I’m writing this post Sunday afternoon, just in case I’m not able to write more before my deadline.
The last two days have been strange. I have been beset by waves of tiredness. Part of it is we are dog-sitting for our neighbors. We’ve done this before. Rocky is now getting older (like us), and makes fewer demands on us than years ago. Still, there’s walking him. That forces me—and Lynda—to take him out. Yesterday the app on my new Samsung phone had discovered workouts amounting to over a mile.
I found myself exhausted by 4 p.m. yesterday, and today I was exhausted before leaving church. Yet, Saturday was a good day of accomplishment. I started with my weekly accounting (spreadsheet) for stock trading. I had a mistake somewhere, but was able to find and fix it. Next was going through books on my literature/writing bookshelf in the storeroom to see what I could get rid of. I brought a couple of dozen books up to the garage and inventoried them.
I’m working on transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia in anticipation of putting them in a book for family members. Though similar to the project I did a couple of years ago with the letters from our Kuwait years, this is, I think, a bigger project, one that I’m tackling at a slower pace. On Saturday I transcribed 5 or 6 letters from 1982. Alas, the 1982 pile doesn’t look any smaller than it did two weeks ago.
I took Rocky outside to drink up the sun while I did some yardwork. That included transplanting one tiny evergreen tree from where it shouldn’t be to a place where I hope it will grow. One down, three more to transplant. I also was able to pull weeds from front yard, staying ahead of the main weed growing season.
In the afternoon, after yardwork, I was able to take an hour to write a section in the Bible study I’m writing. That was sort of unexpected, as I wasn’t sure I’d get to write at all yesterday.
We began moving a few things back in place in our master bathroom. The water remediation work in that part of the house is done but we put off moving our stuff back due to the work involved. But we got a little done.
The evening was dedicated to studying to teach Life Group today (Sunday). I don’t know that taught a very good class, but at least I was reasonably well prepared.
So that was a fairly full day. I suppose the tiredness was earned, not a result of sickness or something unexplained. Today was less busy, as a Sunday should be. I just got back from walking Rocky almost a mile, and we’re both tired. I’m glad we have enough leftovers that I don’t have to cook.
Possibly I’ll revisit this in the morning before it posts, and see if anything should be added.
As I write this on Thursday evening, I’m too tired to think. The last two nights included sleeplessness. Tuesday night after around 3:15 a.m., Wednesday night after 2:30 a.m. The reasons are complicated and don’t need to be stated in detail.
Wednesday morning, I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. I finally got up around 4:30 and went to The Dungeon and got to work. I was reasonably productive, writing over 2,000 words in my work-in-progress before I was too tired to go on. Last night, I got up around 3:20, got shoes and a shirt on, and went outside to complete a task—yes, outside in the dark. Then I went to my chair instead of back to bed and tried to sleep there. I may have slept some, but not much. About 6:15 I gave up trying, got fully dressed, and went to The Dungeon.
I got some writing done, but not much. I ate breakfast as usual around 9:00, met with the contractors doing work on my house, then was back in The Dungeon at 10. The writing was simply too difficult to concentrate on in my weakened condition. I gave up around 11, went to the sunroom to read, and fell asleep. I managed a 30 to 45 minute nap in the blissful coolness of the rainy day.
At 12:30 p.m., an e-mail arrived announcing some good news. That kept me going through my afternoon meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes, my writing critique group.
But, alas, I have no mind for a post other than this one telling you why I have no mind for a post. So I’ll click “publish” without proofreading. I’ll proofread tomorrow, early I hope, and make any edits required.
Here’s to hoping I’ll be able to post more intelligently on Monday.
Sometimes a partial sun, sometimes darker clouds on my Wednesday walk.
I just got back from an afternoon walk, the first since last Sunday. Various circumstances prevented me from going on Monday and Tuesday. I hoped to get in 1.5 miles, which would be the longest since my stroke.
