Such a Silky Anniversary

For years, I've seen advertisements for this African Silk farm.  Many years ago, silk worms were a "thing" in Cape Town, at least in the Homeschool community, and we took our turn with raising them, but we never knew what to do with the cocoons we produced.  Or the worms produced.  So we were all curious about this place and process.  We got a guide named Busi and learned a LOT.    

We knew silk worms eat Mulberry Trees.  That was silkworming 101.  But we moved up a level to learn that there are 3 different kinds of mulberry trees.  Their texture changes as they mature, and baby silk worms can only handle the right texture.  Too much milk in the greenery, and they'll get the big D.  Leaves can also be too hard for them.  Suddenly I started wondering how we had any cocoons!  We fed with whatever mulberry leaves we could find!   

Grey eggs mean ready to hatch.  Brown means they died.  You wanna know how they get the eggs in circles like that?  Count down 7 pictures to see the answer.  

Those babies grow fast!  They feed them with fresh leaves every 2 or 4 hours all day.  The wire underneath helps with cleaning out the waste without losing worms.  

They have 3 kinds of silk worms, Thai,  African, and a cross between the two.  The cross produces faster than either of the non crossed ones.  The African makes a brownish silk. 

Busy little guys have their own jungle gym.  

Busi showing us a white one.  The fine silk comes from the white one, produced by the Thai worms. 

Yellow is the African one, light greenish is the hybrid, and white is the Thai worm.  I think.  They call the hybrid the Zebra worm as it is black and white.  

So the guy on the right is Thai, the guy in the middle is mixed, and we had no locals to look at.  They are fuzzier.  

That black cap is what they put over the female moth when she begins laying eggs, so all the eggs will be together on the paper in a tidy circle. That brown thing that looks like a bead is a pupa, which they take from inside the cocoon.

They put boiling water into the red bowl, and then dip the cocoons in there.  After it sits for a minute or two, Busi fiddled with it with a stick to find the end of the thread/web.  From one cocoon they expect to get 1 and one third kilometers of thread/web!!!

And then comes the beautiful, tempting gift shop!  What fun!  

One of the uses for the silk is some duvets. It sounds like the silk is very good at regulating temperature, so here Tim and Busi were stretching out some silk to show how to begin a single size duvet.  

I've skipped a lot, but I'm working in the car, getting car sick.  Please ask any questions and I'll pump Tim's better memory to answer them  :-)  

K9 Mantrailing

 

Gallup looking so professional, though keeping her feminity obvious with her pink harness.  

2020 was a strange year, and there were so many losses, so many things that stopped or have been put on hold.  I love one new thing that came into our family.  Here's the story of how I "just happened" to meet a girl in the park, wearing a K9 Mantrailing T-Shirt.  

Tim and I took the Cousins for a hike one Saturday morning back in June, I think.  I saw Lauren, as I later came to know her with her man-trailing t-shirt, and it made me laugh, because it does sound a bit desperate for a man.  I asked questions, and she invited Gallup and I to a training session to check it out.

I was so excited!  One of my dreams since childhood was to train a dog for a blind person.  I like the idea of useful, working dogs.  The training sessions meet on Saturday morning which is perfect because Paul sequesters himself Saturday mornings so he wouldn't miss me if I took off for a few hours.  

Those Saturday training sessions are wonderful!  Turns out, Gallup has the number one talent for being a man-trailer:  DRIVE!  She LOVES finding things!  and people particularly.  So she has learned to sniff out people, with me in hot pursuit, dragging along ungracefully behind.  

Another fun thing, three of the cousins have joined me in this.  They are hiders and helpers and enjoyers of the whole Saturday morning outings.  We have tacked shakes onto the end once, and explored parts of towns where we rarely go, and just love our outings, except for eating dog hair.  Gallup is a shedder for sure.   

When she's not being an amazing sniffer dog, Gallup retains her other hobbies, particularly chasing Karoo the cat that lives downstairs.  

If I say, "Where's the Kitty?"  She runs to our bedroom window, as shown, and scans the yard tensely, hoping for a glimpse of Karoo.  I think it's too cute!  

 

Gallup's "classmate" Titan looks so pleased after a successful find of whoever was hiding.  His owner, Bruce, has been mentoring us.  Nathanael's face gives a clue on how much we enjoy these outings.   Daniel and Connie are bringing up the rear.  

Daniel, Connie, and Nathanael in their K9 Mantrailing shirts.  (Getting our shirts was a big deal to all of us.  😏)

A big perk of all this training has been a new friendship with Lauren.  She's a Christ follower too!  She goes to church where the pastor is our kids' former beloved youth group leader, Martin, so the girl talk in the middle of the dog talk is sweet.  😊  We didn't add too many new friends in 2020, but Lauren and her husband Bruce are keepers.  (She wasn't really desperate for a man, she had already caught hers.  :-)

Another of Gallup's passions is this particular frisbee.  She loves to lie down in the water and "sizzle" when it's hot.  She looks so pleased with herself.  I call her Halo-Head when she wears her frisbee.  Unfortunately, we have sunk 2 of them in the water so she doesn't have one right now.  

So I'm besotted with this dog, but who wouldn't be?  She loves me back, even to the smell of my socks!  Is that true love or what?  

I have high hopes that she will be a great asset to society and rescue missing people and give me a great story for a blog post.  😊

I want to have drive too, to find people who are lost in their sins, and need to come to their Creator.  I'd love to help find them.  

