Category Archives: family

family, miscellaneous

Too Busy To Write

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Not going to review this one. I read it, a thin volume, over five or six busy days.

That’s the problem right now, I have too much to do to do any writing. I think it was Tuesday that I put the finishing touches on the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 7. Since then, I’ve done no writing. Well, I spent a little time in The Key To Time Travel, taking care of a few loose ends, especially in the dates that Eddie travels to. But I did nothing to get ready for this blog, wrote no letters, nothing.

I did finish a writing book, titled The Writer’s Notebook. I won’t review it here. It was marginally beneficial. I gave it to my granddaughter Elise, who has also read it and said she got a lot out of it. Maybe she’ll be a writer someday.

The busyness comes from our daughter’s family’s upcoming move, currently scheduled for late this month. I’ve been pushing everyone to sort and pack the small stuff. Sort into keep, donate, discard. And the keeping stuff has to be marked for storage or temporary house.

They had done a lot before we got here twelve days ago, but there is much to do. Everyone has pitched in. Saturday was a major effort. Lots of books gone through, Legos boxed, messy piles gone through in bedrooms. Even yesterday saw some work done. Saturday #2 grandson, Ezra, and I took a modest load of stuff to a thrift store. Hopefully today I’ll be able to take a load of books to a Christian school.

Of course, everything is a mess at the moment. Boxes everywhere, some sealed, some not; some assembled, some waiting for assembly. Many more in the garage, though not even close to what will be needed.

Many Wal-Mart runs later, with many meals cooked and eaten, rides to and from school, and errands run, and we are down to the last few days of this trip. We’ll head home for some appointments, then be back here to help with the final move. That will be about a ten-day trip, shorter than this 16-day one. That will include helping them into the new place.

Writing tasks will begin again later this week, probably on Friday. I’ll report in then.

family

A Productive Two Weeks

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Nuisance on the floor next to me, tired after walking 1.91 miles.

We drove to Texas on Tuesday, March 28, to help our daughter out while her husband is away, beginning his pastoral ministry at a new church. We head home on Friday, April 7 (out daughter’s birthday). It’s been a good two weeks. Busy, but good.

I’m starting this post at noon on April 5th. I’ll have to interrupt it to walk the dog, eat lunch, and do some yard work. I’ll schedule it to post on Friday. But let me tell you what has gone on and edit it tomorrow to add a little more.

Walking the dog has been one of my main jobs during this stay, along with cooking and dishes. The dog, which I have nicknamed Nuisance,  is a handful. She’s big at 65 pounds, likes to play by biting you, and is just a nuisance all the way around. The first day we were here I walked her about a mile. Her walks aren’t for doing her business, which she will only do in the back yard. The walks are for getting some energy out. With no dog parks nearby, the walks are in the neighborhood.

That’s good. The slopes are gentle, and so long as I don’t push it on the uphill slopes, the angina doesn’t come on. The second day I went a little further with her. My natural pace is slower than what she wants to go, so she was constantly pulling. Anytime we passed a side yard and dogs were in it, a sniffing episode followed by much parking and pulling resulted.

Day by day, I learned where the dogs were and adjusted our route to stay away from them as much as possible. And I began to lengthen the walk. By the sixth day we were going 1.75 miles. She had adjusted her gait to mine (for the most part) and didn’t pull as much. My legs felt stronger most days. After Saturday, that is, when yardwork before the walk caused me to struggle that day.

As soon as we got home from the walks, I fed her. She ate and drank voraciously and hurriedly, then found a cool place on the floor to take a nap. For me, more work kept me from taking my nap.

We just got back (now on Thursday) from our last walk on this trip. Nuisance is lying on the floor right next to my chair. I think she has come to like me more than I have her. Tomorrow we head home. We’ll be back later in the month and do the same thing. So she has lots of walks with me yet.

I should probably hate to say this, but I won’t miss her in between these trips. We understand each other a little better. And I’m glad for the exercise these walks have given me. But I’m still not getting a dog.

Bible study, family, travel

On Duty

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Three of these are our grandkids. The oldest is a teen, so not in this children’s program.

