My Mom

This is not the picture that I wanted but it will have to do since I can't find the one I have in mind. I know my mother won't be seeing this because my parents don't use their computer much and they only have dial-up internet. But she is on my mind a lot and I wanted to mention her. My mother's life has not always been pleasant. Her childhood was not so happy. She has managed to overcome a lot of unpleasantness and raise a pretty good family. However, her health has taken a beating. Her bones at this point are terrifyingly brittle. She has had several breaks and a hip replacement but the worst so far was on her 82nd birthday just a couple of days ago. She was stepping outside her door and her femur (thigh bone) snapped. As she tumbled to the ground she scraped her face on the stucco of the house then, as she landed, she broke her arm in three places. Needless to say, an ambulance took her to the hospital and she underwent emergency orthopedic surgery to try to repair her leg which already has a replaced hip and a metal rod in the lower leg from a fall she had a couple of years ago. She will have surgery to repair her arm when she seems ready. It has been stabilized in a splint. Due to the general condition of her body at her age, the healing, if it happens, is going to take a long time. I wish I could do something to help........but what? Pain just seems to be a necessary part of this mortal life- an opposition to comfort and pleasure. I pray my mother will have an opportunity to have both comfort and pleasure, soon, if possible. She's a good person. I love her.

Interesting dilemma

I'm not really good with numbers, as far as remembering them accurately, so I won't try to give exact ones. Dayton is a fairly large city - larger than Salt Lake City- I remember that much. There are many schools that are considered "Dayton City Schools". In the interest of avoiding segregation, which would happen just by nature of who tends to live where, they formed a policy whereby kids can go to whatever school they want to attend. This has also allowed for the many charter schools and private (mostly religious) schools that have sprung up. Due to the resulting complications as well as expense of transporting students from various places to various places, there are very few school buses used, especially at the high school level. Students are expected to generally get to school on their own. Up until last year, students could get special passes to ride the public city buses. When the school budget was voted on, it resulted in necessary cuts. Since much of curriculum in schools is mandated statewide and federally, and pay is usually dictated by contract, schools have to find places to make cuts when voters don't want their taxes to go up even a penny. So one of the things to go was the public bus passes. As a result, some of the students here sometimes don't go to school because their family doesn't have the money to get them there, whether gas money to drive every day or money for a bus pass. The family in our ward that makes up the largest part of our Young Men/Young Women program is in this dilemma. The school district in Dayton long ago was well-known for being a superior educational entity. Cronyism and nepotism have resulted in a seriously decreased quality. The kids in our ward chose what they felt was the best school for them but it's pretty far from where they live. Their mom is single with lots of health problems. They live on child support from a divorce settlement and church welfare. They can't afford to go to school regularly. They can't even get to church regularly, but that's in part due to the fact that the mother isn't consistent about expectations. The mother definitely could do some things to improve their life but is slow to get her act together. Without taking away her responsibility, it's hard to get her the help she needs, the help the kids need to get out of a bad cycle of lifestlye. We love these kids. It's hard. We pray for them and do what we can. We are so grateful for our own children and the responsible way they live and care for our grandchildren. The Dayton schools are "desegregated" but that has caused an even greater problem now. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

NOW how much would you pay?

I know, I know....feast and famine. I go for days, even weeks without posting anything, then I do a whole bunch at once. I don't even know if anyone is still looking in.
Anyway, this is not a really big deal. The picture is the porch ceiling, in the process of being painted. You can see a hole right near the border between the painted and unpainted parts- that's where the original porch gas light used to be. You can also see a large "eye" which, along with a hook that didn't get in the photo, used to be where a porch swing was hung. A porch swing would be very nice but I doubt we'll ever get to that before we leave here. Sooooooooo- that was about the last outside task in trying for great "curb appeal". What do you think? Does this house have it? Our real estate agent comes day after tomorrow to discuss putting it on the market and how much she thinks we might be able to get. We can't afford to give it away so if we can't get at the very least what we put into it, we're going to have to stay and just commute to take care of Ammon's kids. I must confess, the whole concept of having our house on the market and preparing to move rattles me. Oh well..................

Remembering my son

This is the way I want to remember Ammon. He laughed a lot as a baby. We were so delighted to have him in our life. He was beautiful and a source of delight. As a toddler he was still amazing. He learned quickly. He had a gift for music. He still made us laugh.

After some years of turmoil establishing his independent identity, he returned to being a laughing, fun person to be with. Our branch here in Dayton does a "chili cook-off" every year at Halloween. Last year, Ammon was the judge. We were so proud of the way he handled it. He did choose winners but the way he analyzed every entry made each person feel that their chili was the best in some way. Everyone was happy. I don't know whether we'll attend the chili cook-off this year. I know we can't avoid all things that remind us of his absence. Sometimes it seems that we are surrounded by reminders! But sometimes we can try to avoid the pain.
He has been gone over 5 months now. In some ways it seems like such a long time but in some ways it seems like he was just here. We really look forward to being with him again.

