How do you prepare for death?

Getting philosophical again, we recently heard of the death of our beloved prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The world was a better place for his presence but now he is gone. In talking about his passing, someone made a comment to me about not being really surprised (considering that he was nearly 98) but "not really being ready for " his death. It made me wonder about what it takes to get ready for death. A scripture states "if ye are prepared ye shall not fear". Lots of people of afraid of death, afraid of their own life ending, afraid of the loss of loved ones. So how can we prepare so that we don't need to fear death? I have often heard advice from people who have had near death experiences or that have faced the possibility due to a dire medical diagnosis, that we should live every day as if it were our last. What does that mean? If we party hard, will we go out happy? I don't think so. Most people when they are actually faced with leaving this life begin to wonder,"what's next"? That is what we need to prepare for. We prepare for leaving here, or having someone we love leave here, by trying to make our relationships worthwhile. We take the time to tell loved ones that we love them, regularly. We make up quickly when there is a glitch in our relationship. We don't waste time holding resentment or refusing to forgive. We also do all we can to be certain that we give our loved ones good reason to miss us when we go! If we do good things for them, say good things to them, and treat them with respect, they won't be relieved to have us gone. So, ironically, one way to prepare for death, is to make life more pleasant. Also, if we will be fearful of what will happen next, we need to find out all we can about what happens next. Everyone has to do their own inner search as well as investigations into what people report who "have been there", meaning those who have had near death experiences and people who claim experiences with the spirit. Personally, after all I have heard and read, I believe there is a God. I believe He sent His son to this earth to atone for our sins. I believe that there is one Heavenly Father therefore, not all churches are equally right. How could that be possible? God must have an opinion. Our quest is to find out what He expects of us and do all we can to prepare to meet Him. Then we will not be afraid.

We thought we had smelled the last of it!

We're at it again- tearing the house apart. When we first looked over the house to decide which bedroom to have as our "master bedroom", we decided to take the two small back bedrooms with their tiny closets and rip out the wall to make it one larger suite. We put the work on hold several months ago in lieu of preparing for Ammon's family to move in and trying to winterize the house, etc. We have reached a point where we're ready to tackle it- well, as ready as we could be................. We opted to remove the plaster and lathe from the ceiling where the little closets between the rooms had been. Lo and behold, we found, at the top of the outside wall, more animal bedding. It had obviously filtered down from the wall space above. I filled the shop vac full.
I tried to get a picture of the old "knob and tube" wiring as well as the original gas piping as Russ was pulling it out of the wall and ceiling. By the way, we decided that was when the remodeling mentioned in a previous blog took place. 1919 was most likely when they tore apart the ceilings to replace old gas fixtures with more "modern" electricity.
You can just barely see Russ standing on a ladder inside our plastic shield. It did help keep some of the mess out of the rest of the house. It took nearly as long to clean it up as it did to remove the plaster and lathe.
This is the resulting more "open" space which will be finished some day.......................

14 doors

Okay, one more room done- well, mostly. I don't like the results of the ceiling now that the paint has dried. I can see I will need to do another coat. The other major item not done in this room is the doors. The wall color looks much more "pink" in these pictures than in real life. It's hard to see the woodwork but I scraped, sanded, filled holes and gouges, stained, and polyurethaned the trim around the floor, doors, and window as well as doing most of the window. Right now the window doesn't function. These windows are really huge and could use storms but we can't get them this big. We will have to custom-make storm windows for three windows in the front of the house and the two windows on the north side that are in the stairways.
Of the 14 functioning doors in this house, we have fixed 1 1/2. (The half is that I still haven't refinished the wood on the inside of the front door. If you look back into the past blogs, I have pictures of us working on repairing and refinishing that door. We only took the time to do the outside so we could re-hang it.) If we painted a door, it only takes 2 days to do. I have finished both sides of the kitchen door in the back of the house. Below you can see a picture of one of the bedroom doors.
I won't paint this door even though it's in pretty bad shape. So, like the front door, it will need to be taken off the hinges, scraped, sanded, repaired (Russ has been pretty genious at that), then stained, polyurethaned, hardware replaced, and rehung. That takes about 3-4 days per door. I hate to be a procrastinator but that's just too much time with too little progress made for me to want to do that right now. Maybe in the summer..............? Wanna help?

Why have hope?