My wife and I are on grandparent duty, again. Our son-in-law has taken up his new pastorate, further south and east in Texas. The family won’t move until school is out. He will follow a schedule of two weeks in the new location and two weeks home until they make the final move, probably near the end of May.

Since that left our daughter alone with the four kids, we came to dusty, dry, and windy West Texas to help her out. I’ve been taxiing kids to school, taking them to the library, reading with them, and being chief cook and bottle washer for 11 days.

I’m also getting some work done. Did my stock trading each market day. Worked on my Bible study book each day. Following up on author items. So it’s not been a bad gig. And with our daughter here the work is spread out a little more than when we babysat the grandkids for 11 days not all that long ago.

We head home on Friday. Hopefully I’ll get a better blog post done in a timely manner for Friday.

family, travel

The Dance of a Thousand Tumbleweeds

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Well, we got back home late Saturday evening from a 2082 mile road trip. Yesterday was mainly a restful day, including church. Monday will be getting back to normal.

We left home midday on Tuesday, Feb 7, driving to the Oklahoma City area. After dropping our recyclables at the great OKC drop-off center, we met up with Lynda’s step-sister and husband who live nearby in Norman. We hadn’t seen them since Sept 2020. The purpose of the visit, besides catching up, was to deliver to them a box of music we found at our house that had belonged to Katie’s mother. It had been left at our house years ago and was overlooked when we were going through Lynda’s mom’s things.

We spent the night nearby, and continued to Big Spring, Texas. The next day, our daughter and son-in-law left for a 10-day mission trip to Thailand. That left us watching the four grandchildren, three cats, and one dog. Oh, yes, and one bearded dragon. For twelve days. Twelve days of taking kids to school, seeing that they took care of their pets, their lunchboxes, and clothes.

A couple of years ago, when the kids came to visit us, I created the rule that they had to read 30 minutes in a book—a print book—before they could get their screen. I didn’t get any pushback from them, and that’s been a rule for a couple of years now. I made that the rule in their house during our surrogate parent gig, but we did it in the afternoon rather than in the short time between rising and leaving for school. They also had to clean litter boxes, feed pets, and do some room straightening up.

Both Lynda and I were able to spend some good time with each child. Lynda did the daily reading with the youngest, both after school and before bed. Then I laid down with him and sang him to sleep. I read the Bible with the second oldest book, took him to boy scouts, and had some good conversations. I took our only granddaughter on an educational walk around the neighborhood. We had a number of conversations, and worked together to clean up a major mess in her room. The oldest boy, a freshman in high school, spent a few nights away at a friend’s house, and had a friend over one night. He and I had one particularly good and important conversation the day after the parents got back. It went well.

The cats were not a lot of work for us, as the kids do most of what’s needed. The dog was another matter. I walked her around noon every day. She’s a big lab mix, 66 pounds of muscle and excitement. The walks were generally a mile to a mile and a half. I came back really tired; she came back barely winded. One day another big dog hopped the fence of its yard and rushed us. I was barely able to control Nuisance (my nickname for her) until a neighbor, who I think was actually the owner of that dog, got it under control.

We were able to keep up okay with laundry, school requirements, church activities. We also got a lot of cleaning done, things the parents can’t really get to with their jobs. At the end of the time, we were quite tired but feeling good about a job well-done.

Two other bits of excitement happened. On the first Monday, I had a crown pop out. Fortunately, I was able to get into a dentist the next day. The crown was still good. The dentist re-cemented it fairly easily. Then, the second Saturday morning, Nuisance ate a box and a half of dark chocolates left out by one of the kids. We had some anxious moments trying to find a vet who could help us on the weekend, but were successful at that. I had to miss some of a church activities. The dog survived and soon thrived again. The grandkids were not disappointed that we missed some of their activity.

On Wednesday, Feb 22, we drove from West Texas to Santa Fe NM to see Lynda’s brother. Intending to drive home on Friday, we extended our stay until Saturday. It was a good visit. I got out of the house a couple of times: once to the library, once to get a Dunkin. Our drive there was an adventure in itself. It was the day of the big windstorm. We drove through Texas and New Mexico in much wind, sometimes having to slow down as if we were in fog. Then, as we got closer to Santa Fe, the winds increased and the snow started, the winds blowing it horizontally. We passed through one snowstorm, had blue sky for a while, then had another, more intense storm. The snow never accumulated on the roads, but was being caught by fences along the right of way.

