RAIN!!!

After almost 2 months of hundred-degree weather,
I am hearing a wonderful sound!
The preacher is preaching but I am hearing
RAIN, steadily falling down!

I know that my God listens.
He hears, when for RAIN I pray.
I have faith so I always carry
My umbrella with me every day.

Thank you, God, for my blessings -
And that hot days are now on the wane.
In Your time, you have again now sent it -
Refreshing, nourishing RAIN!!!

- by Netagene, written in about 10 minutes during Steve's sermon this morning! -

Nature Girl

Besides the crepe myrtles along the back fence, pictured just previously (and probably some poison ivy, but I'm not going there!), I have something odd growing in my front yard. I have a bird feeder near my front steps and car-less driveway. I like to sit on my porch swing and watch the birds. Earlier in the year, it was mostly mockingbirds, cardinals, and sparrows, with an occasional nuthatch, mourning dove, or robin. Now it's mostly just sparrows. A week ago, in the grass (hopefully my yard man will be over soon!), there is now what I think may be corn! (Saturday, September 11 - a friend told me this is milo. I can't find any pictures that look like it, yet. I found a site for the Kansas Sorghum Grain Association, which I found when looking for "milo". The sorghum syrup I know comes from cane, not grain!) I presume it came from something in the cheap bird feed I buy, or possibly from "bird poop"! I have asked my yard man not to mow it down. And yes, that is me, with the ends of my hair still dark; if I were to cut my hair, obviously it would now be mostly gray. My eyebrows have always been thick and dark. Click on the picture for a closer view.

Flowers in my yard

In spite of the extreme heat, things are blooming. There aren't many flowers in my yard, mostly only the ones that were here when I moved in March of 1999, meaning crepe myrtles along the back fence. Of about 20 azaleas which my parents and nephew helped me plant, only 1 grew. Seems that the side of the street where I live, there's almost no flowers; the people who live in the houses on the low side of the street have a lot of azaleas, so it must have to do with the water staying in those yards longer, and the fact that those houses face south. Nonetheless, the few crepe myrtles are in full bloom.

Another thing which seems to be growing a lot everywhere -
and this is a warning - is poison ivy. My mother is 93, decided a few days ago to pull some weeds by her roses, fell right by the fence, was able to pull herself only to a sitting position, a neighbor heard her hollering, called paramedics, got her inside her house - and a couple of days, she had tiny blisters on her face, arms, and legs. My sister took her to the doctor. He said that half of his walk-ins lately have gotten into poison ivy!

My sister came over yesterday, and we went for hamburgers, and to the store. She brought her camera. So ... here's a close up and another of the crepe myrtles! The trees are loaded with blooms, and there are a lot of crepe myrtles all over town. They come in white, pale pink, deep pink (such as these), and sort of a lilac color. Not only are they beautiful, but they seem to grow best when left alone (meaning of course that they can also take over a yard if you don't cut them back).

Going Places

OK. That was a bit of a misnomer, though I DID "go places". This is mostly about our transit system.

First, most of the buses are old, and even if the transit authority had money (which is supposed to come from the cities where the buses go) to fix them, I've heard that some parts are no longer available. Some of the buses ride so roughly that it seems that my back is going to break and my teeth fall out! I call them the "shake, rattle, and roll" buses, what with their worn out shocks and all the squeaks and racket they make! We get hoarse carrying on conversations while riding.

Also, the air conditioning no longer works in most of the buses. Also, I think only 4 paratransit buses will run, and they have to be used for people in wheelchairs. We who are ambulatory ride in supervisors' vehicles, including small white 4-door sedans, a maroon SUV, an old dark blue Mercury Marquis, and some white vans. Some have MAX or BJCTA on them; some are unmarked. On most (not all) of these other vehicles, the AC does work.

I can be on one for less than 30 minutes and have trouble breathing. Drivers, being on these non-AC'd vehicles 8+ hours a day, are getting sick, having to take days off work, and are even being taken by supervisors to the ER! And how about those who ride who've just gotten off a dialysis machine, and the riders who wear metal leg braces ...

And I guess maybe some of the employees who are inside the AC'd building are also getting stressed out. Maybe that's what happened to me a couple of days ago.