But before I could walk, I had to figure out how to dress. The temperature was 72º with a 10 mph wind plus gusts. Should I put on a long sleeve shirt over my t-shirt? Change out of the t-shirt into a long sleeve shirt? Or just go as I was? I decided the breeze wasn’t all that strong, and a t-shirt was enough.
Step by step, I made my goal distance.
I didn’t bother with a warm-up since my normal pace these days is really at warm-up speed. Out the front door, up our steep driveway and to the left, uphill to where the flatter roads are. After passing three unbuilt lots on both sides of the street, the first thing I noticed was that my neighbor’s trash can was out, and it had been emptied! I hadn’t put mine out since I figured trash was delayed a day due to the Presidents’ Day holiday on Monday. I obviously didn’t get the memo that the trash company did honor Presidents’ Day.
I made it uphill without any angina. It’s not all that steep, but last summer and fall even a gentle walk up this hill brought the pain on. I checked my speed on my phone app, and it was 2.5 to 2.6 mph. That’s about where I wanted to be so, since there was no angina, I decided to push it just a little. Or at least keep pushing myself at that speed.
Trash day, and I missed it. Next week will be overflowing.
Out onto the main road, I turned west, intending to go to the top of the next hill—a fairly gentle slope—go down a little and around a circle, coming up to the same top of hill. I checked my watch, and was surprised to find a screen showing with my heart rate. This is a new watch, synced to my new phone. My cardiologist suggested I get one that did EKGs and tracked the heart rate. I didn’t realize that if I opened the Samsung walking app the phone heartrate tracker would also open. My heartrate rate 93 at that moment. I decided to keep pushing.
My thoughts wandered to the many things on my to-do list, some fairly major things. It is similar to a storm. Some of those things are:
Keep pushing contractors to finish the water remediation work in three places in our house, and do some repairs in another place that involves some remodeling.
Keep pushing the contractor for our gutter replacement to come back and finish the temporary solution he put in while I was in the hospital because the proposed solution wouldn’t work.
Push my proposed flooring contractor to call back so he can come out and give me an estimate for replacing our 38 year old carpet with flooring. I’m about to go to someone else.
Continue with PT for my injured shoulder from last June. Twice a week at the clinic, every day at home and now added exercises twice a day.
Get ready for a heart valve replacement, probably in July. Hopefully this won’t involve open-heart surgery.
Plan a road trip back east to see our son and do other things. Hopefully it will be before the valve replacement.
Short on sleep for the second night in a row; not sure why.
Donate our ancient minivan; it’s no longer road worthy.
Keep pushing forward with my book, which is drawing close to halfway done.
Keep pushing on my two special projects.
Keep pushing on dis-accumulation, which does indeed require constant pushing.
Make a major financial decision that will take some research.
Yes, all these make up a storm. As I walked, I remembered a post here about turning into the storm when the storms of life beset you. That’s what I’m going through, and I decided I would do that when I got home. First thing would be to pull out the vehicle title and call the Salvation Army. Alas, their phone system didn’t work either locally or nationally. I may have to find a different place.
Gotta call that contractor and have this temporary solution changed to a permanent one.
I rounded the circle and made the uphill leg, without stopping for breath. Normally I have to do that, so maybe this indicates I’m in better physical shape than five months ago. Or maybe it’s just that warmer weather brings on the angina more than cold weather.
As I headed up to the next leg of the walk, I heard a loud sound like thunder. Impossible, I thought. The thin clouds all around barely hid the sun, the disc being clearly visible. It must have been one of those empty trash cans blowing over and echoing.
My next thought was how much I love this walk in winter, mainly because I can see through the woods. Houses show on side streets and even across the valley. Hollows are not just opaque with undergrowth, but you can actually see down them. Evergreens are visible scattered within the naked hardwood forest, and how I enjoy seeing them.
On the return leg, just as I passed the street before the street I turn on before I turn onto our street (is that clear?), I heard another thunderclap. No mistaking it this time. It seemed to come from the south, so I made a note to check radar when I got home.
