Identification & “What’s that?”

We humans like–well, some of us more than others–to categorize things. And people. Especially other people, but also ourselves. I think many of us crave identification with a group. We’re tribal, and we feel comfortable when we can give ourselves a label that validates our group membership.

We like to identify with our team. For example, I consider myself a St. Louis Cardinals fan, although I haven’t kept up with them closely in recent years. Doggone-it, they have so many new guys that I don’t even know, and I do sorely miss my man Furcal at short. Hard to believe he was only with them for two years. Time does strange things, but more on that later…

We can identify with our locale, either current or past. I’m a rural Missourian.

We might identify with our occupation. I was a homeschooling mom. Now I’m a… hmm… well, I’m not exactly sure how to end that sentence. = )

But I can say that I’m a Christian, specifically a (marital status) married, (age) middle-aged, (race) white, (socio-economic level) middle class, (political leaning) conservative, (religion) Protestant evangelical Christian, and I’ve been thinking about how those kinds of identifications, group affiliations if you will, change over time. Hitting the big Six-O has given me opportunities to reflect on both some serious things–like where and how I now fit (or don’t) in the various groups I’ve always considered myself a member of–and some other lighthearted, hard-to-believe, head shaking things.

For example, I recently overheard a grandma saying something about a telephone to her seven-year-old grandson. He said, incredulously, “TELL-a-phone?!? What’s that? Is it like a regular phone?”

And the icebreaker in our small group last week was to “share something about yourself that most of the rest of us don’t know.” Since in a previous discussion I had already mentioned to this group my standard response to such an assignment, my early-teenage ability to ride a unicycle–and yes, I did own a unicycle, and while I couldn’t do anything fancy on it, I was able to successfully mount, ride forward (preferably on a slight uphill), and dismount–I struggled to come up with something about me that would really wow the gang. But aha! An idea crossed my mind, and I said that I had toured Cape Canaveral, assuming this amazing factoid would make a significant favorable impression on my fellow groupies. But a twenty-something husband and wife both gave me intense quizzical looks, and then she said, “Cape Canaveral? What’s that? Is it a name?” Shocked and slightly deflated, I explained that it was a space center in Florida where the Apollo rockets had been launched that sent the first men to the moon.

I thought to myself and did not say, “How can anyone not know the significance of Cape Canaveral?” But granted, it was more than 50 years ago. And for that matter, how is it that I can even remember something that happened fifty YEARS ago?!? People who recall things from that far back are, well, old. Although, in writing this post I looked up “middle age” and found that wikipedia, that ultimate source of all wisdom, says,

“Middle adulthood. This time span can be referred to as ‘middle age’ and has been defined as the time between ages 45 and 65.”

So I am officially middle aged, and, as I told my parents over a decade ago, in our family we’ve decided that you’re not old till you’re 80! Just think what ancient things I’ll be remembering then! Rotary dial phones, cassette tapes, paneled walls, cellar doors, small electric appliances (think mixers, irons, toasters, can openers) that last 20 years instead of 20 months, TVs that only get three channels, auto radiators made of metal instead of plastic, Lincoln Logs made of wood instead of plastic… And I could go on to mention things that will be truly archaic when I’m old, things like gasoline-powered cars, cell phones, laptop computers…

Oh, what the heck. Maybe I’m just due for a nostalgic hour of wandering around in Dick’s 5 & 10!

Any guesses?

Do you have any idea what this might be?

Here it is with a pencil for perspective.

Hint: It took me 20 minutes to create it.

I know the pictures are kind of blurry. My phone couldn’t figure out which part of the redness to focus on. And yes it really is true red. Again, it wasn’t worth pulling out my big camera, so the color’s not exactly accurate…

No guesses?

Are you giving up?

Well, OK. I’ll just go ahead and tell you. It’s all the fuzzy pills I shaved off my red sweater!

Doesn’t it look great?!? I’m so very pleased, and now I’m ready to tackle my blue one. = )

Nobody here but us chickens

We’ve had snow on the ground for seven straight days so far, and even though I think the temp got up into the 40s today, there’s still plenty lovely whiteness to be seen. Unusual for here–well snow, period is unusual for here these days–it’s a very dry, powdery snow, and when I drove by Tracy’s house on the way to do a few things at the church yesterday and saw her vigorously sweeping snow out front, as I honked I thought, Yeah, makes sense; a broom is as good as a shovel for moving this stuff.

When I passed back by again on my way home, Tracy was nowhere to be seen, but her unique and oh-so-perfectly-appropriate creation forced me to pull in for a picture out the passenger window.

