Progression towards normalcy

We continue to have internet access problems and I can only get on the net to post the blog in a catch as catch can sort of fashion.

I have been trying to get all the stuff put away that we brought home from Maine.  Mostly it is the same stuff that we took, but I am still tired from the trip home and cannot work as fast as I would like to work.  I do have a place for it all……..it is just a matter of finding that place.  I am sure that some gremlins crept into the house while we were not here and they filled up the spaces with other stuff.

Speaking of stuff, as we drove across the nation, we drove on highways that cut through towns and neighborhoods and if I had to describe those neighborhoods it would be “Rusty”.  Most back yards seem to have a pile of stuff that is rusting away with weeds growing through it.  As we drove through farmland, there were many tractors and other farm implements rusting in the field.  Is it a problem that we have an excess of stuff or is it that we cannot bear to throw stuff away or have it carted away and dumped somewhere?  Many years ago, President Kimball when he was president of the quorum of the twelve, gave a talk in conference referring to the messiness of our environment and how we should clean up our abode and yards etc. and have presentable, and orderly appearance.  America surely has an accumulation of stuff and I plead guilty.  I came to America with one suitcase and now I am inundated.

When we got to the Mail box, we were swamped with letters and requests for handouts and advertisements for just about every service and item under the sun.  I was amazed at the amount of pieces of mail we had and it was only 10 days accumulation of mail held here in Prescott or forwarded from Maine.  It may go on for a while I suppose, but with the pile of mail we had, I fail to see how the Post Office could possibly be going broke.  Someone somewhere has to pay to have the mail delivered and that includes political ads etc.  Social Security alone sent us 4 letters……..maybe the various departments of this government office do not communicate with each other and just mail out as they wish.

We went to our general practitioner yesterday and he was not happy that I have put on weight this past year.  He proceeded to give me a lecture about it and I tried to tell him that exercise was not one of the things we were able to do  on a regular basis in Maine and he suggested that we should have had one of those sit down pedal thingys to keep our feet moving while we sat at the desk to digitize.  It was a lost cause trying to explain to him that movement while trying to keep things totally still worked against what we were doing and would give blurred images.  I guess you just had to be there to understand the ins and outs of digital capture.  They took my blood pressure and of course it was up – always is when I go to see this physician.  I had an appointment with another physician right after it, for my heart check up and my blood pressure was down to 121/85 from  145/85….and less than an hour had elapsed.  I have no explanation for this.   The heart doctor gave me a clean bill of health and said I only needed to go back to see him on an “as needed basis”.    The ablation done in August 2010 has been a success.

Last night we had to report our mission experience to the High Council.  The night before, we had to visit with the Stake President and report our mission to him and be formally released.  I really will miss the missionary mantle.

To take a break I was reading from a book by Chieko Okazaki titled “Being Enough”.  One of the chapters dealt with ‘small prayers’.  She said that these were to her “Sparrow Prayers” from the parable of our Lord about  how our Heavenly Father knows each and every one of us and not a hair of the head would be lost (how do  you explain Bill’s baldness?) and that not even a sparrow falls to the earth unless it is noted by God.  With the Sparrow being a very small bird and being counted by God as important, that even a small prayer can be answered.  I know that this is a fact because I was looking for a particular beading magazine and could not remember where I put it and a small prayer was offered and a short time later I found the magazine.  She went on to say that we often have larger requests made of our Heavenly Father and sometimes he answers yes and sometimes he answers no, but that each prayer is answered according to our needs and not our ‘wants’.  He knows our needs better than we do.