Sunday, December 5
We set the alarm early this morning to allow us plenty of time to get everyone ready for church, but Mother and I both woke up at 5:00, so the alarm wasn’t all that necessary. Mother went back to asleep, but I was wide awake after I’d helped her get up to go to the bathroom and then back in bed, so I got up and puttered around the kitchen for a while.
After arriving at the church, we went to the main building to deliver the CDs of last week’s Bible study presentation we’d edited and burned, I checked on what we were doing for special music (since I wasn’t at choir rehearsal last Sunday night) and then we went to the Family Life Center to mix and mingle for the last few minutes of the weekly fellowship breakfast.
We’ve discovered that one of our points of service is to help wash dishes between the end of breakfast and the beginning of the Sunday school lesson…don’t know how that came about initially, but it is a job that needs doing, and this morning they seemed to be short on kitchen help, so we pitched in and helped a couple of other folks get the place straightened up.
The choir sounded especially good this morning as we presented the opening selection of our Christmas cantata as a prelude to that coming event. There was also a baptismal service with five of our young people being baptized and then David preached a whale of a sermon, rounding out a beautiful morning service.
When we returned to Big V we had some leftover stroganoff for lunch and then lay down for an afternoon nap before tackling anything serious. Sunday afternoons are the only time we get to sleep in what we consider to be our own bed, and it was particularly comfortable today…so comfortable in fact, that when the phone started ringing, I couldn’t figure out where I was or where it was.
I finally got to the telephone to find out that Mike was calling us from Virginia just to check up on us and let us know what was going on there. He is batching it this weekend while Kelly is with a crew doing a video shot in West Virginia.
As soon as we finished our conversation (Barbara was awake by then so we both got to share a few words with Mike), I got dressed and went outside to spend an hour or so cutting down more briar vines along the gully and hauling them off to the burn pile in the lot behind us. That is slow and tedious work, but something very necessary to saving the beautiful trees, especially the young ones that line our property.
Around 3:00 I stopped working and we walked over to visit our neighbors, Gary and Linda, to see how they were doing. We heard last night at bingo that Linda had fallen and hurt her knee, so we wanted to check on her. While we were there catching up on their latest news and views, we dropped off a container of the sweet potato soup that had been simmering in the crock pot all afternoon.
From there, we went over to visit our newest neighbors, Wes and Linda, who have now moved into their new mobile home. We met Wes and Linda the last week before we finally moved Big V onto Our Little Lot a year and a half ago. We were all staying in the RV park and they were looking at property to buy. After a couple days of searching, they decided to buy the lot next to ours and soon had a pad put in for their motor home. After going through some serious medical situations, they were finally able to sell their home in Texarkana and have recently moved to a new house that they had relocated to their lot.
What we, as relative newcomers to the church, found out was that the Christmas dinner is a huge event for the church. Instead of a committee decorating the room for dinner, several ladies of the church each select a table that they decorate, and we don’t mean just putting down a table cloth and a few springs of greenery. The entire room looked as if decorating crews from Neiman-Marcus and Macy’s had spent the day there…some of the most beautiful table settings we’ve ever seen for any dinner, anywhere!
Monday, December 6
Wow…Mother slept nearly 11 hours last night! She usually goes to bed somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00 and wakes up at least once around 2:00 – 3:30 to go to the bathroom, but last night she went to bed at 8:00, dropped off to sleep immediately, and slept through until 7:00 this morning.
With a little later start than usual for all of us, Barbara and I started ginning around the place to get breakfast ready and then spent the morning doing regular household chores…sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, washing the laundry, etc. In fact, we got so busy that we completely forgot about even going to the post office until tonight, and that’s one of the key constant points of each day for us.
When we finally took a “break” from work, Barbara whipped up her famous Mexican casserole for lunch. It’s a very simple and easy recipe, but is always well-received around this house. When it was ready to eat, we got Mother up from her TV-watching and we all gathered around the table to enjoy another meal.
We like to share different emails and stories with Mother after lunch and today we had some particularly interesting You Tube videos that had been forwarded by friends. We watched them together and then I read a really thoughtful story that someone had forwarded to Barbara. We all enjoy that time together when we take a short break from the daily routines to share time and laughs with each other.
After finishing with the housework and lunch, we spent much of our time working at the computers. I was working on the text for last week’s journal, trying desperately to get it ready to send out today, and Barbara was busy editing and cropping photos and creating collages to show pictorially what we did during the past seven days. By 4:00 pm our task was completed as we pushed the “send” key and sent the journal/blog notice off to friends and family around the country.
TJ came over this afternoon to visit and share a spot of tea and let us know that she will be going to the doctor tomorrow in Tyler to have her wrist X-rayed and reevaluated. Her friend Marge would be taking her and they’d be getting out and about for the morning.
When TJ left, we turned out thoughts to what we would be having for lunch tomorrow, trying to get things lined out so we’d have a clue about what we were doing. We finally decided that I’d grill some country-style pork ribs and Barbara would fix a big bowl of Puerto Rican potato salad, one of our favorite dishes. Talking of that then led us into remembering our good friends, Margarita, Maria, and Francisco, who opened their home, and more importantly, their hearts to us when we visited them in Puerto Rico a few years ago.
Before we could fix the potato salad (we’ve found that it tastes best after it has set up overnight in the refrigerator), I had to go to Brookshire’s for some of the ingredients. While I was out shopping, I made the daily post office run, just a few hours later than usual. Once back at the house, we worked together on the slicing and dicing of the onions, apples, and sweet red peppers that are at the heart of the potato salad recipe and before long we had a bowl full of the delicious concoction chilling in the refrigerator, just waiting to satisfy our hunger tomorrow.
