During the last three weeks of January, at least four elderly people, three with known dementia, have gone missing in Nebraska. Only one was found safe and returned home.
A 68-year-old woman wandered away from home just before
11:00 p.m. a week ago Friday night in bitterly cold temperatures during times
of blizzard conditions, wearing neither shoes nor coat. She was missing for two days before being
found on the following Sunday – found dead, contrary to original
reports. We figured she surely must’ve
been in someone’s house, and wondered what the story was, and why the secrecy. Very odd.
But no, she was not ‘okay’, as first noted. Remember my complaint about News Channel
Nebraska’s writing last week? Well, look
at this:
A missing Nebraska woman
has been located by authorities.
In a Facebook post issued
Saturday night by the Police Department, officials indicated that the 68-year-old
woman was found.
Officers did not indicate
the current status of her health or where she was located. The investigation is ongoing.
A press release says no
suspicious activity was involved. The
woman died from medical conditions, along with being outside in extreme cold
temperatures.
Both the local Police
Department and the Nebraska State Patrol had been looking for her after she had
last been seeing [sic] on Friday night.
“Officers did not indicate the current status of her health”
– and then, two sentences later, “the woman died”. Are there no longer any editors at this news
agency??
Another man in his late 60s who has dementia wandered away one
cold day last week, but fortunately he was quickly found.
Last week, a 94-year-old lady in a nursing home in Colorado wandered
outside during the night, couldn’t get back in – and died of hypothermia before
anyone noticed she was missing.
A couple from Aurora, Nebraska, have not been seen since
approximately January 11. They were
driving their Chrysler Pacifica minivan. The woman is 92, and gets disoriented when
driving at night. The man, who has
dementia, is 89. He needs blood pressure
medicine, and doesn’t have it. They got
rid of their cell phones last year, because they ‘never use them’. They stopped late that night at a farm place
east of Aurora, asking for directions to Aurora.
Why, oh, why, don’t people see the signs of trouble and call
the authorities for help for people?!!
This is exactly what I feared would happen to Loren last
year, when he started going odd places, heading to church when it wasn’t time
for church – with no coat – and then, after we took his keys, getting rides
with neighbors who hadn’t a lick of sense, and should’ve known better than to
take him somewhere and drop him off when he wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and
no one else was at the church! I’m thankful he’s in a safe place now.
It is now an established fact: Larry sleeps right through the smoke detector’s
beeping for ‘low battery’. And the thing
was only about 20 feet away from him, too.
Question: Why does
that horrible low-battery beep never sound except in the middle of the night??
I spent several days quilting last week. Late Tuesday night, I rolled the quilt
forward, and the middle point of the quilt showed up, peeking out from under
the front bar.
You know, I’d get more
quilting done, if I didn’t spend so much time putting on sweaters and scarves,
leggings and socks, and then taking them all back off again, and turning the
EdenPURE heater up and down.
I just about arrive at
the perfect Caribbean temperature, and then I paint myself into a corner with
my fancy-schmancy quilting, wonder (as I’m making a nice long curve) where I’m
going to go next, and that makes me scribble nervously with that big quilting
machine, and immediately I am piping hot. 🙄
People often ask me to
make ‘teaching videos’ of my quilting. ha!!
I’ve seen ‘teaching videos’ by quilters,
and I can’t do that! Mine would turn
into “Funniest Panicked Quilter”.
Wednesday
afternoon, I heard Canada geese flying over.
I looked out the window and saw a flock heading toward the northwest –
but they weren’t in their usual neat V shape.
The entire group was somewhat confused, after one headed southwest,
for some reason, and a volley of others thought maybe they should follow,
though they weren’t sure if they should.
Thus, they zigzagged back and forth honking and turning their heads this
way and that, unable to decide exactly what to do.
The sun was
setting, shining a bright orange-red on the geese as they flew. I wanted to take pictures, but it was time to
get ready for church.
I clad myself in
my glad rags, then headed back upstairs to quilt until time to go.
Larry got home
late. Trying to be helpful, he attempted
to back
the Mercedes out of the front drive to put it in the west drive for me, as I
was ready to go, and he planned to come as soon as he got ready.
The Mercedes slid right into the snow-filled ditch.
So Larry got his pickup, hooked it to the rear of
the Mercedes, and then, with me steering, he pulled it out. By then, I would’ve been late, too. We decided to stay home.
After supper, I quilted for a couple of hours. When it seems like a monumental task to
change the thread color again, I know it’s time to shut everything down for the
night and put ze ol’ pate on ze pillow.
Changing thread on the longarm isn’t at all hard, although getting
the cone of thread onto the spindle and the thread through the first couple of
loops and guides are a stretch. Literally. If Larry ever spots me standing on
tippytoes and reeeeeaching clear over to the back of the machine, he invariably
suggests, “Why don’t you just walk around to the other side of the frame?”
I invariably answer (with one of those wifely side-glances),
“Because this way is faster!!” And “Why do your solutions always
involve a lot more walking to and fro for me?”