As I walked the homeward leg, every empty trash can laughed at me. The sky continued to belie any thunderstorm approaching, and my watch told me my pulse was 105. I stopped at the mailbox and retrieved one lousy little piece of junk mail that would go straight into recycling.
Just at I turned down the drive my app announced I passed the 1.5 mile mark. Goal met. No angina. Heartrate about where it should be. Just a slight sweat on my t-shirt. Thirteen cars passed me during the walk (yes, I count the cars)—no fourteen. That delivery truck on the street before ours. I have turned into the storm.
Oh, when I got home, the “all clear” report came from the mold specialist. One hurdle in remediation cleared. Now, if only the Salvation Army would either answer their phone or fix their website.
After having had a busy, family-full Thanksgiving week, it’s going to be a quiet Christmas at Blackberry Oaks. Lynda and I will be here alone.
That’s fine with both of us. If yesterday is any indication, we aren’t as able to do a lot as we used to be. I started my day at 6:00 a.m. after a great night’s sleep. I was in The Dungeon by 6:15. I edited the last two chapters of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. That was the only writing task I had for the day, so I moved on to other things, mainly looking for a lost box of letters. I looked for that yesterday so I could file one stray letter, but I couldn’t find it.
This morning I widened my search in the storeroom, and found it in a place I hadn’t looked yesterday. In that process, I saw four boxes labeled “travel items.” They were boxes of travel brochures we had picked up over the years and, rather than go through them and decide what to keep, what to discard, I just shoved everything into boxes to go through them in the future.
The future came yesterday. I went through the boxes, pulled out everything that wasn’t worth saving, and consolidated the rest into two boxes. That allowed me to do some rearranging of the shelves, including temporary repairs to one shelf. Then it was time for me to make the weekly grocery run. Then back to The Dungeon after lunch, for miscellaneous computer tasks, along with finishing the clean up from the morning’s work in the storeroom.
When I came upstairs around 3:00 p.m., I went straight to the sunroom with my last coffee of the day, hoping to read five to ten pages in The Confessions of Stain Augustine. Instead, I promptly fell asleep. I could read only two pages, as my mind and body conspired against reading retention.
We had planned to make lace cookies in the afternoon, but neither of us had the energy. Hopefully tomorrow.
But the day was productive. One editing pass done through a book finished last week. The clutter reduced a little more. The pantry and fridge adequately stocked. A good afternoon nap for both of us. We’ll get those cookies done tomorrow.
My next blogging day is Monday, Christmas day. I don’t expect many people to be tuning in then, so will say Merry Christmas now. May God bless you on the day we celebrate Jesus’s birth.
I asked my granddaughter to do a sketch for the covers for the Bible study series. This is her first cut at it.
My to-do list remains long. About every two weeks I start a new one, taking the one just done, transferring uncompleted tasks to the new list, and adding more. I suppose the habit is a continuation of my engineering career, and hard to break. Yet, I’m sure thinks would fall through the cracks if I didn’t organize the things I need to do. Like this morning, as I’m writing this in The Dungeon, I see on my computer desk a business card for the auto dealership where I have our vehicles serviced and realize I need to add calling them to have our minivan in for an oil change.
This week, I finished two tasks that I will today cross off the list. The first was writing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. It’s always good when I finish a book. As I work on a book, I will add it to my to-do list. The entry for this one would look something like:
write AWTHW M T W R F Sa
Each day I would then cross out the day as I did my writing work. I may have a future blog post that says more about the specifics of how this book came about, how the writing went, etc. Suffice to say for now that it came together fairly quickly.
Now the editing starts. I’ve been editing as I wrote, so I’m a little further along than I would typically be with most books at the first draft stage. Last night I emailed it to my beta reader, so things are truly in motion. My next to-do list will have this entry:
edit AWTHW M T W R F Sa
Before too long, I’ll have a to-do list with the following:
create publication files for AWTHW
As for the second task, that is to finish scanning a large notebook of genealogy papers, saving them to my electronic filing system, and discarding the files and the notebook. This is part of a larger project to reduce the amount of possessions we would have to move in a future downsizing—an event that is not on any to-do list and is unlikely to be for a couple of years. I’ve already done that to 15 or so notebooks before this one.