Yes, it really is a snow chicken.

And how she managed to build that impressive fowl escapes me. Even though we’ve had eight inches of accumulation here in “the Shade,” nobody’s made any snowmen; it just won’t stick. But when Tracy gets an idea, I can testify that her incredibly strong will absolutely WILL make a way. In the realms of animal husbandry, buying and selling, construction, cooking, decorating, and re-purposing of anything and everything, there’s nothing she can’t do and won’t try, given enough time, money, creativity, and sheer grit, whether it’s covering her ceiling with salvaged doors, turning a grain silo into a wedding reception serving station, or hatching goslings in an eight-cubic-foot incubator in her living room.

So no, I can’t say I was surprised by her snow chicken, just duly impressed. Here’s a closer cropping of the bird.

Tracy raises chickens, you know. Lots of chickens. More than 50. And a goat and a pot-bellied pig named Turtle and four ducks and two geese and several guineas. Plus their bulldog, Rosemary. So what’s one more chicken among all those?

38 days

I wanted to send Josiah a gift for his birthday, hopefully something that would delight him, and I had an idea of what I’d like to do. I did some fun shopping, some creative wrapping, and some tedious packing, and then on January 12, I took the box to the Rockaway Beach post office and mailed it.

[Note: Jo has told us that at his own mailing address he can receive ONLY cards and letters. Anything else, like a box of any size, needs to be mailed to the address of a friend who can receive packages. That’s why I addressed this particular birthday box to both her and him. After a truly maddening and convoluted four-attempt delivery of an Amazon package to Josiah via said friend at Christmas, I decided that the Taiwanese postal service might be more likely to get this box to the correct address if it were addressed to the actual resident at that address (Katy Levinson), and I included Josiah’s name so she’d know it wasn’t for her.]

In addition to the above-mentioned Amazon fiasco, Christmas also involved significant delays in getting packages from Walnut Shade to Jessica and her family in Hong Kong, so, since I pride myself on learning from past experience, I decided to guarantee a my victory in this game of international shipping and receiving by mailing Josiah’s birthday box way too early. That way he’d be sure to receive it well before his birthday on February 17.

I also sent him a birthday card, although I don’t remember what day I mailed it, and on February 11, Josiah sent me this picture of the back of the card’s envelope with the comment, “That’s a very shallow root system.”

I was pleased that he really liked both the photo on the front of card and the notes we wrote on the inside. = )

And then I asked him if our package had arrived, but no, it had not. I was quite surprised and a bit disturbed. It had been mailed a month earlier. Where the heck was it?!? Well, at least it was still six days til his birthday.

I called Josiah at his midday on his birthday, and we had a long, enjoyable conversation. I really do like to get to talk with that man. And then I again asked if he had received his birthday box yet? Sadly, no, he had not. Bummer. Although I was pretty disappointed, I consoled myself and told him (and me!) that it would surely show up some day, and when it did, he’d have what I hoped would be a pleasant surprise. Alas and alack, with kids living in southeast Asia, shipping challenges just seem to be par for the course, and I’m sure a global pandemic hasn’t helped anything.

I recalled a situation with Scott’s dad many years ago. I had mailed a letter to him and Mom when they were living the COWWDNS (“Country of Which We Do Not Speak”) and they received it some five months after I’d mailed it, and on its way , it had gone to some completely other country… I don’t remember which one; maybe Cambodia? Mongolia? Russia? Anyway, I mentally settled in for Jo to be opening his birthday gift in April or May. At least the contents of that box weren’t perishable!

Then very early on my February 18 — which was the evening of his February 19 — Jo sent me this picture, which totally made my day!!!

Yes, this was the inside of that much-anticipated birthday box. It took 38 days to get there, but oh, Hooray!

And then that evening he sent a WhatsApp message to our family group saying that he was “Getting around to opening now – starting with ‘something (and round) soft’ 🤪.”

So Katie, Jessica, and I were able to video chat with him while he opened — and approved of — each item: a couple of eminently tactile dish scrubbers (which, remind me to describe his dishwashing situation), a re-packaged bag Combos (you’ve gotta save space with international shipping), a square of raspberry chocolate, two bottle stoppers, a packet of peanut butter M&Ms, and a mini-griddle. Josiah seemed quite pleased with the various items, and I was thrilled to learn that Taiwan’s 110V, 60Hz power should enable him to safely operate his mini-griddle.

So the four of us had a grand time visiting and laughing during the opening ceremonies, and there was only one minor problem.