Thursday, I expected to receive the gifts I had ordered for
Oliver and Willie, who would each be a year old on the 3rd and the 8th,
respectively. I went outside to check
around the porch. Nothing. I checked on my orders from Wal-Mart, Amazon,
eBay... but couldn’t find the
order. Where were they??
Then I had a thought.
I clicked on ‘Cart’ on Wal-Mart online.
There it was, the entire
order, toys and pajama sets for both little boys, calmly cooling its heels in
the cart. Unordered.
I’d attempted to order those things the day we had the ice
and snowstorm, and our internet wasn’t working very well, and the order
evidently didn’t go through when I clicked ‘Submit’. And I never thought
to check again.
I would have to get
something at the Wal-Mart in town; it was too late to try ordering again.
That evening, I rolled the quilt forward a few more inches,
annnnnd... I had made it to the middle point!
Friday before I could quilt, I had to take my brother’s tax
papers to his accountant, drop off some things at the Goodwill, and go to
Wal-Mart for the aforementioned birthday gifts for Oliver and Willie. Oliver, our second-to-youngest grandson, would
be having his very first birthday party that very evening. Five days
later, on the 8th, his little cousin Willie, our youngest
grandchild, would be having his first birthday. On that day,
February 8th, four of our grandchildren have birthdays. Emma will be 17, and her younger brother
Grant will be 10. They are Teddy and
Amy’s children. Justin, Joseph and
Jocelyn's son, will be 11.
It was only 5° that morning, with a wind chill of
-14°! But I had a thick, fleecy, cream-colored sweater, purchased at
Cabela’s with a gift card from one of the children; I had fleece tights; and I
had tall leather dress boots. I would survive the cold in fashion!
I set the GPS on my phone for Cruise & Associates, who
does Loren’s taxes, just in case I couldn’t remember exactly where their new
office was located. I tucked the phone
in the pocket on my purse, and did a few other things before leaving, such as
blow-drying and curling my hair, and eating breakfast.
Suddenly, for no discernable reason, the phone announced, “In
600 feet, make a U-turn!” 😅
Going to Wal-Mart was much easier than it
was pre-Botox injections. My eyes are
too dry and water a lot on account of not going clear shut when I blink, and
probably not being totally shut when I sleep; but I’m so thankful they stayed
open quite nicely while trotting pell-mell around Wal-Mart, even though the
airflow made them hurt. I didn’t even
run over any li’l ol’ ladies, li’l ol’ men, or small children!
When I got home, I rummaged up a couple of cute birthday cards, signed and addressed them, and put the gifts into bags.
While I was in my gift-wrapping room
downstairs, I righted some of the Christmas mess I’d forgotten about, in my
pre-Christmas rush.
It got into the high 30s that
afternoon. It only
takes a couple of hours of temperatures over 35°, and insects come out to
play. I always wonder how in the world
they survived the previous few weeks’ frigid weather.
Once in the blue moon in
the wintertime, a wolf spider gets into the house. Even less often, there are those fuzzy little jumping
spiders.
The wolf spiders like to
suddenly run at me full blast when I’m barefoot, sitting in my recliner with
stuff all over my lap, or upstairs quilting, in the middle of a particularly
intricate design with no good stopping point.
The wolf spiders out here
are usually about three feet across, with legs the size of my arms.
Well, that’s what they seem
like, when I can’t run or do anything about them for a moment or two.
That evening, we went to Andrew and Hester’s house for
Oliver’s birthday party. There was
pizza... lettuce salad... fruit salad... and brownies with chocolate-covered
Oreos on top, with little teddy-bear grahams atop the Oreos. And ice cream. And coffee.
I was taking pictures of this one and that one... and, while
my eyes were staying open just fine, they were tiring, and things were getting
blurry. I couldn’t really see what I was
looking at through my view finder, so I just relied on my camera’s autofocus
and snapped away.
I aimed at Aaron and fired off a shot.
Everyone laughed.
I pulled the camera away from my face and took a good look
at him.
He’d stuck his clear plastic cup on top of his head, the
scalawag, and I had not at all seen that.
😄
I aimed at Levi – and he promptly followed in his brother’s
footsteps, kerplunking his cup atop his head.
Here I am holding Levi when he was a baby, back in 2010:
Keira, who’d been front row for the shenanigans, laughed
harder than anyone at the tomfooleries of these two big cousins of hers.
She came scampering to look at the images on my camera screen. Upon seeing Levi’s picture, she laughed some
more and said, “He looks so surprised!” She looked at me and
turned one palm up. “But he did it, himself!” she said, and
laughed again.
Later, Hester sent this picture of Keira and me. Perhaps
you’ll recall, Keira is the little girl who was only 2 lbs., 8 oz., when she
was born in April of 2018. She sat down
beside me, then gave me a hug, and said, “You’re all soft and cuddly!” 😍 I didn’t know
Hester took the picture... and Hester didn’t know Keira said that. 🥰
Oliver was napping
when we got there, but woke up before too long, and was somewhat amazed to find
his home invaded by rafts and hordes of relatives. Oliver is shy. He cuddled up on his Daddy’s shoulder and
peeped at us now and then, cute as could be with little teddy-bear ears perched
on his head. He was just getting all wound up nicely when
everyone up and left.