For paratransit, we have to be "certified" to ride, and we have to schedule our rides. An individual ticket is $2, or you can buy a monthly pass for $80 for unlimited rides (the best deal for anyone going to work 5 days a week). If it's the same every day, we don't have to call in (such as going to and from work).

I called earlier in the week to change my Thursday afternoon rides, telling the scheduler that I needed to go to work as usual, but that I needed to leave work between 12:30 and 1:00 to go to meet an insurance agent. After calling 2 or 3 times and the dispatcher telling me the driver was on the way, at 2:00, I finally told dispatch that I was at work ... and was told, "Oh, the driver went to your house". Turns out that rather than it being on someone's manifest to get me at work, somehow my home address was printed ...

I finally got to the insurance office. Luckily the lady was still there. But because I was running late, whoever was to have gotten me of course had to get others, and I had to call dispatch to let them know that I was ready to go.

My other stop was to K-Mart. When the driver got me there, another driver was there already. I was on her manifest! Having just gotten there, again, after doing a bit of shopping, I had to call dispatch to let them know that I was ready to go home. I told the dispatcher that I would be inside because there were no benches outside, plus the fact that the temperature was about 100 (which it's been every day for 2 months).

Again, I waited and waited. Finally the dispatcher called to let me know that my driver was outside. I went outside and - no bus. I told dispatch. He asked, "Are you at the pharmacy side or the grocery side?"

He, or someone, or somehow ... the driver had gone to Wal-Mart, and not the WM 1/4 mile from the K-Mart where I was, but to the WM nearest my house, and about 10 miles away.

I got home about 2 hours later than I should have. I am seriously considering quitting my job; the bus situation is one reason.

Entertainment

This is about TV and worship. You're wondering, "Huh?"

I've never watched TV much. My family didn't get one until I was 15, so by then, I had hobbies that I enjoyed doing (rather than watching TV and being "done to").

I've never had cable or satellite TV, and with the digital box hooked to my 24" screen TV, where my house is located, all I can get is Fox 6, which has, among other things on Saturday, "American Idol Revisited" and "America's Most Wanted".

About the only shows I miss are things on APTV, especially the Britcoms: "Waiting for God" (my favorite), "Are You Being Served?", "The Vicar of Dibley", and so on. Years ago, I also watched "Jeopardy" (Mother tried and tried to get me to try out for that), "Wheel of Fortune", "Hee Haw", the old sitcoms: M*A*S*H (my favorite), Red Skelton, the Andy Griffith Show, and so on. But I don't miss them enough to do anything about it!

I read the TV section in today's paper. I know why I am not even interested in watching TV. A lot of the synopses about shows on tonight told about vampires, nudity, fornication/adultery, murder (crime of all kinds) ... That's entertainment? No thanks. The Bible says (Philippians 4:8) to think on good things.

Then there's entertainment of the religious kind, which is clean.

In Saturday's paper is a list of the happenings at area churches: concerts, dance, fun and games, a health fair, money management seminar, a bake sale, a spaghetti supper ... Rarely was anything spiritual listed. As I wrote on July `2, did Jesus die for all these things? Aren't homes and schools and cities and corporations the ones to have concerts and classes and such? To me, churches are - or should be - about being saved, about what happens to us when we pass from this life!

To some, the services where I worship are probably boring because we don't clap our hands or have choirs and such, but we do learn the Bible and we do learn about Jesus and we do learn who created everything and we do learn what to do to go to Heaven. That's enough for me.

BUS

I was on the bus this afternoon an hour and a half or little more ... a bus in which the air conditioning did not work. One big temperature sign we passed at 6 p.m. showed 98 degrees. The thermometer on my porch a little later showed 96 degrees. I have no idea what the heat index is. Not only do I feel sorry for all of us who ride (this afternoon was a lady who works at Blue Cross - she wears metal braces on her legs, and another lady who is on kidney dialysis), but what about the drivers who have to be in such a vehicle for hours every day! Pray for us!

INTEGRITY

Surprising how things seem to tie in together.

We have 2 engineers in the office where I work at the highway department. One is also a lawyer.

