Bailey Blog

Had a long hiatus from my blog, mainly due to being slammed working down at the Bailey Country Store to get all the issues resolved to the satisfaction of the various inspectors involved.  Man, have I learned a lot about trying to get things done in a small town and with rural county officials!  We are REALLY close to getting open - just need to pass a couple more inspections.  The store looks great, and I'll post some before, during and after pictures soon.  Yesterday the state plumbing inspector came by; nice guy, who gave us several things to change before he can pass us on the plumbing side of things.  The main issue is that we moved the water heater from the middle of the store to a back room next to the furnace.  It's definitely more out of the way now, but the problem is there's no floor drain in that room.  So, as I feared, he wants us to dig a hole big enough to accommodate a 5 gallon bucket with a sump pump.  Pete and I got through the 1 inch of concrete easily enough, but then we hit rock (which is why basements are not popular with contractors in the Rocky Mountains!).  Sledge hammers and shovels just couldn't get through it, so Herb kindly came by with his 80lb jack hammer and in about 30 minutes had a hole big enough for what we needed.  I've never used a jack hammer before, and now I know why Herb is in such great shape!  No job has been simple in this building, and we're not done until we're done.  Bailey Day - the big, annual festival in town - is on June 15, and the whole event is centered in front of the store (live bands, western re-enactments),  So we HAVE to be open by then, and hopefully a week or two before the 15th.  That's the goal anyway!

Bigfoot Blog

Andrew and I have been working at the Bailey Country Store this week, and our plan is to get the store open by the end of this month if at all possible - permits permitting.  The shelves are just about finished and we should have the hot water running by the end of the day today.  Next week we'll have more help from the Journey team to put down a laminate floor in the store, and to build the deck and ramp in front.

Working on a 130 year-old store has been... well, interesting to say the least.  Yesterday John came by to help us get the hot water system functioning again.  Of course, since we last worked on the plumbing and fixed all the leaks there've been multiple freezing nights  - resulting in several new splits in the water pipes.  This is strange, since the water has been turned off the whole time.  Anyway, in the process of repairing the new breaks we noticed that all the copper pipes in the back (very cold) hallway aren't used for anything anymore, so we were able to just cap the whole section off and eliminate the source of most of the leaks.  I was climbing around in some of the dark, dank sections of the building yesterday following pipes and searching for leaks, and the thought came to mind, "I wonder what's back in here?  Nobody's been up here for decades... it would be a good place to hide a dead body."  When I shared my thoughts with John he wasn't amused.

On a totally unrelated note:  I've been tracking the story that first came out late last year of a dead bigfoot and a British documentary film company called Minnow Films.  Well, there has been a new development.  Apparently, the film (which has been renamed from "Of Men and Monsters" to "Shooting Bigfoot" will be premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival at the end of this month.  So the claims of one Rick Dyer to having shot and killed an adult male Sasquatch outside San Antonio last September will be confirmed, or we'll chalk it up as one more (albeit creative) hoax.  I for one am hoping for conclusive proof that Bigfoot exists, cause there's a long line of people who'll owe me steak dinners!

The Llama is Angry Again

I've taken quite a long hiatus from my blog!  The main reason is that we've been working flat-out to re-open the Angry Llama Diner, and we're finally there!  We (Journey Church) completely renovated the Conifer Crossings building, adding the "new and improved" Llama Diner, new space for our Mountain Roads Driving School, a gym, a beautiful new meeting room that can hold up to 200, and office space for our church staff.  All the work was done by our church team and an army of volunteers over a period of about five weeks.  I would come home most evenings, have a bite to eat and crash by 8:30.  In my mind I'm still able to work just as hard as I did in my 20's, but at 50 my body says to me every day, "You want me to do WHAT?!?"  They say you're as young as you feel, which would mean I'm about 97 right now. 


One of the cool things about the new Angry Llama is that we've made all the furniture and decorations out of old wooden pallets.  You can see in the pictures on the right that the light fixtures are just pallets hung from the ceiling with a bucket attached as a lamp shade, the tables are made of pallet wood and covered in resin, and all the decorations on the walls are pallet products.

