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Ehmke Diaries January 4 Joyous Epiphany!! After church and dinner, we started in again moving and cleaning. The boys are doing well. Cole is a marvel at sorting and reorganizing our stuff. Marc arrives with his program counselor. Looks like he will fit right in with us and of course communication is the key. January 5 Back to school. Tonight Layton had a 4-H council meeting plus he is the president. Louise also attended as leader. Marc settled in. Marit worked on piano. Cole continues to organize our books, papers. It's wonderful. He is also getting lots of things ready for Australia. Vance is working on the dairy and wheat meetings coming up. We sent out news releases to local papers. Winter is the time to have grower meetings. Vance and I have made sure Dighton or our region has had an annual Wheat Management and Production meeting for the last 8 years. It is January 24 with excellent speakers. Vance was interviewed on the radio by Hap Larson on his Farm Show on KBUF about the upcoming wheat meeting. They also discussed current profitability issues on the farm and even our dairy plans. Louise met with the Lane County Museum president Judy Fullmer to line out plans for the January 27th Kansas Day celebration. We will talk about local products and the byproducts of the commodities grown here. People don't realize all the byproducts made from commodities we grow which are unrelated to food. Example: packaging peanuts made from wheat, wheat particle board, strawboard, paste to name a few. January 6 Kids were sure glad to see their friends at school. Marc seems to be adjusting. So are we. Made more plans for closing the land purchase we made 3 weeks ago. We will close on Friday. That will bring our farm to 6,240 acres. Most of that is rented acres. We have landlords in California, Kansas, and Colorado. Vance does most of the communication with them keeping them updated on growing conditions, wheat price forecast. He asked me today if we could do a newsletter on our new computer. So we will try!! Louise worked on the Festival of Breads fundraising letter. This bread baking contest for Kansans is April 4 with preliminaries in March. Tanner is working on cleaning our grain bins--getting the bottom wheat scraps the augers do not pick up. He's also sleeping in late--storing up for next semester. He will leave Saturday. January 7 We really have a mess as Louise cleared her desk of piles, which Cole is organizing, into files as well as the books. It will be great when it is all done. Since Monday the phone has been ringing constantly. Everybody is just like us--trying to do those tasks we put off until after the first of the year. January 8 Vance and some dairy directors headed to Syracuse, Kansas to visit with a banker there who is expert at dairy finance and profitability. They may also visit a dairy there. Tonight is the historical society annual meeting. Kansas Day plans are moving along. |