Airplanes

Saturday we decided to go to the Smithsonian's new Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum near Dulles airport in Virginia. This is an enormous hanger that houses hundreds and hundred of airplanes. There was a replica of the plane the Wright brothers flew ,the space shuttle Enterprise and some of every kind of airplane in between. It was amazing to see so many kinds of planes all in one place. We saw lots of World War II planes. The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is there. The SR71, The Blackbird, a spy plane used until recently was there. That plane flew from Los Angeles to Washington DC in 64 minutes. There was even an exhibit about the IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer.) That is a satellite that my beloved worked on for many years. It was cool to see him looking at something that had been such a big part of his life on display in the Smithsonian. It was a fun Saturday thing to do.


The Enola Gay



The white plane in the back is the Concorde



The space shuttle is huge!



Dennis by the IUE console

Laundry Room

I asked my beloved to take a picture of my clean, colorful laundry room. He put together this panorama picture that make my little room look deceptively large. It is only as wide as the washer and dryer. The end with the furnace and water heater is what you see if your back is to the washer. It is a small rectangular room about five feet wide by 10 feet long. I don't have any before pictures so it is hard to tell how much better it looks. It had never been painted. The walls were stained and scarred. The floor was dirty. Now it is clean and bright, but still small. I used up four of my partial cans of left over paint. I wonder what I can do with the rest of my paint. I still have two shades of green, dark blue, bight red, and some antique white.

Any suggestions?

Facebook

Last week I became a member of Facebook. It is a fun way to communicate with my grandchildren. Somehow it seems to be cooler to talk on Facebook than to just talk. It has been fun to set up my page and to add friends. I have found many of the children I was once close to who have now grown up and moved away. I have over twenty friends. I feel so popular. I haven’t yet figured out how to use all the features. You can send virtual gifts and hugs or poke your friends. I was just looking around the site and typed the name Barack Obama into the search. I did find several official and supportive websites as I expected. I also found about twenty-five sites that claimed Obama was the Antichrist. The hate just spilled out of those pages. It is scary what people believe and say. I then typed John McCain into the search engine and found several official and supportive sites. I did find one site that claimed McCain was the Antichrist. So I know some people hate him too. The part of the world I live in is mostly a friendly place filled with kind and gentle people. It always startles me when I come face to face with hatred.

Sunday School

I came across this picture last week. It is a photo of my eldest daughter’s first Sunday School class. She is the cutie pie wearing the bonnet in the middle of the group. The date was 1965. She was twenty months old. Going clockwise around the table from her we see Kim. Kim became an engineer and moved to Seattle where she lives with her husband and a menagerie of animals. The dark haired young teacher is Donna. She has moved to Nashville and is now a great grandmother. I don’t know who she has in her lap. Next is Melodie. She was married and divorced. Last I heard she was an aerobics teacher in Florida. Then we come to the twins, Rocky and Raye, daughters of the teacher Donna. They are both married in living in Nashville. Raye is a grandmother. I’m not sure who the next little girl is. I think her name is Joanna. Then we are back to daughter number one. She grew up, married, raised two beautiful children and still lives in Bowie. The baby in the crib is Graden, the only boy child in the group. He is married with a couple of kids. The last I heard he was selling medical equipment and living in Arkansas. I am just out of the picture feeding my newborn daughter who grew up, married, divorced, and is the mother of three beautiful children. They live here in Bowie too.

Church and Sunday School were a big part of all of these kids lives. Some of them are still faithful to the Church of Christ in which they were raised. Some have found a home in other denominations. Some are no longer believers.

Are you still a part of the faith community in which you raised?

Gettysburg

We have just returned from a two day vacation in Gettysburg, PA. We went to celebrate our forty-seventh wedding anniversary. One of the things we did was to take a Segway tour of the battlefield. It was just one more trip together on our journey through life.

Touring the battlefield was a very sobering experience for me. We stood on this peaceful, green countryside and remembered the tens of thousands of lives that were lost during this three day battle. The ground had been covered with the bodies of men who were fighting for what they each believed was holy and right. They fought for a cause that was worth more than their own lives. They died willingly and courageously. I felt like I was standing on holy ground. The picture of us on the Segways was taken at the High Water Mark of the Confederacy. This is the place where Lee’s troops almost broke through the federal lines. If they had succeeded here, the course of our country’s history might have been very different.



This is the spot where General Lee waited to greet his returning troops after the failure of Pickett’s Charge. Over half of his troops were killed. It was a great defeat and turned the tide of the war.


This is the view from Little Round Top looking down into what became known as the Valley of Death. This little hill was the site of great carnage.


