Sea to Shining Sea

  New 3 Week Old Calves Transfer to new pasture: Charles and Jacob lead the way in getting our new baby calves and their moms transferred to a new pasture. Of course, the babies did not want to come out of the paddock and cried for their moms once they had left to eat the new green grass... Jacob and I tried for two hours to encourage the calves, but to no avail. Eventually, the moms came back and we then feed them again in the paddock to get them all united again.
Once the calves had milked again they fallowed their moms out into the coastal pasture and into the trees along the outflow that goes through the middle of the pasture in a curved diagonal.


 

¶ 1:30 PM

  Wow Another Year!! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. I can hardly believe that the year has come to an end. I have been spending time at the University of Houston on a new grant that we won that will lead our research through 2026. Spooling up our Drug Discovery pipeline has been intense… 15 million compounds already evaluated and now going into a selection process with the medicinal chemists at the Texas Heart Institute has kept the electrons running 24/7 on the Sabine and Carya clusters at UH. I have also had an intense year working with some of the the best material scientist in the world. We have been expanding a materials computational work flow running on multiple GPU cores. The year also included a flurry of activity; planting corn and soybeans and getting the crop harvested and setting up for our 2024 farm plan. I would like to thank the many of you that have helped our family over the past years. Co-workers, Coop members, neighbors, family, and friends have all made our life possible by the grace of God. Your relationships are the most important part of life… Michelle has continued to enjoy her work serving veterans and she has had some great experiences with her family as they celebrated her mom’s 90th birthday and was able to spend additional time in Wichita. John and Jacob are in Yosemite for Christmas with grandma and grandpa. They both had good years as John is finally back from Austin where his job kept sending him to work on the Tesla plant… It’s a good opportunity but disrupted his life and activities with his friends here in Clear Lake. Jacob just finished his first freshman semester in college. Kevin and Elizabeth are spending Christmas in Corpus Christi at his family. They continue to live here in Clear Lake and enjoy their jobs. Hannah is at Texas AM but taking remote classes this semester so is living in Clear Lake and working part time at Space Center Houston. This means that Michelle and I have had the great privilege of having our children close by. We are planning to celebrate our family Christmas on New Year’s Eve as everyone should be back from their travels and we will be at full strength!
I have included a link to the church service in which Jacob’s choir was a large part of the music; if you are interested in hearing him sing: Concordia Texas Choir
I hope that I can reach out more this next year, sorry for being under water with work and letting time slip away.
Sincerely John with Michelle, John Welch, Elizabeth and Kevin, Hannah, and Jacob.
 

¶ 3:15 PM

  Jacob’s Graduation Well we have made this big milestone, our youngest kid has graduated from Clear Falls High School and is getting ready to go to college!

 

¶ 6:18 PM

  Water and Sun. This year was another challenging year on the farm. Snow and rain never seemed to end and pushed back our planting dates. It was amazing to see the water across the surface of the state as I flew into Minot, North Dakota.

 

¶ 5:00 AM

  Craft Christmas 2022 What a whirlwind of a year! Christ has blest us in many ways. First and foremost; Elizabeth and Kevin had a beautiful wedding in Corpus Christi. It was a wonderful opportunity for the families to get together and the love that Elizabeth and Kevin have for each spills over to everyone else. For our family, this was the real end of Covid; as Elizabeth had to delay the wedding 1 year because of the pandemic. The other great blessing was that Michelle was able to spend more time in person with her veterans that she serves. She is a very committed social worker and wanted to maximizing face time and she often commented on the limitations of telemedicine. Telemedicine was a valuable tool, but nothing completely replaces boots on the ground. The farm was both hard and successful. First, we have near historic wet weather in terms of the amount of ground we were not able to farm and then the year snapped very dry during the summer. This put a lot of pressure on the crop; but we had a reasonable harvest. Grandpa and Grandma really helped keep the details running on the farm when I was flying back and forth between Houston and the farm. It was a big year at the University of Houston; as the research I was doing on Covid-19 led to a discovery of a molecule that is a candidate for a therapeutic for the virus by inhibiting the binding of the virus spike protein to the human ACE2 receptor. We got a patent on my discovery and are exploring future plans for development. Hannah is a junior/senior at Texas AM. She now has moved into her own apartment and she really appreciates that. John Welch had a successful but stressful year in which his company leaned on his loyalty and sent him to Austin as a construction subcontractor to work on the Tesla Giga Factor on the night shift. This was in a sense an opportunity, but really, it was a sacrifice as all his friends and family are here in Clear Lake and he had recently bought a condo and established deeper ties. We are all hoping his company helps empower him to stay in Clear Lake. Finally, Jacob is a senior in high school! That is hard to believe. He enjoys Latin and the Troubadour choir. Somehow time is racing bye; even faster now that society is coming back up to full speed. Batten down the hatches and hold on; I think 2023 will be even crazier!!

 

¶ 7:42 AM

  Wind Change from 80's F to 15 F in 1 day Jacob and I went exploring as the weather changed from summer to winter in 1 day.  

¶ 12:31 PM

  A Happy Day Elizabeth Craft and Kevin Moody were joined in marriage on January 8th, 2022. What a blessing to see our daughter and Kevin together. They are really good for each other. The ceremony was inspiring and Christ’s love was present for everyone there. It was at Second Baptist in Corpus Christi and we had both Kevin’s family and our extended families from Kansas and North Dakota come to the wedding. As many of you might have known, they had to delay the wedding for a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic; so this day was long in anticipation.

Overlooking the Bay
Kevin and Elizabeth had selected a venue at the Art Museum of South Texas for the reception. The evening overlooking the bay and the USS Lexington made for a special night.
 

¶ 7:52 AM