We live on a small, 10-acre hobby farm. We actually purchased the property as vacant land back in 2015 and proceeded to build the farm from scratch.
When our kids were younger and didn't have so many activities, we got going with a number of different projects on the farm. Besides planting and maintaining a fairly sprawling garden and apple orchard, we also added a number of animals: Sheep, pigs, chickens, and bees. It was pretty ambitious.
After a few years, we decided to build a barn. Unlike our pigs, which we buy in the spring and butcher in the fall, we bred our sheep, and so kept both a ram and the ewes around year-round. They lived on pasture and ate grass during the growing season (or at least snow-free season) between April and November, roughly, but needed both some shelter and hay in the winter. We used a large, metal quonset-style hut to house them over winter, and was particularly helpful in early spring for lambing. Since they lived off hay for the better part of 4-5 months, storing a bunch of hay for the winter is critical. I initially stored it in our garage and parked my car outside. I then progressed to storing outside under a tarp, but determined I was going to need more space and better storage facilities as our flock expanded. That, combined with storing other farm equipment, meant a barn was in the cards.
I was going to go bare bones and put up a fairly simple 3-sided pole barn shelter (something more like an open shed than a barn, probably), but my wife convinced me to bite the bullet and build something a bit nicer. We put in a fully framed, large barn on concrete foundation with a 2nd story loft I was going to use for hay storage. We completed the barn in late 2018/ early 2019, and it worked out great those first two years. I actually ended up storing the hay on the main level, as to use an elevator to get the hay up and down would be best with two people handling the bales. Our oldest was still too young then to really do much helping on that front, and my wife didn't really want to be throwing bales of hay around, so main level it was.
As anyone who is familiar with my earlier posts, things went somewhat sideways for me in 2020, and a combination of my not being in great shape, and the growing list of kids' activities and just life demands in general, we decided that we should probably sell our flock of sheep. It was just too much to handle. The breed we raised - Katahdin - were selected because they were hair sheep and didn't need shearing - they were just raised for meat. They were lower maintenance, basically. That was the good part. The bad part (at least from a perspective of trying to keep things manageable) was that they were prolific breeders. Most ewes in our flock had triplets when they lambed, and the very last year - which was 2020 - all of our ewes had triplets. We were breeding rabbits. The issue with triplets, besides just having a lot of lambs around, was keeping everyone fed and happy. The moms only have two teats, and that math doesn't go so well with three mouths to feed. So, we ended up with bottle lambs (lambs we would feed by hand ourselves).
In any case, we developed a fairly sizeable and really nice flock of sheep. They ended up being easy to sell. I think we had a buyer within the first few days of posting, and ended up splitting the flock across a couple different buyers. 2020 may have made it easier, actually, as quite a few people I think were thinking homesteading based on what was going on with the Covid situation.
As a result, however, we found ourselves with a big barn, but no sheep or hay that it was needed for. We still have kept the chickens in it over winter (they are out in the apple orchard the rest of the year), and I store equipment like our tractor in it, but I found over the past year or two in particular that it seemed the building was being underutilized.
Given that our kids are now getting older and involved in all of these activities, friends, etc., I decided to repurpose, or 'gentrify', the barn a bit. This past winter I finished the former, never-used-for-its-purpose hayloft into something like a multipurpose room (and a 2nd office for me when I need to escape the house), while clearing out some of the main level for other kid activities like shooting hockey pucks. That portion of the main level was actually the chickens' former spot, and they are going to get a rude awakening this winter as they find themselves relegated out to the quonset hut...
I mention all of this because as part of the ongoing work on the barn I also wanted to bring internet out to it from the house. Prior to insulating and closing up the walls, I ran a bunch of ethernet cable up to the loft from a main connection switch area on the main level. My intention over this summer was to simply run a direct-burial Cat 6 cable from our router in the house to that switch. Fairly straightforward, I thought. However, I began reading that a number of people who have done this have ended up frying all of their equipment attached to their networks due to near-lightning strikes. Even enclosed in conduit, the copper in the ethernet wire acts as a great conductor of electricity. Not being grounded to a main grounding rod like your home electricity is means a lightning strike has a free pass to go into both our house and barn and wreck anything it has a path to. There are grounding blocks that can be added, but they are usually (at least from what I have both read and been told) insufficient to stop the electrical overcharge.
So, my plans to connect the barn stalled for a few months while I considered what to do. Running copper was not going to be an option I was comfortable with due to the lightning risk, and thus fiber optic cables (which don't conduct electricity, but rather sends information in the form of light) seemed to be the only really viable solution. The problem with fiber optic cables is they seemed to be more of a professional job than a DIY. Making the terminations, involving highly polished ceramics so the light can do its thing and minimize signal loss, requires both fairly specialized skills and fairly expensive equipment. Since I had already wired the barn, low-voltage companies I talked to weren't that interested in looking at my job since all I was asking for was to run and connect one wire between buildings. It was just too small a job. I did find a couple companies, but they wanted a small fortune to run the wire and do the terminations, likely because it was such a small job that they didn't need it and could bid high in case I was desperate enough.