This is a wonderful monument. It was erected in 1938 and dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt. Present at the dedication were many of the veterans from both sides of this great battle. The Eternal Peace Monument was erected as a symbol of this nation’s commitment to live together united in peace. I found it symbolic that one of the cannons placed there to indicate where it had been during the battle now held the nest of a bluebird.

It is my prayer that one day all the guns of the world become the home for nesting birds.

Ol' time Religion

Like the country song says I come from a long line of love. Today I was thinking about the legacy of fathers and grandfathers. The lives of these men impacted the lives of many generations to follow them. I wonder if they would be surprised at the stories that are still told about them today.

My grandfather was a Church of Christ preacher in Texas during the first half of the last century. In those days preachers were not paid by the church and they had to support themselves and their families with other jobs. My mother tells this story she remembers about a gift her father was given after holding a meeting.

Mom was about five years old. Her little sister Rubye was three. The buggy they used to ride to meeting had two small red chairs in the back where the girls sat for the long ride to and from church. That Sunday the congregation paid my grandfather for his preaching with two barrels of molasses. The barrels were placed in the back of the buggy next to the girls’ chairs. It was hot in Texas and as they rode home the heat caused the molasses to expand. The barrels began to leak and the molasses oozed slowly out onto the floor of the buggy. When they finally arrived home the girls were unable to move because their shoes were firmly stuck in the molasses. Their dad yelled at them to quit dawdling and climb out of the buggy. They started to cry because they could not move. Finally he figured out their predicament and he reached in and unlaced their high top shoes and pulled them out barefooted. She doesn’t remember how the shoes were freed, but since they were their only good shoes they were rescued, cleaned and worn again to meeting the next week.

What stories have been passed down in your family?

Painting

I walked into my laundry room this week and actually looked at it. It is really dirty! I started cleaning and sorting things out. I use that room to store the things I don’t know where else to put. It is a small, cluttered, dirty room. Among other things in there is all my left-over paint. I have decided to brighten the place up by giving it a fresh coat of paint, using all the half full cans of paint I already have. Today I painted the ceiling with the left-over half can of white primer. That has already brightened it up. Tomorrow I will figure out how to paint the walls and shelves with the two shades of red, two shades of blue, two shades of white and some olive green paint. It will at least be clean and colorful. Another good thing is I will not have all that paint on the shelf and there will be room for me to put up some of the clutter. I think it will be fun to paint.

Does anybody out there have a room decorated in all the left over colors of other projects?

Have a good week-end everyone.

Time Flies

Twenty four years ago today our beautiful daughter married her college sweetheart.

Time flies. Two grown children. Still beautiful and still sweethearts.

Happy anniversary

Nice Week End

Our church secretary’s previous employer was Ray Charles. She is a talented jazz singer who was once a backup singer for Ray, a Raylette. She has interesting stories. Friday night she performed in a jazz concert that was very good. Good music, good food and pleasant company made for a lovely evening.

Friday was the hottest day of the year, 99 degrees with thick humidity and no wind. Our church had a booth at Bowiefest, a community fun day with lots of booths, food, entertainment and kiddy rides. I worked in the church booth for a couple of hours and felt like a wet rag afterward. The heat made for smaller crowds than in years past. In the evening it was a welcome relief to jump in our daughter’s pool. Swimming and visiting with family made for a full recovery from the heat.

After church we went out to lunch and came home to enjoy a Sunday afternoon nap. This evening we went to the movies. We saw The Visitor. It was an interesting story about immigrants to our country and the struggles they can face. I did enjoy it.

Reading

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Finally

The primaries are finally over. It looks like our choice in November will be Obama or McCain. Who do you think they should choose to be their running mate?

Birth

Forty-one years ago today I gave birth to my third child, my first-born son, David. He is a wonderful man who has brought me great joy. Happy Birthday son.

The day of his birth was the closest I have ever come to dying. I don’t remember anything about my labor or his delivery. What I do remember is floating above my body and looking down at a room full of doctors and nurses. I heard one say, “Her pressure is 40 over nothing. I think we’re losing her.” Another voice shouted to pump in more blood. I drifted there watching the activity and thought that I must be dying. It was not a scary thought, just a realization of what was happening. Then I drifted off into blackness. It was thirty-six hours later when I next opened my eyes and saw my sweet husband sitting at my bedside crying. Bless his heart; he had had a hard day. In a day before fathers were allowed into delivery rooms he waited a long time without any information. Finally a nurse came to tell him he had a son, but they were still working on me. He saw the baby through the glass to the nursery, but I did not come out for a very long time. Finally the doctor came and informed him that I had hemorrhaged and lost a lot of blood. It was a close call.

I recovered and gave birth to another son a year later without any complication.

Have you ever had a near death experience?