This notebook contained information on relatives in Lynda’s paternal like, the Cheney family. It was kind of a difficult task. My electronic filing system is really set up for ancestors, not relatives. Therefore, I found this notebook harder to deal with than the others.
But I figured out a way to get relatives in an ancestors filing system. I don’t remember when I started on this task. The notebook is (or rather, was) thick, with loose papers as well. It was probably two months ago that this item first appeared on my to-do list:
scan/save/discard Cheney relatives papers M T W R F Sa
I took several breaks when other tasks took precedence, such as when family was here over Thanksgiving. But my revised filing system worked, and slowly the notebook emptied out. I finished the last of the bound papers on Wednesday, leaving only the loose papers to go.
Alas, yesterday the scan-to-computer function quit working. I’m not a tech guy, but I was able, in about 20 to 30 minutes, do some diagnostics and get the scanner and computer recognizing each other’s existence and get back to scanning. I got a few more pages done, leaving only around ten loose papers for today. As I won’t be doing any book writing today, I should easily be able to get all those done and check this task off the list.
Of course, that will not be the end for these two over-arching tasks. My to-do list is upstairs. Next time I go up, I’ll find it and bring it down to The Dungeon. I have two new items to add to it.
edit AWTHW F Sa M T W R
begin scanning next genealogy notebook
So one task leads to another, and the to-do lists never end. Still, I’m feeling good about things. I’m slowly getting done what I need to do.
Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.
As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day.
Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.
Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.
Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.
From time to time, life gets so busy that I fall back to a habit that served me well in my engineering career: making a to-do list. Not that my days are really so busy that I miss deadlines, doctor appointments, club meetings, etc. Those are relatively few in number, and easily remembered—at least those happening in the next month are.
But as I look around the house, I see lots of things that need doing. Some are small things, but they pile up. It is a needed task to clean up as much as I can before company comes Thanksgiving week. Here in The Dungeon, if I look over to the left, the worktable with our printer has piles of papers. The biggest pile is scrap paper, being kept for printing drafts of my writing for proofreading or critiques. It’s ugly, but it’s going to stay. Next to it is a notebook of genealogy files that I’m slowly scanning and saving to the cloud so that I can get rid of the paper. Also on that table are a few miscellaneous papers that I need to file. One is a charitable donation receipt I need to put with the 2021 tax returns. So far I haven’t felt like dedicating the two minutes needed to do that.
That work table also has two bank statements to file. That’s another two minute task I just haven’t felt like doing.
A little farther away are bookshelves lining the basement family room walls. At one time these were nice and neat, separated into fiction and nonfiction, and alphabetized. They may still be mostly that way, but years of reading and re-shelving, selling or donating, pulling other books from boxes, have resulted in some loose of organization. Fortunately, correcting that, while a big task, isn’t urgent.
What is urgent? Filing receipts! I suppose that’s number one. Many things I used to file have gone digital. Yet there’s still a big pile of them to file. Most of them are medical, the papers you get with each prescription. Some are medical info, others are receipts. Others are grocery store receipts, travel receipts, a few insurance statements, and a few brokerage papers that we haven’t yet switched over to digital. Once I set my mind to it, I can have these all sorted, ordered by date, and filed in about two hours. Maybe that will be a Monday task.
Then there are all the things involved with home repairs. We are inching forward with gutter and downspout replacement. My water damage restoration contractor bailed on me, so I’m having to go through it all again with a new one. I hope to hear something this week from him. And I still need to get the floor guy out here to figure out if I’ll be able to change out the ancient wall-to-wall carpet with modern flooring after all the other work is done. I guess I need to carve out a little time today to figure out which number I called was him and call to set up an inspection time.
