We’re still full-fledged into summer here. We’ve had a few cooler days, but the humidity is still high. Technically summer is here until September 21, and it probably won’t start feeling like fall until some time after that.

Since we don’t have anyone in school (my youngest is taking college classes online year-round), we escape some of the back-to-school hubbub, except that I did happen to be in Wal-Mart during the tax-free weekend just before school started. Though the school supply area was swamped, the rest of the store was fine. Otherwise school being back in session doesn’t affect us much at this point except for avoiding certain traffic areas at certain times a day.

Our big week during the summer was last week, when my oldest son was here for ten days. My husband took the week off, though he did have to do some emails and conferences calls most mornings. Jesse and Jason couldn’t take off the same days, since they work at the same place, but they each had a day or two off to spend time with Jeremy. We celebrated both Jeremy’s birthday and mine that week (I shared about those in last week’s Friday’s Fave Five), had a few outings, played games, and hung out around the house. I think it was a nice blend of doing and resting.

It never gets easier to say good-bye, but this time Jason, Mittu, and Timothy came with Jim and me to drop Jeremy off at the airport. Then we stopped at a nearby coffee shop and sat in their outdoor area to try to see Jeremy’s airplane take off. For Timothy’s sake, Jeremy texted photos of the tunnel to the plane, the inside of the plane, the outside when they had to deplane on the tarmac, etc. I miss the days when you could walk someone down to their gate, sit with them til they boarded, and wave at them when the plane backed away. But this was the next best thing, and a lot of fun. We thought we’d see lots of planes, being so close to the airport. We didn’t, but we did keep track of when Jeremy’s was taking off and saw his plane in the distance.

We had a bit of a shock this month when hospice called and said they were going to  drop my mother-in-law from their care because, by all the standards they can measure, she wasn’t declining. It seemed odd that, if she qualified for hospice three years ago, and she has declined since then, that she would no longer be eligible. My husband met with her doctor, nurses, social worker, and chaplain, and discussed her situation and how she has declined. They reviewed her case and recertified her for another 60 days. I hope we don’t have to go through this every 60 days from here on out. But I guess we’ll have to play it by ear.

Here are some other tidbits from the last month:

What I’ve learned:

• How to do gifs and stickers in texts. A small thing, and not hard, but whenever I learn anything new technologically, I feel really good about myself. 🙂
• How to order in Starbucks. 🙂 I don’t go there mainly because I don’t like flavored coffees and pretty much drink just plain decaf with a bit of creamer, but also because I don’t know the lingo. On the way to the airport I grilled Jeremy about whether SB would even have plain decaf and how to ask for the size I wanted. Another small thing, but now I can confidently go in if I am with someone who wants to stop there.

What I’ve been watching:

• America’s Got Talent (You have to be careful with it, because even though they call it a family show, there are a few acts that should not be on a family show. So we fast-forward through a few things.)
• Making It. This is a new one that looks like it should be on PBS or HGTV. It’s a competition for crafters. It takes a bit for the dry humor of the hosts to grow on you, but I have been enjoying it. And it has been renewed for a second season.
• Unbroken. I loved this book and have been wanting to watch the movie for a long time. Unfortunately, they threw in a few bad words (actually before the hard parts where it would have been more understandable). But otherwise, very good. When it first came out, I had heard complaints that the movie didn’t show the influence of Zamperini’s faith. But the movie didn’t cover his whole life: it ended right when he came home from being a POW. And the afterword did share that he “made good on his promise” to serve God and eventually came to a place of forgiving the Japanese, even returning to Japan. There are several neat cinematic touches in addition to the compelling story.
• Mary Poppins. I saw about half of it with Timothy, and enjoyed watching him giggle in parts.

