One of my favorite inspirational people is Dr. Wayne Dyer.  He authored The Power of Intention, You'll See It When You Believe It, and Being in Balance, among many other books. I am always inspired by his words.  His ideas are powerful.

 

A couple of months ago I saw him on TV where he was giving a seminar on ideas of self-empowerment.  One particular quote struck me.  He said to tell yourself that, whatever you desired, whatever goal you have set for yourself, - IT IS ALREADY COMING! The force of this idea struck me to my core.  What a positive way to live and be.  If you desire to have more financial security you will be looking for the subtle changes that will bring this about.  If you find a coin on the ground, even a penny, you tell yourself that, in regards to your future monetary gains,"it is already coming".  You'll do better at your job, expecting the rewards that it will bring. If you desire better health you will bring it about simply by expecting it to come! You will be more likely to choose healthy food or exercise and will find that feeling better is "already coming". 

 

How much better is it to live life expecting good things, and to recognize them when they appear, than to always be down in your spirits. Always thinking that you will never get ahead, never have any energy, or never be contented. 

 

I have tried to do this since that day in September. For me, anyway, it has worked in unexpected ways.  I feel more successful because I expect to be more successful.  I don't know if there are any actual differences in my life now, but just because my attitude is different I am happier.  And my future is looking brighter than ever because, you know what?  It is Already Coming!

One of the books that has greatly influenced me is called Simple Abundance - A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach. Sarah must be a gentle old soul, for gentleness shines through her words.  If you yearn for a simple and peaceful life you must find a copy and drink in it's contents. This is not a book to devour.  The words should be sampled like a great hors d'oeuvre, nibbled at and savored. There is one short essay for every day of the year.  Every day you can ponder a new thought, try out a new idea, or just enjoy the masterful way she has learned to live a simple abundant life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi, my name is Linda and I'm a night owl.

 

Unlike an alcoholic attending an AA meeting, however, I don't feel the need to control my night haunts, or be reformed in some way. I don't think there's a 10 step program for me, or if I'd even be interested in trying to follow one. I've just been thinking a bit about why I am the way I am.  Sometimes I think society in general looks down on we people of the night.  It is considered ambitious and healthy to get up early, work hard, eat 3 square meals a day, and then go to bed early.  I don't exactly fit the mold.

 

I sleep a little late,  I eat when I want, and I usually start thinking about going to bed about 1 in the morning.  I've tried analyzing why I am just not ready to go to bed when "sane" people do.  I've got a couple of ideas.  You see, I am also an introvert.  My introduction should sound like this;

 

Hi, my name is Linda and I'm a night owl, and an introvert.

 

I think society, in general, also looks down on introverts.  You hear many positive comments about extroverts. "He's so friendly", "She's the life of the party", "He is so much fun to be around."  People love extroverts. 

 

I heard somewhere the difference between introverts and extroverts.  Extroverts gain their energy and "life" from other people.  If they are alone too long they feel drained and seek out the company of others to get recharged. Introverts are exactly the opposite. Although they enjoy the company of people and are not unfriendly, just being with a crowd drains them and they seek solitude to recharge.  Extros love crowds, Intros love one-on-ones. Extros love to talk, Intros love to listen. It takes both to make a balanced world.

 

My mother is an intro, my father is an extro.  My mother is perfectly happy at home.  She's got a lot of projects she works on.  She has no problem entertaining herself.  My dad's retirement was a little bit hard on her because her alone recharging time was cut short.  My dad can't stand being home for very long before he starts fidgeting and pacing.  "Let's go visit someone".  My mother, ever the trooper, will gladly go. No one is a stranger to him.  He will engage anyone in front or behind him in line in conversation.  He could talk to someone who called a wrong number for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat. If you are sharing a plane trip or bus ride with him be prepared to tell all about where you were born, where do you live, how many children do you have, and what is your favorite pie. When we tease my dad about his overt friendliness he just shrugs his shoulders and sheepishly says, "well, how else are you going to get acquainted?" My husband is cut from the same piece of cloth.  He can always find an area of common interest with anyone he talks to. There are no strangers.  Just friends you haven't met yet.

