Becky Bacon is coming back on August 29.  I can hardly wait.  She is an absolute joy to be around.  She walks into the house, takes her stuff to "her" bedroom, puts yogurt in the fridge (I hate yogurt) and sits down.  Sometimes, we talk.  Sometimes we don't.  Sometimes we go get Hideaway Pizza, sometimes we go to the Garage and get hamburgers.  Sometimes we scrounge around in the refrigerator for leftovers.  She is like the sister I never had.

Of course, I have my sister Lisa, but she is the exact same age as my girls.  So she is more like one of my children.

Becky B. is going to help me hang pictures.  I should be through with everything else by the time she gets here, and the only thing left will be to hang things on the walls.  If we don't get everything done, my friend Rebecca Perkins has volunteered to help.  I'm going to be in debt  to everyone I know.  That's okay, they are good friends to be in debt to.

The last move, Lisa (sister) hung all my pictures.  But that was before she and Becky (daughter) got into the estate sale business.  (Swan Estate Sales--google it.) Now, neither one has time to mess with this kind of stuff.  And Lisa has a full time job Monday through Friday as well.

I'm sure I'll have plenty of help.  My Connection group at church has volunteered to help.  I'll use them to transport greenery and lamps if I need to.  I am so blessed that so many people have said they would help me.  I've learned one thing, when you are my age you need help.  I've always done everything by myself, but this time I do need help.  This will be move 27.  The next one--I swear--will be 6 feet down.

I've been making sandwiches for Tony and his boys everyday.  They scarf everything down.  And are so very polite.  If the rest of the world is raising boys like these two, our world is going to be in good shape.  When I went over to check on things today, their dad had backed himself into a corner of the hall, and the boys were crawling in and out of a window, bringing him tile they had cut for him.  Every time I think I can't be more impressed, they one up their game.

On Wednesday, it will be August.  What happened to this year?!!  It is trickling like sand through my fingers.  I barely got Spring started and we are in the dog days of summer.  And the world is burning up.  It is hot everywhere.  All over the world.  I think it's probably time everyone agreed that the earth is warming up, and getting even warmer.  Europe is setting temperature highs.  So is Asia.  Hello--is China listening?  Maybe we should all get together in peace and figure out what to do for the good of us all???

Tile is down in the new house.  Tony will seal and grout it by Tuesday.  It looks fantastic.  All of you out there are invited to come by and look.  The appliances will be delivered Wednesday.  The 1st.  The counters go in Thursday.  Everything will be installed by Friday.  Jon, Scott and Sam are coming Saturday, Sunday and Monday to move all the boxes I've packed.  The movers are coming that Friday the 10th, and this house closes on the 13th.  Monday.   I think I am going to make it.

I watched Tony lay tile for the last five days.  And those 13 year old twins.  They keep amazing me.  Austin was running a tile saw with a water cooled rotating blade, and cutting tile while his dad was laying it.   He, Austin, said, "Go look at the tile I cut to go around the floor vents.  They were perfect.  I asked him what he was going to be when he grew up.  "A chef," he answered.  "I love to cook.  Especially baking things."  He has already picked the school he is going to go to in five years.

And Tyler said, "I'm going to be a mechanic.  My dad has already helped me take a car apart, and an engine apart," he continued.  "He taught me about a bunch of other car things and how to reassemble them. " I didn't know what he was talking about.  He obviously did.

What is so amazing is the intelligent conversations these boys conduct.  They hold their own on any topic that has come up.  They told me about the many (Many, many) surgeries and hospitalizations they have had due to problems they encountered (as twins) at birth.  Austin matter of factly said, "I gave Tyler a bunch of blood when he had to have a transfusion."  These boys amaze me.

They will go far.  I told both of them that I would try and make it to their high school graduation.  It gives me something to look forward to!!

Tony calls me grandmother.  The boys call me Ma'am.  You can't beat that.

My friend Jeanette--I don't know if I have mentioned her before--is the first friend I made in Edmond when I moved here.  I was standing outside the First Baptist Church on the first Sunday morning after moving here, wondering if this was a church I might like to visit, when she came up and asked me if I would like to go to her Connection group with her.  So I did.  And now I am teaching it.  And Jeanette has been like a spring in the middle of a desert.  She is always ready to help me.

She came over today to look at the new house while Tony was laying tile.  And when she went home, she called and said, "We need to make cutouts to scale to help you figure out where things are going to go.  I'll come over tomorrow and help you do that."  Hallelujah.  Praise God.  I have been so exhausted packing boxes that I haven't had time to figure that out.  I have always made cutouts before I moved--measuring the rooms and where the windows are--but I have been so busy that I put that on the back burner of my mind to do later.  I had no idea where things were going to go.