I did talk to someone, though, who pointed me to a company that makes what they call pre-terminated fiber optic assemblies. Basically, rather than having a wire that needs to be fitted and terminated with connectors on-site, this company (LANshack) would custom-cut whatever length you needed, and enclose the terminations in protective plastic and kevlar sheathing, along with a pull-hook, so you can safely pull it through the conduit.
I was a bit skeptical that this was actually something that I could pull off, but it was going to save me a lot of money to do it this way vs. hiring someone. I also knew I could get it done before it starts to get much colder (vs. potentially risking that an installer wouldn't get me in before winter), so I thought I would give it a shot.
Anyway, I hand dug 180' of trench, laid my conduit, and then ran a pull string through it two weeks ago. The cable arrived just this past week, and I did the cable pull on Thursday late afternoon and then made all the connections that evening. Everything went better than I had anticipated, and here I am typing and posting from my barn hayloft/ office on a Sunday evening. It worked out pretty nicely.
Why am I even writing about this?
I had started a post on some things regarding stones and voyages across oceans, but it felt like a complete chore to write, honestly, and nothing was coming easy. So, I abandoned that for now and thought I would write about this in order to use it as an example of how almost everything I do or think about right now involves these blasted stones.
In short, as I was going through the install of this whole thing, it all kind of served as a metaphor for at least one of the functions that I see the Sawtooth Stone (and perhaps Anor Stone, and other stones) performing here in our world.
I needed to establish a link between my house and this barn. Not just any link would do, or not just your standard connection that could potentially be compromised by electrical signals from lightning or nearby wiring. It needed to be fiber optic cable - something that transmits information in the form of LIGHT, something incorruptible and undisturbed by any outside influence so long as the cable and connections are intact.
This light pulses through this cable and then terminates at ceramic ferrules - the quality and clarity of these ferrules is critical to ensure the signal is transferred appropriately at the connection point. In my case, I am actually 'translating' light signals at both the barn and house ends of this connection. On the house side, I am wired with ethernet cables just as I am with the barn. I had to install a media converter that I plug both an ethernet RJ-45 plug and the ceramic ferrule connector (in my case, LC connectors), and which converts the ethernet signal into something the fiber optic cable can carry and transmit with its pulsing light signals. On the barn side, I had to do the same thing, with the media converter once again translating the light signals into transmissions the ethernet cables can carry to all of my connected devices. One cable connecting the buildings, terminated at ceramic ferrules, converted to ethernet, and then distributed throughout each building.
Ceramics are, in most cases, apparently crystals. As mentioned in my previous posts on the Anor Stone/ Liahona and other stones, I believe the stones we are dealing with, including the Sawtooth Stone, are crystals (see this post on the Liahona, for example). This also makes them potentially ceramics as well (I will summarize a dream from a couple months ago on the ceramics point at the end of this post).
So, we have light/ information being transmitted from one place to another, arriving at a connection point involving both ceramics (Stones) as well as an Ether-net converter. As also mentioned in an earlier post, my belief is that it is none other than Ether (the prophet from the Book of Mormon), also known as Abinadi, Faramir, etc., who will be on one end of the connection point (ours), holding the stone-ceramic and both receiving and giving communication to another stone-ceramic located in a place potentially quite far away from our own (see this post)
Thus, as you can see, in my own efforts to connect the barn to my house's internet, I created a little story that I think holds (at least roughly) for how the Stone will be used. Information (stories or light) will be shared across vast distances, with stones as the primary link or bridge that this information is received at. Translator-recorders (i.e., the media converters) will be at either end of this link with their respective ceramics-stones (Eowyn-Ilmare on one end, and Faramir-Eonwe-Ether on the other, in the case I have written of before, at least), and their job will be to take the information transmitted through their stones and make it both usable and available for the people in their respective locations.
So, there you go - we've gone from sheep-barns, to barn-internet-connectivity using fiber optics, to the story of how I think true stories will exist once again both in our world and in Heaven (on Earth as it is in Heaven...). As mentioned in previous posts, these stories will have an impact on those who hear them, with some embracing them, and others not so much. And I don't think this situation is limited to Earth. When we read of secret combinations 'above' us, and spiritual wickedness in 'high places', we think too small if we limit that to Beings on Earth. That corruption may extend into lands of Heaven itself.
I mentioned a dream. This dream was from a few months ago:
In the dream, I was back in the house I grew up in (and that my parents still live in). I was talking with my dad about something, and I started to say something like "It just feels like things are close, because I can hear you guys upstairs on your ceramics making a lot of noise". As I was saying this, my dad's face transformed into that of Keanu Reeves as the character of Neo in the Matrix movies, which was a bit strange, and I found that it was difficult to tell whether the words I said were coming from me or the person I was now facing as Neo. As soon as I became aware of this, I woke up.
I won't get into all of my thoughts regarding this dream, but the 'ceramics' word stood out to me then, and I looked it up at the time. Upon learning more about ceramics, I concluded that the word must have been a reference to stones (as in Palantiri-like stones). That dream then also came back to my mind when I learned that the terminations of the fiber optic cables were ceramic, and then my mind went down the metaphorical path I outlined above as I was going through the installation process this past week.
So, there you go. Stones are so pervasive in my mind, that I can make even hooking up my barn to the internet have something to say about them.
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