Lisa has wanted to learn the art of canning for some time now and she found that opportunity with Lois Guthrie (another staff member of Harvest Home Farm - and Becky’s mom). Together they canned 24 jars of pickled beets from a “special” recipe from Mike. Now Lois and Lisa are not beet lovers and neither is Becky. Come to find out MIKE is the ONLY member in the family that actually like beets. So… beets anyone?
Well Drackley Downloaders we are please to bring you more news from the farm. As described in our last post the farm has a new water trough that is unique. It is based on geothermal energy (earth heated). Here are some pics that I hope are worth a thousand words 
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Do you have email? How about a cell phone? Have you ever said, “I’m blogging this!”? How about using an iPod? Do you drive by GPS? How about Facebook, Twitter’ing? Do you have a SPAM problem? Virus ever brought you to tears? Yep, I’ve been there too (minus the cell phone, but Lisa has one 
). I tell you the need to be in communication just seems to overwhelm me. And the list just keeps growing every day. I’ve counted now 10 different e-mail accounts that I manage, not to mention all of the camp staffs’ e-mail accounts to maintain. Isn’t that crazy!?!? You may have noticed though Lisa and I haven’t “blogged” anything for quite some time. I confess my reasons - I’ve been enjoying getting to know Lisa and learning how to communicate with her… especially this first year of marriage. I guess this is a strange way to introduce to you something that Lisa and I are about to be a part of … A Sabbatical!
Through the wisdom of camp - every seven years missionary staff qualify for a sabbatical. A sabbatical is intended for the combined purposes of personal growth, camp growth, and rest and rejuvenation through learning experiences such as continuing education, travel to other camps, research, or other planned activities that address these purposes.
Lisa and I will be heading over to another camp recently establish here in Wisconsin called Harvest Home Farm. The camp is run by former missionary staff of Camp Forest Springs the Poulos’. We are excited for the opportunity to work in a farm setting and all the activities that go with it; quite a change for me with my computer fingers and no calluses to working with animals, baling hay, butchering chickens, and wranglers breakfasts.
Some of you may be asking “a sabbatical? ... but you’re so young!” Exactly! We are taking the opportunity of a sabbatical when we ARE young. Lord willing, we hope to have a family and have lots of “little Herbie’s” running around some day but in the mean time an experience like this as newlyweds seems to be where the Lord is allowing us to be a part of. This sabbatical allows Lisa and me to rejuvenate and personally for me to take a technological pause, gather my bearings again as to how technology can be best used at CFS. We appreciate your prayers as we venture to help out Mike and Becky Poulos for six weeks at Harvest Home Farm starting August 16th, 2009.
