Stake Conference talk - Sept. 11, 2011

My topic today is Lifelong Education.

You young people are fully involved with your education, so my topic necessarily makes me focus on continuing education AFTER you leave school. But, to you young people I say this one thing – if there is one subject you really want to try but it isn’t in your regular course of study, figure out a way to TAKE IT! I always wanted to try out fencing, but for various reasons I didn’t. I should have. For you, there will never be a better time.

So, I have 4 things to say about Life-long education:

1. It’s not too late and your mind works fine

2. It’s all about interest

3. There are more ways to skin a cat than with a dull butter knife

4. Why bother?

First thing: It’s not too late and your mind works fine

When I was young, I was thrilled to be able to go to BYU. We lived about 90 miles from the Y, in a very small town. Provo was like a dream for me, and I loved every minute of it.

My second year at the Y was my Mother’s first year going back to school. She had been there as a young woman, earned her teaching certificate, and was teaching school when she met my father. But she only had a 2-year degree and wanted to get a bachelor’s degree. It was a tough decision to go back, especially since she still had kids at home. The three youngest ones, especially, worried her. She felt like she might be abandoning them. In the end it was arranged and my youngest sister came to the Y with Mom while my youngest brothers stayed with Dad, along with the older kids. Mom missed them terribly while she was away.

Mom was scared of whether she could complete college courses at her age – she was in her 50’s then.

I saw Mom on campus fairly often, which was great. We settled in to the regular grind of classes and studying.

Mom put me to shame with how hard she studied. She focused on her school work so much that she had no social life beyond Suzy and me. That first semester she was learning how to be a student and at first her grades were only acceptable. After that she hit her groove and got A’s. She fussed and worried one time when she got an A-.

The next year, I started my hitch in the Marine Corps, married Liz, and came back to the Y in December, three years later. My first semester back at the Y was my Mom’s last, so Liz and I were there for her graduation. The college reserved a row for us at commencement. During the program, the Dean had Mom stand up as a special tribute to the most senior graduate from the Y that year, and an honor student. Then he asked the family to stand. My father stood up, all 9 of their children, 3 of our spouses, and 5 grandkids. I mentioned that they reserved a row for us, and we’d filled the whole thing. It was a long row, too.

My mother had worried that it was too late for her to go back to school. She had found that it was not. She outperformed almost every 18 and 19 year old there. In truth, it was her focus and dedication that earned her top marks. Her age forced her to study harder to keep up with her younger classmates, but her age had also taught her how to do just that. It was not too late.

I, too, had a later-in-life education experience. A few years ago I took a class in human anatomy and physiology – just for giggles. My experience was like my mothers. I had to work hard, but I didn’t settle for less than perfect grades.

The old noodle still works, even if it is a bit slower than it used to be.

Second thing: It’s all about interest

Many of you who know me, know that I keep honeybees. Beekeeping is not for the faint of heart. People often ask me, “But don’t you get stung?” I answer that of course I get stung. In fact, I get stung often. When I have to work with Africanized bees, I get stung a LOT! The thing is that I don’t mind getting stung in return for the reward of honey to share with my family and friends, and it is my pleasure to do so.

I enjoy reading about beekeeping. Many books about it are written by rank amateurs, but I like them anyway, because they have insights and tidbits of knowledge about my favorite subject.

I find that the more I learn about them, the more I want to learn about them. There is no end to this process, and it applies to more than just beekeeping.

We all have things that interest us. There are very few of you who are interested in bees, but there is something that interests each one of you as much as bees interest me. Well, maybe almost as much as bees interest me.

On the subject of lifelong education, there is no mention of a requirement to learn about honeybees. We, each of us, get to choose the subjects. We should continue to educate ourselves about whatever subjects interest us. The subjects we love the most, are the subjects at which we have the will and means to continue to learn more. If you put me in a room and forced me to memorize baseball statistics, I would think it pure torture. But I guarantee there are people in this hall who would think it a delight to be in that situation. Who would lap it up like sweetened milk and use the knowledge as the base for a lifelong pursuit of that interest.

All we have to do is continue with the things we already enjoy. But if we fail to continue to learn, then we will begin the process of forgetting what we knew. This is one of those use it or loose it things.

All of us who sit on the stand today hope that everybody in this building will spend some time learning about the gospel of Jesus Christ, in addition to other things we learn. But even on that topic, there is room for individual focus. Many of us love family and focus on genealogy, or family histories. Others of us love the scriptures and pour over them daily. Some spend their time with the organizations of the church, others on pure service. Some devour every word spoken by latter day prophets.

