Day 229 - Odds and Ends

Good evening, dear people. Bad news for you - Loriann is one of the most truthful people I know, but she misspoke yesterday when she wrote "I'll be here again tomorrow." She won't be able to do the blog tonight because she's currently on her way home from her favorite city, the Big Apple, home of the New York Mets and some other baseball team whose name slips my mind at the moment. She was going to (I believe) the first ever reunion of people who had worked on Reading Rainbow, which of course she had done for years. I'm looking forward to hearing about it when she gets home tonight, and I'm sure that you fine folks will get to hear about it tomorrow. Perhaps there will even be some pictures!

Today something rare happened - Loriann and I slept in and we actually slept late. We woke up at 7, got Domino and brought him into the bed with us. He did his little pouncing moves, fell off the bed, climbed back up again - you know, the usual kitten things to do. Loriann and I fell back asleep and didn't wake up again until 9:30! I can't remember the last time we slept that late. When we woke up we saw Domino curled up in a ball, sleeping beside us. I think we all really needed it. Even Hannah and David were still asleep!

I had a cool experience at work this week. A young lady came up to me as I was walking down the hallway back to my office and asked if she could ask me a question. Thinking that perhaps she was going to ask me the story behind my cane I said yes. She then surprised me by asking me "Were you in a bad car accident in East Greenbush last November?" Well, that was certainly a lot more specific than I was expecting! When I told her that I had been, she told me that she's been praying for me and Hannah (and really, my whole family) for months, since the crash happened, and had been following our progress on this blog. A relative of her's goes to Generation Church at Delmar Full Gospel Church with Joseph and Hannah, so she had heard about the crash shortly after it happened. My new friend is named Cindy, and I got to have two delightful talks with her this week. Her husband leads a small group in their home and the whole group has been praying for us, as well. It's always such a blessing to meet another believer out in the world, and the fact that this woman is one of Loriann's "bloggies" just made it that much sweeter. I'm looking forward to Loriann getting to meet her as well. Something tells me that they'll hit it off just fine.

You all know by now that Loriann's favorite writer is C. S. Lewis, and of course he's wonderful. (I'm rereading The Screwtape Letters these days, in fact.) My favorite is a contemporary of his, another Englishman born in the 1800s, P.G. Woodhouse. If you've never read anything of this comic genius, do yourself a big favor and remedy that situation as soon as possible. (I would suggest Right Ho, Jeeves as a wonderful starting point, but it would truly be difficult to pick a bad work of his.) Let me just tell you two of my favorite lines of his. This one takes place after a young man refuses to eat, in order to prove his love for a woman: "Even Seppings, Aunt Dahlia's butler, a cold, unemotional man, had gasped and practically reeled when Tuppy waved aside those nonnettes de poulet Agnes Sorel, while the footman, standing by with the potatoes, had stared like one seeing a vision." Another classic line of his is much shorter: "If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

I thought of Wodehouse today because a quote from one of his classic characters popped into my head. Madeline Bassett said to Bertie Wooster "Life is such a muddle, isn't it?" Last Saturday I wrote on Facebook that the simplest things could be the biggest blessings, and how nice it was to make my kids a big breakfast of pancakes and waffles and sausages, and then be cleaning up the kitchen later. I remembered that it wasn't that long ago that I couldn't do those little things. Later that same day, though, Loriann came back into the living room to find me sobbing on the couch. Out of privacy concerns I can't share exactly what I was crying about, but suffice it to say that I was grieving a loss that was a result of the accident. She practically ran to me and we cried together for a few minutes over the situation. I'm blessed that I have a wife that I can share both the happy moments and the sad moments with, and doubly blessed that my wife is of the character of Loriann. [But you guys know that, don't you : ^ ) ]

I believe that both of those emotions, coming on the same day, we true and honest and that God was in both of them. He wants to share the happy ones with us, and - true to His Word - He'll never leave us during the sad ones. We just have to remember to turn to Him. Sometimes that's harder in the happy moments. I think we're getting better at it, though.

Thank you for your continued prayers, folks. Please continue to pray for full restoration for my Princess, who's gone through so much, through no fault of her own. Thanks for sticking with us and supporting us for all this time.

Tomorrow Loriann will be back. In the meantime I'll leave you with one more quote (about a golfer) from Wodehouse: "The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows."

P.S. (Sunday morning) I just remembered the name of that other baseball team! I must have been thinking of the Brooklyn Cyclones.