Thinking about Cambodia again today. We’ve got word that quite a few of the children, including my friend Chanra, are ill with unexplainable high fevers. They will be going for blood tests tomorrow. I remember when Julia was only about 4 years old and had recurring high fevers and we couldn’t find any cause for it. It was a scary time. Imagine having 20 + children and five or six of them sick like that… Please join us in praying for their quick return to health. And let me know if you enjoy the slide presentation that my friend Trish put together for our talks this weekend. Click the link below for a quick visit to Prek Eng, Cambodia, orphanage houses Jeremiah’s Hope and Joshua’s Hope.
Category: Uncategorized
Cleaning the Counter
I’m constantly shuffling papers on my kitchen counter. The mail ends up there, telephone messages, church bulletins, cash register receipts, medication instructions, coupons. I’m just so sick of paper everything. I’m for saving a few trees.The most frustrating thing during my latest sweep was a product registration form – let’s call it a prf – that gives no clue what the product was. Evidently we bought something that could be registered. That sounds quasi important doesn’t it?
Well, I wonder what it was??!.
I’m so glad that failure to register it doesn’t affect it’s warranty rights. How can I send it in when it quits working if I don’t know what it is? What if it goes rogue and starts killing people and they won’t be able to notify me of the recall because I haven’t registered my whatever-it-is?
Spanish speaking people buy a lot of these too because it’s a bilingual registration card. How handy. They’re covering all their bases, well, except for telling you what it is you’re registering.
Hmm… in the trash. I’m just sayin’…
I’m an Artist, kind of…
I tried a new thing today. Trying new things is good in that it gives me exercise in facing fear and helps me know that I am not yet an old dog, because old dogs cannot learn new tricks. Today I face painted.
This was a volunteer job – I could have chosen other activities to oversee but there is just something in me that never quits wanting to be artistic. So I volunteered to do a shift at the face painting table and gave myself a week to figure out how to do it. Thank God for the internet. There is a nice lady who has done quite a few videos on face painting and I spent an hour watching her talk about it. It helped even though I would rather have watched her DO it on faces. There are people who make their living painting on people, which is really kind of unbelievable when you consider that the paint always gets washed off relatively soon.
It’s kind of a big deal when you know you’re going to hold someone’s face in your hand and attempt to paint a picture on it. You have to get really close to this person (this is where the phrase “in your face” actually has some meaning). No one likes to sit still for very long so it’s got to look like whatever it’s supposed to be on the first try. And you must deal with the person as well as deal with the paint. Both can be challenging. Often I was able to talk children into the picture I knew I could paint – say a star, or a flower.
The boys were the hardest since not many of them ask for stars or flowers. “I want to be Spider Man” he said. I looked at him for a long, awkward time and then referred him to a book of faces on the table. I have to confess I do not know what Spider Man’s face looks like – at all. He found a picture of a red face with web-like lines and evil eyes that really looked more like a devil than a spider but I decided if he liked it I could do some modifications. I’m not one for making small children into devils. He ended up being very red and webby and evidently it bore some resemblance to the arachnid hero because he was quite pleased. Boys like dolphins too. I was also asked to do a snake on an arm which I did in a beautiful periwinkle blue with black stripes. Boys will be boys.
Mommies get their faces painted too. They sometimes have to show their children that it doesn’t hurt and that it is cool. One Dad had his bald head painted. It was a pumpkin. I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful canvas he made. I’m not sure this would be my choice for a profession, but I did get an inquiry as to whether I could do a birthday party next week. That at least makes face painting an easier job than selling Mary Kay. I’m just sayin’ maybe I will order some paints of my own….
November Plans
Since our staff turnover seems to be continuous, I thought it would be good to clarify my request for time off during Thanksgiving week when Jonathan and Esther plan to visit Florida. I usually get the weekend off but had asked for Friday as well. I planned to work on Thanksgiving itself, get off as early as possible and have a quick turkey meal before heading to the airport to pick up the visitors. I am excited to say my plans have changed.