All of these things are good. We should each continue our lifelong education about the gospel.

Third thing: There are more ways to skin a cat than with a dull butter knife

I told you about experiences going back to college. I don’t mean that you should all sign up for classes tomorrow. College is a very formal method of learning about something. It is particularly appropriate when we need proof that we have mastered a topic. It is one of the best ways to start your professional life. But in most cases proof of knowledge is not needed. The knowledge itself is the thing.

There are many ways to continue our lifelong education. More than I can list here today. But I will list a few ways to illustrate the point.

· Back in the olden days we had books called The Encyclopedia. I loved sitting and reading the Encyclopedia – it was full of interesting things. A few years ago, Liz and I threw our Encyclopedia Brittanica away. Today, we surf the web. Today, we say IT is full of interesting things. It is also full of garbage, but remember, we get to choose our subject. Go forth and learn!

· Join a book club. Book clubs are for people who need a little nudge to get started reading books. Liz is in a book club that meets once a month to discuss a book everybody read since the prior meeting. The members are mostly LDS and the books are all suitable for LDS readers.

· Personally, I love to read and need help stopping, instead of help getting started. When I pick up the 23 volume set of books by Patrick O’Brien, Liz will roll her eyes because she knows I will be “out of the house” until I have read them all. I am an unabashed reader.

· When we can’t read, we can listen to audio books. I find that driving to Utah is a fast and enjoyable drive when I have a book playing. Of course, if Liz is along we find things to talk about and never play our audio book. That’s even better.

..

Fourth thing: Why bother?

By this I mean what are the reasons to continue our lifelong education. In the end, I think the reasons boil down to two: We pursue lifelong education for our work, or we continue lifelong education just for fun. Beekeeping was my example of learning just for fun.

Work is a very good reason why we learn. Our employment is the basis for our daily security. It gives us our homes, our food, our clothing and shelter. It can make life good or it can make it hard. I’ve tried it both ways, and good is better.

As our children left home, Liz, who had been a full-time homemaker, began to look around for something to do with the rest of her life. She wanted to have a credit score of her own in case anything ever happened to me. And she wanted an income that did not depend on me. These were legitimate concerns.

We addressed the credit score by taking out car loans in her name only, and obtaining credit cards with only her name. We paid them off as we have always paid off our debts. That part was easy. The employment was a bit more complicated.

She had not worked since we were first married, and did not feel very qualified for anything. After all, I plucked her away from her college education after only 1 year. When she had worked, it had been in an office capacity.

So she started looking for office work and landed a job as an accounts payable clerk in a small investment firm, involved in multi-family housing. It was a starter job by anybody’s account.

The next few years were intense for her. She took a class in basic accounting and found that she had a better head for mathematics than she had supposed. This surprised her father, who had tried to coach her through high school math classes.

She has always been very organized, and she applied her organization skills to her job. She flourished.

As she got better at her work, she was given more responsibility. The company expanded their holdings in commercial office space and she accepted responsibility for the day to day operation of a building – then another.

She learned how to calculate square footage, and apply it to rates to give quotes – all in her head while talking to clients. She learned how to sell.

As she moved on to more and more responsibility, she decided she needed a realtors license, so she studied and passed that exam. She has grown immensely in her abilities and today manages about a half million square feet of office space.

She has grown in her employment, but she has also found great satisfaction in being able to do things she did not believe were possible for her. She is continuing with her lifelong education, and I am very proud of her.

I’ve talked about

1. That it’s not too late for lifelong education at any age, even for college

2. That it’s all about your interests and that you get to choose the course of your lifelong education

3. That there is more than one way to skin a cat and

4. Why we bother to make education a lifelong pursuit

It is my prayer that we may all continue to learn and grow in the gospel and other areas of life.

The Africanized honeybee Blues

I am strictly a hobby beek. Africanized bees have driven me nuts the past 4 years. Before that I had no problem with them. This year I finally gave up on keeping two hives at my house in town, mostly because I am worried over the liability in an area with so many children and non-beeks (BEEK = beekeeper) near by. The decision came because of an incident, of course. I had two hives at a widow's house out in the country and one of them went insanely Africanized . When I harvested honey, smoke had no affect. So many bees were flying in front of my face I could barely see, and I got many stings through my bee suit, plus several on my face from bees inside my veil. The widow is fine, but my assistant and I were chased for over a mile - that is we stopped about a mile away and got out of the truck to take off veils and coveralls, and got mobbed again. My assistant no longer goes to bee yards with me.