We spent the drive dodging tumbleweeds as best we could. At Vaughn NM, we got out for a pit stop. The wind was near hurricane force. We made it into the store and back into the car, afraid we would be blown to the ground. After Vaughn, we saw an amazing thing. The wind was so strong that, instead of blowing tumbleweeds across the road, it was tearing the tumbleweeds apart. The smaller pieces—still recognizable as mini-tumbleweeds—no longer in pieces big enough to catch the wind and whiz by, seemed to dance across the highway, bouncing a few feet, then bouncing in place a while before moving before the wind. It was like a dance of a thousand little tumbleweeds in front of us. Quite exciting to behold, had I not been hanging onto the steering wheel for dear life.

Our trip home on Saturday was relatively uneventful and, for me as the driver, relaxing compared to every day of the trip before that. We got in about 10 p.m., having lost close to 1.5 hours of time with stops related to picking up some items that were supposed to be delivered to us at Christmastime.

Would we do it again? You bet we would. For our kids and grandkids we would be temporary caregivers/guardians in a heartbeat. For the pets, well, let me thing about that a little.

family

Very Late

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Well, here it is Friday evening and I just realized I hadn’t done a post today. It’s been busy. Our son is visiting us from Chicago, here for a few days to help us out as my wife convalesces following her pacemaker surgery. I’m sorry to not have a real post, but it will have to wait until Monday.

family, Health

A Comedy of…?

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I think that line is usually finished with “errors”. A comedy of errors. Though I don’t remember exactly why or where that comes from. Maybe Shakespear. No matter.

That’s what yesterday morning was: a comedy of something. Problems. Troubles. Difficulties. Setbacks. I have to go back a few days to set this up—which I will try to do succinctly.

Lynda has had heart troubles for a while, mainly a-fib. At the same time she had high blood pressure and took a medication for that, or maybe it was two medications. One time she blacked out while walking the neighbors’ dog and fell face-first on their driveway.

When she was in the hospital in April 2020 for her burst appendix, her heart acted up. They worked on meds for that, eventually figured she needed an ablation, had that, and seemed a little better. Her episodes of a-fib slowly became fewer, less frequent, and less severe. But they still came, even more than a year after the procedure.

Then Sat night/Sun morning, she had a severe episode of her heart racing then stopping. I don’t mean stop racing, but stop all together. That kept her up in the night, but she was better by morning. Then it happened again on Sunday afternoon and on Monday sometime.  Talks with the staff of her primary doc and cardiologist brought different answers. When it happened again Tuesday as we were about to eat supper, we went to the ER at our closest urgent care facility.

They were able to get an EKG just as an episode took place. Sure enough, we could see speeding up followed by missing beat. They decided to admit her to the main hospital, and took her by ambulance. After a few hours of monitoring, they decided she needed a pacemaker. But that couldn’t be done till the next morning, Wednesday, and would be followed by 24 hours of observation in the hospital.

I spent the night with her Tuesday, rushed home Wednesday to see to my meds, brush my teeth, get a few things; got back to the hospital literally two minutes before they wheeled her over to the OR. As the day went on she seemed ok and would likely be released on Thursday as planned. So I went home around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

That brings us to Thursday morning. Through a Messenger post, I learned that her heart was still racing some, making her sick, causing her to vomit and not keep her med down. I gathered the things that would be needed for her discharge, got in the car and—it wouldn’t start.

What now? It didn’t sound like a dead battery. I called AAA for a tow. Right as I was talking to their automated system, Lynda called to tell me what was happening with her. So I didn’t really hear what the auto system said, just that someone was coming and would be there in an hour. Lynda thought her discharge was still possible.

Great. My wife is sick in the hospital and I can’t make the 20-mile drive to see her. Then I remembered that our old minivan was back in running condition. Barely, but I could take it to get her. Except, AAA was on their way. And it had started snowing. One thing not working on the old minivan was the windshield wipers. No, I couldn’t take that.

Who could I call? Several people in church would help, if available. Maybe the shop would give me a loaner, though last time I needed one they didn’t have one. Hmmm. This was a major stress point for me.