When the kitchen work was all finished, we got Mother into bed and then spent the rest of the evening working on projects for Christmas while I watched the Patriots demolish the Jets on Monday Night Football.
Tuesday, December 7
It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. On the morning of December 7th, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer, who said they must be American B-17s, and not to worry about it.
Because it was Sunday, there was a bonus ration of milk to go along with breakfast that morning. There was a sailor named James Jones in the mess hall, who later wrote From Here to Eternity (1951). He said, "It was not till the first low-flying fighter came whammering overhead with his MGs going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep them from being stolen.”
The Japanese planes dropped bombs and torpedoes, and ships started capsizing and sinking. Altogether, 2,390 Americans were killed. President Roosevelt got on the radio, talked for less than 10 minutes, and said that December 7th was a day that would "live in infamy." Congress declared war the following morning and the United States officially entered WWII. (From Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac”
We asked Mother where she was when she heard the news abut Pearl Harbor. Mother was 18 years old at the time and her family was living in Tyler. They had gone to church that morning and then, as was her custom, she and several girls went driving around downtown Tyler, circling the courthouse square and looking for other young people (translated that means guys!) to visit, when they heard the news on the radio. She said that everyone was so shocked by the news that they didn’t even know what to think.
Daddy was later drafted into the Army Air Force as an aircraft mechanic, serving in El Paso and then at Hunter Field in Savannah, Georgia, where he was preparing to be sent overseas, but the war ended before he was deployed and he returned to El Paso.
I got up early this morning to get ready for our weekly prayer meeting at the church in Yantis. Because Barbara can’t lift Mother back into place in the bed when she wants to sit up (we can hardly wait for the new mechanical bed to get here!!), I woke Mother at 6:30, got her propped up, and took her the morning paper and her coffee.
I was going to work at Our Little Lot this morning, but it was 28 degrees and I just didn’t care that much about crawling around under trees and cutting vines, so I trucked it on back to Mineola, stopped at the donut shop for an apple fritter for Barbara, and then returned to the house to find that Barbara had been busy getting Mother her breakfast and then wrapping Christmas presents that we had purchased. With the presents stacked around our little tree in the living room, it really was beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
After Barbara got Mother dressed and sitting in her chair, I went in and put Mother through her daily exercises. We lost electricity for about a half hour this morning and without electricity and the TV to distract her, Mother made it through the entire range of exercises in record time. I’ve been telling her that we guessed we’d have to do like she did to us boys when we were growing up…if the TV was distracting us from doing our homework, then the TV just had to go. After this morning, I think there may be some validity to that.
We stayed around until the power was back on and then while Mother took a mid-morning nap, Barbara and I went downtown to do some more Christmas shopping. Mineola has a number of specialty stores in the downtown area, and we always like to check them out for unique gifts. Unfortunately for us, some of the shops we like to frequent were closed again today…still don’t know why, but we did manage to find some really nice things for some of the folks on our gift list.
When we were finished downtown we returned to the house to check on Mother and then went to Walmart for a few things for Christmas, the house, and Big V, and then returned to the house where we went to work getting lunch ready. Barbara worked in the kitchen and I went outside to grill a batch of country-style pork ribs as my contribution to the dinner.
TJ came over at 2:00 and we had lunch…pork ribs, baked beans, and Puerto Rican potato salad…yum-yum…just can’t beat a meal like that!
After we ate, cleaned the kitchen, and got Mother squared away in her room, I drove out to Holiday Villages to do some work around Big V. When we got the cover put over Big V, I just snaked the water and sewer hoses and the shore line down the inside edge of the wall, around the back, and then down the outside of the wall to the hookups. That worked temporarily, but wasted a lot of space and was a giant pain when it came time to mow and trim around the edge of the pad.
Today I cut a six inch square hole in the base of the wall and ran all the lines through it directly to the utility hookups, reducing all the lines and cables by about 12 feet. That’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version. I borrowed a saw from Gary, our neighbor, to cut through the steel siding, but the siding was too flexible and it just didn’t work the way it should. So, I used my power drill to punch a series of holes all around the cutout area and then took my trusty hammer and screwdriver to chisel down and across the line of holes to open the space for the lines to go through. It took about an hour longer than it should have, but by 5:00 I had the lines reconnected and the water hose insulated, with everything ready for the projected cold snap and possible snowfall tonight. I still have to trim out frame the opening I cut but we don’t have the mess back there that we’ve had since summer.
When I got back to the house I was going to start work on the text for this week’s journal (Barbara has already been working on the pictures and collages), but I was exhausted for some reason and, after watching some of the Kansas/Memphis basketball game, I went to bed and fell asleep at 8:00…very early for me.
I slept until a little after 11:00, woke up somewhat refreshed, and came back to the kitchen to find Barbara, who had also slept for a while and then woke up again. We quickly reconstructed the events of the last three days and then I settled in hammering away at the keyboard, trying to get current with the journal/blog…ah, the lives of aspiring authors! And so, constant readers, if you’ve made it this far in our writings and ramblings, you should know that it is 1:19 AM on Wednesday, December 8, as we finish the entry for this day.
Little did we know what the morning light would bring…
From Mineola, Texas,
Jim/Dad/Gramps & Barbara/Mom/Grams