Starting next week we'll head to Bailey to finish all the work on the Bailey Country Store to get it up and running.  Daph and I stopped in at one of the restaurants in Bailey to grab a bite last night, and the waitress said, "I know you - you're the one trying to open the Country Store, right?"  When I told her I was, she replied, "Well hurry up!  We're all getting impatient!"  I've probably heard the same thing from a dozen people in the last month; nice to know the folks in Bailey are behind what we're doing.

Marriage Part 2

We're expecting somewhere between 3 and 15 inches in the next 24 hours.  How is it possible that one web site predicts "light snow" and another up to 15 inches??  Go figure.  Don't they all have the same computers using the same weather models to predict precipitation?  I don't get it. 

Anyway, thought of a couple more marriage principles that we've gleaned over the past few years:

5.  The first one to be humble wins.  It only takes one of you to humble yourself and admit where you're wrong - sincerely - for healing to begin.  Unfortunately, most of the time both parties believe they're right in their own eyes and in the end everyone loses.  It's very sad to watch.  It just takes one, because it's almost impossible to remain hard-hearted in the face of true humility and confession.

6.  The power of prayer.  I'm amazed how rare it is to meet a couple today who ever pray together.  Maybe it's a reflection of how far our culture has removed God from the picture.  I'm not talking about non-Christians here, but couples who've been in the church for many years but who have never actually prayed with their spouse.  There is great power available to us when we come to God in agreement, together, to ask Him to heal whatever is broken in our marriage. 

Odds and Ends about Marriage

Daphne and I have done a bit of marriage counseling over the years, and we've learned some interesting truths about life and relationships in the process.  Here's a sampling:

1.  We can't want your marriage to work more than you do.  Sometimes in seems like we're the ones doing all the cheer-leading while the couple sitting across from us have given up and don't even want to try.  Doesn't work that way.  If you don't want to work at this relationship, let's not waste all of our valuable time pretending.  We've even said to some couples, "Well, it's clear that you've got fighting down to a fine art.  Maybe you should write a book on how to have a good fight in your marriage."  Doesn't really help them, but it makes me feel better.  I think it's pretty funny, actually.

2.  The only person you can change is yourself.  "If he'll just change, everything will be great!".  Sorry, doesn't work that way.  You gotta deal with your own "stuff", and we've all got plenty of issues to choose from.  Nobody needs a Junior Holy Spirit getting on their case, and God has his work cut out just changing you, just like He does with your spouse.  So get out of the way.  Your nagging gives you some sick sense of control, but all you're doing is driving your spouse out the door and into someone else's arms. 

3.  The goal isn't peace, but understanding.  It's fine to slam the door and go outside for a smoke, or take a drive, or whatever you do to calm down.  But when you get home nothing's resolved, even though you've got an unspoken cease-fire.  Your disagreement is still there, hanging in the middle of the room for you both to knock your heads on and start another fight.  If you can't figure out what happened and why you keep reacting to each other, you'll never get back the intimacy you've lost.

4.  He needs respect, and she needs love.  You can re-package it anyway you like, or pretend that liberated women need respect as much as men, or that modern men just need a hug.  Doesn't change the way God designed us.  When she's loved, she feels respected.  When he's respected, he feels loved.  And here's the other side of the coin: when she doesn't feel loved, she'll act totally disrespectful, and when he feels disrespected he'll become an unloving brute.  Works that way every time.  

Finishing feels good

We finally finished building the floor in the Bailey Country Store, and it feels good!  Neither Brian (teammate) nor I had ever laid a floor before, so not a bad day's work for a couple of rookies (who had the help of a couple of experts, to be fair).  I can finally see some light at the end of the hallway that leads to the staircase that leads to the corridor that leads to the end of the tunnel.  We had to raise the floor so much (15 inches) that I feel like an NBA player when I stand in there now (except I'm not black and I can't jump worth a darn).  Now we just need to tackle the plumbing, the walls, the broken windows, insulation ...


Last night we watched the episode of Finding Bigfoot that was filmed in Bailey last September.  A friend of mine took several screen shots as proof positive that Gwyn and I do exist, and that we were present at the town hall meeting.  They even had a shot of my Sasquatch cut-out holding a sign that said, "I do not believe the evidence supports the existence of humans."
Of course, several guys from church texted me about Unicorns and fairies and such nonsense.  Skeptics can be so immature.  You'd almost think I believe in some mythical, hairy, 8 foot beast that roams the woods around Bailey.  Now THAT would be crazy.