Eva and Oliver were so
cute playing together, side by side on the floor.
Here's Carolyn giving Grandpa a goodbye hug:
Hester sent us home
with three brownies.
Saturday
morning, I got up a little earlier than
usual in order to quilt before going to Omaha to visit Loren; but I found an
email from the CPA at Cruise asking for more information on Loren’s original
home loan, and the amount spent on nursing home care. It took me well over an hour to round that
all up. See, this is why I very much
need a CPA to do this work. There’s too
much about it that I do not know.
I had barely started quilting when Larry got home, and we
headed to Omaha.
As we drove, I read the news and answered some emails. An online quilting group was discussing ‘the best
quilt-related gift given or received’.
Hmmm... I could name some lovely books various family
members have given me... including some downloadable versions from Lydia... or
some beautiful cones of longarm thread from Hester... or some pretty cuts of coordinating
fabric... but there are a couple of things that I am very fond of:
1)
A small, bright red vinyl bag with a Velcro closure that
grandson Lyle, age 4 at the time, got from a fast-food joint in town. He
carefully extracted his bag of food from it immediately upon getting it, ‘so
the bag won’t start smelling like food,’ he said – and then he gave it to me
for Mother’s Day ‘to put quilting things in,’ he told me. He was so
pleased when I exclaimed, “Oh, it’s just perfect for the embroidery floss I’m
using on the quilt I’m working on!” Lyle is 15 now, and I still have the
little bag, and it still has embroidery floss in it.
2)
A fat quarter, all tied in a ribbon, in pale mint green,
with little birds printed on it – chosen by little Keira, just 3, for my
birthday because, she said, “Grandma likes birds and fabric for quilts, so this
is both!” One of these days, I’ll put some pieces of that fabric
into a quilt for her.
We found Loren in the dining room when we got to the nursing
home. A man and a woman were sitting on
the other side of the table from him.
Someone else had been there, as there was a fourth plate, most of the
food still on it, though it looked like someone had walked through it. I moved it aside, and we pulled up chairs
next to Loren.
I thought at first that the man across the table, who was
outgoing and friendly, was there visiting his wife, as he was telling her she
needed to drink every drop of whatever was in her cup. She didn’t much like him telling her that.
“Look at me!” she demanded.
“Do I look sick to you?!!”
“Drink every drop!!” he responded, and then, to be sure he
made his point, “Every drop! Every
drop! Every drop!”
About the time I decided the man was not visiting, and
that he actually belonged there, Larry, who had first thought, as I had,
that the man was visiting, happened to glance down under the table – and saw
that the man’s feet were clad only in socks.
Ah. Yep. He was a resident.
After he left, the woman gathered all the full, half-full,
and empty glasses and cups at the table and proceeded to start pouring everything
into one cup. Suddenly it was full, and
she stared at it in surprise, nonplused, and wondering what to do about all the
other half-full glasses and cups she’d been planning to pour into it.
She scooted vessels around a bit and started over, pouring
into another cup.
Same song, second verse.
She then lined up three bright yellow ceramic coffee cups
and informed me they were hers. Moments
later, she decided one was her sister’s.
Or maybe it belonged to ‘that woman who lives on the other side of the
bathroom’ at her apartment. (She must
have a semi-private room, with a bathroom shared with another semi-private
room.)
She said she needed to take those cups ‘upstairs’ to her
house, and wondered how she would carry them all. She looked over into the kitchen, saw a man
working in there, made a round circle with her mouth, and tried to whistle.
She looked at me. “I
can’t make a working whistle,” she said.
She gestured at the man in the kitchen, pointed at me,
muttered something unintelligible, nodded at me, gestured at the man in the
kitchen. She clearly wanted me to
whistle him into the dining room for her.
I smiled at her, and suddenly had to choke back a laugh when
my naughty brain wondered what she would look like if I let loose with one of
my really, really LOUD whistles, which I can make without using my
fingers at all.
She frowned, since I wasn’t doing what she wanted.
She spotted Mattie, the black lady, at the next table. Mattie had on a black zippered hoodie with
the word SHUG printed across the front in large letters.
I have now learned that SHUG is short for ‘Sugar’. A term of endearment, pronounced ‘Shoog’,
with the ‘oo’ pronounced like the ‘oo’ in ‘book’.
Mrs. Yellow Cup tried to get Mattie’s attention. “Hey!” she called, waving a hand.
Mattie calmly nibbled at the dinner roll in her hand.
Y.C. tried again, waving an arm this time. “Can you hear me?!!” she said,
reminding me of the kids playing with their new walkie-talkies: ‘Can you hear me now?!!’
Mattie chewed on.