What I’ve been wondering:

• Did people really sing songs together while they worked a long time ago? A book I read mentioned a sea shanty being sung by sailors as they rowed, and that prompted the question. According to Wikipedia, they did. There are songs associated with other types of work as well. I wonder if any of these songs are still sung as work songs, or whether recorded music is used when a certain rhythm and synchronicity is needed. It would seem so strange in this day and time to sing with your coworkers.
• I read a while back that because we have ready-made music available and on so much, people don’t make their own music any more. I think the advent of YouTube may have changed that. But my aunt told me one time that when they were young, they’d gather around the piano and sing as a family, just like you see on old movies.
• Much has been written about the decline of robust congregational singing, blaming it on the professionalism and loudness of worship bands in church and the lack of singability or unfamiliarity of many contemporary songs. But I wonder if the fact that we don’t sing together as a society in almost any context any more plays a big part in it.
• On another subject: why do fast food restaurants toss condiment packets in by the handful, even if you say you only want one or two? I know they probably don’t cost much individually, but I am sure they add up! Some we just keep them on hand and use eventually, but others get tossed because we don’t use them beyond that one meal.
• I also wonder at the tendency to over-notify. I have three different places on Facebook that tell me I have a new post (one is enough!) Twitter shows me new tweets yet also shows me some again “In case you missed it” and then will show me some of those same tweets in my notifications. I don’t sign up for many sales notices for companies because they send them 4-5 times a week. Drives me crazy! Once a week is more than enough. All this over-notifying actually works against those who do it. I have any sales emails sent through a filter so I don’t even see them. If I am going to a place and looking for a sale or coupon, I’ll look through that folder. On anything that lets me adjust settings, I set it so as not to receive push notifications on my phone.

What I am making:

We had two birthdays and an anniversary this month – but one of the birthdays was mine, so I didn’t make a card for it. 🙂 We also had a baby shower, but since that one has not yet been given, I’ll wait to show it. I don’t think the recipient reads my blog, but I want to be safe. 🙂

This was for Jason and Mittu’s anniversary:

The couple and smaller heart were made using the Cricut. The burlap and lace background was from a pack of scrapbooking paper one of the kids got me for Mother’s Day (or Christmas?) I printed the wording out on the computer and used scalloped scissors for the top and bottom.

This was for Jeremy’s birthday:

The birch trees were cut out on the Cricut and then glued onto grey paper. The fox was a sticker, but made of fuzzy material and with a sticky pad on the back so it was raised. The sign was supposed to be reminiscent of signs you’d see tacked onto a tree (like wanted signs on cartoon. 🙂 Maybe I should have phrased it like a wanted poster!) The little wood frame probably takes away from that idea. But I still like it. And I did find and install a font that looks like carving on wood (something else I learned this month!)

Around the blog:

Besides the book reviews, Fridays Fave Fives, and occasional Laudable Linkages:

• Goals for the Second Half
• “A Heart at Leisure From Itself“
• You Are Not Enough.
• Toward a Quiet Soul.

It wasn’t deliberate, but the theme for the month seems to be focus.

I discussed what I was reading on my What’s On Your Nightstand post earlier this week. I am particularly enjoying the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I am listening to the audiobook but may see if the library has a print copy. I am also getting a lot out of my ESV Study Bible. The notes are quite helpful. Plus I just finished Malachi, and they had a lot of supplemental material inbetween it and the start of the New Testament with Matthew.

And that, I think, is about all for this chat. 🙂 Thanks for reading.

(Sharing with “What I’m Into” at Leigh Kramer’s)

(Graphic courtesy of Crosscards.com)

Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas, receiving His love and sharing it with those around you.

I don’t usually post “rambling” posts too closely together, but I forgot some things last time. 🙂

• On the health front: Since going off one of the medications I was put on post-afib surgery, I have not had any more major episodes lasting hours. They said it would be rough going off of it, but instead it’s been the best I’ve felt since the surgery. (Thank you, Lord!) I’ve had some little flutters lasting just a few seconds at a time – they seem to come in clusters for a bit during they day, but then nothing the rest of the day. But that’s MUCH better than 2-6 hours!