So I moved all 7 hives to a new yard where there is nobody living nearby. The Africanized hive from the widow's place was packed full of bees and had made a lot of honey. I debated with myself whether to simply burn the little meanies, but I opted to re-queen. But even re-queening an Africanized hive is problematic.

• Two new queens arrived from a commercial apiary that specializes in gentle, productive queens.I opened the Africanized hive to find the queen and got mobbed, as expected.Didn't find the queen in the top box and gave up. Instead, I took the advice of an experienced beek and separated the hive into two, hoping to make queen finding easier.

• Returned after 3 days and verified there was no queen in one of the boxes. Queens come in a little wooden box with screen on one side and a plug of candy in the hole where they were inserted. For shipping, a cork is placed on top of the candy to prevent premature release. Normally the cork is pulled as you put the new queen in the hive. It takes a couple of days for the bees to eat the candy, and then the queen can escape into the hive to start her royal life there. I installed a new queen, but left the cork in place so the workers couldn't release her because sometimes Africanized bees are reluctant to accept a new queen and will kill her if you put her in with them too soon. This box didn't have a large number of bees, so I moved the bigger box 30 feet away and put the smaller box where it had been.

• After I moved the bigger box, I went through every frame looking for the old queen. There were a lot of bees in there and I was unable to find the queen amongst all the piles of bees. I am good at finding queens, so I think she was a runner. I needed to spread them out some more, but I didn't have another bottom board. I had a box from a failed split that still had a few bees and some stores in it. I put this deep on top of the Africanized box, with paper towels between (a newspaper combine - where you combine two hives, but separate the bees from the hives with paper so they can get used to each other before they come into actual contact. It prevents the bees from killing each other. After a couple of days they've chewed holes in the paper and the bees mingle peacefully).

• It was five days before I could get back out to the bees. Pulled the cork on the queen cage I'd placed in the smaller box. Looks good for this new queen. She has plenty of bees with her now and good comb to work on.

• Went to the remote box and the entrance looked like there were fewer bees than there had been - a good thing. I smoked the entrance and opened it up. Checked the top box and found the queen almost immediately. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Not for her - she's dead - it was lucky for me because I didn't have to go through both deeps to find her. I figure she ran from the smoke, right into my waiting queen catcher. I returned later that day and put a new queen in the box, still in her cage, of course.

So hopefully I will be back to all gentle bees. The real penalty of Africanized bees for me has been that I HAVE to wear a full suit. We've had record high temps this summer and there I am dressed for a winter blizzard, sweat gushing from every pore. Even my eyelashes sweat. Every time I go out to the bees it takes a day to recover and get re-hydrated. Only a few years ago I enjoyed working bees in shorts and a T, plus a veil. I wouldn't dare do that anymore. I used to get stung only rarely, but now I get stung regularly in spite of the sweat suit. I get stung almost every time I go near bees, and when a hive goes Africanized I get stung a lot - right through the bee suit. I have two veils that I've had for many years. This year I had to buy a new one with elastic to keep it tighter, because when the Africanized bees mob me a few of them will get under the veil when I bend over.

On the other hand, Africanized bees are aggressive about gathering honey as well, and they produce lots of it. I had a great harvest this year.

Sammie

We are all alone, again - just the two of us in this big house. We have had kids here for the past several weeks. Angela and Nancy both brought their families here to share our summer, and found the hottest summer on record. Yum!

Yesterday, Nancy took her kids to a play house, bumper cars, arcade, kind of place and they didn't want to take the baby, and I didn't want to go at all (gimpie wimp that I am.) So I got to stay home with Sammie.
He has been fun to have. He took his first steps while he was here with us, and is fully prepared to enter that most hazardous and crazy stage where he suddenly has the ability to reach and climb on most things, without any notion of whether he should. But I digress.
While we were together, he pooped his pants and I changed him. Afterwards I went in the powder room to wash my hands. When I finished, I turned off the lights and closed the door behind me. I could hear Sammie the entire time, but after I left, he started to cry. He was in the living room, so I went that direction. But no, he was in the office, so I turned back that way. But after a couple of steps it sounded like he was in the living room again. Maybe he was in the kitchen? It finally occurred to me that he was in the now-dark powder room. I inched the door open and a very angry little Sammie crawled out. I picked him up to comfort him and he gave me a very dirty look indeed! The mystery is how did he get in there without me knowing it? It is a tiny room, and with my big awkward boot, I just can't imagine how I left that room without stepping on him or bumping him with the door. Oh well. I made him a bottle and that made everything better again.

