Last week, you’ll remember, about the time I was finishing typing my letter, I had re-discovered my pictures from Seattle Filmworks on the computer. Well, I managed to get them onto the hard drive, and now I’ve created an ‘album’ on the computer, which I can view as a ‘slide show’, or download one at a time, and make each picture any size I want--so small it is nearly impossible to see, or so big that only one eye will fit on the screen at a time.
On one roll of film, I took two shots of Lawrence and Norma. They stood in the same place for both pictures, and so did I. On the first picture, they both had their heads tipped just a bit, while on the second, they each straightened up. Now, when the pictures go clicking along through the ‘slide show’, it looks as if Lawrence and Norma abruptly stand up straighter, and, for some reason, this seems to tickle the children’s funny bones immensely. We showed it to ‘Grandpa and Grandma’, who were struck with the humor of it just as much as their grandchildren.
Monday, those pictures all arrived--the real McCoy, not the ‘virtual’ sort--and I put them into my album. Computers are incredible, but, judging from my experience with them, I am much more likely to lose pictures on my computer, than I am likely to lose pictures in my album.
Teddy managed to remove that ‘Registry Problem” off our computer; then everything went haywire and it totally lost its bearings. I mean, it crashed. Big time. Since those two computer technicians who’d previously worked on it didn’t seem to be able to ever completely repair it, we called a friend of ours, by name of Frankie, whom we often tease about thinking he knows everything there is to know. I once sang to him, “I saw Aaron and Moses, playin’ ring around the roses; for I was born ten thousand years ago!--and there ain’t nothin’ in the world that I don’t know!” He just laughs and teases back. The funny thing is, sometimes he does know quite a bit about things.
As I said, we called him. He was soon at our house, checking out the computer. It was worse than he’d expected. After finally getting it to at least run ‘scan disk’ and such like, in which it checks its own programs and repairs any problems it discovers, he was having trouble proceeding further; so he took it home with him. It’s still there; he’ll have to reprogram it, and I haven’t heard how the task is progressing.
While Frankie was in our living room Monday evening, working on the computer on the east side of the room, I was busily arranging pictures on the computer on the west side of the room. Having shot a good picture of Frankie himself at the last wedding we attended, I ‘clicked’ on that picture, and enlarged it until his face filled the entire screen.
Then I cried in mock alarm, “Oh, no!! Just look what this computer has done!”
Frankie whirled around, looking apprehensive. And there he was, staring right back at himself. Hahaha, the look on his face was too, too funny.
Joseph just got himself a prize possession, using his birthday money: a new stereo system. It has three compact disk players, a double cassette deck, and, of course, an AM/FM radio. And great big speakers.
Monday evening, I suddenly noticed that Victoria didn’t look a bit good. I picked her up--and found myself holding the hottest baby I’d ever felt. I hurriedly took her temperature: it was 104 degrees! Rushing into the bathroom, I filled the tub with lukewarm water, put her into it, and then gradually cooled it down. As usual, she stayed her amiable self, with nary a word of complaint coming from the dear little girl. While I washed her hair, I calmly explained to her what I was doing, and gave her a few ‘Eskimo kisses’ to divert her attention from the coolness of the water. When I got her out a few minutes later, her temperature had dropped almost two degrees, which was a relief.
Tuesday, we had a previous appointment with Dr. Luckey for Hannah and Joseph (for her finger and his thumb), so I asked him to give Victoria a checkup, too. It turned out her throat was all red, and her tonsils were swollen, so he gave us a prescription for amoxicillin. Victoria seems all well, now.
Joseph had two warts growing at the base of his thumbnail, and the doctor froze those off. Having heard this news, Joseph’s friends, twins Anthony and Charles, sent him an E-mail: “Joseph! You must quit hiding those frogs under your bed!”
Joseph responded with the following message:
Dear Anthony and Charles:
Ribbet ribbet ribbet ribbet ribbet ribbet rihbet ribbet ribbet........
......hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop hop.................
to which he received this reply:
“Dear Joseph: How many frogs do you have under there, anyway?!!”
By the time we got to see the doctor, we’d been waiting for about two hours, because he’d had several emergencies. So, after looking carefully at the lump on Hannah’s finger, right at the base of the finger where it joins the palm, he told us he would need extra time to do the procedure, and asked us to return Saturday. It would be a delicate operation, because of all the little fragments of joint and tendon and blood vessels in that location, and he didn’t want to do it when he was running so late and trying to hurry. So Hannah went back Saturday morning, taking Dorcas with her to drive home.
Dr. Luckey removed the lump, which was a ganglion cyst, somewhat like the one Teddy had on his wrist, only Hannah’s was hard, and couldn’t be drained with a syringe. The doctor sewed it up with dissolvable stitches and wrapped her hand in gauze, and she is not to remove it until tomorrow. (The gauze; not the hand.) We arrived home five minutes short of four hours after we’d left home. So that removed a large chunk of that day.
I finished Hannah’s dress for the Spring Program, and then, finally, I began typing my father’s sermon notes. I am now going great guns on it, and hope to get done with this particular section in a couple of weeks.
