Crazy Life

This week my husband and I took a three day motorcycle trip, We were on a scavenger hunt of sorts looking for a city and a county for each letter of the alphabet. This took us to Xenia, Zanesville, and Youngstown, OH. I have a cousin near Youngstown and we had not seen each other in about 37 years, we estimated. We had been close in our childhood, she and her brothers would come down to visit our grandparents in the summer. I was an only child and she was the only girl so for the duration of those visits we were stuck together like glue. Life happened, we grew up. She went in the Army. A couple of years later I went into the Air Force, She had a child and a job, and then I had 4 children and a job. We reconnected on Facebook but you know how that is. A few pictures, a joke and some likes. I messaged her and asked her if we could stop by for a short visit. When we got there it was like summer vacation had just started. We hugged and chatted away as if it were merely a school year si

Have you ever lost something and wasted time in your day searching for maybe your keys, or a present you bought someone on sale and put away for a time? Have you ever been on a trip and become completely lost in a strange city in a scary neighborhood?  Maybe you have been looking for something that isn't lost, like in a scavenger hunt. I have played Pokémon Go! nearly since its inception. *I have logged hundreds of miles, my fitbit bears witness to that. I have walked all over various towns searching for the elusive Dragonite. One night as I prepared for bed a Snorlax appeared right at the end of my bed! SCORE! Have you ever felt emotionally lost? Grieving for a dead relationship or the loss of someone you love? Maybe you are dealing with deep depression or things in your past that haunt you. You are not alone. David in the book of Psalm 25:16-17 cries out "Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart and free my from

I learned to read long before I started school at the age of 7.  In the first grade I was reading Trixie Beldon Mysteries and could not understand why we had to read Jack and Jill and Tip and Mitten. Babyfied books. I had my own public library card and each week my mother would take me to check out new books. In Junior High - what people now call Middle School I developed a taste for adult novels with salacious content. The Exorcist was popular at this time and I was about half way through reading a paperback I had bought, when my mother noticed what I was reading. She was the original inventor of the phrase "Garbage In, Garbage Out" She threw the book in the trash, tied up the bag and walked me out to the garbage can with it. What an outrage! Censorship! The woman was ahead of her time. She knew how to practice reverse psychology. She told me she knew of a good book I should read when I was older, but that I was too young to understand it now. It was called Catcher in

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script> <script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({ google_ad_client: "ca-pub-2360701609150243", enable_page_level_ads: true }); </script> I have a problem - well probably more than one. I am a hoarder. I grew up relatively poor. Not the starving dirt floor poor. The kind that only owns two sets of school clothes, that never went on any school trips, that couldn't get a school jacket or a year book. Now I keep EVERYTHING. I still have my first stuffed animal and doll. I KNOW the dog chewed the crotch out of the underwear but they are still usable - sort of. My mother died and I am having a tough time getting rid of her things. I had to tell myself that her dentures were just pieces of plastic and not part of her. My husband had to pry my hands off her glasses to drop them in the donation bin at the Lions Club

According to Western folklore the owl is considered to be a wise, silent and solitary bird of prey, wiser even than the eagle. My husband is Ojibwe Indian and he tells me that in his language  "gookook'oo" is the word for an owl.  The Owl is both feared as it is used by practitioners of "bad medicine" and honored when worn by a wiseman as a symbol of one with healing powers. The Cherokee watched the screech owls closely while tracking enemies because they were said to foretell victory or defeat in battle. A.A.Milne, if you recall, is the author of Winnie the Pooh and here is what he had to say about owls. "Owl is the grand and rather clever old man of the forest. He can also spell Tuesday." In the book of Proverbs Wisdom is always referred to with a female pronoun and she is frequently coupled with the word Understanding.  I can see that! There are special words for those who reject wisdom. The Hebrew one of petayim is one who is naive, pos

I have been thinking about a vacation. It has been awhile. Last year I was bitten by a brown recluse spider and spent most of the summer recuperating. It was quite painful and even now can be sensitive at times. This summer my husband ended up in the hospital and had open heart surgery on the day we were scheduled to leave for the beach. He will be in rehabilitation until October so no summer vacation this year. There are a lot of places I want to go and a lot of things I want to see, I have dreamt of going to Prince Edward Island in Canada since the 5th grade. Our teacher, Mrs. Eulalah Harris read us " Ann of Green Gables"   and I have wanted to go to Avonlea and see Marilla ever since. And to have red hair. The other place I want to go, and have been close to many times but never topped is the SPAM Museum in Austin Minnesota. This is probably due to being such a big Monty Python fan. A few years ago we were riding on our motorcycle through New York on the way to Mai