A Monday Hodgepodge

Pearls Before Swine

It just dawned on me, that it has been days since I visited blogs or posted here. Y'all must have thought I fell off the face of the earth.

The cartoon above reminds me of our family. It will just be the two of us this year (their choice, not ours). What are your plans?

First some news, I think we have finally found a church in which to feel comfortable in. Sundays usually find us in the First Baptist Church. Being a "grace believer" I will not be "joining" (i.e. submitting to water baptism) but it's a pleasant diversion every Sunday morning. I spoke to the Pastor briefly about it, and he said it's not a problem. Without "joining" one just can not hold office or vote in the business part of their church. Thankfully, I'm not interested in any of that anyway. But the natives are friendly and there is a motorcycle club called F.A.I.T.H. Riders in which we are members. That should pacify even my persnickety side.

We have started on, hopefully, the final remodeling project in our 23+ year old stick built home. It's taken over a year to accomplish all the necessary interior projects but it's been well worth the financial and physical pain. The current project is the guest bedroom. It still has 23+ year old carpeting. First Hubby removed the smelly carpeting in the closet and placed nice easy to clean floor tiles. Today, we've removed everything from the bedroom except the ceiling tall bookcase out into the hallway. The bookcase needs another coat of white paint before moving on. Then we'll started pulling up carpeting and replacing it with the floating Pergo flooring.

And something else good came from all this work.

Experience is a wonderful teacher. For most who know me they know that one of my absolute favorite hobbies is genealogy / family research. I've been following people's migrations and habits for years. It's become second nature to figure out why an ancestor moved or did whatever they did during their lives. I also study a lot of old photos. This leads me to I keep all our photo albums in this closet that's being renovated. This week, whilst everything was in a disarray, I began thumbing through an old homemade photo album that belonged to my adopted mother, Helen, who had died in 1966 when I was 10 years old.  I have few memories of my mother. The reason being that like a monkey in a cage, my father was good at flinging obscenities or threats in my direction whenever I even so much as spoke to him, so, I quit asking him anything at a young age. Anyway, I happened on a couple of old Polaroid photos in the album that I'm sure I must have looked at a million times two and wondered "Who are these people?" since there was no writing on the photos. Well, I was sitting on the bed casually looking through the album and I had one photo of Mom in one hand, and this one below in the other, and I finally realized, this is my Mom at a very early age! She always had that serious look on her face. My Mom and her brother, Richard, where the only children of Richard Darrell Koethe, I, and Edna Margaretta Strain. This has to be her in that very treasured photo album. That was such a very joyful moment to discover a photo of my Mom for the 'first' time. It's a nice Christmas gift.

And I'm still enjoying, and learning about, my new Smartphone. I feel so modern. *lol*

If I don't get to post again before the Holiday, I hope everyone has a very happy, prosperous and safe CHRISTmas season.