It was about 10:30 PM Thursday evening here, 11:30 PM for Katie in Virginia, and 12:30 PM Friday in both Taipei and Hong Kong. It being midday there, while we were video chatting as Josiah opened his gifts, Jessica was hanging laundry out on their balcony. They don’t have a dryer, so everything gets hung up to dry – either out there or, when it’s rainy, inside their apartment. Ezekiel (20 months old) had been out there with her, but he was throwing things off the balcony, a BIG no-no. To punish him, she sent him back inside and closed the sliding door. But evidently she closed it too hard or something, and it latched. It locked shut. With Jess outside and Ezekiel inside alone. Now, Jessica’s not one to panic. She just said, “I’m going to have to drop off the call; I’ll get back on once I get inside.” She called Matthias who was at the base and told him he had to come home (I think it’s only a five-minute walk, perhaps less if you realize your very bright and curious toddler is suddenly wandering through the house unattended) and let her in, which he did.

Oh yes, and about Josiah and his dishes. He lives in a very nice little apartment, basically one living room/bedroom with a kitchenette and bathroom. It’s all sleek and modern and neat and clean, but get this: he has no hot water in his kitchen sink! Nothing’s broken; it just wasn’t designed that way. (Perhaps the kitchenette was an after market addition?) Not only does the kitchen have only cold running water; it also has only one sink, which can make rinsing a bit challenging. There is hot water in the bathroom sink and of course in the shower, so although the apartment is small enough that the two sinks are fairly close to each other, the whole process of washing dishes is pretty convoluted, what with trying to use hot water to rinse them before, wash them, and then rinse them after. I think Josiah sometimes does dishes in the shower!

Thankfully, his mini-griddle is non-stick, so hopefully clean up will be easy.

And thus ends the saga of Josiah’s Happy Birthday box.

Lower than a limbo bar

When I got up this morning here’s what our digital thermometer said.

Yes, you are reading that correctly. It says NEGATIVE 14.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That was at 5:45 AM. And then at 6:55 AM, once it was light outside, I took this picture of our analog thermometer on the smokehouse.

In all my 60 years on this planet, this is the coldest weather I have ever seen.

After re-shoveling the path to the mailbox and carrying out our outgoing mail for me, Scott swept the blown snow off the porch so I could walk my circuit without slipping. However, even though there was no wind and I was all bundled up and walking fast, after only three minutes, my hands and nose were numb, so I punted my fifteen-minute mental health goal and came back in. = {

I must say that Scott has done LOTS of other helpful things for me today, enabling me to stay warm and dry while enjoying all the lovely scenery. (I am so very blessed.) He has…

• knocked all the snow off the Durango
• shoveled paths to and from everything we’d like to access
• driven me to the bank and Walmart — where he scanned and bagged an $87.72 cart through the self-checkout for me because they only had one regular cashier line open, and you can imagine how long that line was. I don’t like self checkout and will only use it when I have five or fewer items. We had 30.
• filled the bird feeder
• checked the propane
• taken out the trash
• and probably numerous additional husbandly tasks that I haven’t yet noticed or given him credit for.

We are grateful to be safe and have electricity, water, and warmth. We know people who’ve been without one or more of those amenities in the past 24 hours.

And speaking of warmth, when you live in a 109-year-old, three-story frame house, with a propane furnace for the bottom two floors, and a heat pump for the top two, if you don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on utility bills, you learn to practice CCC (creative climate control), and sub-zero temps really force the issue. In “normal” winter weather — which this clearly is not — we usually leave the attic heat pump set at 60 all the time, and we keep the first floor furnace at 65 all the time, except when we have folks over, in which case we set the furnace to 72 or to higher numbers for visiting oldsters. The other exception to our 65-during-the-day policy occurs when Scott happens to want it warmer and cranks it up to whatever he deems comfortable. = ) We also run an electric space heater in our office as needed.

But now we are dressing in layers and playing thermostat roulette.

Aside from preparing food, eating food, and cleaning up after said prep and consumption, we’re pretty much always on the second floor, either in our office or in our bedroom, each of which is currently outfitted with one of our ancient of days electric space heaters. Note that we’re not doing any laundry these days because we learned the hard way many years ago that the drain line from our washer freezes when the temp is below 15, and trust me, there’s nothing quite like a washer tub full of sopping wet laundry that you can’t drain, spin, or dry. Basically, we’re living out “The Wise Old King” song: “And when we’re up, we’re up” (so we close the downstairs vents, set the thermostat at 60 or lower, open the upstairs vents, and run the space heaters)… “and when we’re down, we’re down” (in which case we temporarily turn off the space heaters, close the upstairs vents, set the thermostat at 65 or higher, and open the downstairs vents)… “and when we’re only halfway up, we’re neither up nor down” (meaning that when one of us is up stairs and the other is downstairs, we open everything, run everything, and do our part to help the White River Valley Electric Cooperative and Town and Country Propane employees send their kids to college).