“SHUG!!!” shouted Mrs. Yellow Cup, pronouncing it so that it
rhymed with ‘bug’.
Mattie stopped chewing and stared. She looked around the room to see who the
woman was shouting at. The room was
emptying, as people were mostly done with their supper.
“SHUG!!! YOU!!!”
yelled Yellow Cup.
Mattie decided her new name must be ‘Shug’, rhyming with bug,
and got up and came to see what the woman wanted. After a conversation that I really wish I
could repeat for you, but can’t, since it made no sense whatsoever, and
therefore did not stick in ze ol’ grey mattuh, Mattie gave the lady a couple of
gentle pats on the shoulder, and the woman responded in kind, patting Mattie on
the arm.
Mattie departed, stage right.
A young black girl came in pushing a rolling cart and began
collecting more dishes.
Mrs. Yellow Cup wrapped both arms around her three yellow
cups.
“I’ve never lived like this before!” she told me.
What, hugging yellow cups?
Preventing the stealing of said yellow cups? What?
I smiled at her. She
frowned back.
She launched into a long and illogical discourse on
husbands, coffee cups, tractors, and dogs, not necessarily in that order.
Loren stopped his conversation with Larry and listened
intently.
When she petered out, he asked in a tone of concern, “Were
you able to warm that up?” pointing at the cup.
Mrs. Yellow Cup looked at him blankly, having had her
chronicle interrupted thusly. Then,
warmly, lifting a cup in salute, “Oh, yes, thank you! I warmed it up at my house.”
I decided it was time to exit the dining room. I gathered up the newspapers we had brought
Loren, and we put our chairs back where we’d gotten them.
Loren pointed at a walker that was on the far side of the
table. “That’s my walker,” he said.
I had noticed he was not in the wheelchair when we
arrived. Now I was glad to see that he
was using a walker, and actually remembered that he needed it, probably because
those falls – three, at least – made him understand he really did need
it. I pushed it around the table,
positioned it beside him, and he got up.
Meanwhile, the girl got all the dishes collected and placed
on the cart, and managed to snag one of the cups while Mrs. Y.C. was
preoccupied watching us.
“NO!” yelled Mrs. Yellow Cup, hanging onto the other two for
dear life. “You tell her!” she
ordered me.
The girl tried to take the cups. “They’re not yours!” she said, evidently not
a student of the Better Diplomacy and Tact School.
“Yes they are!!!” yelled Y.C.
They conducted a brief tug-of-war, telling each other, “No!”
“Yes!” “No!” and “Yes!” by turns.
Loren stalled out completely, the better to watch the
show. I paused, waiting for him.
“I have to take them to the kitchen!” said the girl.
“Tell her they’re mine!” Y.C. said to me.
The girl looked at me, shook her head, and mouthed something
to me. Not being a lip reader, I can’t
tell you what that bit of dialogue was, either. Maybe something on the order of, You keep
her attention over there on that side, and I’ll sneak up behind her and
grab the cups from this side. Who
knows.
But I, trying to be a Helpful Hattie, smiled at the woman
and said, “They need to wash the cups in the kitchen!” I gestured in that direction.
Mrs. Y.C. gave me a look of amazement. “That’s never happened before!” she
exclaimed. She shook her head in
aggravation. “I’ve never lived like
this. I’ve just never lived like this!!”
(What, with clean yellow coffee cups??)
Loren was starting to head back to the table, apparently
thinking he needed to help resolve the issue.
“It’s okay,” I said, putting my hand on his walker. “She’ll be all right.” He looked at me, raising his eyebrows. I grinned at him. “Whether she wants to be or not.”
He laughed, and followed me from the room.
We continued on to Loren’s room, where we conducted the
remainder of the visit peacefully, with Larry describing various matters
concerning his truck and a variety of other vehicles, until I would imagine
Loren’s head was spinning. Spinning or
not, he obviously enjoyed the visit. He
likes Larry, he likes conversing with Larry, and he has always enjoyed
conversations about vehicles.
We encountered The Lady of the Yellow Cups again in the main
interior lobby when we were leaving. She
was sitting in a chair right in front of the nurses’ station. Another lady in a wheelchair was slowly
making her way past, and Yellow Cup Woman was shoving the wheelchair away and
saying loudly, “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!!!
YOU’RE ABOUT TO RUN OVER MY FOOT!”
The woman in the wheelchair was trying to steer
prudently! Siggghhhh... At least
Mrs. Yellow Cup is small enough and frail enough that she probably won’t cause too
much damage, though I don’t suppose it would take much to knock other frail
persons off balance.
Usually the nurses and other staff are good at spotting
potential problems and warding it off by distracting and redirecting residents;
and if any are becoming overly agitated, they do increase their medications,
carefully. The doctors and nurses
monitor the residents’ medication levels closely, and do a very good job of
keeping those levels where they should be.
After leaving the nursing home, we met Joseph and the children at La Mesa Mexican Restaurant, as we’d brought a present for Justin, who will be 11 on Wednesday. We gave him a shirt, a silver sailboat with a small clock in the front of it, and a dry erase board and marker.
