Yesterday I walked into the office of a friend and she was going to show me baby  dolls that had been purchased for the kids taking the classes in parenting.  The dolls are realistic and are hooked to a computer so that if the baby cries and the “mom” doesn’t feed, change, love on it – it is recorded.  It records other things too.  As we were about to open the boxes to look at some her phone rang and I proceeded to get one out while she answered the call.

As I turned, looking at the doll and reading the warning on the package another friend walked in and I had to ask – isn’t this a tiny bit ironic?  The doll was in a plastic bag that carried the usual warning – Keep away from children, choking hazard, can cause asphyxiation.

As I told hubby about it that evening, he asked “Was the doll blue?” When I replied that it wasn’t he looked up from the paper he was reading and said “It’s not very realistic then is it?”

And people think my humor is twisted…

I had to hunt for a belt this morning.  That may be too much information for most of you but the fact that I had to actually hunt for one should tell you that I haven’t needed one for awhile.  I am nearly to the halfway mark of my initial goal and I was tired of hitching my pants up constantly.  I finally made it past the “plateau” (at least the first one) and I am walking everyday.

The funny thing about losing weight is that once you start, every pound lost motivates you to work at losing more.  I make conscious decisions about not what I eat or don’t eat now.

I may have to shop for new jeans before too long 🙂

I’m watching The Librarian : Return to King Solomon’s Mines on TV. I’ve seen it before but there is nothing else on and so I am reading, writing and keeping one eye and ear on the show.

The hero and the girl are traveling, walking through the sand when they stop suddenly because they see this head sticking up out of the sand with some kind of ceremonial makeup on. The head moves and startled the girl asks if he is okay. He responds with a slightly British accent, that he “has been better”.

Chuckle. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective….

For me, the summer is winding down and while it has been a time of rest and regrouping for my family, I’m getting the itch to get back. There are still things I would have liked to get done here at home this summer but we have been spending our time trying to adjust. Everyone is home and that is a new situation. We also know that our oldest will be a senior this year and the youngest a junior so it won’t be very long before they are out of the nest. I am certain I just blinked and they grew up. And who IS that person in the mirror. She wears bifocals and has lines around her eyes and some grey hair. I’m sure I don’t know her.

Oh well, at least I’m not buried up to my neck in sand.

Today was a rainy day. The news channel said we got about 33/100s of an inch but our rain gauge said a little more than an inch. Dale and I were sitting on the back porch enjoying the rain when all of a sudden there was a flash of lightening and a clap of thunder that sounded like a rifle going off next to my head. The flash seemed like it was in the next door neighbor’s yard. I jumped out of my chair so fast I nearly knocked it over though I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Maybe for a second I was going to try to outrun the lightening. Dale was amused to say the least. The outcome was that our house and two other had their phones knocked out. The man next door lost the power supply on his computer. Thankfully mine was uplugged including the modem. Jessica had a report to finish and I needed to do some cleaning in the computer lab at school so I took her up there and while I was there I called the phone company. Like everything else these days you don’t get to speak with a human. According to their little online test there was no problem in our line. They suggested that you unplug all phones and answering machines and then start plugging everything back in one at a time to test all the equipment. When we got home I did what they suggested and nothing worked. Dale had some wire and rigged something up outside. He thinks the little circuit board in their box is fried. We have phone and internet now. It’s a good thing I married an electrician. I don’t actually know what the lightening hit and the only thing I can figure is that it either ran along the ground or the air around us just got charged. Our answering machine is dead but everything else seems okay.

After that we decided to go for a ride and see what was going on in the rest of town. The storm had passed and we were restless. We drove around town and didn’t see any more storm damage but as we were driving home we passed the hospital and both parking lots were empty except for about a dozen state patrol cars and an ambulance. The police had all the entrances to the hospital parking lots blocked. I stopped at the Exxon station before we went home and mentioned it to the girl behind the counter. She told me the Pakistani President had been here visiting his nephew and had some sort of heart attack. I thought this had to be some sort of mistake and then the news this evening said the Pakistani President had been visiting in northeast Texas today including a stop in Paris. They didn’t mention anything about the hospital but the two pieces of information were an awfully big coincidence. Maybe the news tonight will be a little more forthcoming. All in all it was a pretty strange day.

I haven’t posted in a little while because it’s been a calm period  and I hate to even mention it because Dale is still having stomach pain occasionally and I feel like another trip to Baylor is in the future, I just don’t know when.  He fights it because he just hates to go.  I just hope if we go it is soon – before school starts.  I am determined to try to miss as little as possible and that may mean driving back and forth and I’m already burned out from running on adrenaline.  My sister-in-laws came for a visit and he really enjoyed it.  Today was Jessica’s fifteenth birthday and we spent some girl time shopping and eating ice cream.  It wasn’t much but she knows things are shaky right now.   She has grown up so much this summer.  She has been such a lot of help and so has Kinsey.

I should be learning how to use a MacBook by next week.  I am so excited.  I have been reading online about it as much as I can but I will learn much faster by doing.  I promise to write more about it as I learn.

Yesterday I thought my computer at work was dying. I was frantically transferring stuff with my flash drive to another computer and burning it to cd. Not that this was a bad thing to do – I am an incurable junk collector in real life and on my computer. There is still a lot of “house-cleaning” to do. Our computer guy (there really should be more elegant titles for the two people that keep things purring along – (like Grand Rulers of Technology World) came and looked at it and spent about 20 minutes and had it running fine. The problem wasn’t that complicated and I am not a complete newbie, so what is the “thing” that makes someone be able to sit down at a computer and be able to tell what the problem is and take the necessary steps to fix it? I know that there is a lot of education and experience involved but the part I’m fascinated by is the thought process. I have experienced it sometimes and I have some skills but definite limitations. Yesterday was one of those times where I seemed to be in one mode and that mode was not at all on the same plane as the problem. That happens in other aspects of our lives too so maybe it’s not even a technology problem but a perception problem.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as if everything is.”

Albert Einstein

Grace is God giving us what we do not deserve

Mercy is God not giving us what we do deserve

Author unknown

We can’t always change our circumstance, but we can always change our attitude towards our circumstance

Author unknown