Factoid of Interest: We’ve found that even with super cold temps overnight — and with our bedroom space heater turned off, the downstairs thermostat set at 58, and the upstairs thermostat set at 50 — our bedroom stays a toasty (and almost overpowering for the post-menopausal member of our marriage) 72 degrees.

I’m not a super fan of the bitter cold, but by all means, let it snow!

Let it SNOW!

It’s been pretty nippy around here the past few days. In fact, we haven’t gotten above freezing for several days, and the wind has really been whipping. Our friendly KY3 meteorologist, Brandon Beck, has been talking to us about snow in the near future. I’m aggressively hoping against hope.

I am also a creature of habit. Every morning I read the Bible and pray and review my memory verses. That’s for my spiritual health. Six days a week I do a 45-minute workout at the Branson Rec Plex gym for my physical health. Then as soon as I get home from the gym, I take a 15-minute walk to the gate and back for my mental health. With each of those three habits, I experience some initial inertia; it’s sometimes hard to make myself get started. But once I’m fully engaged and on a roll — and especially once I finish — I feel great. This is especially true of my fresh air walk. It’s only 15 minutes and 3/4 of a mile, but because it’s such an essential part of my morning routine, I was a bit disappointed when we had we had freezing rain earlier this week. Although it didn’t knock the power out and it didn’t really cause any significant driving problems, the glaze on grass, gravel, and dirt, coupled with high winds made walking on Coffee Road pert near impossible.

But… my mental health definitely did NOT want to give up my walk, so I needed to improvise.

If I can’t walk on the dirt road, where can I walk outside that’s flat, not too windy, and has safe footing?

Hmm… how about the porch?

This has turned out to be a brilliant idea! Our porch is 21 feet long and 7 feet wide, and by moving the furniture (porch swing, rocker, table) to the middle, I created enough room to make an oval track where I can walk at about the same pace I use on Coffee Road. As a bonus, I get to watch the traffic go by, an experience I haven’t had since I stopped walking on the highway shoulder two years ago. Here’s the view from the flag end…

… and from the grill end. Note the flag action.

So I’ve been walking laps on the porch circuit for the past few days.

Then last night — Saturday night, the night before Sunday morning church on Valentine’s Day, immediately after which service our church would be having a special “Love One Another” luncheon for which I had prepared and would be bringing a pan of gooey triple chocolate brownies — yes THAT Saturday night, I saw this weather forecast. Note the projected low temp for Saturday night and the expected high for Sunday afternoon.

So, it was 6 degrees and snowing nicely when I left home, brownies in tow, at 8:44 AM. I found the core church folks busy in the kitchen, as would be expected, and Pastor Barb looked up at me, surprised, and said, “Oh! Did you not get the text? It was just sent.” Well, no, it turns out I was driving when it was sent at 8:46. It said, “Good morning LCC FAMILY.CHURCH IS BEING CANCELLED DUE TO THE SNOW AND FRIGID TEMP. PLEASE WATCH SERVICE ONLINE AT 10 AM ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. STAY SAFE AND WARM.”

Well.

A canceled church service is always unfortunate, but at least the worship team was still practicing, so I did get to go in the sanctuary and enjoy 2.5 minutes of half a song. Meanwhile, Cheryl froze my brownies (plus all the other freezable luncheon ingredients), we each took some of the salad that wouldn’t keep till our potential luncheon re-schedule date two weeks out, and I got to drive back home through lovely swirling snow. = )

I’m now typing this at 2:30 Sunday afternoon, the “warmest” part of the day, and the current temp is a balmy 9 degrees with a wind speed of 12 mph. A very fine, dry, windblown snow is coming steadily down. I wanted to show you our current accumulation, but since I already went out a few minutes ago to measure the porch, and since I don’t want to face the -6 wind chill again any time soon, I channeled my Golden Retriever and took this picture from the front Zoom Room window.

Oh, Brandon, may your most extreme prognostications come true; rejoice with me, Katie, Jessica, J.R., Terryl, and Dolores; and by all means, LET. IT. SNOW!!!

The wooden ruler

See, I write our church’s bulletin. It’s a standard 8.5×11″sheet which gets folded in half, and the layout of the left side always stays the same. Only a bit of the left’s content changes week by week. Hmm. It’s hard not to think politically when one types a sentence like that.