When I was putting things into the giftbag, I noticed those brownies
(mysteriously, there were only two left) with the chocolate-covered Oreos and
teddy-bear grahams on top. I grabbed a
little Ziploc bag, put the last two cookies in it, and tucked it into the bag.
When Justin began looking in his bag, I told him, “There’s
something in there that you’ll have to share with your sister!”
He soon pulled out the bag with the cookies, and both he and
Juliana grinned at me. And then if they
didn’t save the cookies until they were done with their supper, with no one
even telling them to.
I would’ve done that, at their ages, but Larry never would’ve, not in a million years. Someone might’ve eaten it for him before he got a chance to, after all!
Joseph’s wife Jocelyn wasn’t there, as she works nights, and she was sleeping. She’d had four days in a row of 12-hour shifts. That’s tiring. When we were just about ready to leave, Joseph ordered some food-to-go for her.
Have I ever told you what a ‘Mrs. Bigsby quilt’ is?
Mrs. Bigsby was a neighbor lady who lived in the
little house next to the one where I grew up. She and her husband lived there from the day
they married ’til the day they died. She
helped her church group make quilts for the poor.
I use the term ‘quilt’ loosely. Hers were odd shapes sewn together
willy-nilly, never mind if they lay flat or not. The ‘quilts’ were incongruous combinations of
cotton, double knit, canvas, silk, velvet, burlap, you name it. She’d wash tops after putting pieces together
and hang those strangely shaped things on the clothesline, and let me tell you,
they had more ravelings and frays than you can imagine.
I asked my mother, when I was, oh, maybe 4 or 5 years
old, “Why do the poor people have to have ugly quilts?”
Mama, who liked our neighbors and very rarely said a
derogatory word about anybody, replied, “I don’t know; but that’s why they blow
out their candles when they go to bed: so they don’t have to see them.” haha
Just think: all
at the same time, whilst sleeping under a ‘Mrs. Bigsby quilt’, a person could
be well-ventilated, snuggly smothered, exfoliated, and gently smoothed!
But I should say, in Mrs. Bigsby’s defense, she and
her husband were poor people, too, and she was doubtless doing the best she
could. They always treated our family
with kindness, and years later when I lived across the street and had my own
children, they were kind to us, too.
The Bigsbys raised all their own vegetables in a tiny
patch of garden behind their house, and they had a couple of fruit trees, too. Even when old Mr. Bigsby wasn’t able to walk
very well, he’d be out in his garden, crawling along the rows, planting,
weeding, or harvesting.
Have you ever noticed that poor people are sometimes
more generous than wealthy people? Mrs.
Bigsby, who knew I loved rhubarb from the time I was little, would sometimes
bring me a handful from her garden, after I lived across the street and had a
passel of kiddos. I like rhubarb pie...
and I like rhubarb sauce hot, and poured over French vanilla ice cream.
When we started our church school, it was just down
the block from the Bigsbys’ home. There
was a parking lot between my parents’ house and Bigsbys’ house, and the
children would sometimes play soccer, soccer baseball, or volleyball there. Here’s Keith’s class playing volleyball. Keith is the boy in the white shirt,
smack-dab in the middle of the picture.
The Bigsbys’ house is on the right, and their detached garage is on the
left.
Trouble was, there wasn’t a fence, and the ball
sometimes went into Bigsbys’ garden. The
children were all told to be careful, and the teachers explained how that
garden was those elderly people’s main food source... but kicked balls can take
an errant flight, especially when kicked by a youthful foot.
The games stopped if a ball went into the garden; that
was the rule. Somebody would try to step
carefully down the row to retrieve it. Several
times, somebody bought a new plant, if one got broken. A few times, friends brought fruit baskets to
them. We didn’t want our school to be
the cause of upset and frustration – or worse yet, hunger! – for these good
neighbors!
Finally, after a few too many balls bounced onto a
plant, the teachers decided they just couldn’t use that lot for ball play
anymore, and took the children to the large enclosed area that would someday be
(and is now) a balcony over the sanctuary.
A few days of that, and Mr. Bigsby called my
parents. “Where are the children?” he
asked. “We really miss them! We loved watching them. Don’t worry about a few bouncing balls; we
want to see the children play!”
So the children returned to the parking lot ... and
just tried hard to be careful.
The elementary children often made cards for the
Bigsbys’ birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, and other holidays. Mrs. Bigsby told my mother that after Mr.
Bigsby was unable to walk, and was starting to get forgetful, one of the things
he most enjoyed doing was looking through and rereading all those cards.
We got home from Omaha at about a quarter after 11. My eyes were hurting, especially the left one
that that very young woman doctor injured 8 or 9 years ago, pressing on it
much, much too hard ‘to see if the tear ducts were stopped up’, she said. It never fully recovered from that.