Today, I heard that there is a Bluegrass Festival in Myrtle Beach, S.C. over Thanksgiving week and if all goes well my employer intends to be there. I, on the other hand, will be in Bradenton and off work from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving until the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Imagine my surprise and delight. I had to keep from doing a dance in her presence. Instead I calmly remarked that the schedule would work well with me and I would do whatever I could to assist her and the new nurse to get ready for the trip. It does sound like a fun trip for her and I’m glad that she may get to go – for my reasons as well as hers.
This Beautiful Place
This picture of a setting sun over a lake and wooded horizon is from my summer visit to Wisconsin. One of our last days there the family went up to a resort on Lake Owen called Garmisch. It’s very German and the main lodge, high on a bank overlooking the lake, definitely shows the European style. The restaurant there has always been one of our favorites and I would say that I’ve probably gone there every time I’ve visited home in the last twenty years. Every year I say I’m going to get a room and stay there sometime. Every year I dream of taking a kayak around the lake. It’s such a beautiful place and I just wanted to give it credit. And here are a couple more of my best pics of Garmisch.
A Strange Day
Really it was a good day – I don’t regret anything about it. I did start out with a prayer that it would be time well spent so I’m going on faith here and feeling free to enjoy it as it was. But it was strange.
My thinking was that I would change what was happening in the lanai (closed in screen room, for you northerners). It has become a storage room of sorts which would be okay if it didn’t have glass walls that leave all my stuff in view from outside and from the living room. Typically people sit in their lanai and have morning coffee, looking out at palm trees and outdoor critters and birds and enjoying nature. When it’s cool enough, you open the sliding glass doors and let the breeze blow in. This is typical of most everyone except me, because my windows are so dirty and water spotted from my irrigation system that I can’t see out of them. And I don’t often open my glass doors because my screens fall off. The project was going to be washing those windows and storing stuff elsewhere and having a beautiful, inviting room at the end of the day.
I moved all my outdoor plants away from the windows to begin washing. I had to get the leaf blower out to clean off the sidewalk. I had to rearrange the shelf to find a cord for the leaf blower. Actually I spent about an hour in the garage cleaning off several shelves and boxing up my canning jars. A reality check revealed that I was not out washing windows like I was supposed to be so after a second cup of coffee I re-focused. All my plants that I had pulled out on the yard looked so bedraggled and in need of care that it overwhelmed me. I went inside to work from the other direction. I took a few things off the lanai floor to store in the garage. One of the things reminded me of an email that I needed to answer so I did that for an hour and kind of forgot about the lanai. Then I remembered and went out once again with my third cup of coffee to decide what I could do. My pantry is in the lanai so I decided to clean, consolidate and weed out old food products. I made an overwhelming mess taking things off the shelves. Some of the items needed to go into the kitchen storage so I went there and ended up cleaning several cupboards in the kitchen. I found two huge, opened containers of Hershey’s cocoa and couldn’t get it all into one so I had to make brownies and use up the leftover cocoa. I found lots of stuff I didn’t know I had. And evidently I had it for a long time because there were lots of “best used by 2007” and similar messages on the cans and boxes. I got overwhelmed and decided to play the piano and regain my sanity.
This was basically the pattern of my day and in case you’re wondering how I got from washing windows to baking brownies – well, you had to be there. It was a perfectly clear progression. Fortunately it ended with an up-to-date pantry, a new sense of organization, and a list of new “to dos”. I still didn’t get the windows washed.
Storage Wars
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I watched (once) one of those reality shows recently that follows several groups of people who bid on storage rooms that are up for auction due to nonpayment. It was sort of interesting to see them sizing up the contents without actually being able to paw through. It made me think of our own storage room that was mistakenly put up for auction back in 1987 and how painful it was to discover half of our earthly belongings suddenly gone – an empty room. Somebody got a real deal there with all my wedding china and flatware, quite a few family antiques, furniture… I’m getting sick thinking about it.
Lately, with an art project in mind, I’ve been looking for old window panes. I’ve been going to a couple of the places on my route to and from work – after three years of passing them by and thinking how interesting their junk looked. They are little shops, usually old houses, with collections of odd things, old things, used things, and thrift store stuff. Honestly, they kind of suck you right in with charm and mystery. I did find some window panes that were slightly rotted, paint curling, glazing half gone and glass partly broken out but I decided that $45 was a bit much for what I was getting. (So if you’re getting old wooden windows replaced – do not throw them in the garbage because you can practically pay for your new windows by selling the old ones!!!) My biggest problem, besides the price of the windows, is that I almost always find something else in the store that I can’t pass up.
