I usually try to catch the WPCA-FM broadcast of my stories on the first Tuesday night of each month, but tonight it blew by me. It’s Marina’s birthday and we had fun happening. In fact, the past several days have had plenty of fun, what with family gatherings, musical jamming, and lots of laughter. Saturday, we enjoyed time with daughter Hannah’s family over in Dresser, which is about 40 minutes from our place. Sunday saw daughter Britta and her husband Mark here, along with a surprise: granddaughter Kaija and her fiancé Forrest Major. Forrest will be a great addition to our family: he’s bright and a very good musician to boot, so we had plenty of guitar music and a bit of drumming and clapping going on. Monday was recuperation day, shopping, car repair, and a good time spent by me with two guys in Osceola’s Senior Center’s chat group. Today it was phone calls from daughter Alice and son John, along with emails from grandchildren and more calls from friends. Aaron did up a very fine dinner with pork loin, asparagus and potatoes, in addition to whipping up good pancakes for breakfast. And, hey, no snow shoveling today!!!
My books are selling, but slowly, per usual. Anyone hankering to get rich by writing your way to it needs to modify expectations. As I’ve said, it’s one thing to write; it’s another thing to write and get published; and yet another thing to write, get published and get paid for it.
Wolf Creek UMC is limping along with occasional musicians at the keyboard. I wrote the Easter bulletin with the options of spoken words or hymns, depending on whether or not we have a musician. At this writing, we do not have a musician. I did 9 years with CD’s for music as a chaplain at Good Samaritan Care Center and found them restrictive and generally “blah”. One congregant proposes that we sing hymns we all know a capella. Another possibility is that I work to recall all the verses of praise choruses I led close to 40 years ago and employ them with my guitar. That approach would change the entire character and form of the Sunday service the WCR congregation knows. We may very have a mix of all of the above. Stay tuned. (Pun intended.)
Son Aaron has been in from Portugal and he did yeoman work shoveling heavy wet snow last week. That helped plenty after I’d injured myself, probably by piling snow into the 8+foot piles off our deck. I am grateful. He is lobbying hard for us to move; I’m too old for physical stuff, he says. (Me: “Oh,yeah?”)
I’m sorta tuned into the election results tonight for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race. I’ve got to say that Wisconsin’s politics are shameful, especially in terms of the gerrymandering we experience. We are a state pretty well divided, politically, and we should be able to demonstrate the outcomes from that in our electoral results. Right now, the votes of many people are rendered void by the voting structure of the State. Honest people on both sides of the issue know that’s not how self-governance should operate.
We are into April now and the wood stove still works to take off the chill downstairs. I don’t mind the work involved with a wood stove. I can use the exercise and the old saying is true: wood warms you twice: once, when you chop and split it and again when you haul it and burn it. So let’s raise a toast to being warm and toasty!