Nevertheless, you can’t imagine how good it was to walk into
the nursing home and to be able to look around and actually see everyone
without my eyes suddenly squinting shut, and to have a nice conversation with
Loren with eyes that behaved fairly normally, really. And then we had
supper with Joseph, Justin, and Juliana, and, happily, my eyes were not
misbehaving at all.
A friend and I were discussing various studies in the
Bible. She is reading the book of
Numbers. There are parts of that book
that I suppose can be a bit tedious, but when one understands how nearly
everything there has a greater meaning and points forward in symbolism to the
New Testament and the coming Savior, then a whole lot of those tedious things
are wonderful.
And as for the lists of names?
Our children used to think it great sport when I’d go
plowing lickety-split through those verses with looong lists of names (such as
in Numbers chapter 1, when Moses was to ‘take the sum of all the congregation’;
and in other books of the Bible, the genealogies), reading as fast as possible
– and now and then slowing down to over-enunciate a name I really didn’t know
how to say at all, using my very bestest English phonics (which probably winds
up giving a completely wrong pronunciation of those old Bible names). I’d
try hard to do it with a straight face, but sometimes the looks on the children’s
faces – not knowing if they should laugh, but wanting to – would crack
me up.
Well, I didn’t often do that, because of course I was a
stickler for treating the Bible with great reverence. Our God is a holy
God! Not many seem to know that, these days. But now and then,
the genealogies somehow brought my funnybone to life.
{Og and Magog, for instance... hee hee. I once
suggested to Hester and Lydia, trying to sound earnest and sincere, that they
give those names to their new dollies. Those little girls’ faces looked
so funny, I couldn’t help it, I smirked. Then Lydia, who was about 2 ½,
gazed at me with a serious-but-indignant look on her cute little oval face and
said in a reproachful tone, “Mama.” 🤣}
However, if there was ever anything in the verses like what
it says about Enoch – he ‘walked with God after he begat Methuselah three
hundred years’, Genesis 5:22, we slowed right down and discussed why it would
be that it says he walked with God after he begat Methuselah. What
about before? Now, we know that Methuselah’s name, translated from
the Hebrew, means, “His death shall bring forth,” or “When he dies, it shall
come,” ‘it’ being the flood. We don’t know if Enoch knew there would be a
flood, but he obviously understood that there would be a catastrophic happening
of some sort that would end the world as they knew it and change
everything. Furthermore, he was not told how long Methuselah would
live. Would he die as a young child? Enoch didn’t know, so he set
himself to walk closely with God from then on.
In just the same way, we know that the Lord is
coming, and it could be any day! So we, like Enoch of old, should ‘walk
with God’, for we ‘know not the hour our Lord doth come’.
Things like that make the genealogies intriguing. I
like to read works of godly men who have studied such things and who have
worked out just who all was alive at what times, how many generations of his
own offspring a man might have known, and which kings were alive when certain
prophets prophesied.
But what I immediately thought of when my friend mentioned ‘Numbers’
was the story in Chapter 13 of the unfaithful spies who went into Canaan to ‘search
it out’. Out of the 12 men, only Joshua and Caleb were honest and
faithful and brave.
Those men came back lugging, among other wonderful fruits, one
cluster of grapes that was so huge, they had to ‘bare it between two upon a
staff’! – and yet they ‘discouraged the people’, saying, “It is a land that
eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men
of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the
sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as
grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
I remember my father preaching on this chapter when I was a
little girl, and remarking, “I wonder if they even tasted of those
grapes and pomegranates and figs?! The Bible says, ‘Taste and see that
the Lord is good.’ I’ll bet if they had’ve so much as tasted the
grapes, they wouldn’t have been so quick to say, ‘We be not able to go up
against the people’!”
When Joshua and Caleb spoke to the people (Chapter 14),
telling them, “If the Lord delight in us, then he will bring us into
this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only
rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land,”
the people wanted to stone them!
They were rebels, all right; but they sure didn’t like being
told so!
Just two chapters later (16), Korah, who was a Levite,
of all things, and 250 princes of the assembly, ‘famous in the congregation,
men of renown’, rebelled against Moses and Aaron. He said, “Ye take too
much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them...”
Every one of them, holy!?
Moses said, “Even to morrow the Lord will shew who
are his, and who is holy!”
The next day, Moses told the congregation, those who
would listen to him, to ‘depart from the tents of those wicked men’ – and very
soon after they had gotten away from Korah and his cronies, 31 the
ground clave asunder that was under them:
32 And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed
them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all
their goods.
33 They, and all that appertained to them,
went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished
from among the congregation.
34 And all Israel that were round about
them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also.
35 And there came out a fire from
the Lord, and consumed the
two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.
And then, would you believe, the very next day, the
congregation of the children of Israel again murmured against Moses and
Aaron, and said, “Ye have killed the people of the Lord.”
Two falsehoods in one very short sentence: first,
Moses and Aaron didn’t kill those people, God caused the earth to open
and swallow them. Second, they most definitely were not ‘the
people of the Lord’.
