Bits & Pieces

No single thing dominates my journal entry for Tuesday; it was a day of bits and pieces of significance to no one but me.

In my garden project I potted flowers until I ran out of potting soil. So the project is finished until after payday when I can buy more. I’ve been ordering the project not only to clear accumulated debris and to maximize the flower displays, but also with future ease of maintenance in mind.

Two purple finches came to the feeder today, first I’ve seen in weeks. And I stumbled across a 4-foot gray and black snake sunning himself by the steps; I hadn’t seen this one before.

As I worked I thought a lot about our plan of Christian giving. That’s something for Ginny and me to talk about again soon.

I also thought about the next stage in getting my fire history book written. I’ve delayed that book too much; I’d intended to finish it two months ago, but life intervened. My discipline as a writer lacks… well, discipline.

Speaking of discipline: Until today I have not looked at a photo of a naked woman on the internet since last October or November!

This means a triumph for my deepening spiritual maturity and purity of heart — or it means that I’m getting too darn old to get turned on by much of anything.

But for about 20 minutes this afternoon I checked out a site I remember to see if there had been any changes. I discovered that the lady still has no clothes.

Danni claims to be the most downloaded woman on the web. I can see the reasons for that — both of them.

When Ginny got home she clued me in to a neat site called Hurricane City at http://www.hurricanecity.com/ . This site contains everything you’d possibly want to know about hurricanes past and future.

A couple of times every year we face decisions about approaching hurricanes: will it hit here? Or south of us? Or north of us? Is this one close enough that I should take all the pictures off the walls? Sink lawn chairs in the pool? Run for the hills?

The tv weathermen update us with various probabilities and graphic maps showing percentages of possibility.

Well, the folks at Hurricane City used one of these cones of uncertainty of a tee shirt which is a hoot! I howled when Ginny showed me this thing:

We drove to the library to return this weeks book and a lady there greeted us with, “Say, aren’t you Eve’s parents”? She proceeded to say all sorts of good things about our daughter; we knew she is great but it’s nice to hear that from others too.

In local news: I heard the sirens but I didn’t know what had happened till I watched the evening tv news — a minivan filled with kids ran a stop sign and was T-boned by an SUV killing a driver and mangling ten kids who are in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. Another 7-year-old child who witnessed the crash from the side of the road also had to be hospitalized for shock and trauma; and two firefighters required hospitalization when they were injured as they rescued the kids.

In national news, there is the usual furor over a constitutional amendment about gay marriage. As I look at the couples around me and as I browse blogs on the internet, I think we Christians ought to focus on strengthening our own shaky marriages than worrying about somebody else’s marriage.

A lot of Christian people endure miserable relationships and lead sad, miserable lives at home. This saddens me. In our first 38 years, Ginny and I periodically set aside a day for no other purpose than to work on our marriage and make sure things are well between the two of us. That doesn’t solve all our problems, but it certainly helps.

Some wise Englishman, ( Lord Chesterfield? Churchill?) said, “The chief end of all human endeavor is to be happy at home”!

We Christians tend to ignore the log in our own eye and worry about the splinter in the other guy’s eye.

In international news: Indonesia’s Mount Merapi volcano threatens to erupt adding to that nation’s misery. About 6,000 people died in the earthquake last week with 36,000 wounded; and the volcano has caused an additional 11,000 to evacuate. This on top of a measles epidemic and bird flu and riots causes enormous disruption and pain. But I wrote about my interest in Indonesia’s sufferings back on May 29^th & 30^th.

Indonesia has the world’s most volcanoes with 128 of them being active.

Anyhow, that’s all I have for today’s journal entry which tracks my mature (check spelling, not manure) development as I grow toward sainthood —or degenerate into a dirty old man getting worse.

I can see my own daily progress:

For instance, I used to be indecisive; now I'm not so sure about that.