Well, later is here!!  Jeanette is going to help me.  It is such a relief.  And on top of that, Ann called and said, "Tomorrow morning we are going to take a break and go garage sailing.  You need to do something fun for a few hours."

I am so blessed.  God provides me with people in my life who care about me and lift me up.

One of the things I have learned in the last eighty years is that you need people who uplift you in your  close circle of friends.  And you need to drop those who pull you down.  In my past I have had to pull away from people who made me feel "down."  Good people, but not exactly what I need in my life.  I need people to keep me going.  I want to spend my time with people who don't gossip, moan, whine, or negate others in every situation.  People like that make me tired.

Of course, all of us have our moments.  We all need to be picked up and restarted from time to time, everyone needs a friend to talk to when things are going on in their life which are difficult.  But for some people, moaning about their difficulties is a permanent home.  They like it there.  And it will wear you out.  My friend Jeanette has given me a lift from the "Slough of Despond."  (Pilgrim's Progress.  Read it.)  Today, I am going to cut out stuff from graph paper with my friend.

One invention that we didn't have when I was growing up was a paper shredder.  I remember tearing things into tiny pieces to destroy them.  But with every advantage--paper shredder--comes a possible disaster.  Have you ever turned one upside down, up into the air when it was full of shredded paper?  That's what I did this morning.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been over carpet, tile, etc.  But I upended it over a glass of water which got knocked over in the process, 20-30 pages of books and paper I was trying to sort.  And my chair--need I go on.  It was a colossal mess.  It is still a colossal mess and will be until I shake everything out that is covered in tiny pieces of paper and wipe up the water.  And then the only thing I can do is break out the vacuum sweeper and hope for the best.  What a mess.

I was trying to be careful.  It made no difference.  I think everyone should upend a paper shredder flying through the air in their lifetime.  It makes you thankful for another invention we didn't have when I was growing up:  a vacuum sweeper.  We only had brooms and dust mops.  You used the dust mop on wood floors that had been waxed to a shine with Johnston's Wax.  I don't remember anyone having carpet.  We had throw rugs.  Which had to be taken out each week and hung over a clothes line.  Then you would beat the rugs with a wire contraption until the rugs didn't spew dust anymore.

I remember saying to my Gran, "You had it so much harder back when you were raising a family."  She answered me by saying, "We washed outside in a tub, hung everything on the line to dry and threw the wash water on the kitchen floors and swept them with a broom.  The water ran through the cracks in the floor to the dirt below, and the chickens were glad to find a cool place to hunker down.  We didn''t have to keep things "Pretty" like you do today.  In some ways, it was easier."  Can you imagine carrying heavy loads of wash water into the house to clean floors!  And Gran was probably barefoot and pregnant.  She had 6 children.  I don't know how she did it without a vacuum.

Nobody waxes floors anymore.  Floors come with a permanent shine.  And when that wears off, you paint a new shine on that lasts as long as the first one did.  Or strip it out and lay a new floor.
Polyurethane put Johnston's wax out of business.  And Hoover put the oil mop out of business.  Things change.  God stays the same.  Today, tomorrow, and forever.  That's a good thing.

My contractor has twin boys--Tyler and Austyn--that I have fallen in love with.  They are such gentlemen.  Thirteen years old, and they work along side their father Tony--who I truly admire and respect for the way he has raised his sons.  They work.  And are learning to do things most thirteen year old boys have never heard of.

The other day, I went over to my new house and one of them was ripping out tile with some sort of a power jack.  The other one was sweeping up the mess.  Yesterday when I went over, both of them were on top of the kitchen counter ripping off wall paper above the cabinets.  And it was stuck really bad.  They had spray guns to wet it down and soften it so that they could get a grip.  I've removed lots of wallpaper in my past, but I never saw paper that was so stuck and hard to remove as this was.  But I am sure the boys will get it done.  They were sticking with it every time I went over.

All the while their dad was sanding down the concrete where the tile had come up.  Getting it smooth and prepped to lay new tile.  I hope they have it done by the end of the week.  But that may be a little ambitious.  It is a huge job.  It is a wonderful thing to watch a man training his sons how to work.  And their dad does a loving job of helping them learn.  It's a rare thing in today's world for a father to apprentice his sons.  In my day, it was the norm.  Boys grew up knowing how to do just about everything to keep a farm running.  Electrical wiring, plumbing, woodworking, building barns and helping with "House Raisings."