 

I don't mind being an intro.  I don't feel like I need to aplogize for it.  I'm glad to have visitors and go visiting. I love it when my family is here.  Christmas was fun.  We played games and talked and laughed.  But when they left I felt drained.  I needed to recharge.  It was late.  I couldn't just go to bed.  I would wake up more tired.  I needed some alone time to do those things that give me joy, infuse my chakras, and rejouvenate.  Maybe if my family were all night owls I would have to get up early for those peaceful moments. Maybe, but I doubt it. I don't think you can really change an owl into a lark any more than you could change steak into ice cream. I think I truly am, and always will be a night owl.

 

It always makes me smile when synchronicity appears. Carl Jung coined the word to explain those times in your life when amazingly coincidental things happen. A good example of this is when you find a picture of an old friend stuck inside a book and then run into her the next day. Another way to describe this phenomenon is that you are witnessing the tender mercies of God. It always feels like a hug from above when these things occur. I had one of these occurrences yesterday, which prompted me to share these thoughts with you.

 

On our campus we have computer support personnel assigned to each building.  Whenever we have computer “issues” we call up our support person and they fix it for us.  A couple of weeks ago we got a new support guy.  We had his office phone number, but not his cell.  He was never in his office as he was always around campus fixing computers.  I happen to know his daughter.  I thought to myself, “the next time I see Stacy I’m going to ask for her dad’s cell number.”  It wasn’t an hour later that I passed her.  I hadn’t seen Stacy for months!  It took me by surprise so much that I failed to ask for the number.  I told the secretary that I work with that the very next time I see her I would ask for the number.  Less than 24 hours later I had to hike to upper campus to hand deliver an important document needing a signature.  I went to the 3^rd floor of a building I hadn’t been in for a year, and literally ran into Stacy.  This time I got the number. And I left smiling. 

 

Another dramatic instance of synchronicity in my life happened about 18 months ago while doing the mundane task of mowing my lawn.  It was in the late afternoon on a hot July day when I finally got around to the lawn-mowing task.   The sun was starting to sink into the western sky, which irritated my eyes every time I faced that direction.  My eyes have always been overly sensitive to bright light. I usually end up with a headache.  I had mowed for about 10 minutes when I felt the headache coming on and thought to myself, “I sure wish I had a visor”.  I was in the swing of mowing, though, and didn’t stop to go in the house to retrieve one.  Less than 5 minutes later a car pulled into my driveway and stopped next to me.  My friend, Vione, rolled down her car window and handed me a visor. I almost couldn’t speak. She said she was cleaning her house and found the visor that my daughter left at her house the previous week. Over a year went my before I told her my side of things on that July day.  Then she was speechless. 

 

It reminds me of the song “From A Distance” by Bette Midler.  I love the lines; 

“God is watching us.

God is watching us from a distance.”

And He not only watches, but once in a while He reaches down and gives us a hug.

A month ago at work, I was asked if I wanted to work a couple of hours longer each day. Since I was only working 4 hours at the time I decided it would be a good move both for my family and for me personally.  The only thing I worried about was Oscar. 

 

Oscar is my 2 year old.  He has a mischievous streak, a cuddly body, and a happy smile, complete with long drippy tongue that hangs out most of the time. Oscar is my dog.  He is a Lhasa Apso which I think is Tibetan for "territorial, German shepherd watchdog spirit crammed into an Ewok, "teddy bear" body. Oscar rules the house.  He perches himself on the back of my couch, watching over his domain through the big picture window in our living room, all day while I am at work.  I was worried about him not being taken outside in a timely matter.  I didn't relish the thought of having him revert to pre-potty-training behavior.  And so began "Project Oscar”. 

