Sunday Wrapup--September 16, 2012

I could have been a wee bit more dramatic last week when I wrote about our DLM family Cardiologist Appreciation Day.  (Don't you hate it when that happens?--Missing out on a chance to be dramatic.)  I didn't know that my sister Carol was also seeing a Cardiologist last week.  She has had test results similar to mine, but many more symptoms than I have ever had.  Lois suspects that Carol has a problem similar to her own.  Carol is beginning a monitoring process similar to what Lois had recently, except that it will cover a longer time span.

In further developments, Lois is scheduled for a "mapping and zapping" procedure tomorrow.  With the catheterization last week having ruled out a blockage as the cause of her PVCs, plans are in place for laser-killing the nerves that are sending the bad signals to her heart.  This involves another catheterization and an overnight hospital stay at Galichia in Wichita.  She requests prayers for healing and peace.

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Two nieces and two nephews of mine are just now leaving Australia after traveling there for more than a week.  Two of them, Heidi and Hannah, are coming home here, but Christopher goes home to Oswego, Kansas and Hans goes back to Faith Builders.  Lucky them.  They were visiting friends and sightseeing.

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Shane "preached" at Thomas, OK today.  Our church has been sending ministers down there regularly, and lay members to function as preachers for a day.  They are short-handed right now on their leadership team, and their small group feels the need for help with filling in the gaps that are present.

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Harry Shenk's father, Harold, died this morning.  The funeral will be on Friday at Weavertown in Lancaster Co., PA.

On Friday, Edith provided hot lunch at the high school.  Over the mealtime visit, we heard from Harry that his father was not well and Harry was seeing to getting their family van ready for travel to Pennsylvania.  

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Ervin Miller was found this past week to have significant blockage at the lower end of his esophagus due to unknown causes.  It was causing him not to be able to keep food down.  For now, the answer seems to be to eat very slowly, in small bites.  Walking goes less well than it used to, and he is in a wheelchair at church, of late.  He's 94.

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Edwin and Clara Yoder (from Harrisonburg, VA I believe) were in church this morning.  This is probably the only couple where he is a first cousin to my father and she is a first cousin to my mother.  We used to call him Menny's Edwin.

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Some overnight temperatures in the upper 40s are clearly signalling the end of summer.  Today is also the last day of the state fair in Hutchinson.

One of the predictable effects of the state fair is the presence of many more highway patrol officers on local roadways than usual.

Last week, two mornings in a row, I came upon a patrol car parked beside the east bound lane of US 50,  just west of the overpass near the cemetery.  That location struck me as a very unwise parking spot.  I've learned the hard way that officers take seriously a failure to move over into the next lane when you approach the spot in the road where an officer is parked on the shoulder.  So I should have moved into the left lane, right?  That is a two-lane road, however, and the left lane is the oncoming traffic lane.  With the overpass immediately ahead, I couldn't see very far ahead, so doing so risked an unpleasant surprise.  I gambled and moved over, and won.

I didn't even think of it till later that I definitely didn't want to be stopped by an officer for any reason.  On Tuesday of last week I discovered that my driver's license has been expired since my birthday on June 9.

Hiromi, on the other hand, was very aware of my precarious legal status when he left for work about the same time I did and drove by Nisly's Trash Service first.  After stopping at Nislys, when he approached US 50, he saw a white minivan on top of the overpass, with an officer's car parked right behind it.  He was pretty sure I had gotten nailed.

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The other predictable effect of state fair week is rain.  This week on Thursday we had a rainy day.  It's the first day in a very long time that I can remember such a day--off and on drizzles most of the time, with about a half-inch total at our place.  At school, it's common for the students to celebrate such days by eating lunch on the front porch of the church.

Far more common than long slow rains (but distressingly uncommon over the past two summers) is rains that come and go quickly.

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William Hershberger told a wild story this morning in church about an event that took place on his way home from his son's place near Oskaloosa, in eastern Kansas.  He was traveling in his truck, pulling a trailer with a loaded bulldozer.  Behind the trailer, he was towing a small car.  Unknown to him, the car unhitched itself and took off to the right of the roadway.  People watching saw it go airborne (20 feet in the air, they said), plow right through an intersection, and finally come to a stop somewhere down the line.  He was all innocence till an SUV from Texas pulled in front of him, motioned him to a stop, and asked if he was towing a small car.  "Well, you ain't no more," he informed him.

William left his parked truck and someone took him back to his car.  By then there were several officers on the scene.  (See note above about plethora of officers at state fair time.) He didn't fill in all the details after that, but I presume he hitched it back up and drove on home.  It happened about four miles east of Burton.

He finished by saying that all he could do afterward was say, "Thank you, God."

William is decidedly undramatic, so the telling of the story elicited quite a lot more reaction from the listeners to the story than was evident in the story teller.

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Hiromi's online Hebrew class for tonight was canceled without notice.  Someone more knowledgeable than he announced on the class chat forum that today is the Jewish New Year, so I suppose a teacher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem could be assumed to be on holiday.

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Somewhere in Bangladesh, someone, (Austin, I think) knows something we don't know.  The baby we're all looking forward to meeting in November now has a name vetted by a Bangla speaker, to make sure it doesn't mean something embarrassing or otherwise inappropriate in Bangla.  The bit of probing we've done so far has been rebuffed.  Imagine that.

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Last week a former student of our principal's died in Ohio.  The last I heard, Wesley was considering attending the funeral, but was unsure of funeral plans at that point.

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There's a smart mouse in this house.  If looks could kill, it would have died midway in its race from behind the kitchen stove to the pantry.  I'm consoled by the knowledge that there are four baited traps waiting in the pantry.  I am even more consoled by knowing that I have a husband willing to carry out any dead mice that end up there.  He's also willing to re-bait and re-set those traps as often as necessary.  He's wonderful that way.

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Today was the deadline for returning open-ended surveys to the feasibility committee--about possible building projects.  We almost failed to get our survey handed in.  I casually asked Hiromi this evening if he had done so, since it had gone to church tucked into his Bible.  "Oh no," he said.  "I forgot."  He ended up trundling over to Marvin Nislys to hand it in before the deadline passed.

Distribution of the surveys was a welcome development.