This morning, early, Nancy and Richard loaded up their kids and headed for the airport. I got up to see them off, and then headed out to Gunter to care for my honeybees. Morning is the best time to work them before the temps get high, but it's no picnic. I have them where they get afternoon shade, which means they get morning sun. Which means it was HOT! I got there at about 8:15 am and it was just under 90 degrees, and humid. It was quite a bit higher than that by the time I finished up and crawled out of there, although not quite so humid. As I write, it is 109 and still climbing - forecast to reach about 111. Dang! I got a few frames of honey out of the hives as I pulled the (empty) supers off them in preparation for the fall nectar trickle. These are the supers where I already extracted spring honey. I put the supers back on the hives for a short time so the bees can clean the sticky, left-over honey off the comb. Now I can store clean supers with good comb until next spring.

Letters from WWII

When Liz's mother died last January, one of the treasures we found in her possessions was a box full of letters from her husband during WWII. Everyone was curious as to what they might contain, but the work of going through it and doing anything with it was too much for anybody to deal with - at least at that time. There was talk to dividing them up between all the siblings, but ultimately Liz offered to look through them and decide what to do next. As she read them, it became apparent that they are a real treasure, both historically and to the family.
When Mark Ashurst-McGee, who is a Doctor of History, visited us recently, he suggested that the first step is to take good quality scans of all of them, to preserve them and make it easier to share them. The originals can then be archived in a manner to preserve them, and the scans can be transcribed to make the text searchable and more easily read.
I happen to be waiting for my new job to begin, so I volunteered to do the scanning, which I just completed. There are 136 letters, each of 1 to 15 pages, so it was a very large project. I scanned the envelopes and anything included in the letters, too.
It has been fascinating to read these letters and get a better understanding of what the war really meant to be a typical American couple during that time of conflict. The letters begin before they were married, and since they were together quite a bit while Bill was in training in the states, they skip over some important events in their lives, such as their marriage. When he went to sea in the U. S. Navy, they became full of the yearnings of a young husband who missed his wife immensely, but they are also full of interesting views into life during the war years. The HAWAII dollar bill he included in one letter is fascinating all by itself, being marked to make it useless to the Japanese in case they captured additional U. S. territory and the cash in use there. It tells a lot about the fear of Americans for the Japanese who had attacked them.
Only a few of his letters were censored (words cut out of them with scissors, or in one case an entire page removed), but it is apparent he was always aware of the censor looking over his shoulders. After the war ended and censorship halted, the tone and content of his letters was radically different.
While I read the letters and wondered about his ship and the battles he mentioned, I took the time to read in published histories the larger view of what was happening. I found photographs with his ship (LSM-130), usually next to the ship being photographed, or in the background. I also found crew musters and other supporting documents for LSM-130, which are of some interest in themselves.
But the best part has simply been sharing my father-in-law's thoughts as he served his country. He would deny he was a hero, but he was to me.

The secret to hot weather hog hunting

Keith and I made an important discovery today. How to hunt hogs when it is miserably hot and the creeks are dry.

Fact: It was 105 degrees today - the hottest day of the year, so far.
Fact: So far, every day this July has been over 100, except 2.
Fact: Today we jumped two herds of pigs.

Here is the deal. Water is drying up with our long spell of hot weather, and the pigs are actually quite fussy about where they want to wallow. They want a place where they can walk down to the waters edge, no gravel, and nice shallow water and/or wet mud.

Several weeks ago, Keith went with me when I went out to Honey Grove to pick up my bees, and while I was working he walked over to a pond where we know pigs hang out. He shot a big sow over there as it got out of a mud hole.