She recently won a trip (because of some paper she had written) to the Alabama Bar Association's convention in Destin, FL. On return, I asked about the convention, if there were interesting seminars and such (one co-worker was more interested in how much did she party). She said that the keynote speaker was a lawyer who had worked at the White House under Nixon, and was involved somewhat in the Watergate mess. I'm not much into politics, but especially remembered the names of some involved, though I didn't remember this particular person.

She showed me a book of the Power Point Presentation slides that the man used. He is Egil "Bud" Krogh. A few years ago, he wrote a book called "Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House". She offered to loan it to me after she had read it (she bought it at the convention and had him autograph it), but after reading more on line, I bought a like-new copy from abebooks.com because it sounded like something that I'd like to read more than once. His site is simply www.budkrogh.com. Here's one little bit from it:

What is happening within the Integrity Zone?

The Integrity Zone is a plan of action, bases on the belief that you want to act in good conscience. In order to be in good conscience, it is imperative to act with integrity. If you do, you'll have a beneficial outcome. Here is that core idea in a diagram:

I encourage you to find a copy and read it. I am going to reread it - and I tend to mark in a book (another reason I sure didn't want to borrow my boss's copy)!

Today's Bible study was about Joseph in Genesis 39. The visiting teacher/preacher (Steve is out sick) talked about how Joseph was tempted, but that he did what was right.

When I feel better, I'll expand on both Bud Krogh's book, and points from Scott's Bible lesson about Joseph. Stay tuned!

Computer, etc.

A short update - Shane's mother brought him to my house yesterday and I think he worked another 2-to-3 hours. He could not get Linux to install, but was able, with yet another set of discs, to get Windows installed completely again. For some reason though, IE continues to go to the fake site for some AV programs. At least he had loaded the real Malwarebytes on a thumb drive, so that's here and running. Lost all my old email that was in OE, but at least the address book was intact. Don't have Quicken and no luck finding the free one on the internet. At least I'd copied all my checking account stuff to a Word document. Couldn't get the audio drivers to work, so no sound for now (no big deal for me because I rarely listened to anything). I found the drivers on line for my printer but haven't installed them again yet. And I don't have MS Office installed, nor Open Office, which I've heard is as good. For now, I'm typing things into Word Pad.

When you are unable to see well enough to drive, the computer is most handy. Shane also does not see well. He rode the fixed route bus home.

Because I still don't feel well, I'm not on line a lot lately - mostly napping and drinking a lot of water.

No, I didn't disappear!

Hope you are well. The "sunny South" has been way too sunny, even for me, with daytime temperatures above 90 for about a month, and the heat index over 100 most days. We had about an hour of welcome relief the last 2 days in the way of afternoon T-storms. On the bus on the way home from work on Thursday, my driver almost had to pull off the road because of the deluge. There were a lot of lightning strikes, and traffic signals were out in places. Luckily it seemed that everyone, even on the highway, was treating it like a 4-way stop.

I've been off-line a lot because of computer problems. Shane and I got a ride to Best Buy recently and I bought an external hard drive. He moved things to it for me, then tried to reload Windows. No go. So - another day, and he was able to use some discs he had to reload Windows, but the system wouldn't take the key. He then was able to load it another way, though I'm on a countdown with about 26 days left. He's going to try one more time, maybe later today, with some other discs. If that still fails, he knows how to install Linux and Open Office, neither which I've ever used.

Another problem is that in trying to again find the "real" Malwarebytes, AVAST, SpyBot ... something from Sammsoft comes up, and according to another site, Sammsoft is NOT the real thing! I know what the real icons look like, and the ones that I found are completely different. Obviously shortly after I installed those programs, I deleted them. What a mess! Thanks to Ann in Texas, I did get the real SuperAnitSpyware, which is up and running.

Right now, I do not have sound or a printer. I miss the printer.

Last and least is about me ... I've had sinus problems as long as I can remember, and this year has been the worst. The extreme heat (and riding buses, many which the air conditioners do not work), smoke (neighbors cooking out), grass/pollen ... just to keep from "drowning", I've had to "live" on Claritin during the daytime, and Benedryl, Tylenol PM, and cough syrup at night. I hardly have energy to type, much less crochet! No real need to go to the doctor because most scrips have terrible side effects. Otherwise, I'm well.