quote of the day

Find peace with yourself by accepting not only what you are, but what you are never going to be.
-- Anonymous

a big hole in the wall

I've been absent from the blog recently because of the busy-ness of remodeling, piano lessons, and caring for my grand daughter, Tara, who endured an emergency appendectomy last week. I have a new patio door that was delivered last Wednesday, but I haven't been able to install it because of the weather. Tomorrow, the temperature is supposed to rise all the way to 50 degrees so I'm going to jump at the opportunity to cut a 72"X80" hole in the wall to accommodate the new door (photos forthcoming).

i want my chair back

Lizzie, the dog that lives at my house, is a mean and spiteful dog. She won't get out of my chair. She's old and deaf and won't respond to stern language, but then again, she never responded when she was a pup. I can't hit her with a stick or the animal lovers would have be put in prison and tortured for years and years. Even if I went to the trouble of tilting the chair and dumping her out the chair would still smell like her. I can't win. I usually just sit in Dorothy's recliner, but then she complains that her chair smells like me.

• I went to the store today for Dorothy. As I was walking between two cars, I heard a click and then something hit me in the back of the head. I looked around as one of the cars back out and drove away. There was a man sitting in his car who looked puzzled. I told him I had just been hit in the head with something. He told me a little boy in the car that drove away had been playing with a toy pistol. That little twerp was a pretty good shot. I hope his mother took the toy away from him. Little kids don't need to be shooting people with toy guns. It just gets them used to shooting them with real ones.
• Our ESL lesson this week was about ordering food in a restaurant. I asked my students if they are comfortable ordering from a menu. One student said she just asks the waiter if he can speak Spanish and if he says no she orders from the buffet.
• I've been so busy on the remodeling and my piano lessons I haven't had the time to post to this blog. I'll have some photos of the progress posted here soon, and maybe I'll upload an audio file of a song I've mastered, that is if I ever master one.

hunter on the trampoline

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quote of the day

We are where we are, as we are, because of what we are.
-- Earle J. Glade

remodeling progress

Dorothy's brother Bill is helping me on this phase of creating a dining room. This old house has very uneven floors so we're leveling them.

jenna the blues pianist

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marley's baptism

Marley and Kelly have their picture taken before the baptism.

The youth minister, Jason Kelly, explains to the congregation that Marley has made a commitment of faith and is now publicly demonstrating her personal identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

quote of the day

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
-- Charles Schulz, Peanuts cartoonist

tara's birthday

It's Tara's twentieth birthday and as she attempts to blow out the candles on her cake she gets lots of help from her younger cousins. As per our tradition the birthdayee (I just made up a word) gets his/her choice of cake and dinner. Tara chose a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and for dinner we had tacos.

This is my new keyboard. I'm slowly and haltingly playing "Happy Birthday" as we all sing for Tara.

quote of the day

"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
--Robert Louis Stevenson

cyber democracy

This morning I emailed my congressman expressing my concern over the importation of defective and toxic products from China. So far, toxic pet food, tooth paste, toys made with lead and other dangerous substances, and fish treated with antibiotics have been discovered. Who knows what other harmful things have been introduced into this country that haven't been detected? All in the name of global trade. At a time when our government should be protecting us from unsafe imported food, the FDA is closing 7 of 13 laboratories that test for these problems.

Thanks to the Internet, we have opportunities to communicate with our elected Representatives like no other time in history. I urge all citizens to express how you feel about the state of our country to the people you sent to Washington to represent you. Online, you can track your congressman's voting record and see if he is watching out for your interests like he promised when he campaigned for your vote. America is beginning to suffer from the actions of corrupt politicians and special interest groups, and its our responsibility as voters to let them know that we're not going to stand for it.

To email a member of Congress or the Senate use these links:

http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

quote of the day

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct of what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
--Rachel Carson

work work work

We need more room. Our extended family is growing by leaps and bounds and our holidays and family get togethers are pretty crowded affairs. So I'm eliminating the wall between a storage room and the pantry to make one room 10X13. We'll make this into a nice dining area. The contents of the pantry were moved into the laundry room, and the stuff that was stored in the other room are now in a storage bin in town. I think we should have had a bonfire in the back yard and burned all those possessions that we never use, but, the chief executive vetoed that idea.