• Since I was doing so well, I was hesitant to start the new medication. I read the information that comes with a prescription – something I don’t usually do because they tend to make me not want to take the medicine – and, yep, this made me not want to take it. I know they have to include everything that could possibly happen, and most of the time when I go ahead and take it, I don’t experience any of the dire potential side effects. But this, first of all, said it is usually given in the hospital under a doctor’s supervision. Yikes! Nothing was said to me about that, and I am assuming since they sent me home with it, it’s a low enough dose to be ok. But that definitely is scary. There were a few other things that make me reluctant to take it, but that was the main one. I can’t decide whether to call the doctor’s office and ask if I can avoid taking it, since I am doing so well – or whether I should just not take it and then talk about it at my next appointment. Probably the first course is the better one, but I don’t want to get into a position of him saying yes, I should take it, and then me deciding I don’t want to after all, and then having to explain that. 🙂

• Things I’ve seen that make me wonder:

• Why do they charge delivery charges if that doesn’t go to the driver? Well, this doesn’t say it doesn’t go to the driver, but that’s what I assumed. Maybe it’s like waitresses: they get paid a little but less than they would normally and the rest is made up in tips. But by the time you had a delivery charge and a tip, that’s a significant amount – and one of the reasons we don’t often have food delivered.
• I was rummaging around for some dental floss in the back of the bathroom drawer (trying to get better about flossing) and found one that had come from the dentist’s office a while back. It had an expiration date from a year ago. Dental floss has an expiration date? I don’t know why it would. It would make sense if it had a flavoring on it – I’ve seen some with a minty taste. But this didn’t have that. I don’t think it would shred or fray in just a year’s time. My husband thinks it’s a scam to make people buy more floss. 🙂
• A note on prescription information insert from the drugstore: “For faster refills, call 24 hours in advance.” That does not seem faster to me. 🙂

• I don’t think I have shared the most recent birthday cards I have made yet. Jason had a “milestone” birthday this year, and in looking for ideas for his card, I came across several listing things that had happened during his birth year. I ended up doing this one on the computer – I told him that even though it wasn’t hand-made, it was Mom-made. 🙂

Jeremy likes foxes, and I was aiming for a design that didn’t look childish.

Jesse is an avid video gamer, so this seemed appropriate for him.

• I mentioned last time being frustrated with complicated issues being reduced to zinging tweets and snarky memes in public forums. I’ve been thinking that we ought to bring back forensic debating in schools. Not the farces that we call presidential debates during election season. When I was in college, one of the regular commencement week activities was the championship debate, a culmination of different groups who had been debating a particular topic all through the school year, and the top two teams debated the final round before the entire school body. At the time, I am sorry to say, I found it quite boring. But now I wish more people were educated in this kind of logical thinking, giving out and responding to facts rather than conjecture, name-calling, and shouting each other down. I hope school debates are still conducted like this. I know some schools still have them, but I think more should and they should receive more emphasis.

• I have also been alarmed to see more and more anti-capitalist rhetoric in recent months. Some equate capitalism with greed and oppression when it should be equated with opportunity (the little guy who pursues a big idea, the family restaurant that grows into a national chain). I lived through the Cold War and helped pray people out of Soviet prisons: believe me, you really don’t want communism. Talk about oppression. There is no perfect economic system: every one has its flaws. And because we’re sinners, there are people who are going to exploit the flaws in any system for personal advantage, so there needs to be safeguards in place. This is an area requiring study and thought, not just sound bytes.

• Our family is currently going through some major changes. My husband was asked to take on a different position at his company. He’s had to turn down a few of those requests before because they involved travel, and he felt he couldn’t be away more than a couple of days at a time due to his mom being in our home. She tends to get a little more disoriented when he’s away for very long. But that’s also out of consideration for me, so I don’t have the bulk of her care, and I appreciate that. This position will not require that kind of travel, so that helps. It’s an area he has been partially involved in for years, so I hope being in it full time is enjoyable for him. Right now they are still in a transition phase.

• Another big change is that we have decided to leave the church we have attended for seven years and look for a new church home. There really isn’t any one major issue, but my husband has been unhappy there for some time. We talked it out and decided it was time to move on. We didn’t visit around various churches when we first came here because we knew the pastor at this church (who has since passed away) and knew from the start that’s where we would attend. So we’re going through that visiting-around process now, which is always…interesting. This is the first time we have ever left a church for reasons other than moving away, so it feels a little awkward in many respects. I always feel a little homeless without a church family, but I do have a sense of excitement to see what the Lord has in store for us.