Believe it or not, there is a recent report that an adult male Bigfoot was shot late last year while a British film crew was making a documentary about Bigfoot.  Apparently, they'd set a bait trap high on a tree and a Bigfoot came to investigate.  The crew's guide woke up, saw the bigfoot, jumped out of his tent in his underwear and shot it in the back of the head.  The film crew wrestled the gun away from him, but too late. According to the article (see the link below), the Bigfoot measured 7'8" tall and weighed 490 pounds.  I would be highly skeptical myself except for the fact that the film company - Minnow Films - is well known and has made a number of excellent, award-winning documentaries.  They claim that they're keeping the carcass until the film comes out in April.  We'll see.  Here's the article I read on this project - the film is tentatively going to be called, "Of Monsters and Men".

http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/bigfoot-news-december-12-2012/


They apparently filmed several seconds of the Squatch eating the bait from inside their tent before it was shot. Below is a clip of that video; judge for yourself.

Bigfoot news

For all my Bigfoot skeptic friends, this blog entry should be amusing.  A few days ago, a friend of mine who lives in Bailey sent me an email that she'd found some "interesting" tracks on her property.  I went over to investigate the next day, and took a few photos.  Unfortunately, we had a light snow after the tracks were made, so the definition was poor.  What was clear, however, is that something walked across her property with 7 foot strides, in a straight line, and the prints were 16-18 inches long.  One of the prints - see below with my boot next to it - still shows what might be the imprint of toes and a mid-tarsal break (believed to be a sasquatch characteristic). 

Of course, my skeptic friends - I'm talking about you Brian - say that it is clearly a hoax.  OK, let's go down that road for a minute:  the prints are located in a remote part of the property, and had to have been made during the night in sub-zero temperatures, on stilts (7 foot stride), without making one mis-step in the process.  I'm not saying the tracks definitely WERE made by a Sasquatch, but to believe this is a hoax is an insult to my intelligence.

Speaking of Bigfoot:  Apparently, the episode of "Finding Bigfoot" (Animal Planet channel) that was filmed in Bailey will be airing this Sunday evening.  I'm hoping that Gwyn and I will show up in our bright, green Sasquatch Outpost T-shirts on the front row of the town hall meeting, and that they'll show my Life-Size Sasquatch cutout as well.   Maybe this is the beginning of something really big... (no pun intended)...

New Floor

We made huge progress on the new floor in the country store yesterday, thanks to all the Journey staff guys who came down to lend a hand.  Basically, we're raising the whole floor up 14 inches over the original floor.  You can see the new joists in the pictures on the left - the floor will go down on top of those joists.  We have some technical issues to overcome - namely how best to raise the front door up to match the floor, and then we'll need to build a handicap deck and ramp out front.  Still, it feels good to get so much work done in one day!  The old girls still needs a huge amount of work, like repainting, fixing the walls, fixing many broken windows, adding shelving and counters... and the list goes on and on.  However, we're still shooting to open at some level by the first of February. Q This continues to be a faith adventure, as we do not have the funds to finish the renovation work and we're trusting that God will provide what we need, when we need it.  He already provided the resources to build the floor, so we keep trusting Him for the rest.

Quote from Steve Brown's book, "A Scandalous Freedom":
     (regarding the common viewpoint that Christians should always be "nice")  "Christians can be dangerous!  No, not those.  The real ones.  The weenies aren't dangerous.  They are irrelevant.  But those Christians who have discovered they don't have anything to protect and nothing to lose, who have learned that Jesus is Lord and that it doesn't matter what others think a bout them or do to them - they are dangerous... really dangerous."
     "Why are we so bound and so imprisoned that we feel afraid to speak up, stand up, and be Christ's witnesses in the church and in the world?  In other words, if we're free, why don't we use our freedom to be bold?"
     

Back to Blogging

After a hiatus of several weeks due to my computer being on the fritz (AND I fixed it all my byself) I'm back to blogging.  Duke (my yellow lab) is snoring on the floor next to me as we both try to stay warm by the fire.  Speaking of Duke,  I finally bit the bullet and bought an invisible fence to keep him contained on our property after getting at least 10 calls from neighbors... "Um, I have your dog here at my house; what should I do with him??"  I've never used one of these devices before, but even when I turn the collar up to the maximum setting Duke just strolls right across the wire without so much as a flinch.  I've thought about putting the collar on myself to test the shock, but in the end I'm just too chicken.  I've watched the YouTube videos and that's enough proof for me.  got to think on that some more.