Then things turned around. AAA got here, tested the battery, said it was bad, jumped it, and it started right up. It was a nearly 6-year-old battery. I drove it the four miles to the Dodge dealership and they got me right in. I drove back home, took care of a few things, and headed to the hospital.

It turned out Lynda’s pacemaker was working properly, but those gadgets are for the purpose of stimulating the heart when it beats too slowly or when it skips a beat When her heart started racing, it was also skipping a beat and the pacemaker kicked in. They control the proper beating of the heart with a combination of the pacemaker and medicine.

Except she was nauseous and couldn’t keep the medicine down and they didn’t want to re-start the IV to give the med intravenously. Problem upon problem.

Eventually, as the day wore on, she got a shot of anti-nausea medicine. She felt a little better as that kicked in and was able to keep her next heart pill down. By evening, she was much better and they were ready, not to release her, but move her out of intensive care. I went ahead and went home. As soon as I walked in the door, the hospital called. No, nothing was wrong. They told me they had finally moved her to a different room.

What a day it was. Problem upon problem. Except, one business adage is that there are no problems, only opportunities, right? Sure didn’t feel like it at the time. Her heart racing to 170 beats per minute. The car not starting. The nausea. The despondency that caused. The hours ticking by with no apparent solution coming. None of that felt like opportunities.

Our children called, which helped ease Lynda’s mental condition. A good friend from church, a woman whose husband was ill and had just been released from the same hospital the day before, called and prayed with her on the phone. Lynda’s brother called a couple of times. And, through social media, she was able to see an outpouring of love, prayer, and support.

Problems make you stronger, right? Perhaps so, but I never want to go through a day of problems like that again. Maybe some day we will look back on yesterday and be able to say it was a comedy of problems and laugh about it.

Maybe, maybe not. I just hope we don’t go through anything like that again.

Christianity, Christmas, family

Christmas Memories: Church

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The Epiphany was less elaborately decorated than this church, but the decorations seemed sufficient and appropriate.

In a number of past posts in Decembers previous, I shared Christmas memories. I had thought of doing another one of those posts this year, but am not sure what to write about. I’ve covered such things as the way we did our wrapping paper, how we bought and decorated the Christmas tree, the idea of progressive decorating, and the candy house. What else is there to write about?

I’m writing this on Sunday evening. Today we had an excellent service, the guest speaker being Dr. Mark Lindstrom, our former pastor and now district superintendent. Then our adult Sunday school class had its annual Christmas party, something we hadn’t had for a couple of years due to the pandemic.

Church growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, meant services at the Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal church. Our church was more English Catholic than Protestant. We attended Christmas morning when we were young, but I remember the year we were first old enough to attend Midnight Mass. That would have been when my brother was around 7 or 8 I would guess. I remember it was a normal work night for Dad, so Mom’s parents came from Providence to get us and take us to church.

I remember the church was nicely decorated with garlands, wreathes, and votive candles on the ledge of each stained-glass window down each side of the sanctuary. The decorations were not as lavish as churches put up now, but they seemed appropriate to us. I guess I ought to say to me, as I can no longer ask other family members about it.

The processional was “O Come All Ye Faithful”. That was different than the processional for morning service, which was “Sing, Oh Sing This Blessed Morn”. But that song wouldn’t have been appropriate for a nighttime service.

About 3/4 of the way through the service, we sang a slow version of “Silent Night”. On the second verse, the house lights slowly started to lower. By the third verse they were out completely, and only light was from the candles on the altar and the votive candles. I remember how beautiful it seemed. A few years later, when I was an acolyte at Midnight Mass, I was the one to control the lights, and was quite nervous about doing it right.

When mass was over, many families exchanged presents. I don’t remember us doing that. What I do remember is that Dad was at the back of the church. The Providence Journal let him off early from his shift, and he came straight to the church.

Once we began attending Midnight Mass, Sunday morning became a little different, but that’s a memory for another day.

family, reading, The Forest Throne, travel

A Pleasant Weekend Behind, Crunch Time Ahead

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On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.

Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.

I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.

We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.

I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.

Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.

The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.