Eerie

I went to a church building 1/2 hour south for a meeting this evening. Driving back through several different communities, I found it somewhat eerie to come upon whole blocks every now and then that were totally dark. There were no streetlights or lights on in any houses on a block, then there would be lights again. It was impossible to see the traffic lights that were hanging in the dark. Sometimes there were stop signs stuck at the intersection to remind people to treat the non-functioning stop lighted intersections as a 4-way stop. Approaching a totally dark block made me more alert to the possibility of a traffic light being out. Some cars just breezed on through. Luckily, I saw no accidents due to that kind of carelessness. It has been a week since the power went out. At church there were some that still don't have power. At least two of the households are in areas where they have their own well so they are also without water! They have had to resort to running hoses from neighbors or trucking in water in whatever containers they have. I drove by one fire station that had a hand-written sign out front "Free Ice" and inside I could see pallets of stacked ice bags, available to those still without refrigeration. It has been interesting to see how helpful and resourceful so many can be. There are some who have bitterly complained and been really critical of the power company for being "slow" or "uncaring about their area". That has made me feel sad. I feel the same sadness when I read or hear bitter criticisms of President Bush. I have to wonder how things would turn out if those people who are so heavy on the criticisms were in charge.

It wasn't so bad...

I don't have any pictures this time. Hurricane Ike hit down south then proceeded up through our area before it got too worn out. We didn't get any rain but we had sustained high winds for 5-6 hours with gusts up to 78 mph. Apparently even the local meteorologists were taken by surprise because they hadn't predicted it. There were trees knocked down, poles pulled down and lines broken or pulled down all over the place. Hundreds of thousands of people were without electricity. The wierd thing was how widespread it was yet how localized. There were pockets all over that never went without power. At the beginning, even the electric companies were stunned by how widespread the outages were. Our electricity went out at 3:08 on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 14. Some people were without electicity for only a day or so. All of the houses across the street from us had power by Tuesday. Our power finally came back on Thursday afternoon around 4. Angela got hers back on within a couple of days.(We loaded up our freezer without opening it and trucked it over to her house to plug in.) Janice and Victoria in Cincinnati got their power back on shortly before we did. All of the "waste disposal sites" in the area are overflowing with branches, leaves, and spoiled food. Most of us tried to keep our freezers closed tight for as long as possible. Generators were not to be had within 100 miles but I'm sure they will be higher on the priority lists for many households. We had talked about it but never got one because we still don't have any idea what our future holds. We have contacted a real estate agent and will be talking to her later this week about putting our house on the market. There are still some things we need to finish and we'll work on it. The market isn't really promising. If we do sell it, we're not sure what to move, get rid of, store, or whatever. Anybody have a crystal ball handy?

The final frontier

This is undoubtably the least attractive part of the house. Due to our present circumstances, we probably won't be doing anything to dress up the basement. We have cleaned it up, including putting in new glass block windows and parging and painting a wall that had been leaking due to the destroyed gutter when we bought the house. This first picture is the entrance to the "cellar"- as steep and creepy as you might picture in a 100-year old house. At the bottom of the stairs is a walled-off section that we assume has been used as a food storage room due to the shelves in it. That's what we're using it for!
Continuing on around (clockwise) you can see the shelves where we store all of the paint and supplies, most of which will stay with the house when we (cross our fingers) manage to sell it. Then you can see the relatively new furnace and water heater. Miracle of miracles! They were something we DIDN'T have to spend money to replace or repair!
Continuing on around is the incredibly heavy tool bench (you can see part of the glass block window just past Russ's yellow RC plane on an upper shelf), the new electric service panel Russ installed, then the opening to the outside. You can see the "Bilco" door in previous pictures from the outside. You can also see the additional posts we put in to prop up the sagging old floor upstairs. We paid someone to do that ($1,000) just to avoid the tension of raising it an inch every day until it looked more level and worrying about every creak and groan!
Still coming around, we come to the area just under and behind the stairs where we have our laundry and freezer. You can also see the hole in the wall just under the light bulb where we accessed the crawl space under the kitchen to clean out several boxes worth of bottles (booze and canning and whatever) as well as a couple of bags of trash (old detergent boxes, clothes, and I don't remember what else) before installing insulation under the floor to help keep the kitchen warmer in the winter. Lots of work that took time and effort but nobody who ever looks at this house is going to know how far it has come because they didn't see it before we did all of this.

Here we go adventuring!

I wish I had my camera here while I'm spending a few days with my grandsons so Victoria could visit her parents and some friends in Utah before she starts school. The weather is cooling slightly so we took the opportunity to go for a hike through the woods. Picture an adventurous 5-year old that would give Peter Pan a run for his money. He is always in the lead position. Following on the trail was the dog, panting hoarsely as she pulled hard on the leash with me trying not to let her pull my arm out of its sockey. Trudging behind was the determined 3-year old who always wants to do everything "by myself"! Jeremy (the 5-year old) had a stick chosen for its length (the longest, of course) and Kadon (the 3-year old) with a stick chosen for its sturdiness because he is determined to whack anything and everything he can without getting into too much trouble. They were both thrilled with the opportunity to hike "farther from home than we ever had" and thought the woods a great adventure. They weren't nearly as annoyed as I at the sounds of traffic not too far away, even a glimpse of the highway every now and then through the trees. I have felt my closeness to the end of this fifth decade of my life on occasion. But it is so wonderful to be able to see the world through younger eyes once in awhile. These boys don't have as much to compare things to as I have so they feel less disappointment. And when they are disappointed, it's usually easier to cheer them up. Being older and wiser keeps me from bursting into tears as easily as my grandchildren, but it also keeps me from giggling and oohin-and aahing as easily. I am enjoying them. I wish I could see more of them more often!
But I'm not complaining. I'm grateful for the opportunities I do have to spend time with them.