As I was saying, the right side is free formed, involving three, four, or sometimes as many as five paragraphs, each of which is a very short article about some upcoming something we want our people to know about. On a three-article week there’s more vertical white space between paragraphs than on a five-article week, the reason being that it’s very important to me that the top and bottom of the right side’s text line up exactly with the top and bottom of the its static partner’s text on the left. And I have figured out a nifty way to assess this: I put a ruler against my computer screen along the bottom of the left text and then adjust the line spacing on the right till the right text is hopefully perfectly aligned with the left.

BUT… (you knew there was a but coming, right?) But my ruler is an orange plastic jobbie that’s been around for a L-O-N-G time, and I think it may have been exposed to excessive heat somewhere along the way — not Lake of Fire kind of heat, but maybe it’s just that summers in my lap drawer are really scorchers? — because it’s somewhat warped, and that makes it hard to get my two bottom lines accurately aligned.

So I had this brainy idea to buy a WOODEN ruler, one which would always have a true line and maybe even one of those nifty metal edges. Ooh!

Most everything being plastic nowadays, I figured I’d either have to go to Dick’s and pay, as my dad would say, “retail plus 10%” or look online. Sure enough, I found ’em at Amazon but only in 3, 6, 20, 25, 60, or 72-count packages. Since I only needed one and definitely didn’t want to pay more for shipping than the cost of the ruler (and no, thank you to Amazon Prime), I decided to wait till my next Walmart run — which would’ve been today, but with the roads ice-glazed following a lovely night and a day of off-and-on freezing rain, I stayed home all day — and it’s a good thing I did.

I had fun today dealing with lots of little pending tasks: filling the med boxes, washing the lettuce, doing a load of laundry, packing the 60-year old nativity set that belonged to Scott’s folks to mail it to his brother, making salads, researching bulletin paper, watering houseplants, stuff like that, and as I was putting away the small stack of leftover name tags from our Raising Disciple-Makers seminar last weekend, what to my wondering eyes did appear in the far back of my second desk drawer, but TWO old-fashioned wooden rulers. HOO-RAY, HOO-RAY!!!

I’ve migrated one to my lap drawer where he’s cheerfully whiling away the time between now and his first bulletin aligning session by playing nicely with his curvaceous orange plastic friend, and I don’t have the shame and embarrassment of buying something I already have on hand — like peppercorns.

I did it again!

Sigh.

But I think I only did it once… well, once this week.

I do like freshly ground pepper and lots of it, in my scrambled eggs, in certain soups, and especially on my salad. A few weeks ago, I went to refill my pepper grinder — I say my because Scott never uses it — and the container of peppercorns was nearly empty. A travesty! So onto the whiteboard on the fridge “peppercorns” went. That note was then transferred to my index card shopping list, and on a nippy Wednesday morning a few weeks back, I scanned the shelves at Walmart. No, I wasn’t interested in the upscale, multicolored, more expensive peppercorns. For me, Tone’s black would be fine. But oh rackum frackum; they were out! Or were they?

I could write an extensive treatise on my love/hate relationship with Walmart; with their discontinuation of products I depend on, with their constant relocation almost everything except the checkout registers, and with their tendency to have bygones reappear weeks or months later with no warning. But this post is actually not about Walmart. If it were, I could also say a lot of WONDERFUL things about quite a few of their employees: Kaycee, Stacy, Bob, Greg, Kathy, Jane, Sandy, Susan, Alisa, Gwen…

When I couldn’t find the peppercorns, I crouched down and dug around and eventually in the far back found their one and only container of Tone’s black, and grabbed it. Back home I opened it, filled my pepper grinder, and put the now three-quarters full container on the shelf in the pantry. Mission accomplished.

Until a couple weeks later when I needed to check if we did or didn’t have another jar of peanut butter, and as I was perusing the bottom shelf of the nonperishable foods rack in the playroom (and no, we didn’t need any peanut butter) I saw behind the applesauce… Scott’s stomach could go wonky… and cherry pie filling… I might need to make a dump cake on short notice… a brand spanking new container of Tone’s black peppercorns! AARRGGH!!!

But I narrowly escaped on the wooden ruler.

Since I love to learn

Here are a few things I’ve learned lately.

1. I like to eat meals in bowls.
2. I emphatically dislike waking up when my alarm goes off and realizing that the previous night I unknowingly set it for an hour too late.
3. When our master bath toilet’s flush handle doesn’t work, it’s because the rod gets hung on the water intake tube.
4. I want to use print, not digital, versions of maps and Bibles.
5. Although I wish I weren’t there, I am clearly in the generation that strongly prefers email to Facebook.