 

expatriate life, family, letters, Stars and Stripes, The Forest Throne, travel

More On Those Three Special Projects

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Back on September 26, I posted about three special projects I was involved in and how they were keeping me from writing. The projects were:

  • inventorying the Stars and Stripes newspapers before donating them to the University of Rhode Island Library.
  • Digitizing years of printouts of letters, as a deaccumulation project.
  • Finishing the Kuwait Letters book and make it available to family members.
These newspapers, on which Dad set type in Africa and Europe during WW2, are on their way to their new home and, hopefully, permanent place of preservation.

I wrote about each of these projects in the previous post and won’t detail them here.

By a strange set of coincidences, all three projects finished on Friday, November 11.

I finished inventorying the Stars and Stripes not too long after I made that post in September. But the newspapers sat waiting on me to make up my mind whether I was going to ship them to the library or not. I hemmed and I hawed. I carried two of the three boxes upstairs. I gave it much thought. Did I really want to trust this precious cargo to a shipping company? At last I made a to-do list of all the things I have to do and included shipping them.

Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.

When I saw the large number of tasks I must complete, I decided to go ahead and ship them. I self-scheduled that for Friday afternoon and brought the last of the boxes upstairs from The Dungeon. I loaded them in the car and headed to UPS. I wasn’t impressed with the people there and how they might handle them. They recommended re-packing the newspapers in their boxes, which provides better assurance of safe delivery (and insurance against damage). I decided to go ahead and do it.

I left the boxes there. Due to busyness on UPS’s part, I wasn’t able to hang around and supervise the transfer to new packaging. I’m trusting that they will do it right and, when they are delivered this Thursday, November 17th, the Library will find them undamaged.

See that tall stack of paper? About half of it came out of old correspondence notebooks.

Also on Friday, around 9:00 a.m., I completed scanning the printouts of emails I found in a thick, bulging, 3-ring binder. These were from 2002 to 2005, consisting mainly of e-mails and messages that I sent or received when I was a member of and later moderator/administrator of a couple of poetry critique boards. I wrote a little about that in this post. The letters were arranged more or less chronologically, but were interspersed with printouts of poetry critiques I made during that time. Those critiques, posted at the poetry boards, might be considered correspondence but I chose not to do so. I will deal with the critiques some time in the future.

That one notebook is now devoid or letters. It is full of those critiques, but they are consolidated from two smaller binders and are in an arrangement that I can tackle with less effort sometime in the future.

These are not all the letters I need to digitize, but they represent the lion’s share of them. I have one other notebook that contains letters from about 1990 to 1999, a mix of typed, handwritten, and e-mail letters. I started on them Saturday. But it’s just a 3/4-inch binder and will be short work. I hadn’t even counted them as part of the special project. Why? Because this binder is small enough that I won’t mind if it stays on the shelf for several years. It won’t, but it’s not part of the special project.

The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed.

The other special project was my book of correspondence, The Kuwait Years In Letters. I’ve blogged about this several times, one of the best of those posts being here. When I wrote that, in June 2022, I had the proof copy in hand. My wife and I were either just starting or well along in the proofreading process. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. But before publishing, I decided to ask the family about the cover and if they wanted changes in that. Yes, they did. I put together four alternate covers, and they chose one as the best.

I uploaded that cover to Amazon, and it was approved with no changes. I again sent it out to the family. My daughter liked it, but found one typo on the back cover. I fixed that on Friday night, and uploaded to Amazon. Since the only difference between that cover and the last one was a single letter on the back cover, I knew it was going to be accepted. I went to bed Friday night knowing it was all over but the ordering. Sure enough, I started Saturday morning by looking at an e-mail from Amazon. The cover was accepted and the book published. I quickly ordered family copies. Once they arrive and are in good condition, I will unpublish the book.

So, in a 14 hour time span, those three special projects that were preventing me from doing much writing came to a close. I will continue to worry about the Stars and Stripes until I hear from the Library. I will continue to scan a handful of letters most days, probably into early December. I will anxiously await the arrival of the Kuwait Letters book and the family’s reception of it after Christmas.

But I think, now, I will feel much better about carving out time to write. When will I start? Maybe as early as today. The Key To Time Travel awaits my attention. Eddie is in trouble, and I need to figure out how to extricate himself from it.