Work Hard, Sleep Well, Look for the Sunshine

It has been a few weeks since our last entry and much is happening. We are working hard on the remodel of the bungalow over at Church Farm (an historical name) and on enhancing and promoting Camp Liahona. We have started keeping track of our time just for fun. Last week we put in 67 hours on the remodel and the Camp. We have gotten permission to build a web site (probably CampLiahona.co.uk and Jack is burning the midnight oil a bit on that. We have also gotten permission to announce that camping will be available to families and church groups year round! We are excited about the new possibilities of making this beautiful little spot an oasis of peace and beauty in a world that is getting more and more perplexing and noisy.

Meanwhile the winter solstice has passed. This morning we awoke to fog on the fen and took this picture from our bedroom window. We have a lot of foggy mornings - it has been unseasonably cold and when the humidity is high like today, the wind blows the heat right out of you because your clothing is too damp. Like our home in Copalis Beach, Washington, we often look for the sun when it isn't to be seen. This morning it is trying its best to burn a hole on the fen.

At Camp, we saw this swan walking about on frozen Lake Liahona. There is a pair of them wintering over on the lake and its island. On our way to remodel the bungalow on the Little Ouse, we also saw this huge flock of swans working the newly ploughed (English spelling) farm fields. These fields are part of the 2,500 acre farm we live on.

I remind you that these photos can be enlarged by clicking on them. 

The fields in this photo were sugar beets and they have just been "lifted", stacked, loaded into huge "lorries" and hauled to the sugar factory about 3 miles North of us. The straw you see in the foreground of this picture was the insulation over a stack of sugar beets a few hundred feet long. We happened by the day they had a large machine moving slowly along the stack shredding huge straw bales that were being drawn into the maw of this contraption and blown onto the beet stack. The fields have now been plowed and drilled with winter or spring wheat (not sure which, they change over about now) so we suppose the swans are doing their best to keep our crop yields within reason. Ha. the farmers seem very efficient. We often see that the day after the beets are lifted they are plowing and the following day they are drilling wheat seed into the fen. It is then only a week or 10 days before the field begins to turn green with wheat grass. About a third of this farm was leased out to lettuce growers last year. We notice now that every lettuce field and every potato field is turning green with wheat and we wonder if the Brethren have decided that it is a good time to focus on the staff of life. It is fun to watch the whole process and to wonder at the magnitude of these huge farms. The wheat seed "packets" are about a cubic meter each and we see them stacked in the barns awaiting the burial of their contents.