My computer has been goofy.  I haven’t been able to post.  

Will try and do better next week.

 Finally went to see the doctor.  She went over me with a fine tooth comb, did a Covid test--I don’t have it--put me on two meds and said to let her know if they didn’t take care of the headache and upset tummy.  I’ve really been under the weather for weeks.  

I woke up this morning with no bad symptoms.  Hallelujah.  Gimme’ the pills.  She thinks I  stressed my entire body dealing with the back pain for so long.  Sounds reasonable to me.  I am a stress bomb anyway.

I was supposed to get blood work, but forgot.  Got all the way home and had to turn around and drive back to get it.  No wonder I am a stress bomb sometimes.   I do it to myself.

One of the things that occurs as you age is keeping up with what is breaking down.  Old people talk about their ailments because they are always occurring.  It’s one thing or another.  God’s way of getting us ready to travel--to heaven.  Ken always said--especially in terms of going to war, “Don’t threaten me with heaven.” 

He was the bravest person--man or woman--I have ever known.  He never talked about his exploits unless it was to tell a funny story.  And some of his escapades were really funny.  As for ailments, he was post flighting an A4 in Viet Nam to see if there was battle damage.  As he walked around the back of the plane, it “burped” a ball of fire.  Burned his entire body.  One of the men doused him with water and they put him in a shower.  I heard that one after he came home.  Among other mishaps. 

The divide in the nation seems to be getting larger.  It is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime.  And based on terrible misinformation coming at you from every angle.  I have heard all sorts of things that normally wouldn’t be given the time of day.

It takes years and years to do a study on the results of a vaccine---we don’t know anything about that yet.  But things are being brandied about as absolute facts after five months.  One of the latest is that it will make you infertile.  You can’t possibly know that in five months!!  Five years maybe.  Yesterday, I heard that the vaccine if filled with something that makes you magnetic.  Where is this kind of stuff coming from??? 

I’ve never seen anything like this.  Trump introduced “Warp Speed.”  It was a resounding success.  It worked.  Biden acted on that and those who got the vaccine (including Trump and Biden) aren’t going to the hospital.  98.2% of deaths are from the unvaccinated.  If you don’t want a vaccine, okay.  But why get on a soapbox about it?  What this has to do with politics escapes me.  But then, I am a scientist.  I’ve worked in labs.  I know how lab science works.

America seems to have lost faith in itself.  Perhaps it will cause us to turn to God again.  I’m tired of all the division between people over stupid stuff.  Let’s talk about things that count in eternity... 

I called my friend Carolyn last night and told her I was getting little spots on my legs that peeled.   She told me it was a fatal disease for which there was no cure.  Old age.  It’s nice to know what is going to kill me.

I hadn’t checked my garden in a couple of days and when I went out there, there were twenty or so ripe tomatoes.  You can only give so many away and then you have to do something with them...which I’m not going to do.

But my cousin Ann makes salsa, so she is going to take them.  Fridays we go to breakfast, but this morning I fixed a spinach, tomato, mushroom and bacon omelet for us and finished it off with. toast.  Yum.  She likes to go to the weekend sales...and I go along to keep her company.  She doesn’t like to do it by herself.  I’d be doing nothing at home anyway.

We seldom buy anything...but she is always looking for things that are cheap for her “basket.”  She keeps it by her piano for her students and when they do what they are supposed to do and do it well, they get a “prize.”  Everything she buys at the sales is brand new.  

It is amazing what people buy and never use.

I am hooked on “Married at First Sight.”  I can’t imagine someone marrying a person they never met.  Maybe it intrigues me because after Ken spent twenty-one years as a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps doing super-sonic crazy things, he chose to spend the rest of his life as a professor in Sociology--of all things!!!

He had been the commanding officer of three different squadrons of men--one of those in the Viet Nam war--officers who were also pilots, and hundreds of enlisted men, and was fascinated by the interaction between the human community and what motivated them. 

So when he retired, he went back to college and got a degree in Airspace studies and his Master’s in Sociology.  I spent many an afternoon in his office at the end of the day, waiting on him so we could drive the fifty-five miles back to our home, listening to him discuss different points that intrigued him.  Listening to his expertise on the subject of sociology.

Why do people do the things they do?  Why do they think the things they think?  Why do they believe what they do?  Why do they react the way they do? He would walk into a new class and say, “The basic question that all mankind must answer before they can answer anything else is: Is there a God. It affects every other thing you build your life on.  I believe there is a God and it will influence how I teach this class.  If that bothers you, then go to the administration building and find another teacher.”  I loved the guy--what can I say.... 

Pat decided that she better come look at me.  Sometimes telling her I am okay isn’t enough.  It’s not that she doesn’t believe me, she just knows that I am self-sufficient and sometimes wait until it’s sometimes too late to yell.  She stayed all night, declared me fine and went home this morning.

Becky came by as well.  She is doing an estate sale this weekend and said there were already over 100,000 hits on the site photos.  It is a really big one.  If you haven’t ever been, look on line at Swan Estate Sales.  She works on it all the time.  The houses are sometimes left after years of neglect and have to be cleaned--it is hard work.  She hires a lot of people to help.  Two more in August.

Amy called Pat this morning to get instructions with tending the horses.  Pat can’t easily leave them, and one of them that she is boarding needed a swift kick.

Horses and estate sales.  I don’t understand my daughters.  But what can I say...they both have always worked hard at what they do.  Me?  I like cleaner venues in which to spend my time.

I like retirement even better.

Headache is almost all gone.  Hallelujah.  I’m through running into walls full speed.  Nose cartilage is still sore--probably cracked, but what the heck, it didn’t kill me.

Ann saved me some eggplant parmesan--yum.  And Brad--Jeanette’s son--sent me Chinese.  Enough for five or six meals.  So I don’t have to figure out what I am going to be eating for the next week.  Thank God for the people who remember me that way.  I had an ear of corn for breakfast with toast.  My unconventional solution to the morning.

If you have older single people in your neighborhood, take them a plate.  It means the world.  They’ve quit cooking.  They’re eating frozen dinners.  Peanut butter sandwiches, grilled cheese, etc.  A hot meal is a delight.

I used to do that for neighbors without any idea what it meant to them.  Now I know.  Maybe what goes around comes around???

I did get up this  morning and put green beans and potatoes on.  I fried a pound of bacon yesterday and have fresh tomatoes.  So I will share it with someone.  My mother taught me to use frozen green beans. Add bacon grease and they taste the same as fresh if you do it right.  I fry the whole pound of bacon so I can have BLT’s for lunches.  Yum.  Pigs are one of God’s best inventions.  Ham, bacon, pork chops...