons and enjoyed the collection of player discs they left. It was great. The six months turned into a year…and then two. We didn’t ask Mr. B about it, we just kept praying that a miracle would happen and he and his wife would suddenly forget they ever owned a piano.

On a cold winter Saturday morning in 2005, the fateful call came. It was Mr. B calling at 9AM to inform me that he had a moving truck on the way to our house to pick up the piano- he needed it that night for a Christmas party they were having at their house. His wife is, shall we say, a very determined person, and really had Mr. B’s tighty-whitey’s in a wad about waiting so long to get the piano back. I listened to Mr. B's sad story while a broad grin formed on my face. I used the ancient mystical power of leverage. Mr. B’s $40k piano, a successful Christmas party and his marriage were hanging in the balance.

I casually, and with a kind and gentle voice, told Mr. B that I wasn’t letting anyone in my house to take the piano until my drainage problem was fixed. Mr. B was silent for a good 10 seconds (a surprisingly quick reply in "builder’s time"). He assured me he would take care of it right away- would try to have his crew out sometime before Christmas- if it didn’t rain- and get it fixed. I agreed that was a good plan and told him he could get the piano back right after that. Again silence. We went back and forth for a few minutes- him throwing out solutions, me laying out the only way it would go down.

By 11:00AM there were 6 workers in my backyard, a backhoe, 2 trucks, and a crew of grass seeders that couldn’t speak English. All the while the piano movers were sitting in their truck at the front of the house.

By 2:00PM the trenches were dug, drain pipe laid, trenches re-filled, and grass seed and hay laid down. The crew left, and Mr. B arrived in his obligitory builder's Ford F-150. He walked me through the work area, proudly showed off how it would work, and then said he would go out front to let the movers know they could get the piano. “Not yet” I said. We went through a series of tests- flooding the patio with water from the hose twice to make sure the drains took care of the problem. It worked great, but I was concerned that leaves and debris would clutter the drain openings and asked him to install wire grid traps. He left for Home Depot, returned and personally cut and installed the filters. By 3:30PM all the work was done, his movers came in and got the piano loaded by 4PM, and rushed it to Mr. B's place in time for his 6PM Christmas party.

No kidding- that night it rained like crazy. Out of habit I came downstairs at 1AM to check the patio and was thrilled to see all was ok. I went right back to sleep.