One time a few days after I read this story to the children,
I heard some of them playing Sunday School in one of their rooms. Dolls and
stuffed animals were all lined up in chairs... some of the kids were sitting in
little chairs holding their dolls... and one child was the teacher.
 |
Joseph, 1 ½; Teddy, 3
|
1986 |
“It’s two lies in one short sentence, that’s what it is!” he
proclaimed. 😅
(I guess that one had been listening, hmmm?)
In the very next chapter, Aaron’s rod, just a dried-up old
stick, not only bloomed, but it ‘yielded almonds’! The immediate
significance was that God had chosen Aaron to be the High Priest in Israel; but
it looked to the future, too. It can signify the miracle of salvation;
but something more, too. In Psalm 110:2, one of the Messianic Psalms, it
says, “The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion.” Isaiah
11:1: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a
Branch shall grow out of his roots.”
It’s just so wonderful how everything in the Old Testament
points forward to Christ – “the law having a shadow of good things to come”!
I love the book of Numbers. It’s wonderful, and
terrible, and so full of things that mean more than it would appear on the
surface.
Someday in heaven, I imagine we’ll be astonished to realize
how very much more every little jot and tiddle in the Bible meant than we ever
understood down here!
Having mentioned Enoch, I was reminded of a song that has
the lyrics in it, ‘Like Enoch of old.’ I
finally remembered: it’s “Walking with Jesus”,
and the rest of the line says, “...is my soul’s delight.” Here are the words:
Sunday morning, we sang
one of my favorites, Hail to the Brightness of Zion’s Glad Morning. When I was little, we often listened to the Old
Fashioned Revival Hour Quartet singing that song on our record player. However, we had to listen to I Am A Poor
Wayfaring Stranger in order to get to Hail to the Brightness, and I
did not like that song. I was
glad when my parents decided I was old enough to carefully lift the needle and
move it forward on the record.
To this day, I have the
order of songs memorized on all the old records we had.
Late in the afternoon, I got ready for
our evening service. As often happens, Larry
was running late.
I exclaimed, “Look at the clock!”
His answer? “If I stand around looking at the clock, we’ll
be late!” 🙄
It was so wonderful to have eyes that behaved almost
perfectly normal at church, though they do get a bit blurry at times, sometimes
enough to have me seeing double. If I can blink good and hard, everything
clears up, at least for a little while. They
didn’t burn as much as they did a few times last week; I was glad for
that. I could look up at the choirs (mixed choir in the morning, men’s choir
last night) as they sang, and actually see them! Well, fairly
well, I could.
As I told Joanna and Bobby, who are both in the choir, “You
looked pretty good up there! – except you are sometimes beside
yourselves.” hee hee
I will be seeing the eye doctor for a checkup on Wednesday,
and I will tell him of the problems. I think I could probably do just
fine without that one shot under each eye.
He gave me low doses of Botox, he said, to determine how I
reacted to it. He asked me that day in his office if I thought I also had
Meige Syndrome (involuntary facial movements), and started to describe it to me
– but I knew what he was talking about, having read about it in my studies of
blepharospasm. I told him I did indeed have a few odd things happening in
my face, but I was pretty sure it would stop on its own if only my eyes would
behave. I think wrinkling my nose, for example, was more of a voluntary
muscle movement (though I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it as I
did it) as a way of trying to get those silly eyes back open!
And it seems I was right, because I haven’t had much trouble
at all with random facial movements since the Botox treatment.
The doctor, after looking at me having such a time that day
in the office, began telling me about a doctor in Omaha who was more
experienced than he is at giving Botox shots in areas of the face other than
the eye. But I said no, I didn’t think I needed shots anywhere but around
the eye.
(Especially not if those shots might be causing the
blurriness!) (Well, if they’re causing blurriness, it’s because they’re
keeping the eyes open too much, and the eyes are watering excessively, even
mattering a bit.)
Hannah is not at all well. She was recently prescribed
Naproxen for a hip that was so painful she could hardly walk – and now she has
had a severe reaction to the medication. It showed up as a rash and bump
on her forehead... then her lymph nodes swelled on one side of her face... and
a doctor at Urgent Care thought she’d been bitten by a brown recluse spider
(and prescribed medicine for that).
But a few days later, with the swelling and pain increasing,
and the Naproxen burning her throat when she swallowed it, she did some
research and realized her symptoms were not compatible with a spider
bite, but were definitely compatible with a Naproxen reaction.
This can be quite dangerous.
She is in somewhat fragile health in the first place, with acute asthma
and sinus disease, along with allergies to everything under the sun.
We pray often for this dear daughter of ours.
 |
| This is Hannah's senior picture, 1998 |
Earlier today I was on the phone for
over an hour, first with someone from a ‘coupon company’ that Loren evidently
subscribed to in 2021, unbeknownst to me.
I saw an amount deducted from his checking account, and called the
number to find out what it was all about.
I should’ve noticed sooner; but somehow, it blended in with the auto
payments to his insurance companies; that’s what I thought it was when I
noticed it before.
