Good Morning, Gracias!

Regardless of your preferred network, the chances are good that you have watched at least a few minutes of a morning talk/news show in the past few months. FYI: Those shows are known as breakfast television. They are filled with headlines, human interest stories, and some witty banter. Well, dear “viewers,” welcome to Good Morning, Gracias! This post is sort of like one-stop shopping for everything you need to know about what’s going on around the Sowers4Pastors homestead.

We don't even talk about the
construction in this post, go figure.
It's continuing on, around and
in-between teams.

The big headlines over the past few weeks have involved visiting teams. That means we’ve missed talking about some stories that deserve a little attention. It’s sort of like when the great C.S. Lewis died on the day JFK was assassinated. (Does that count as witty banter? Perhaps.) Anywhooo… Other happenings didn’t stop just because teams were present. For instance, work around the coffee farm was going strong.

That’s what is known as a teaser. Now you will sit through a commercial for coffee before returning to the story about the crew chopping weeds between each coffee plant. With machetes. On 50 acres of property. Oooh. Aaah! Then they fertilized by digging a hole on the uphill side of each coffee tree and putting in a handful of fertilizer. Next, they headed out with the backpack sprayers. There is no mechanization when it comes to coffee farming, so each guy had a sprayer filled with fertilizer and water, weighing in at a whopping 50 pounds when full. They walked up and down the hills of the coffee farm, spraying, refilling, and repeating.

A member of the security crew
checking things out
around the farm

So much water was used that there was a mini-incident. You may recall that the property has two water tanks. I’m pretty sure their technical names are “the big one” and “the small one.” The big tank is about the size of a 3-car garage and holds 60,000 gallons of water. The small one is the size of a very small bedroom and holds 6,000 gallons of water. For a brief time, it was accurate to say that the small one HELD 6,000 gallons of water because the crew forgot to flip a valve to refill the small tank before completely draining it. I have it on good authority that it was definitely a valve and not a switch.

It’s time for a human interest story for all of you animal lovers. The Sowers family now owns a pig. Are you surprised? So was Trish! Somehow that little bit of news slipped right past her. The pig joined the family when a teenage team member, Caleb, decided to raise support to buy pigs for some of the families of sponsored children. Caleb raised the money and Russell went out to purchase them. As long as he was buying pigs, Russell chipped in and purchased an extra one for the homestead. It’s pretty far from the houses, so it’s not like Trish has been walking around like Mrs. Magoo, completely oblivious to the livestock.

Don't tell the little guy, but his
name is, "Bacon."

On Monday, Trish was home alone when it started raining. The welcome rain suddenly and unexpectedly turned into the first electrical storm of the season. She knows what to do when Allen is away and she needs to disconnect the home’s solar power unit. This time, there was no warning and a lightning strike hit too close for comfort. Trish jumped up to see if they had lost power and was reassured to see the microwave light was on. When Allen arrived home a couple of hours later, he walked over to flip a light switch. Nothing. Nada. Zip. They checked other switches and some lights worked, while others didn't. Weird.

Allen headed out to the bodega and flipped the breakers. He also replaced the meter. Recognizing that they needed to power down, he disconnected the inverter and reconnected. He then tried to reboot the system. Things have mostly recovered, but they are operating on a prolonged “brown down” until the parts that were already ordered arrive with a team in about three weeks. In the meantime, they are functioning with about 95% of their normal power.

It’s time for the Good Morning Gracias book club. This month’s recommendation is… wait for it… the Bible. Ha! Oh, there’s that witty banter again. Hundreds of Bibles have been purchased for the bookstore. There is a huge variety of editions that are currently getting inventoried and priced to go on the shelves.

A picture of the mountains around the farm, which also just happens to be a picture of pastors picking up food for a small feeding center by motorcycles purchased through the ministry!

Puppy did not want his picture taken

The time has flown by and we must close this episode. We leave you with the stunning green vistas of the area surrounding the buildings. Thanks to the rains, everything is bright green. Now, because we want to keep the ratings up, we’ll throw in the new kitten and an adorable litter of Rottweiler puppies.

-posted by Christi.