The town of Bailey and the Bailey Country Store still take up most of my time now.  In the last 30 days we initiated a Christmas decorating contest among the businesses in Bailey, for which I created a "fitting" trophy made of a deer antler strung with battery-operated Christmas lights; I was elected to the board of the Platte Canyon Area Chamber of Commerce (think Mayberry);  and I wrote an article for one of the local mountain newspapers about "new beginnings" and the country store.  I was particularly happy about the article and several people commented on it last Sunday at church (I'd forgotten all about it by the time it was published).  The article describes well what the Lord has put on my heart for this little town and this forgotten country store.  So here it is:

She’s 130 years old, built when Bailey was young and steam trains still rolled past along the Platte River.  One of the first buildings constructed in the town (1878) the Bailey Country Store has always been there – providing not only groceries, but also a sense of history and stability to this little mountain community.   The past few years have not been kind to this old girl, however.  When the store was closed in late 2009, Bailey lost not only a town icon but the only functioning grocery store as well.  She’s sat quiet, dark and cold for almost three years – the paint peeling from the walls and the sign that once proudly announced her presence vandalized by bored teenagers.   Tourists would occasionally stop by for a few staples on their way to go camping, but the locked door and butcher paper covering the windows left no doubt that it was either back to Conifer or on to Fairplay to buy their marshmallows, graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate. 

Until now.  Three months ago we ( The Journey Community Church) leased the building from its new owners with the goal of re-opening the Country Store to provide a much-needed and sorely missed service to the town of Bailey.  If you drive to the bottom of Crow Hill today and look to your right you’ll notice that the store has a new paint job and a brand new sign… and a life-size Sasquatch holding a cup of coffee.  The new Bailey Country Store and Sasquatch Outpost Coffee House are on-target to open their doors in early February.  The exterior looks great now, but inside there’s still lots of work to do.  The original floor is rotten and unsafe so a whole new floor must be built above it for the old girl to be useful once again – not to mention painting, repairing pipes, fixing the heating… and the list goes on.  It’s a time of new beginnings, not just for this old store but also for a community that’s been hit hard in recent years by tragedy and recession.  Bailey folks need a fresh infusion of hope: hope that better days are ahead and that their lives – like the old country store – still have value.  We can all start over again if we just have a little faith in God and in ourselves.

I believe in Bailey, and it’s time for this community to stand up tall and declare: “We are strong.  We are resilient.  We are community.  We are Bailey!”

checking back in

It's time to check back in after a hiatus of several weeks.  After losing two friends in quick succession, life became rather hectic when we launched our first Saturday evening service for the Journey Church Bailey Campus.  We held our second service last night, and though our learning curve is rather steep we're all excited about what lies ahead.  Daphne, Gwyn and I are still the only full-time staff for the Bailey campus.  We need God to raise up a worship leader and a youth pastor soon, as most of our volunteers are my age or older (ie, wise, mature, and "seasoned").  We are passionate to reach the youth in Bailey, but we need an influx of young blood.  God knows.

After almost four weeks of waiting and (unsuccessfully, in my case) learning to be patient, we are about to get the permit to rebuild the floor in the country store.  God has provided much of the lumber and materials we'll need to build it - which is in itself ironic; the donations only came a week ago, so even if we'd had the permit to build we would not have been able to do the work.  The Lord knew all this, and while every impatient bone in my body has popped out of joint over the past 30 days, He was working behind the scenes to provide what we need.

After preaching the past two Saturdays I am gaining a new appreciation for the challenge that Michael faces every single week to come up with a new sermon from a fresh perspective.  I find it very difficult to set aside even a few focused hours to think, pray and write... and I have only a fraction of the responsibilities that he does.  I can only imagine how much harder this will be once we start working on the remodel of the store!  I'm already A.D.D on my best days, so throw in a very enticing and long-awaited building project and ... yikes.  I still have one gainormous problem:  I depended completely on Mark's know-how and passion for this project, and now he's gone.  The Lord must have someone else waiting in the wings to fill Mark's very big shoes.  I wonder who it is?