I'm going to wax philosophical again. As we drove to church yesterday past boarded up houses and sad-looking people, littered streets and yards, and closed businesses, I wondered how people can feel like bothering to get up in the morning. There have recently been in the paper articles about human beings doing very inhumane things: woman putting her 3 week old baby in the microwave oven, a 10-year old raping his 7-year old stepsister, a man raping a woman then, later, before she was to testify against her, killing her and her unborn child. Last night we watched a movie imported from China with English subtitles called "King of Masks". It was very well made and a fascinating story. It brought out the undesirability of females in the Chinese culture. Girl babies are "throw-away" babies. Then we watched a 60 Minutes program about war waging in the Congo where women are constantly, repeatedly, and very publicly and brutally raped. It's all enough to make anyone feel like there is no hope on this earth. Yet, I do have hope. Why? I get my hope from the same source that the women victims in the Congo get it. They sing together of the promise of resurrection and the peace the Lord offers. A friend sent me an article about research that is just being explored because of evidence that women are actually very real supports to one another and can be for men, too, if allowed. When women follow their natural instincts to nurture and ignore the world's ways of drugs, power-seeking, wealth, and vanity, they can be a strong influence for good. A prophet has said, "Someday, when the whole story of this and previous dispensations is told, it will be filled with courageous stories of our women, of their wisdom and devotion, their courage, for one senses that perhaps, just as women were the first at the sepulchre of our Lord Jesus Christ after his resurrection, our righteous women have so often been instinctively sensitive to things of eternal consequence." I think about how I have felt lonely because I have not yet made many friends here in Dayton. Then I realize that some of my very best friends that I enjoy being with are in my family. I love talking to my sisters, my daughters and daughters-in-law. I am grateful for the women who have been my friends over the years, whether related to me or not, that send me uplifting e-mails and letters or call me, that heal me emotionally and spiritually. I will not be among the "good men who do nothing" that are the cause for "evil to triumph". I have hope because I am not alone in not only recognizing that there truly is good and evil in the world but wanting good to triumph and being willing to do anything to help make that happen.

AHA!!

Everything we do on this house seems to take forever. Looking back from today, we can see that we have done a lot since we bought it 9 months ago. But every day it seems like we just take little baby steps toward completing the massive amount of work that needs to be done. Although there are lots of houses here in Dayton that were built in the early 1900's, many of them have been updated at some point along the way. This house, for whatever reason, never got anything more than some paint and a new furnace and water heater. Russ has just about finished the the plumbing and electric work but some of it won't get done until probably next fall when we tackle remodeling the main bathroom. We are currently working on one of the bedrooms. We have put probably 14 or 15 man-hours into scraping the ceiling and starting on the woodwork. Today we found an interesting thing. When we scraped away the paper over the plaster on the ceiling (we have decided that replacing all of the plaster with sheetrock is just going to be way too much work so we're going to just repair most of it) we found some writing. Before I realized it, I had washed away some of the pencil but we tried to get a picture of it. It clearly says Nov 7/ 1919. There is a name but only part of it is there and we have no idea what the name is. The original real estate listing for this house says it was built in 1910. Apparently, it wasn't all done at once or else they had some remodeling or repair work done. Whenever we come across something like this, I have images spring into my mind as I wonder what life was like in this house nearly 100 years ago.
We both scraped until we thought our arms would fall off! The bamboo-type wall covering is going to stay. It was probably put up to cover some problem and we don't want to know what the problem is. Ignorance truly can be blissful.

She's growing!

When Brooklyn Celeste Fellows came home from the hospital, she weighed less than 5 pounds. At a little over 3 months old, she has finally reached the landmark of outgrowing premie size clothing. At her latest doctor visit, she weighed a huge 9 pounds! we realize that some babies start at that weight, or even possibly bigger. But Brooklyn is just a really petite little girl. I made a blessing dress for her about a month before she was born. When she came home, we were afraid she would be swimming in it! Due to various circumstances, her blessing was postponed until just this last Sunday and she wore the dress with style! She's a cutie!

more of Angela's artwork

We are continuing to improve this house, slowly but surely. The transom window above the door into the kitchen was broken quite awhile ago. Angela offered her stained glass talents to replace it. We cleaned up the frame, scraping, painting, and refinishing it, then Russ put in the window Angela had made. Here is the result. Awesome, isn't it? Here it is up close. Unfortunately, it shows the flaws in the wood finish.