 

The first order of business was to install a dog door.  I went to Home Depot and bought a very nice door with double flaps.  It was important that we get a door that did not let in too much of our frigid winter weather.  This door looked nice and, more importantly, looked like it would let very little outside air in.  We then had to find the perfect spot to put the door.  I settled on the closet wall of our laundry room.  He could go outside through this door and be out on our deck, which is about 10 feet off the ground.  I had already installed another door at the top of the deck stairs so that he would have to stay on it.  He runs away every chance he gets, to go chase the wild rabbits that live in our neighbors back yard.  I knew he was not to be trusted with total freedom, so the gate stayed closed for the time being.  The first trick was to train Oscar to use the door.  It took a couple of weeks, a pound of hot dogs, and a lot of coaxing and praising, but he finally mastered it. 

 

Our next big job was to buy and install the wireless radio fence that many of our friends had raved about.  We went to Petco and purchased the fence, which consisted of a radio wire (100 feet), a receiver collar, and a transmitter. The wire is laid out in a closed loop, starting and ending at the transmitter.  If the collar gets too close to the wire, a static shock will result.  This shock is like the shock you get when static electricity builds up from dragging your feet across the carpet and then touch something metallic.  It surprises you, but hardly does harm.   We laid out the wire around about 2 of our acres, and finished the loop by tacking the wire about 3 feet off the ground on two sides of the house.  The idea was that Oscar would be far enough away from the wire that it wouldn't affect him.  Wrong!  He not only had to stay away from the walls of the house, both inside and outside, but he would also get shocked if he tried to go through his dog door! This would never do.  We tried twisting the wire, looping the wire, and even considered buying another 100 feet so that we could loop back around the yard, when we finally decided to call the customer support number on the back of the box.  They immediately had a great solution.  All we had to do was to run the wire up the side of the house, over the roof, and drop it back down right at the transmitter box. Brilliant!  We had a lot of snow that week, so the next dilemma was to figure out a way to get the wire over our house without Mike having to actually climb up on the slick roof. We thought about it and procrastinated doing it for about a week. Finally we decided Oscar really needed that freedom to go clear out on the dirt and do his business.

 

My solution, said in jest, was to tie the wire to an arrow and shoot it over the house.  Mike thought it might work!  We tried a lightweight bow and tied a light string to it.  The house was too tall and the wind was too strong.  It didn't work at all.  So Mike went to his friend’s house and borrowed a compound bow.  He told me to stand out on the deck and watch for it.  SURE!  I'm just going to go out and stand on the deck and get skewered in the eyeball.  I stood inside the house and watched out the window (after making sure all other living creatures were safely inside). I waited and watched. And watched and waited.  Finally I went into the front yard to see what was going on.  The wind was still too strong.  There was no control over the arrow.  We would have to find another way.

 

Mike asked for a heavy hammer.  I found him one and he proceeded to tie the string onto it.  I was wondering what in the world he was going to do with it when he looked up over the roof, took aim, and threw it as hard as he could.  I had visions of the string getting caught up and the hammer swinging in a perfect arc straight through one of my windows.  It didn't happen.  In fact the hammer landed in exactly the right spot.  It was a simple matter to untie the hammer, tie on the wire and start to haul it up over the house.  Only, the wire got caught up on the eaves and came untied and fell back to the ground.  I ran around to the other side of the house to tell Mike to stop pulling only to find that he had already stopped and was up on the roof.  He climbed up to look on the roof, to try to avoid letting the string get caught up on anything, when he noticed the snow was completely melted off.  It was a very simple matter to jump up there and finish the job.  Oscar's fence was now operational.  Now all we had to do was train him on it, which really didn’t take very long. I think the one time he made a run for the bunnies and was shocked mid-stride he realized all those flags in the yard were there for his protection.

 

I love knowing that Oscar can come and go as he pleases.  With the weather turning nasty and my time at home shorter and shorter, it is so gratifying to glance out the back window and see my little poochie rooting around in the snow without me having to take him out there myself. 

