cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"Several times this week I have thought about these Thoughtlets.
On Wednesday I finally caught up with sending Sara hardcopies of past Thoughtlet's, which I had got behind on printing out, and had not mailed to her in Africa. I'm still 20 behind in giving Matt hardcopies of Thoughtlets, since he doesn't have an e-mail account he regularly signs on and reads. Both Roice and Rob came by this week, and as you can tell by the MAIL TO list for the last several years, they have each requested to be removed from the Thoughtlet e-mail list. So whenever I see them, I think about this effort and wonder if it will ever be of any use to them. I wonder if it is of any use to the others who receive these notes, and sometimes epistles, and never have time to read them, or who simply trash them. Then I think about how I wish my Dad, my Mom, my Grandparents, and others had taken the time to leave more description of their legacy, of my heritage, and I re-resolve to keep up the effort.
Andrea recorded Joan of Arcadia on Friday evening, because we went to a Seminary Teacher dinner and satellite broadcast. It was about a High School Debate Team, with - what is becoming THE common subplot in the media more and more controlled by a few homosexual writers - graphic descriptions of someone who beat up on a gay pastor with a baseball bat. The part that got me thinking about Thoughtlets was where Joan helped a boy who stutters recognize he found his voice in writing. As I heard this, I thought, `Even if few read the stuff I write, in a very real way, that is what the Thoughtlets have done for me, they have helped me find my voice.' Of course, it has proven worthwhile to have a companion who cares, who sees things which I am blind to, and who is willing to edit things which distract from getting my points across. Thanks Andrea.
Yesterday, as Andrea and I cleaned out the greenhouse, I was wondering what to write about this week. I realized I have been doing this for 7 1/3 years, and I still seem to find more and more to write about each week. The only time I duplicated a name and did not realize it was with the title Book (../9822.html), which I renamed the duplication as Book II (../0342.html). There has been some replication of content, and yet not nearly as much as there is in other areas of my life: like family - kids going through the same stages and discovering the same things anew; church - repeating basic principles again and again and again through reading the scriptures again and again and seeing new meaning each time; and work - where each interpretation project or geophysical concept follows the same basic process over and over. As Andrea and I were working in the greenhouse, and as my mind went back to the years when I put a lot of time into growing things in the greenhouse, I realized I have never written about the greenhouse on the south-southeast corner of our house.
This week seemed particularly full, and so there are a lot of different things I could write about.
There were family things, including the visits from Roice and Rob, receiving a Christmas present in February, Jared's birthday, Melanie's status as she enters the final stages of her pregnancy, Matt's on-going struggle with school and with grades, my struggles with finances and not closing any of the very good opportunities I keep working on - yet, Andrea's creative teaching of seminary - including having the kids build an alter to Baal in the Relief Society Room when the carpets had been taken out to be replaced and there was little issue of making a mess as water was poured on the sticks to soak them before Elijah called fire out of the sky to consume the alter (she didn't demonstrate the last part), etc.
There were church things. For instance, I taught all of the Young Women last week, so the teachers could all go to a special Relief Society meeting with the Stake Leaders. I was asked to talk about the importance of the Home Environment and creating an environment where the spirit of the Lord can dwell. I could write a book about my thoughts regarding this. It is lesson 5, and I covered all of the points in the lesson. I also sang `The Wooden Shoe' as an introduction (../9806.html), and `I Once Saw a Family' as a conclusion (../9652.html). Somewhere in the middle I had the girls take turns reading The Nellie Unthank Story. In fact, I think this story is so important, I'm going to repeat it here, before I talk about the greenhouse. And before I repeat it, I remind you that one of the reasons for sending these Thoughtlets is so you kids have a source of reference material where you can go for talks or papers or pondering or to escape for a while. The thing that struck me as I read this story in preparation for the lesson was that it was written by William R. Palmer for the Instructor in April of 1944. He writes about recalling Nellie Unthank. I remember Dr. Palmer. Mom used to take me to see his museum of Southern Utah Indian artifacts and she introduced me to him. His interest in science was one of the reasons I became interested in science. And he wrote:
The theme of my message to the Young Women was that they need
to keep their room clean, like Nellie kept her cabin clean.