And that wraps it up for today!

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I have a couple of posts percolating in the back of my mind but haven’t had the opportunity or the mindset to work them out, so for now I thought I’d just share the other odds and ends floating around there. 🙂

• I feel like people must be getting sick of me talking about the ablation surgery and atrial fibrillation by now. I’m getting sick of it myself. “Shouldn’t that be all over with?” Well, that’s what I would have thought. Recently I had four different afib episodes in the space of a week, from 2-6 hours each. I’m not sure why – I was at rest when most of them started, even dozing when one began. I contacted my doctor, and he wants to put me on a different medication, but first I have to go off one of the ones I am on for five days so it is out of my system before I start the new one. They told me I might feel a little “rough” during the days without the medicine I am going off of. But I am about halfway through that five-day period, and so far there have been a few little ripples, but no major episodes, for which I am very thankful to God. I’m three months past the surgery, so I hope we’ve turned a corner and I won’t have any more major episodes, especially as the rest of this medicine gets out of my system before starting the new one. If I don’t have any more major afib episodes between now and then, I’m even toying with the idea of asking if I can avoid taking the new one. But we’ll see.

• When I first heard they wanted me to go off one of the medications for five days, I was alarmed, thinking that surely without the medicine I’d have even more episodes. I have this tendency to run through all the possible “what if” scenarios I can come up with.

But one thing this experience has helped me with is that I decided I just could not live every day fearing I might have afib (and that it might not go away on its own and then I might have to go to the hospital and then we’d have to make arrangements for Jim’s mom, or it might cause a blood clot, etc., etc., etc.). I prayed about it, asked other people to pray about it, and just decided to go on about my business, and we’d deal with whatever happened when and if it happened. I’ve had to go through this all again in my mind a few times, but overall it’s much more restful to live this way! Who knows, maybe learning this is one reason God allowed all this to happen.

• I had a clear birdfeeder that attached with suction cups to the kitchen window so i could watch the birds a little more closely. But not long ago we had a little mouse in there! I wish I had caught a good photo of it. I took the bird feeder down — I don’t want any more uninvited guests there! I think this is the first mouse I have seen or even seen any evidence of since we moved here seven years ago.
• We’ve been hearing some kind of creature scurrying around the attic, larger than the little mouse in the birdfeeder, so my husband put a trap up there, the kind that will catch it but not kill it so he can release it in some woodsy area away from the house. It kept getting the peanut butter out but evading the trap. Reasoning that maybe the trap was too small to close on it, my husband got a larger one. But after several resets with both peanut butter and peanuts, we kept getting the same results: missing food, but no trapped animal. So finally Jim hot-glued some peanuts to the metal plate where the food goes, thinking that when the animal tried to pull it off, that would trigger the trap door. This is what he found the next time he checked it:

He said the paint on the trap was getting a little sticky from the heat in the attic, so he sprayed it with WD-40. But it may be time to go to a mouse-trap type trap sized for a larger animal – as well as writing some manufacturers about their failed traps!

• Do you have a process for reading blogs? I have all the blogs I read on Feedly, and I usually start looking through them while I am eating breakfast. I guess because I am eating and not in a mode to comment on them, I tend to go through first and eliminate some I’m not interested in reading. For instance, I follow some recipe blogs, but if I can tell by the title I’m not interested in a particular recipe, I delete it.  I follow some craft and card-making blogs, but this time of year when there is a lot of Halloween stuff, I delete those, too. Maybe it also makes me feel like I am putting a dent into my blog-reading if I eliminate a few right off the bat. 🙂 Next there are a few blogs I read but don’t comment on, usually bigger blogs with a significant following who get several comments a day already. I figure they don’t really need my two cents, so I don’t comment unless a post has particularly meant a lot to me or unless I feel I can add something to the discussion. Then there are some bloggers who are friends now and I comment on almost all of their posts, so I go on to those next, and if a particular post needs an especially thoughtful comment, I usually save that for last, sometimes coming back to it later in the day. Often some time in the middle of that I have to go run errands or accomplish something, so sometimes I finish blog reading in the afternoon. I usually avoid it in the evening so as not to be off on the computer while my husband is home.