Then there’s flu shots. We normally get them in early October, but couldn’t this year and I haven’t made appointments since then. That might be a today task as I can do that online. Oh, and the Silver Dragon need some routine servicing. I think Wednesday is free, if I can make an appointment on Monday. Oh, year, just remembered: I have some over the counter things to order as part of our Medicare Advantage Plan benefits. Better do that today as well.
Somewhere in there I need to work in some stock trading. The latter is mostly Monday through Friday, only 15 min to a half hour a day, plus an hour wrap-up on Saturday.
See why I need a to-do list? I have to grind through these things, trying to get everything done without letting something fall through the cracks.
I’m going to end this blog post here, and do those on-line things while I can. I hope on Friday I can post that I got lots done, and feel less stressed about everything.
Where the extrovert goes to talk, and the introvert goes to read.
An introvert and an extrovert walk into…let’s make it a coffee house rather than a bar. They are not together but arrive at the door at the same time. The extrovert pulls open the door and holds it for the introvert, who says thank you. They stand in line together, get their coffee at about the same time. The coffee shop is kind of crowded, with almost all tables having someone at them, so the extrovert says, “Let’s sit together at that empty table.”
The introvert has a book under his arm, and was obviously hoping for a quiet time of reading and sipping his large house blend, but doesn’t want to be rude, and so says, “Sure.” They sit together and the extrovert keeps up a steady conversation between occasional sips of his latte. The introvert says little. He has placed his book on the table, hoping the extrovert sees it and recognizes what the introvert wants.
Fortunately, before their coffees get cold, the extrovert sees a friend enter the shop, excuses himself, and goes to the newly arrived friend. The introvert heaves a sigh of relief, picks up his book, and begins to read.
Is this a realistic scenario? To me, who sits well out on the introverted side of the spectrum, it seems about right. I’m obviously not an unbiased observer.
But it seems to me that the introvert sees an extrovert and, rather than say, “Why can’t you be more like me, just keeps to himself and lets the extrovert do his thing.
Coffee, a book, and solitude when you want it or community when you want that. The introvert’s life.
But the extrovert, encountering the introvert, not only says, “Why can’t you be more like me,” and then sets out to convert the introvert to the extrovert’s ways, insisting he join a group of six other extroverts for community.
Am I right on this, or am I being too harsh on the extrovert, or perhaps not understanding the extrovert at all?
At a literary agency blog that I follow, the post this week had to do with ways and means of marketing our books, but slipped in this statement:
A high percentage of writers are introverts, yet even they crave community…just on their own terms.
And I thought ain’t that the truth?
You ask what’s the point of this post? Maybe nothing. Perhaps I’ll print it out on cardstock half-size sheets, carry them with me, and the next time an extrovert tries to draw me out in a coffee shop, hand him or her a copy.
Three posts ago, I wrote about a reunion I helped facilitate between my wife and an old friend, who was also an old friend of mine. Along the same vein, but different, was something that happened over the next few days. Let me set this up.
The man on the left is my dad, Norman Todd, somewhere in Europe during World War 2. Who are the other three?
I found the photo at the right in a box of photos at Dad’s house when he died. Dad is on the left. The other three men were mysteries. The photo was taken someplace in Europe. Once Dad was assigned to the Stars and Stripes, he was in Algiers (briefly), then Anzio beachhead, then up the boot of Italy with the mobile publishing unit, then southern France in three different places. Readers of this blog have heard all this before, at posts at this link.
I wondered who the other three men in the photo were. Most likely they were Stars and Stripes staffers, but who? And was there any way to find out?
Perhaps the most famous part of the S&S staff was cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Dad was at the same location Bill was on V-E Day (May 8, 1945), but how long they served together and in what locations was a mystery. Dad told me that Bill sometimes had him model for some of the Willie & Joe “Up-Front” cartoons.
I wonder if Dad modeled for any of these Bill Mauldin cartoons.
Bill is so famous that from time to time a post about him shows up in my Facebook newsfeed. I always comment on them about Dad’s connection to Bill, hoping someone will respond. Not that I think any of the men in the photo are still alive (unlikely) but hoping that someone would say something to me that might help me either identify the men in the photo or hear something that might bear on Dad’s war service.