The entire town, or church, would raise a house from the ground to the rafters in a day.  The women would feed all of the workers breakfast, dinner and supper before the day was done.  Boys, and girls grew up knowing how to do things.  Everybody pitched in.  But that is rare today.

Most kids don't have a clue any more what they want to be when they grow up.  They go to school, but don't get a chance to apply anything they are learning to the real world until they graduate.  And if they to to college, it isn't any clearer to them.  As a counselor, I would get a new crop of college freshmen every fall, and ask them what they wanted to major in.  Every year it was the same:  "I don't know.  I just think I'll take the basics."  By the time they figured it out, they had wasted two years on stuff that didn't count.  And even then, many of them still didn't know what they wanted to do.  Sad.

I have lived through 14 presidents.  I find it interesting how much of history people forget--or maybe they never knew?  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president when I was born.  He was in his second term--having been president since 1933.  I was born in 1938, and was seven years old when he died.  I remember.  The war was not yet over, and the people of America were very unsettled.  Roosevelt was in his fourth term as president--an unprecedented accomplishment.  (Now presidents are limited to two terms.)

When you live through something, you know what happened--which is not what the history books write about it later.  I know what it feels like to have FDR as president.  It affected everyone in the country, my folks included.  My family talked about events with other family members.  I grew up hearing very intelligent discussions about politics.  About the economy.  About war.   Roosevelt was revered by almost everyone in America after we got into WW2.

But the president I remember the most about was Truman.  He was president from the time I was seven, until I was fifteen.  I watched him be very decisive about dropping the A-bomb to end WW2 before more Americans died.  Japan had been defeated, but refused to give up.  He later sent troops into Korea to stop the move of Communism there.  He became President when FDR died in office, and was later elected to a second term, serving from 1945 to 1953.

I voted for the first time for the next president, Eisenhower.  I didn't tell my grandmother.  She would have disowned me.  She was a dyed in the wool Democrat.  But Eisenhower was a hero, and I was much impressed by heroes at that age.  I voted Independant once--Ken knew the VP in that party--he played football with him in Pensacola. Through many elections, I have voted.  Sometimes one way, sometimes another.  I have tried to understand the issues, knowing that I was going to be disappointed in the results of my vote.  Democrats are not Democrats anymore.  Republicans are not Republicans anymore either.  I don't know what has happened to either party.  I lived through a time when the presidents tried to do what was right--in as much as they knew how.

God please protect us from almost all of the politicians of this age.  God please lead our nation as you have in the past.  Help our leaders figure out what they need to do to keep us out of war.

Have you ever been afraid to open a package? You know what is in it, but what if it isn't exactly what you ordered?  The tile for the dining room and kitchen came Saturday.  I haven't had the heart to open any of it.  What if it isn't the right color.  What if it isn't what I picked out...etc. etc.  What if I hate it?
The tile man comes today so it is too late to regroup.  It's going down one way or another.

I spent yesterday going through "The Closet."  You know the one.  Back tax returns.  Paper articles you have cut out.  Family memorabilia.  Three ring binders filled with...??  Some is easy to throw away.  Some of it I thought I would never open again--back when I moved here.  It's that "Just in Case" stuff that you are afraid some other generation might want someday.  I sincerely don't know what to do with all of it.

I saved that room and closet for last because I dreaded it.  It was worse than I thought.  I did toss all of Ken's "Aunt Betty and Uncle Clair" stuff.  They died years ago and left no children.  All their nieces and nephews are gone.  I've kept their stuff for 30 years.  Too long.  Nobody cares any more.  Sad, but true.  I tossed and tossed and sat and wondered what to keep--for someone else to trash.

Life is filled with things that don't matter.  And way too few things that do.  This is the second time I've made my "Last Move."  I swear I am never going to do this again.  I still have CD's.  And cassette tapes.  I did throw the reel to reels out--only to have Becky ask for them a couple of months later.  Who knew!!  I'm going to leave all that stuff in "The Closet" and let David (who bought my house) figure out what to do with it.  The next generation is better at this than I am.  Nothing is permanent with them.  Technology is moving too rapidly for me to figure out what to keep.  They throw stuff out with abandon and get new stuff.  I can't do that!!

We never threw anything out when I was growing up.  We had so little.  We were always "Making Do."  Repurposing.  Making kids clothes out of some adult's old work things.  Using pant legs, zippers and whatever we could--to go into a finished garment.  Nobody threw out plastic bags, twist ties, rubber bands.  Old inner tubes were cut into rubber bands for our clothes pin guns.  Kids didn't have store bought toys.  Only what gramps fashioned for us.  It was the best of times.  Moving was never a problem.  We didn't have much to move.  Just what God provided--which was enough.