• How do you feel about “tweetables,” those sections of a blog post specifically designed for someone to tweet a line from your post? Some will even be labeled “Click here to tweet.” When I first saw that, I thought, “Wow, the audacity!” It seemed a little too self-promotional to me. But then I saw someone ask a blogger for those – I guess she wanted to promote the post but clicking on something like that was easier than copying and pasting. So now I am caught between wondering if it comes across as a push to promote or as a service to readers. It’s difficult because bloggers want readers – otherwise we’d just be writing journals. And I always appreciate when someone shares my post on social media in some way. But it’s hard to know how far is too far to go. I guess it’s not that much different than the little buttons I have at the bottom to share a post somewhere.

• This will sound awful, but I get frustrated when missionaries put you on their mailing lists without asking. I DO believe in supporting missionaries and reading their prayer letters (carefully!) and praying for them, and I have signed up for several prayer letter lists. But when you rediscover someone you used to know 30+ years ago on an online forum or social media and then all of a sudden you start getting their prayer letters – it shouldn’t bother me, but it does. It’s always better to ask than to assume to let the person ask the missionary so he or she doesn’t feel put on the spot. Maybe because I do want to treat them carefully and pray for each one, it’s easy to feel overloaded. But then, it’s doesn’t take all that much time to read through a prayer letter, pray for the requests immediately, and then delete it, and it’s a ministry to them. And, obviously, if I have time to blog and watch TV and do other things, I am not so pressed for time that I can’t spend a few minutes reading about and praying for someone. So why am I complaining? I don’t know. I guess my inner curmudgeon is coming out.

• Like everyone else in the country, I was horrified and deeply saddened by the LA shooting a few days ago. I haven’t felt inclined to write a separate post about it – probably anything I could say has already been said somewhere. But I am saddened as well by the hateful rhetoric following the shooting, especially the backlash against people offering “thoughts and prayers” instead of doing something. Well…as this post says, thinking of and praying for someone is “doing something.” That doesn’t mean some kind of action doesn’t need to be taken as well. But what that action should be is a big and complicated question. I do believe in citizens having guns if they want them – but do they need machine guns and the like? Are there not laws currently in place for whatever this man was doing? Lots of people have had guns for centuries without doing something like this – is there something else to consider? Mental illness, perhaps? And what should be done about that opens another whole set of complicated questions. I haven’t heard whether anyone has ascertained a motive for the shooter. Was it just hate? Or a warped sense of fun? What do you do about that? I’m probably making a mistake opening up this can of worms at the end of a post like this when I need to stop in a minute and get some other things done, but I’m just trying to convey that there are a number of issues involved that are not simple, and a differing opinion is not in itself a stupid one. It doesn’t do a lot of good to rail against the hatred out there and then treat people hatefully within our own sphere of influence. I don’t want to throw this out as a cliche, but, truly, the gospel is the only thing that is going to change people’s hearts in the long term. May God give us wisdom and grace in how and when to share it and live it out, and soften people’s hearts to be receptive to it.

This is the first weekday in about a week and a half where I haven’t had to go somewhere during the morning. I thought that would provide for a busy day getting things done at home, but instead I’m tired and a little fuzzy-brained and fighting off a headache (due, I think, to the air pressure system). So It seems like it would be a good day for a ramble. 🙂

I had my post-op visit with the cardiologist yesterday. I had been discouraged because I’ve still felt a number of heartbeat irregularities, mostly minor, but some longer, one as long as 12 hours. The most recent long bout was five hours last Friday. They had told me to expect some irregularities, that the surgery itself could cause some. But in my mind there shouldn’t have been that much, and certainly not 5 1/2 weeks out from surgery. But the doctor was cheerful and said everything was “just the way we like to see it.” I see him again in 2 months. I’m still not feeling particularly cheerful about it myself, but I am a little more hopeful, especially as the last couple of bouts were considerably milder than usual. I’ve been told that occasionally people have to have an ablation for atrial fibrillation more than once, and if we have to do that, we’ll deal with it, but I sure hope the one I had will take care of it.

