respublica

Call Day 2022

Call Day is arguably the most major event in the seminary school year, ahead even of graduation. It is on this day that second year seminarians receive their vicarage year assignments and the graduating class learns where they will begin their lives as pastors. These places can be anywhere in the country and emotions run high. Each service is beautiful, the chapel is always filled. For the past two years this day had to be done virtually and live streamed due to the Covid shut down. It worked, but was not the same as in person.

Today will be one to remember I'm sure, the relief of being in person and with classmates and families and seminary faculty and staff. I have to confess I miss not being there for this and I know Dale is grieving this loss in his life. But we will watch the live stream and remember all the students we'd come to know and be glad for them.

Back to the Sem

Dale and I went over to the seminary this morning for an unveiling of his presidential portrait. Every president since Concordia Seminary's founding has his portrait on a wall in what is called "the Presidents' Room in Pritzlaff Hall. During his last few months as president, a portrait artist did drawings of him in our side yard. This was a different setting from the other 9 past presidents in that they are all pictured against a wall or in a chair.

Dale wanted to be outside with the bell tower in the background as well as a natural setting. What makes this even more different, he wanted our most loved dog, Ferdie, in there as well. Ferdie was pretty much the campus dog, loved by everyone and he loved everyone. And so it was done. The chapel service was beautiful and will be a fond memory for us one last time.

Fall impression

This is one of my favorite pictures from the Concordia Seminary campus. Each year in late Fall, a few of us made the climb up to the roof of Luther Tower to begin getting the Christmas Star in place before it got too cold to go up there. It wasn't turned on until December, but doing it made sense and also gave us a good view of the surrounding area with the muted Fall colors. This is Luther Statue down below.

I will miss that climb this year.

A real taste of the Sem

For some years Concordia Seminary grounds people have tended a circle of hops which grow around a tree next to Sieck Hall. There have been any number of years when home brewers picked the hops and made beer from them. One of those was a former student who picked some hops when he visited the campus last fall and used them to make beer up in Wisconsin. Yesterday a box arrived on our front porch and in it was some of that beer and the bottles are labeled wonderfully.

 

This is so cool. Taste of the Sem beer and info on what was used to make it. 

Thank You Aaron Boerst!

A little bit of the seminary in our basement

I've mentioned before that Dale has been obsessed with redoing part of the basement to house his office and books. That effort included using old windows which had been removed during renovations of the seminary faculty homes. As these windows were headed for large dumpsters, Dale was out there rescuing them and stacking them up everywhere. These windows were most likely put in when the homes were built in the mid-1920's and are made of solid wood, oak, I'm sure, and weigh a ton. I admit to thinking he'd lost his mind.

But he has turned them into doors for all the new bookshelves he's built in our Collinsville basement. It's not finished yet but huge progress has been made and I spent all day yesterday scrubbing that area of the basement floor, cleaning each pane on the windows. It's not perfect or finished yet but we can see it's going to be comfortable and rather attractive. The floors need work, but we may have professionals come in and do something with them, at least in this area.

When we lived in the campus house I dreaded having to clean those windows, there are so many panes it used to take forever, and I believed I would never have to do it again. Wrong. The bookshelves on the left still have to have windows put on, probably this weekend.

Summer work

Our grandson is working part time on the seminary grounds and it is really good to see how seriously he takes his work. He's learning a lot and is around a couple other boys his age as well as seminarians who do landscape work. Good guys all and a great learning experience being with them.

Yesterday he got to cut back bamboo. Now who wouldn't want to do that. Actually it is helpful for the future to learn how out of control some plant life can get.

Just when we think we've seen it all

This campus has had its issues with outsiders (locals) over the years, but today takes the cake. I looked out the front door and saw two guys with metal detectors in our side yard. They would sweep the detectors around then stop periodically and stoop down to dig. I knew they were not our people and this was pretty bold to come onto private property and do this. I texted our facilities director with a photo and he sent security over. They then had to leave.

What the heck?

 

Selecting a watermelon

Here on the seminary campus we've planted watermelons for a number of years. These have been of the small variety because we were never certain of the length of the growing season. Plus, smaller melons are easier to deal with. But, we learned early on that knowing when to pick them is an art in itself. So many years we've gone to Google to find out the signs we need to know when a watermelon is ripe. Often the squirrels know before we do and eat right through any number of them.

I came across a chart detailing the way you can tell what you're getting when you look at watermelons in the store or on the vine. Frankly, this does not seem all that helpful to me, the signs are very subtle and when you actually are in the midst of actual watermelons they all look pretty much alike.

Here is a picture I took of some of our campus watermelons with our youngest grandson sitting with them. He will be in second grade in the fall.

In any event, we began looking at the bottom of the melons to see if there showed any yellow. Also we checked the curly tendril on the main vine closest to the fruit should have turned brown.

Nature is taking over

It is unreal how things are growing this year. Trees are bushy-er than I've ever seen and plant life, oh my. This may well be a result of very little human interaction with nature. No one to pick or clip or walk through or on. It's amazing to see our 3/4 quad which is usually filled with hostas, but whoa, this year the hostas have gone big and are competing with each other to see who can be the most showy.

A few campus scenes from this past week

These have nothing to do with graduation, but I found them interesting. First was a sod company laying sod at one of the faculty homes. What was fascinating was how they did this. Big truck rolled in holding huge bales of sod. One man was on some kind of machine which drove up next to the sod truck and used a hydrolic tube of some kind which he moved into the center of the bale and brought it to where another guy was waiting. That man had another machine which unrolled the sod onto the ground perfectly. A third worker then used a heavy roller machine to flatten it in. They did the entire yard front, back and sides in quick time.

Then I walked down the alley behind these houses because we'd had an issue with local teen-aged boys  back there last week. I may write about it at some point. No one to be seen thankfully, but I was taken with the ancient stairs which were built in the 20's or early 30's so professors could park their cars back there and climb up to their homes. It's an amazing piece of construction which has lasted all the years with little wear and tear except for the rust on the rails. Since last summer when fences were built behind all the houses, the stairs lead to no where. I still hope no one decides to tear them out, they have such history.

Then came a walk around the campus fountain and in a small planting circle were these rare Alliums. Most Alliums have big round heads but these just sparkle. Gayle somehow found a few bulbs and put them there. They are named Atropurpureum Alliums. Very cool.

And finally, the day after graduation we came over to Collinsville to get some work done on the house before our move. The first thing for Dale was to fix one gutter downspout which he accidentally ripped off with his car's side mirror sometime back. But he did it!

Today, after much rain Saturday and this morning, our front and back gutters were gushing over their sides. We knew it was because they most likely were filled with all the Oak Tree strings. Our front Oak trees drop bales of those things and sure enough, they were full. So I went up to clean the gutters. Dale, who is very uneasy with heights, held the extension ladder for the front gutters and I climbed up and emptied. Yuck. But now they are clear. Then it was around the back which really isn't extension ladder workable because of the deck. So we got the ladder in one spot and I climbed up and hoisted myself onto the roof. The roof is pretty flat so I laid on my stomach and reached down to pull out all the masses of Oak strings. That was kind of fun. 

This is a picture of the back roof. Dale was too scared I was going to tumble off to take a picture. I did notice neighbors behind us peeking out their windows watching all this.