Today we headed out to go over there again, but we decided to walk down the creek a bit first. I didn't really think I would be making any long shots, if any, and I wanted a light rifle, so I carried my Win 94, which I haven't shot in some time.
Keith was trying to sneak along close to the banks so any pigs wouldn't see us until we got in range, but I was trying to stay on high ground where I could see them ( pigs don't have very good eyesight, but they can hear extremely well.) So I saw a pig (I think a boar) down the creek. It got up out of the mud and was moving around slowly. It knew we were there, but didn't know if we were a threat. So I took aim with my 30-30 and missed! What? I usually hit what I aim at. It was around 100 yards, with iron sights, and should have been a gimmee. The pig hurried on around a bend in the creek. So we continued. Again, Keith was hugging the bank, so when I saw two more pigs as we rounded the bend, I couldn't get his attention. I was amazed the pigs were still there, but they clearly didn't want to leave that cool spot on a hot day. As I watched, another pig came down the bank and joined the first two. No piglets, so that's why I think they were boars. As I aimed, this third pig got directly behind one of the others, making a really big target. I aimed at the center of mass and fired again and missed again! So I am doubting my sights. We messed around, but of course, all the pigs in the World knew where we were after that.
We continued down the creek and a dog came out to bark at us after a bit. Smart dog, too. When I bent down to pick up a rock, he split.
We kept walking, but it was HOT and we were getting tired, so after a half mile or so we turned back. We'd walked further than I thought and it seemed like a long way back. As we got to about 100-150 yards from where I'd shot at the pigs, I saw a sow come down the bank into that same mud hole! Yippee! A bunch of little piglets followed the sow and another sow. We watched them settle into the mud. Than a third pig came down the bank and joined them.
We tried to sneak closer, but after a bit one of the sows stood up and we froze. It laid back down, but clearly we'd been made. We got a little closer, but when they all stood up, we both knelt and took aim. I let Keith take the first shot (the one where you have a chance of connecting) and I could tell it was a good hit. We both fired once more. This is a photo of the sow we found around the bend. Notice the razorback hair standing up? The sow was gravid and we felt good about this because we'd removed 10-12 feral hogs from the area with that one shot. That is our mission - to keep in check the feral hog population.










Lessons learned:

1. Following the creek bed with the breeze in your face is a good tactic for hot weather feral hogs.
2. Be sure to take a rifle with a scope, even though it is heavier than the carbine.
3. Sight in your rifle periodically, whether it needs it or not.

By the way, we were half a mile downhill from the nearest point where we could get with the truck. We had no cooler, nor ice. We had no water and were both getting over heated rapidly. Did I mention that it was hot? So there was no chance of recovering good meat from this sow. We left her for the buzzards.

Going to the airport

I took Mark A-M to the airport this morning and Naomi and Haley wanted to go along for the ride. Well, of course we stopped at Outdoor World to see the fish tanks and stuffed animals.



They wanted their photos taken by this stuffed rabbit. Well, of course we can do that!






















They tackled this Kodiak bear.












And they saw the rattlesnakes. I think there were three of them in there - all in a ball - but it could have been 4.











They just had to pick out a gun they wanted for when we go hunting together. (Just kidding.)


And we had fun with the bear.

I HATE chiggers!

Chiggers are a fact of life in the South. I usually take some care in preventing getting chewed up by them, but they caught me off guard this year.

• I tended bees out at Honey Grove and applied insect repellent. No problem.
• I tended bees at the new place in Gunter, TX and forgot to apply insect repellent. No problem. Whew! Dodged a bullet on that one.
• I worked in the yard last Friday and got two bites. Drat it! I put applying insecticide on the yard on my list of TO DOs, but not right at the top.
• Sunday when we got home from church, Liz parked close to the lawn and I had to take two steps on the grass. I got absolutely eaten up!
• Monday I put a heavy dose of insecticide all over our yard and onto the neighbor's yard where we might wander while running around the house. I applied insect repellant on my rubber boots, but before I poisoned I adjusted the sprinklers and must have washed it off a bit because I got a few more bites. I don't like to put insecticide on my yard. I don't like poison where I live, and I don't believe it is beneficial to kill everything that lives in my grass. But chiggers tip the scales in favor of a total wipe-out.

The troubles with chiggers are these:

1. You can't see them or tell where they might be lurking. They are tiny little light-red mites. The test for them is to put little black cards sticking up out of the grass. They crawl to the highest point and the card will turn red as thousands of them crawl to the top of it.
   
2. You can't tell when they bite you. You could easily brush them off if you knew you had them, but you can't tell. The bite only begins to irritate you the next day and the chigger is dead and gone by then.
3. They don't bite you where they get on you. They crawl up your body looking for a soft place where it is easier to chew. They can't actually get any good out of biting mammals, and it is difficult for them to do it. So they keep crawling until they find a place where it is a bit easier. This is most often the back of the knees and the groin area, or sometimes under your arms. Little buggers!
   
4. You can't do anything about the bites that really helps. They itch like the dickens, but if you scratch or rub them it makes it worse. Some people put nail polish on them, but I can't tell that it makes any difference. After about 3 days the tube the chigger left behind kind of pushes up and if you care to risk an infection you can scratch it (and attached skin) off at that point. Or you can suffer through 2 or 3 more days and it will be over.

Did I mention that I really, really hate chiggers? Little buggers!