 

When I was relating this story to my son, David, he informed me that when his Dad threw the hammer over the house he was displaying­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ non-conformity or creative thought patterns. That is the ability to think outside the box.  You can look at a hammer and see other uses for it that don't necessarily include pounding or prying.  He said there was a study done http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1074912 where volunteers were placed in a room that had a pair of vise grips and two strings hanging from the ceiling.  The strings were placed far enough apart that you could not hold onto one and reach the other.  The object was to have the vise grips clamped onto both strings using only what was in the room.  Successful volunteers would by clamping the vise grips onto one string and then get it swaying back and forth, then grab the other string and wait for the swinging string to come within reach.  Then it was simply a matter of clamping them together.  I’ve always been pretty good at thinking outside the box.  I guess that ability is nurtured when you are an artist.  You look at things in a different way.  For example, we hired my son to do a lot of tiling in our house.  He did a great job, but I was fascinated with the process and wanted to try it myself.  I watched as he took measurement, marked and cut the tile.  That was the part I was a little worried about.  I’ve never been good with numbers.  I can’t hold them in my head for any length of time.  I didn’t know how I was going to be able to figure out the angles.  When I laid the tile in our bathroom I did it by myself.  I found another way.  When I came upon a particularly difficult shape I simply took a piece of newspaper and pressed it into the space creating creases where the edges were.  It was a simple thing to cut out the shape and place it on top of the tile to mark it.  The customer service rep with the over the roof suggestion had an “out of the box” solution to our problem. And I’ll never look at a bow and arrow, or a hammer again without thinking, “hmmm, I wonder if I can use this for……………..”

Yesterday at work the professors in the geology department where I work were comparing themselves in geologic terms.  One professor, ready to retire, was likened to a fossil.  A newly hired teacher was called a soft rock.  One of our senior students, knee deep in a major project, piped up, "I guess that would make me dirt".

 

 

I lived through it.  My daughters sounded great.  I only messed up once (at the very beginning of "my big solo").  Luckily the piano was facing the wall, so nobody saw the face I pulled when I bonked when I should have plunked. I am not good at maintaining the confident performing facade my daughters have.  Where do my kids get their talent?

 

I have always been exposed to classical music.  My dad would play Beethoven every Sunday while my mother finished our Sunday dinner.  For years I would smell pot roast every time I heard the strains of Handel, Bach, or Mozart. I was exposed to it, but I didn’t learn to love it until I had children of my own.

 

My oldest son, David, started out our family's string instrument obsession by playing the viola in the 4th grade music program.  Once he entered Jr. High he decided he needed a better instrument than we could give him.  He found a great friend and benefactor in a man named Ed Brown.  Ed lived 30 miles away, so David would beg rides from neighbors, relatives, and friends to go to his house, where Ed taught him the fine art of viola making.  David learned how to choose wood, even down to which tree in which grove worked best. He learned how to make the pattern, cut out and join the pieces, and tune the wood using a vibration system which showed where it needed to be carved down more.  He learned how to apply the varnish and the finishing pieces like the pins, strings, and chin rest.  His instrument turned out great, not just for a kid of 15, but really great.  Once in college he thought he would like once again to upgrade his instrument, so he bought a really nice viola.  After using it for a couple of years he sold it, saying he liked his own viola better. 

 

 

Lisa has played the violin since the 4th grade.  We bought a beautiful little violin for her for about $500.00.  It was a sacrifice for our family to spend so much on an instrument, but we wanted her to have it.  (The instrument she uses now is astronomical in price compared to her first one. The bow alone cost more than three times that amount.) When she was in the 7th grade we decided it would be good if both David and Lisa joined the youth symphony.  That was a sacrifice on our part as we had to deliver them to practices every week and then either hang around for a couple of hours or drive back and forth to Idaho Falls, which was 30 miles away.  It was a happy day when David received his driver's license.