Part of the longer healing process is due to the fact that what they’re trying to accomplish with the ablation (as I understand it) is creating little teeny spots of scar tissue along the nerve that’s causing the irregular beats, either by heat or freezing – not so much as to impair heart function, but enough to disrupt that particular nerve’s signals. So not only does all of that need to heal and settle down after surgery, but then it takes time for the scar tissue to develop – longer than I had thought, evidently. I had thought everything would be “done” by this visit, which led to my discouragement at still having issues.

So we’ll see where we are in a couple of months. I also got some much-needed clarification about what to do if I do have a longer bout of afib at home – how long to just rest at home and when to see a doctor.

Well, enough of that.

Other thoughts that have been accumulating recently:

• My own little corner of the Internet has been on the quiet side recently. Some blog friends have taken a hiatus for the summer, or for a longer spell, for various reasons, and some are only posting sporadically.

• Is anyone thinking of doing Write31Days in October? The idea is to choose a topic, any topic, that you’ll blog about every day of October. I’ve done it a few times before with 31 Days of Missionary Stories, 31 Days of Inspirational Biographies, and 31 Days with Elisabeth Elliot. I enjoyed doing them, and they were well-received. But so far I don’t have anything in mind to write about this year, and I don’t know if I have the “umph” to do it. We’re coming off of a busy time between the surgery, the eclipse, the family stay-cation, and “birthday season” (several family birthdays July-September). I was just thinking today that it was nice to look forward to nothing major on the schedule in October. But I am praying about it. Let me know if you’re planning to participate.

• Recently I’ve seen a few comments on social media judging people for not commenting on particular issues. Seriously, people. Not everyone wants to participate in every online debate or wants to strew their thoughts on every topic, particularly divisive ones, all over the Internet. Plus, some issues are too big for the 140 characters of a tweet. I’d rather have a serious, in-depth, informed, and thoughtful discussion on a issue than trade snarky sound bytes. So don’t take media silence as indifference or lack of caring. I’m not saying it’s wrong to discuss divisive issues on social media, but, honestly, a lot of those discussion that I see are more about scoring points for one’s own side and portraying the other side as stupid or dangerous or uncaring than they are about shedding any light.

• I never saw or heard of leaving two spaces between typed sentences until fairly recently, and I’ve wondered where that came from. I never had a typing or keyboarding class, so I have wondered if it’s taught there, or if it is a regional thing. I just looked it up, and this article delves into the history and tells why it is considered wrong. This one says it’s especially a no-no in writing proposals.

• Do you ever go back and edit old posts? I’ve discovered some of mine have some photos missing or broken links. I used to use sources like Photobucket to upload and share photos so I didn’t use too much of my free storage space provided by my blog. Though Photobucket is still in business, I think some of the others must have gone out of business over time, because I’ve discovered some old posts with a place for a photo, but no photo there, and nothing happens when I click on the icon that is there. Plus there are some broken links here are there, where the post or site I linked to is no longer online. It would be a lot of work to go back through 11 years worth of posts to fix that kind of thing, yet I hate to leave posts like that, especially the ones with missing photos. So I’ll probably correct them as I come across them and have time. I know for some of you, whenever I do anything with an old post, it shows up in your feed as a new one. I apologize for that. I don’t know how to avoid it. If I start fixing old posts on a larger scale, I’ll try to let you know.

• Do you find yourself living back in the “dark ages” in some respect? For me, it’s the price of clothing. I can accept that the price of gas and food changes, even though sometimes I am horrified by it. But I still find myself not wanting to pay more for clothes than I did back in college – almost 40 years ago. A lot of times I can still find clothes at those prices, or close to it, but it’s getting increasingly harder to do so. I recently upped the price range I consider acceptable, but there are some clothes catalogs I immediately toss because they are so ridiculously high.

• ‘Tis the season…for corn mazes. Have you ever done one? They do not sound like fun to me. 🙂

Well, that’s probably more than enough rambling for one day.

Like many of you, we’re still praying for those still dealing with the effects of the hurricanes on the east coast and the wildfires in the west and for the help they need, financially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.