After a lot of tinkering I have finally figured out how to run this blog on my own website.  This blog has now moved: 

The new address is www.thrasherarts.com/blog.  Please visit!

Sarah and I have been at the camp for nearly a month now and I’ve been so busy I haven’t had the gumption to sit down a post entries.  Once again, it’s not from the lack of exciting things to relate… it’s just that I’m pretty much a lousy blogger.  However, to be honest… we’ve been very busy trying to prepare for the camp season with many improvements to the camp, cleaning, organizing, building and such… not to mention finding and hiring a summer staff; which is always a challenge. We’ve also had snow and or cold rain nearly everyday, so it makes it that much harder to work in.  Then of course this very temperamental and slow dial up connection doesn’t make blogging much fun.  So see… I have plenty of excuses. 

For those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about maybe I should briefly fill you in.  Each summer, my daughter (who I homeschool) and I, leave my wife to hold down the fort at home and head off to Montana to run a small Christian camp in the Gallatin National Forest in southwest Montana.  We usually leave a month before the actual camp begins and this is it.  It’s the hardest month because we’re very busy trying to prepare for campers to arrive in June.  It’s cold, wet and lonely during this month but Sarah is a real trooper and finds many interesting things to keep her occupied and continually learning new things. 

This year, she brought most of her animals with her and we added them to our very small 12×12 cabin which is where we will reside until the end of August.  I am including photos of our cabin below. 

Also, in a moment of insanity we bought a new English Setter pup.  This makes 3 English Setters we now own.  Very cute and I’m hoping to make him into a good hunter as well.  Aptly, his name is River and you can see a few photos of him as well. 

Sarah, helps me around the camp a lot… especially with the crafts and activity planning and she loves hiking around the camp and identifying plants, trees, wildflowers and animals.  This year she’s become interested in tracks and scat and has a started collecting and labeling scat samples.  That’s something you don’t see everyday!

This week will be our last week before staff comes and the summer really gets rolling.  We were lucky to have Emily come for an extended weekend to visit and just have some family time.  Sadly, she leave tomorrow but will return a few times over the summer so it’s not so bad.  

Check back periodically to see what happening and how our summer is going and hopefully we’ll get our pod cast back in the mix soon. 

It’s been a long time since I last posted and I really have no real excuse.  I’ve been busy preparing for the 2008 camp season with designing a website, brochures, programs and trying to find a staff.  Sarah and I took a couple of weeks and traveled throughout the northwest attending college job fairs looking for staff.  It was a lot of fun and we had the opportunity to spend sometime in the snow and doing a little fishing.  Above are a few photos. 

Also, we’ve added a few pets to our personal zoo and botanical garden.  A couple of Gerbils will hopefully yield a litter in the near future and we’ve also added a bunny.  This summer at camp we’re taking everything with us and I’m creating a little nature center where the kids can play with the snakes, turtles and other critters.  Should be a good addition. 

Sarah and I spent some time building bird and bat habitats in the shop.  We’re installing them at the camp along with cameras to view the inhabitants. 

Above are some recent pictures of our adventures.  I’ll try to spend some time in the near future catching up on homeschooling posts.

Santa brought Sarah a nice mountain bike so we can do some trail riding in Montana this summer.

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and even though it’s sometimes difficult to get in the Christmas spirit living in the desert we had a good one.  At Church this year Sarah got a chance to follow in her mothers footsteps and sing a solo which she did very well. 

Sarah and Emily made a gingerbread house from scratch!

Decorating the tree.

We’ve been raising a Sinaloan Milk-snake for two years now and a couple of weeks ago it somehow managed to escape from the terrarium.  We search the house pretty well a few time but sadly it was gone.  Sarah and I were pretty bummed since we’d watched the hatchling grow to a pretty nice sized adult.  So, after a few days of searching we decided to get another snake as a replacement.  This time we went for a little cheaper snake and got a corn-snake.  Below is a picture of him. 

So, today I was cleaning out the laundry room and guess who I found, cold and alone between two painting stored next to the dryer.  Yep… our Prodigal Milk-snake.   Not the most remarkable Christmas miracle but hey… we’ll take what we get.  Now we’re up to 2 dogs, 2 snakes, a cat, a tortoise and a bunch of fish.  Next I think we’ll get a partridge in a pear tree. 

Getting ready for Christmas and into her work with some gingerbread cookies where process is more important than product. 

Getting a little a help with writing practice with our pet tortoise.

Here is a picture of Sarah and her Coke and Mentos experiement.