The first woman canceled the
account. I asked about a refund, since
the person they sold this to has dementia.
She transferred me to the billing department, where I had the pleasure
of talking to the rudest woman I’ve talked to in a long time. I was explaining the issue when she
interrupted to say, “That account has already been canceled. What’s the address again?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “the person I talked
to first just canceled it; but I needed to---------”
“ADDRESS???” she interrupted with an
exasperated huffing noise.
I paused long enough for the silence to
sink in. Then I said, “Well, that was
rude.”
“Ma’am,” said the woman in a sarcastic
tone, “if the account has already been canceled, I don’t know what you want
with me.”
I started to say, “I wanted to ask
if-------”
She interrupted again, “Have a nice day”
– and hung up!
I called the company back and reported her. Not that it will do any good, because that next
person I talked to was none too polite, either. And no, we cannot have a
refund.
Buncha thieves.
I wonder if anyone will ever listen to
those (supposedly) recorded conversations?
If they do, they will see that I was telling the truth when I said woman
#2 was rude – and I was never rude to her.
Next, I needed to change the address at
Humana and Aetna from Loren’s old address to mine. I already did this, 2 ½ years
ago! But the young couple who purchased
Loren’s house have gotten several pieces of Loren’s mail lately.
I decided to try changing the address
online, rather than risk bumping into Her Thieving Rudeness’s twin.
At both webpages, I was allowed to
change the phone number and the email address (again, I already did that, a
couple of years ago), but not the physical home address. I called the 800 numbers.
They refused to allow me to change the
address. Aetna (whose phones are manned
[womaned?] by a person who has a marshmallow in her mouth and tucks the phone
tightly against her third chin) will send a form via USPS, with a list of hoops
I must jump through in order to accomplish an address change.
Next, the person at Humana, whose first
language is not English, also said they would send a consent form – that
Loren must sign. (That’s probably
what Aetna is sending, too.) Cannot
people get it through their thick heads, when I tell them I have Power of
Attorney, and Loren has dementia and is in a nursing home, that he cannot
sign papers??!!! I thought I was done
coping with this insanity – and I coped with it plenty, back in 2020 and 2021.
“He can’t sign any consent form,”
I said. “He has dementia. He’s in a nursing home. I have Power of Attorney. I do the signing. It’s the legal way of doing things.”
I offered to email copies of the Power
of Attorney papers.
He had to go off and have a lengthy
chat with... ? The King of Liechtenstein,
for all I know. Supposedly,
someone who knew more than he did. He
then directed me to their webpage, which I already had up, and pointed the way
to a place where I could upload the Power of Attorney papers.
So that’s done now; he said it will
take three days for them to ‘process’ this (slow readers, they are, evidently),
and then I will be able to contact them (can-to-can, via string?) and change
the address.
 |
Camping at Fairplay, South
Park campground, Colorado 08-05-98
I think it would be easier and a whole lot quicker just to
write on the errant envelopes, “Addressee no longer lives at this address”, pop
it back into the mailbox, and lift the red flag – but then we’d run the risk of
his insurance getting canceled. 😲
Ah, well. At least this young man was polite, so
I responded in kind, thanking him for his help before hanging up.
A few days ago, I got a notice from Loren’s car insurance
company. I am to verify their
records: Norma is one of the drivers of his vehicles, right?
Aaarrrggghhh, if you know how many times I’ve told them.
So I wrote on the paper, For the gazillionth time, she
died in June of 2020!!!!!!!!! and dropped it in a mailbox. I don’t usually respond like that – but
statistics show that snotty notes get better results than polite ones.
So... snotty it is. 😃
Did all the places where I changed Loren’s address
to mine and informed them of Norma’s death and suchlike simultaneously hit
‘Reset to Default’ or something?!
I like to listen to the rural radio in
the mornings as I shower and curl my hair.
This morning, a couple of men were having a discussion on price of
cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs. One
asked the other, “Is this a new cyclical-type cycle?”
Man #2 assured Man #1 that it was
indeed just that.
You know, I’ll betcha most cycles
are cyclical, whataya think?
And did Man #2 answer that with a
straight face??
Supper tonight was spiral ham, hominy
(from a bag of dried hominy, which I prefer over canned hominy, though I like
it both ways), bread pudding (made from the leftover bread we made soup bowls
out of a couple of days ago), mango Oui yogurt, strawberry-kiwi juice, and
bananas, which Hy-Vee had at the perfect ripeness, not too green, not too ripe.
Word of the Day:
Proquiltinating: quilting when you should be doing the
housecleaning.
I wonder what the word would be when
one is watching car crashes – or baby goats in pajamas – on YouTube when one
should be going to bed? "Procrashinating," I reckon.
I’m a night owl, there’s just no getting around it. My
brother is just the opposite, and for years he tried getting me to change –
sometimes being downright pushy about it, too. I finally started
telling him, every time he began harping on the issue, “Listen, everyone
knows owls are smarter than chickens!!!” That hushed him up.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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