One of those posts came up this week. A post by Grand Comics Database, showing a Bill Mauldin cartoon of Willie and Joe, the two sad-sack soldiers featured in his “Up Front” cartoon series. A number of people posted to it, and I added this comment:
My dad was a typesetter for the “Stars and Stripes”, in N. Africa, Italy, and So. France. He knew Bill Mauldin and was friends with him. Dad told me Mauldin often had him pose for the cartoons.
One woman answered with the following comment:
Your dad must have been in the same group as my dad, same countries, same background. Bill Maudlin drew this picture of my Dad on an index card, in pencil.
She added the cartoon.
I then took this to Messenger and sent her four photos of Dad with other men, including the one above. There was a delay of some hours, when she messaged back:
The man on the right third pic…is my Dad! what a shock to see him in your pictures. It is a small world.
later adding:
just could not believe I was looking at my dad’s picture, when you sent that one. I only had a few of him during the service and unfortunately he passed when I was only 13, so not enough years to know too much about the war….
His name is Fred R. Unwin. Born in London, he made his way to America (part of the story I still need to learn) and was indeed with the S&S in Europe. After the war he stayed in printing (as Dad did), as a pressman and later a supervisor, in Chicago and Phoenix. I’ll get some more info about him as our conversations continue.
Robyn sent me some photos of her dad, and I said to Robyn:
So, shall we call ourselves Stars and Stripes cousins?
She, of course, said yes. Thus now we are cousins.
When I made that post, I had hopes but no expectations that anything would come of it. But two men in the photo are now identified, Norman Todd on the left, Fred Unwin on the right. Will the two men in the middle ever be identified? Possibly not, but I feel good about having one more known, against the likely odds.
Juanelle and Lynda. First time they’ve seen each other in 47 years.
We came to Branson, Missouri for a combination of writer’s conference and time away from home. We’re staying in our timeshare. Internet has been spotty, which is why I didn’t write a post yesterday or today. I may have to find a Dunkin’ and use their internet. Right how, as I’m writing, we seem to have a strong signal. Just as well, because as a result I have a different post to make.
Another part of the trip was a meet up I arranged between my wife, Lynda, and a long-lost friend, Juanelle. They were best friends in Kansas City before I met either of them. Both RNs, they worked together as teachers in the Research Hospital school of nursing. They ate lunch together, hung out, and had much in common. Juanelle attended Kansas City First Church of the Nazarene at the time, Lynda attended Rainbow Blvd. Church of the Nazarene.
Lynda and Juanelle on our wedding day.
It was at First Church that I first met…Juanelle, not Lynda, in a singles Sunday School class. About eight months later, I met Lynda, at a national singles retreat held by our denomination. Image, we lived five miles from each other and we had to go to Glorieta NM to meet. We hit it off, and were married in January 1976. Lynda asked Juanelle to be her maid of honor. Here’s a photo of them on our wedding day. It was not too long after that that Juanelle moved from KC to California, and we didn’t see her and somehow didn’t get her address.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Through one of Lynda’s cousins visiting Juanelle’s church, we reconnected. Then we moved and she moved and we lost connection. Then I did some internet sleuthing and found out her contact information. Juanelle’s husband had just died. I wrote her a letter on behalf of Lynda and me. Some time went by before we received a letter from Juanelle in the mail. She had just moved from California to Springfield, Missouri to be closer to family. Springfield, I thought. Why, that’s just a two-hour drive from us!
Lynda and Juanelle in deep conversation while the rest of us talked among ourselves.
To shorten this story, I finally arranged a meeting with Juanelle. She came to Branson with her brother and sister-in-law, and we had a long lunch and getting reacquainted time. Three hours went by very quickly. I figure it was just over 47 years since Juanelle moved, after which until today we never saw her.
Here’s to meet ups with long lost friends. May we meet up again at least a few times before the great reunion in heaven.
