A "hobby" farm? What has our Dale Schmitz gotten himself into? Let Dale describe what he is busily doing. In his email to me in February, he began by expressing his hope to attend our reunion this coming October:
"Hopefully I'll be able to get to Dallas this fall for the reunion. It's been since 1993 at the JOSS that I've seen you and others....... I always wondered where and how Tom Radascy is, along with others.
Seems like retirement, now 9 years for me, is so busy, but with much more enjoyable things. Family and grandkids, family reunions, and uncles and aunts now in their 90's.
We've got a 50 acre "hobby" farm/woods about 50 miles from here. And so I go there quite a bit to putz around like when I was a kid on the farm, driving tractors, mowing grass, and cutting down lots of trees. Have 3 ponds there, just dredged this past winter. A very good place for deer, turkeys, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, and I even saw a cougar/mountain lion there last summer.
The farm is on the way to a house we have on Sun Valley Lake, that is 75 miles from here. I should fish more but seems like always things to do. And we still have the first house we bought there, but hopefully it will be sold yet this month.
Frances and I leave for Honduras Feb. 19 and return April 8. Some of my time there is spent working on projects (electricity, plumbing, painting, etc.)for friends and family. And visiting family and friends.
I'll also spend a week in March working with two other guys coming then to provide donated carpentry tools we collect here and "give" to carpenters in Honduras and in El Salvador. We also provide training classes on some of the tools. I'm the only one on the Board here fluent in Spanish and so spend considerable time corresponding and setting things up from here, and there. ......... To earn the tools, the carpenters have to donate 40 hours of work to their community, school, church or a person with needs, plant 3 trees,and mentor another person. ........ Our goal is to improve the lives of families by increasing the income of the carpenters. The organization is Tools for Opportunity, www.toolsforopportunity.org/.
Winter has been like an öld-fashioned one we remember from the 50's, 60's and 70's. We have lots of snow on the ground, and it has snowed 1-2 inches three times this week. In fact, it's snowing now again. But a warm-up is to finally come next week, with temperatures up into the 40's for a day or so.
Enough rambling for now. I hope all is well with you and your family."
Dale is a testament to an ol' sayin': "The farm boy may leave the farm, but the farm never leaves the farm boy." I was recalling this very verse during this past week as I was weeding and tilling our landscape beds and spreading cubic yards of mulch around our house in 90 degree weather.
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