This week I stopped in at the Hard Times Trading Post for a look and was greeted with “hi-welcome to our new shop-we’re working like the storage wars show-there’s something new here every week” and then she took a breath. I thought to myself that maybe it was high time I got on the good end of the storage war process. There had to be something that I really wanted here if I looked it over very meticulously. And I mean meticulously, because if you just walk around looking, it will all seem like junk. You have to look at each item as if it were the only thing on the shelf, or in the bin. My first good find was a great 4 person tent. It is so new that some of the guy lines were still factory wrapped. It had been put up at least once because there was an empty plastic water bottle in it but it’s in perfect shape. Ten bucks. I grabbed it.
Another item that caught my interest was a motorcycle helmet sitting on top of a bookcase all by itself. Julie has been wanting us to go for a ride on her bike but she has only one helmet. I took a picture of it and sent it to her. Phone cameras are so convenient for times like this when you need an expert opinion on something. Unfortunately, the expert didn’t respond until later that night when she told me that brand of helmet often costs over $200 and I should get it. I had to work the next morning but a friend stopped in and got it for me. Twelve bucks. I checked online and saw the same model going for $269.00 new.
Stopping there just might be my new weekly treat.
Thoughts on Usefulness
I screw up fairly regularly, and it happened again today. It’s a hazard that comes along with being kind of good at a lot of things but not really good at anything in particular. I’m often useful and most always dependable but a bit dangerous if a flawless product is needed. I do what I enjoy, even when it’s something simple, because I don’t need perfection and am too busy most of the time to attain perfection. The truth is, I probably need a certain degree of imperfection. All these little “let downs” remind me that very little of anything that goes on is about me.
Recovery is kind of important. I’ve gotten a lot of practice in not falling apart when something goes wrong. Today, I didn’t recover as fast as I would have liked, but I ended fairly well. Endings are important. I often sit in the audience, noticing when something is amiss and finding myself more concerned about how the performer is taking it than the mistake itself. I’m always relieved when I can tell that they are shedding the stress and feeling okay. I don’t really care that they’ve made a mistake, I just don’t want them to be devastated by it. I hope people feel that way when they’re listening to me.
I suppose there will come a time when the stress of doing things and possibly doing them poorly will be more than the pleasure I get from being involved with making music. For now I want to be courageous enough not to quit trying. I want to keep going until I’m all used up and someone boots me off the team. At that point it will be okay. Someone else will need the opportunity. The underlying truth for me is that God, who made music possible, who made me able to hear it, made me able to imagine it performed perfectly even when I can’t accomplish that – He hears it as I imagine it in my heart and we both enjoy it together. With that reality, I don’t even have to be useful. I just have to be. I’m extremely comfortable with that.
Blogging from a phone
I don’t know why I did this (and even worse, I don’t know HOW I did it) but now I can post from my phone. I read the instructions over and over, entered text messages, registered my device, and still couldn’t fInd an icon that would magically take me to my existing blog and not a new one. But fortunately there is a store that I finally went to where I just accepted all kinds of rules that I didn’t read and the free app is mine, a picture icon, right where I want it. Will I like it? I don’t know. I’m developing a bad case of phone dependency… just sayin’.
AAAAaaaaggghh!!!! It set my pageviews back to 0. I was almost up to 3000. I do not have this figured out at all.
$$$ = headache
We have been given an assignment to make ourselves a budget. I’m working on it and I’m getting a bit sick. I recognize the feeling as being the same one I get at income tax time, even when it’s not my job to file. Just the thought of having to come up with any given figure, or produce pieces of paper that prove I’ve earned something, or spent something starts a nervous reaction in my whole person. Headache, anxious stomach, inability to concentrate, irritability and dread hit me with a vengeance.
To make a budget I have to figure out how much we earned and how much we spent over a period of time (I chose the last six months). I spent the last six hours going through bank statements, credit card statements, and pay stubs. I put it all on a nice little spreadsheet. Unfortunately it shows that we spent more each month than we earned. How can this be? It’s very interesting. It’s very confusing. It’s very alarming. My head hurts.
I Just Have to Say... 