There has really been only one time in my marriage that I thought I was genuinely and perhaps legitimately, ”in trouble”.  I mean, I get ridiculed on a daily basis for something but the day I bought my 2 year old daughter a rifle was a day I was definitely in the dog house.  Okay,  okay, I’ll concede now that two years old might have been a bit premature, although as a defense of precedence, I have a friend who’s daughter received her first .22 at the baby shower.  What can I say… I was itching to get my future hunting and fishing buddy on her way.  Well, I agreed to wait until she was older and the cute as a button miniature .22 caliber Chipmunk went into the safe.  We got it out when she was five and began some safety training and this year she’s just the right size to use it.  We’ve spent some time shooting this week at the range and then did some plinking around out back in the woods with an air rifle.  She’s getting pretty good and I think if the weather cooperates… this week we’ll have the opportunity to go on her first squirrel hunt here in Kentucky.

For the past couple of years Sarah has hinted around at her desire to be a Princess for Halloween.  We usually try to side track that desire and say something like… “Oh… everyone dresses as a princess… why don’t you think of something a little more interesting”.  She’ll agree and then comes up with something else far more creative.  Well recently I have been working on a series of stories about Princesses and trying them out on her at bedtime so the theme was hard to avoid this year.  So… Rapunzel it was. (Even-though Rapunzel isn’t a princess until the end of the story.) However, we don’t do anything half way when it comes to something like this so we used it as a teachable moment and went to the library to research the period styles, the origins of and variations on the story.  We hunted for the best fabrics and designed and built this period costume.  It was a lot of fun and she ultimately got to satisfy her girlie side. 

Every time I get back home I get the opportunity to work on my family history and genealogy projects.  I recently had a great aunt pass away who’s library yielded some new information.  This sparked a trip to Smithfield and Shelbyville Kentucky where many of my root grew.

Below is a picture of four generations on the Middelton side.  Sarah, me, my mother and my grandparents.

Below is a picture of a grave marker at the Smithfield Commentary marking the grave of my great, great, great grandfather, Hugh Atchison.

The house my grandfather grew up in and the sign which I suspect my great grandfather made since he was the local Blacksmith in Smithfield, KY during the time it was likely erected.

I took Sarah to the Cincinnati Art Museum and being the type of kid she is, she loved it.  We did a little scavenger hunt that they offer to school groups and one of the piece to find was this marble sculpture by Moses Ezekiel titled Margret Friend.  The description indicated that it was unique because the sculptor didn’t romanticize the little girl which most artist of the period would have done, yet he remained true to the somber nature of Margret Friend.  The scavenger hunt form ask you to write a short story about why you thought Margret Friend was so sturn looking.  This is what Sarah wrote.

“Margret Friend, not so sweet.

She’s got a head, but has no feet.”

Went to the Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, OH today to study some plant life.  Had a lesson about this cotton plant and the cotton picked from it.  We love cotton!

Sarah and I took off for a three week trip to visit family in Kentucky.  We usually drive but this year decided that in the interest of time we’d fly.  Sarah hasn’t flown since she was two so it was a big treat.  We’ll be spending our days doing and seeing things from my home state. 

We re-made the life mask that we made a couple of weeks ago.  The dog got ahold of the first one and ate off the nose so we weren’t ever able to make the plaster positive.  This one came out much better since she knew what to expect this time and didn’t move quite as much.  We also talked mommy into doing one this time.

Click on thumbnails for larger images.

Remember that old camp song, “It Only Take A Spark, to get a fire going…? 

That pretty much sums up my education philosophy.  Ignite a spark in the right spot and the desire to learn more is like wildfire.  School for me was a miserable experience because not until I discovered Theatre was the flint even struck.  It was then I knew I would teach by taking the roads, perhaps less traveled but fueled by passions and interests.

Primitive skills have always been a passion and interest of mine.  I’ve studied survival techniques and outdoor skills since I was a teenager and can remember heading out onto local farms and woods testing all of the things I had read in books.  Nothing I would ever learn in school of course but from these practical skills I learned about native cultures, frontiersman and Mountain Men; I learned about biology, anthropology, history and many others in much deeper and lasting ways than did my peers. 

My fascination for the everyday skills practiced by our ancestors seems to have rubbed off on Sarah.  Today I taught her how to make a fire without a match.  She doesn’t have the strength for friction methods but she really got the hang of flint and steel.  I was amazed and said, “Wow Sarah, that’s something not many kids can do”.  Then she said, “Well not many kids have a Dad like you”. 

It was one of those moments.

Follow this link to see a short video of Sarah starting a fire with a flint and steel.  http://www.mydeo.com/videorequest.asp?XID=2082&CID=134356

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge