An Arkies Musings

This weekend was beautiful and the fall colors were exquisite.  We made a trip to Little Missouri Falls to look at the fall scenery.  The road out to Shady was lined with glorious colors.  I'm not sure why, but the newest owner of the house my parents owned a number of years ago had made his yard look like a plane crash scene. At the falls The Little Missouri River plunges through a cleavage creating a spectacular waterfall during periods of high water. Then it tumbles over a series of natural rock dams 2 to 4 feet high, intermixed with relatively quiet pools (natural swimming holes) it continues as a cascade for several hundred more yards.  The falls are beautiful any time of the year, but they are particularly spectacular during the fall color season. Sunday afternoon we traveled the Talimena Drive up Rich Mountain to Queen Wilhelmina State Park.   The Talimena Drive stretches across the very top of the Ouachita Mountains in Easte...

The Hope Floats - Wal-mart 67 Relay For Life team held a innovative and interesting fundraiser on October 20, 2012.  When people made donations to the team their name was written on the bottom of a rubber duck. The ducks were then taken to the middle of the pond at Rich Mountain Community College and set adrift. When the ducks were set adrift, Lady, a black lab, was sent into the water to retrieve a duck.  The name on the first duck retrieved received a 40" flat screen HD TV, the second a Nook e-reader and the third a rocking chair.     It was a breezy day, and when all of the rubber ducks had been blown to shore, the kids present had a great time collecting the rubber ducks from the lake. It was a great fundraiser and over 2200.00 was raised for Relay For Life.

Brandi Sachs is a friend of mine and is very active in the Relay For Life of Polk County.  This article about her was published in a local paper, The Polk County Pulse. Citizen of the Week by LeAnn Dilbeck - Published in the October 17, 2012 issue of The Polk County Pulse. Family is an integral part of who so many of us are.  But for many it goes much deeper and defines who we are.  A statement that can be said for this week's Citizen, Brandi Myers Sachs.  And family is who has inspired one of her greatest passions...an active outspoken champion of the Polk County Relay For Life. "It was devastating," says Myers through tears when she remembers getting the call that her Aunt Peggy had pancreatic cancer.  Her aunt underwent treatments but lost her battle within only a few short months of diagnosis.  Brandi had known of others with cancer but had never had the devastating illness strike so bitterly close to home and says she regrets now taking so ...

I recently read an editorial in the Adventist Review written by Steven Chavez titled, Even Our Adversaries.   It made an impression on me and this post borrows heavily from it. Not long after He had washed His disciples’ feet at the last supper, Jesus spoke to them.  His words are recorded in John 13:35: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another”.  His words still challenge us with a nearly impossible goal: to demonstrate our loyalty to Jesus by the way we love and serve each other. Jesus didn’t say that proper doctrine would prove we are His disciples; Even though understanding the Bible is important.  He didn’t say that our understanding of Bible prophecy would prove that we are His disciples. Jesus said that people would know His followers by their commitment to love everyone—the lovely and the unlovely. Aren’t there more important things to worry about?  What could be more important than the one thing that...

After attending church we drove to DeGray Lake for the afternoon. My wife had driven to Arkadelphia on Thursday to speak as an American Cancer Society Hero of Hope at the FCCLA meeting at Henderson State University. The drive was beautiful with the beginnings of fall color, so she wanted to go back to the area when I could go. The drive was beautiful even if the day was overcast. We saw a lot of beautiful scenery on our way to DeGray Lake. We even saw a bobcat cross the road and were able to pull off the road and watch it for a while.  I love old barns, and had to stop and photograph this one. Our first stop at DeGray Lake was at the Point Cedar Campground, one of eight different campgrounds that surround the lake.  Last year  I was invited to speak at the Arkansas-Louisiana Pathfinder Camporee held at Point Cedar.  Even though it is less that two hours from my house I had never been there before.  It is such a beautiful place that I had ...

On our trip this last weekend we started listening to the podcast, Stuff You Missed in History Class . One of the podcasts was on Henry Ford. I thought I knew quite a lot about Henry, but I learned something new; I learned about Fordlandia. In the 1920's Ford Motor Company was producing over a million cars a year. Henry Ford needed rubber to make tires, hoses and other parts for the cars. Rubber does not grow in Michigan, and European producers enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the rubber trade because of their Asian colonies. So Henry decided to grow his own. In 1927 he decided to get it by carving a plantation and a miniature Midwest factory town out of the Amazon jungle. He called it Fordlandia. The site chosen for Ford’s new rubber plantation was an area of some 2.5 million acres on the banks of the Tapajós River, a tributary of the Amazon about 600 miles from the Atlantic. It took Ford’s agents approximately 18 hours to reach the place by riverboat from the nearest town...