For, quoting Delbert L. Stapely in the October 1974 Conference:
And I told the Young Women, this starts with keeping their
rooms clean. Monday morning when Andrea came back from
Seminary, she said when she asked the girls about my lesson,
one of them said, `I went home and cleaned up my room.' Then
Tuesday night the missionaries came over for dinner, and I
went out on splits with them. But I wasn't going to write
about the church things. I am going to write about the greenhouse.
There were work things I could write about. I had interesting meetings with a group called Seismic Insight, who are out of Bountiful, Utah, and who are doing a geostatistical approach to unraveling seismic data. I kind of expected the topic for this week would be NAPE, for it was the North American Prospect Expo on Thursday and Friday, and I spent both days at the new and expanded George R. Brown Convention Center. There were a lot of interesting discussions, promising leads, and I really don't want to write about any of these until one or more turns into an actual contract which will allow to meet our financial commitments and to get out of debt.
So I decided to write about the greenhouse. The story of the greenhouse starts in Dallas and with the conversion of a young man whose name, I believe, was Brian Lavery. Bryan lives in Homestead, Florida now. We were kindred souls. Bryan ran a commercial greenhouse in Dallas. I was his Elder's Quorum President. I would go over and work with him in his greenhouses. I loved the work. We were close friends. Once one of the big ice storms hit Dallas, and Brian's heaters went out. He was going to loose everything he had growing. I made a run across town on the ice streets to help him heat up the greenhouses. It was a scary experience.
We lived on Hanover Street, just north of Lover's Lane. It was our first house. I liked the house because it had a greenhouse in the back. Bryan helped me set it up so we could grow a lot of material. I learned about perlite from Bryan. I learned how to mix mulch, sand, and perlite and to fill flats full of pots at the same time. And I learned how to pull off branches from plants and to create hanging baskets. I grew dozens of hanging baskets in the greenhouse on Hanover Street. I saw this as a way to make extra money, and the only thing I never figured out was how to go about selling the plants. I didn't want to do it, and did not know anyone else who wanted to. I just wanted to grow the plants and to enjoy working in the greenhouse. We had a neighbor that thought we had a commercial establishment in our back yard, and she reported us for breaking the homeowner's deed. It was a hassle. That and the fact we only had a two bedroom house and Roice and Ben were about to be joined by Paul was the reason we sold the house on Hanover Street, with it's beautiful little greenhouse, and moved across the street from Ed and Carole Gray on Lockmore.
And that was the end of having a greenhouse for several years. Yes, we grew tomatoes and had a garden on Lockmore Lane, and on Blue Quail Drive in Missouri City. But it wasn't until Landmark went public and we finally had some money that it was time to put in another greenhouse. And then we had the problems with the neighbors on Emerald Green. It was against the deed restrictions to put in a greenhouse. I had my lawyer, Ed Rogers, call the homeowner's association. This wasn't a very good move. Roice's friend Andy Bowling's Dad, who lived across the street and down a couple of houses was the person I ended up negotiating with. We put up a 9 foot fence to hide the greenhouse, and lowered the greenhouse by 4 feet, so it didn't come off of the edge of the roof. And finally we got approval to put it in.
The greenhouse represents Kolob, or the source of the original DNA which was used to populate planet Earth with different species, each after their own kind, as described in the different scriptural accounts of the the creation story, in Paul and Kate's painting of the backyard. The greenhouse was where I chose to have my photo taken for the teleconference in December of 1990 (http://www.walden3d.com/w3d/papers). According to my spreadsheet of production from the greenhouse it was the 16th of January 1991 when I picked the first tomato from the greenhouse. It had a value of $16,451.21. The spreadsheet says I ate it after Melanie refused to eat it. I gave the second tomato to Sherry Sump, my administrative assistant, on the 22nd of January. On the 26th of January I gave three tomatoes to the Principals at HyperMedia, and on the 29th I gave six tomatoes to the ward welfare committee. This meant I had delivered or eaten 11 tomatoes, and the cost per tomato had dropped to $1,495.56 each.