Thursday night, just as I was all primed up to start typing Daddy’s notes, I learned that Joseph needed his report on The Battle of Coral Sea typed. So that I did. It’s an altogetherly exciting story, and was one of the turning points in World War II. I enjoyed typing it, even if it did delay my starting on those sermon outlines.
Hannah was looking up crocheting and yarn companies on the Internet the other night, when she discovered, on a site called ‘Crochet Mining Company’, ‘free digital postcards’. There is a huge selection of pictures to choose from, and by clicking on a little box, one can make it ‘snow’ on the postcard. Another click makes the lakes shimmer and reflect. There is a choice of songs--from classical to up-beat tempo, and so forth. Hannah and I promptly sent cards to Hester, Lydia, and Caleb; and several cousins, nieces, and aunts besides.
In return for the postcards, Jodie and Sharon have been picking wild violets by the handfuls, tying little bouquets together with yarn, and leaving them at my door with notes reading, “To Great Aunt Sarah Lynn, with love.” Even as I type, the delicate scent of lilacs and carpet bugle is wafting through the room, lilacs they picked from my mother’s bushes. Mama told them to pick as many as they liked, and soon their hands were full of the fragrant blossoms. Sweet little girls!
I just received notification that my poem 'My Baby Victoria' that is being published by the National Library of Poetry in the book entitled 'Sound of Voices' will also be read on a cassette along with ten other poems, which means I am in the finals, along with those other ten people. This year, grand prize is $2000.
One morning when I went into Victoria’s room to get her up, her fan was making a dreadful racket. I turned it off. “Goodness!” I remarked. “That doesn’t sound very good!”
Victoria shook her head in agreement. “It sounds naughty!”
At suppertime, she noticed grapefruit seeds on somebody’s plate. “Oh!” she said, “Go give these bird seeds to the feenches?”
Wednesday evening before church, I tried to make Bayou-style gumbo stew. Says me to meself, “Reckon a whole canister of Creole seasoning ’ll be ’nough, hmm?” and I dumped it in.
It was enough.
It was more than enough. It was too much.
Several of us picked cautiously through it; but we couldn’t bear much of it. Since I stayed home with Victoria that night, I spent some time remaking the stew: I cooked two more pounds of vegetables, three and a half pounds of hamburger, and a pound of mashed potatoes. When that was done, I mixed it all together. Voilá!--by the time everyone came home from church, it was just right. Of course, that meant there was about three times as much stew as we needed; so, of course, that meant that we would have leftovers Thursday. And guess what?--it was even better the next day. Evidently the spices had soaked into the vegetables and meat, and everything was well flavored, and the broth didn’t make our hair stand up on end from an excess of spiciness.
After pulling lots of weeds in my flower gardens, I bought flowers and planted them. Do you recall how, last spring, I got all carried away and bought a whole cartload of flowers? And it was entirely too many flowers for me to easily plant in one afternoon? Well, Friday Hannah, Victoria, and I went to the greenhouse. Hannah had a cart, and I had a cart. So.......I filled them both. Now, if one cartload was too much, what do you suppose two cartloads was?? There were 168 flowers. Good grief.
But I got ’em planted, I did! Saturday, I did lumber about rather stiffly; but those flowers were planted. Saturday afternoon, I helped Hester plant morning glory seeds at the base of the trellis that my sister and brother-in-law, Lura Kay and John, gave me for my birthday last October. I hope to plant clematis and wisteria, both perennials, this fall. I like perennials; they come up each spring all by themselves!
While I was planting flowers, Teddy was splitting wood. We had accumulated a very large pile on our back driveway, and it really was quite an eyesore. He kept at it for four hours, not quitting until, finally, he simply couldn’t lift one more log onto the splitter. He stacked them all neatly in the northeast corner of our yard, where they will dry nicely for next winter.
Thursday, Lydia and Caleb’s class had a pizza party at Pawnee Park as a reward for reading so many books throughout the year. Hannah transported several of the students, and Dorcas went, too, since she has helped out in the classroom numerous times. Hannah took lots of cute pictures, and the lady who arranges the yearbook will use several of them in the next annual.
Wednesday night, somebody made a bomb threat to all the city schools, public, parochial, and private, along with several businesses. One of our church members who used to be a police reservist came and searched both school and church in the middle of the night, and school went on course as usual the following morning. All the other schools in town started an hour late, since the bomb squads didn’t come to search the buildings until Thursday morning. Since then, we’ve been keeping all the doors on the school and church locked from the outside--those inside can get out all right; but those on the outside can’t get in unless somebody lets them in.
What an evil old world we live in! Everybody blames everyone else for the moral decay of the country; everybody has their own elaborate idea about what has gone wrong; and nobody seems to notice that the more God is kicked out--out of the home, out of the school, even out of the church, of all places--the worse everything gets. Few people know that the answers to all these problems are as close at hand as our Bibles. But those are all dusty from lack of use.
There is a nest of baby bunnies just across the street, beside the front porch of the church. They are getting livelier every day, and, if you stand perfectly still and watch the little mound of soft rabbit fur over the top of them, you will soon see it bounce up and down. I managed to get a picture of one bunny before his eyes opened. (No, I didn’t touch him.)
Now I’d better get back to those sermon notes. They are so enthralling, sometimes I go on reading, and forget I’m supposed to be typing!
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