 

2019 Winter Trip, Queenstown Section

This trip is precious, as it is the last one where our Joshua is with us, at least for awhile.  He's 18 now, and off to college in America in August.  We plan to be in four places, the first being Queenstown, South Africa.  We're actually staying at Tylden, which I have fallen in love with.  It's about 6 kilometers off a tar road, and we're staying at Light of the World Mission. 

We slept in this building. 

Jock with Josh or Josh with Jock.  The beginning of a great tongue twister. 

 Tim preaching at Sunday School with a blue hand.  He doesn't like the feel of chalk.  Kind of ironic. 

Light of the World Mission is next to a river, which is significant.  The river floods a couple of times a year, so a hotel was built next to the river to house people stuck on this side of the flood, until the waters subsided.  I think it was in the 80's, that a man named Jack bought the hotel, and used it for missionary work such as camps, Bible schools, and a little church.  Late in the 90's, Frik and Sue Labuschagne came, and they are leading the mission still. 

Pastor Mike Watson in Queenstown invited us so he has filled some of the time, though not as he expected as he has had cancer since we were here last time.  Frik scheduled Paul some other places, and with the "leftover" time we prayed for open doors, and set out visiting schools in Queenstown.  The first day Paul scheduled 10 preaching appointments!  (though I must confess, one of those was online, in America).  After that he combined preaching and scheduling.  When his schedule got full, he started scheduling Timothy, who was now more free to help.

The first few days here, we had another project underway.  We had hoped that both our sons could have a try (Josh) or another try (Tim) at getting their driver's licenses.  We had noticed how the wait time for an appointment to take the test can be just days in these smaller towns, unlike Cape Town where the wait can be weeks or months.  So we made appointments for the following Monday, and went to work having some more driving lessons to perfect their "K-53" skills.  (K-53 is the South African skill set required uniquely for the test.)

Monday morning dawned.  Appetites were low, and tension was high.  We went into town early, still in the dark, to Pastor Michael's house so Paul could borrow the church van so that the boys could use our car.  We had a little panic as we discovered our rear brake light was out (again! what's with that light?!??)  The sun was up, but we didn't know if any place would be open where we could buy a bulb so we scrambled around to get that sorted out.  It wasn't too bad as we had needed a new tire as we had a VERY flat tire on Saturday and had learned a car repair place.  We got a new light bulb and still had a few minutes before Josh's test time at 8:40 AM.  We headed in to the municipality building. 

Then came the blow:  the municipality was on strike!  It is still on strike today, I think, a week later, so no driving tests have happened.  It looks like they will have to try in America. 

The low appetites had worn off, so disgruntled boys were soothed and comforted with a quick trip to KFC for a snack.  At least now they were free to be more helpful to Paul. 

I thought Thursday's schedule was remarkable.  We had an early morning school first, which Paul and Tim handled, then Paul parked us at the pastor's house so we could get some work done with Wi-Fi while he and Josh went to a 11-1 appointment.  They preached 6 times at that one school!  Taking them class by class.  That has some advantages, but it is very tiring for the chalk artist evangelist.  Top priority was to race home for a rest after that, as we were schedule to be interviewed (whole family!) on the radio from 6-8 PM that evening. 

I really enjoyed that interview.  I was a little worried about Paul overdoing, but he had slept for over an hour that afternoon, and he seems to have made it through without a sickness. 

Friday was remarkable in a different way.  We woke to find blood spattered right down the hallway of our current home.  Tim had a horrendous nose-bleed.  (This is cold, arid country right now, and our Capetonian skin is drying and cracking and even bleeding as we adjust.)  We mopped that up and kept moving.  Had to be out of the house by 6:30, to get to the first school and be ready by 7:30.  The plan was for Paul to preach there, with Josh to assist, but the nosebleed changed that plan.  Instead Josh now assisted Tim, just in case. 

I want a T-shirt that says, "Uber driver" cuz it was like that!  We dropped Paul at the first school about 7:15, then raced to Tim's school by 7:45 then back to Paul to pick him up to get him to his 8:30 school.  I stayed with him through that one, helping to hold the chalk board as it was WINDY!  Then together we zipped back to Tim's school to find him and Josh had preached twice and then walked a to a shopping center to wait for us.  Three schools accomplished, four time preaching, by 10:00!

Then Paul could rest, while the boys spoke at a youth group that evening. 

Also of note, some record breaking cold weather (at least the coldest this year) came through over the weekend.  Brrr!  It got down to -6 degrees Celcius.  Someone said I must be used to this, being brought up in New England with snow and all.  But I'm a wimp!  New England has heated, insulated houses.  This cold is colder.  But it's great sleeping weather.  We're in bed early to get warm, and at least one of us lingers til the last second before launching out each morning.  

This bucket got "skun over" with ice, as my Gram would have said, plus icicles.  Chilly! 

The only touristy thing we've done on this trip was as we were driving from Cape Town, we slept over in Graaf Reinet, a beautiful, historic town where Andrew Murray used to live and preach, and David Livingstone's family went to recuperate.  Josh and I did their parkrun, and then we went to the Valley of Desolation to see some more of God's creativity.  

They were more enthusiastic than this picture looks. 

On Wednesday, after some schools, we plan to head to Swaziland where it should be warmer.  We're grateful for our cheery, helpful boys, for open doors, and for open hearts.  We appreciate translators in Xhosa for some of the meetings, and new missionary friends.  I've also enjoyed their little granddaughter Skye who has helped and inspired me with my Instagram Bible pictures (see vickiyoung1066).  It is good to follow God, to obey Him, and to trust Him.  He blesses so much along the way. 

Frik and Sue and Skye.