Over the next few years I came up with a tomato index:
By April 22nd of 1991 I was down to $181.78 value per tomato.
This did not include additional costs for seeds, mulch, gas
to heat and run the swamp cooler, etc. Then the greenhouse
got hit by white fly and everything died. The next entry was
not until May 8th of 1992, when I recorded picking 2 Jalapeno
Peppers. By December 25th of 1992 the value per tomato
equivalent was down to $91.71 each. The next year was not
very strong. In fact the last entry in the spreadsheet is
on June 15th of 1993, and the value was down to $59.87 per
tomato equivalent. This was for a tomato equivalent
cumulative count of 274.78 picked tomatoes. And then
HyperMedia collapsed, and I'm still recovering from the
financial failure of that experience. There have been a
lot of Aloe Vera plants and air plants that have come out
of the greenhouse since then. However, they were not counted,
and they really don't have a nutritional equivalence to
tomatoes, so the next tomato grown in the green house will
still cost about $59.00, based on the original investment.
Hopefully we will do better when we build a greenhouse as
part of a new kind of city or as the base unit of a thermal
power tower up the side of Cedar Mountain. As was discussed
with both Paul and Melanie tonight, `all these things are
for our good and give us experience' (Melanie thought this
should be the theme of the thoughtlet this week).
Anyway, I have not done much in the greenhouse for the last 10 years. The single leaf of Air Plant picked up in Hawaii on the way back from China once kind of took over the greenhouse. Along with the ginger plant from Nell Turner, and the Aloe Vera from my Dad. When the swamp cooler rusted completely out, I pulled it out of the greenhouse. I tried to grow a hanging basket once, and it died from lack of water when I got busy or went on a trip. I had problems with plants dying from too much water, which I found out by sending samples to Texas A&M University. It has been a good experience for me, and it is certainly not an example in cost justifiable spending, at least not based on $59.87 per tomato equivalent.
A couple of years ago Andrea and I cleaned the greenhouse out and planted a couple of hundred aloe vera plants. We did this again on Saturday. It took from 10:00 until 2:00. It does look a lot better than it did. And now we need to figure out what to do with a couple of hundred aloe vera plants. Melanie, do your Young Women need a fund raising project for camp?
Saturday after picking up Matt from work at the Mall, Andrea and I went to see Miracle, the new Disney movie about the U.S. Hockey Team. It is a good movie, and even though I'm not much of a sports fan, I enjoyed the movie. At the end it showed photos of the actors and told who they represented and what the person was doing now. I thought it was saying what the actors were doing, and Andrea corrected me. It is worth everyone going to see, and it would be worthwhile for three grandsons to see in the next years. It does depict how much work is required of a real champion.
Today was quiet. In Sacrament Meeting I wrote another possible stanza for Prime Words based on a talk by William Townsend, a relatively new member of the ward:
The dinner/broadcast for seminary institute teachers on
Friday night came to my mind a few times today. President
Packard, Acting President of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles,
was the main speaker. He warned that the world is only
going to get worse and worse, and that we must work in our
homes to protect children from the Satanic flood that is
and will cover the earth. He also pointed out how much
stronger the youth of the church are today, than they have
been at any time in the history of the world. Seminary is
an important program, and this fact certainly came through
in the evening's talks. I was particularly touched with
his testimony of Jesus Christ. He started off talking
about the sudden end of World War II, and of his being on
a tiny spec of an island in the South Pacific, and going
to the top of a cliff and watching the waves, and deciding
he was going to dedicate his life to being a teacher.
Then at the end of his talk he said, `I know no more now
that Jesus is the Savior of the world than I did when I
sat on that tiny spec of an island in the South Pacific
60 years ago. But now I know the Lord.' A statement not
unlike Dr. Palmer's words: `But in that face there was no
trace of bitterness or railings at her fate. There was
patience and serenity . . .'
The same kind of feelings I have found, and hope to find again, in my greenhouse."