 

Both David and Lisa tried out for and made it into the All-Northwest Orchestra while in high school.  They were able to fly to Portland for the adventure. (A first for both of them.) The next year, after David graduated, Lisa decided to learn to play the Viola.  She auditioned for the All-State Orchestra on both the Viola and the Violin and was accepted for both. I can’t remember which instrument she played.  I think it was the viola because she was placed higher in the seating.  She majored in music in college.  This is when she really started to excel.  Musicians sacrifice so many of their hours to perfecting their craft. It was nothing for her to practice 5 hours a day. While here she won the Concerto Competition and the Young Artist Competition which was held in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She has since graduated from BYU-Idaho, attended Aspen Music Festival for 3 years, and obtained her Master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She is currently teaching a one year appointment for a professor who is on sabbatical.  She plans to return to CCM in the fall to finish her Doctorate.

 

Joni played the Viola for 5 years, Abby the Violin for 8 years, and Andy played the Cello for 5 years. Ours is a musical family. One of my greatest joys is watching them make music together.  It is music mingled with laughter and love.  Music really does help my world go around.

Tonight is our department Christmas dinner. The secretary was in charge of ordering the room, food, and sending out the invitations.  I was in charge of finding musical entertainment. What an easy job for me!  My family is bursting with musical talent. Lisa, my oldest daughter is currently teaching music at our university, and plays the viola, violin, and piano.  Both she and Abby, my youngest daughter, sing very well. It was an easy thing to ask Lisa to come up with 2 Christmas numbers.

 

I settled back and relaxed, knowing the food would be great, the company would be great, and the musical numbers would be great. 

 

Yesterday I got a call from Lisa. “Mom, can you play the piano for us while we sing a duet?”  I am not a performer.  I am not really that musical.  I took piano lessons for about 10 years, but never really progressed passed about the 4^th level.  I have mild panic attacks when I have to get in front of a group of people.  I remember one piano recital I was in.  As the date for the recital drew near I played my pieces worse and worse.  My teacher said I was just nervous and would be fine when the day came.  She was wrong.  When it was my turn to go up and play my pieces, my hands were shaking so bad that I didn’t think I’d be able to play at all.  Somehow I began, though, and thought it would be all right.  That’s when my mind went totally blank.  Since these pieces were memorized that was not a good thing. The teacher took pity on me and didn’t force me to play in the next recital. I think she was trying to avoid embarrassment for herself as well. So when I got the call from Lisa I was immediately in panic mode.  She assured me it was not hard, and that we would go slowly, and that I would be fine. I went to her office (our buildings on campus are right next to each other) and tried to play the piece.  “Maybe if you left out these notes”, Lisa offered helpfully.  I tried again.  “You could also leave these notes out” she coached.

 

I told her I would try to find someone else to play.  My only other hope was a student who works for us in our office. I knew she played the piano as she would have to leave early to go to her piano lesson.  I gave her the music hopefully.  Last night at 8 pm she gave Lisa a call.  She would not be able to play after all.  My panic button was in alarm mode.  I went to the piano and plunked through an extremely watered down version of the piece.  “Okay, I can do this”, I told myself. When I played the second time through my daughters sang their parts.  They sounded so beautiful that I would listen to them and forget to play my little “one note at a time” accompaniment. I had a hard time keeping a steady beat. Lisa said, “Are you losing your groove, mom?”  Yes!  I lost my groove when I realized I was going to have to play this thing. 

 

So tonight, in front of the people I work with every day, in front of my children, my husband, and anyone walking down the hall, I will be playing the piano. And when I get to the middle of the piece where there is a short introduction between verses, I will hear Lisa’s voice in my head, “here comes Mom’s big solo.”  Plunk plunk, plunk, plunk……

 

The sky has always fascinated me.  I will go outside at midnight and just stare at the stars. Because I live in such a rural area I can usually see them all vividly.  There are no city lights to detract. At around 5:00 every evening I will look to the west and watch for the next 30 minutes as the sky turns orange, pink, salmon, yellow, and navy blue. And on the rare occasion when I am conscious in the early hours when the sun starts to peek over the Teton Mountains, I am in awe of that as well, all though in a sleepier, subdued way. In the winter I watch snow, in the summer I watch lightning, all year around I watch the wind, or at least the effects of it.

 

Clouds are mesmerizing.  They billow up and flatten out and streak across.  Sometimes they are so thin you have to squint hard to block out the suns harsh rays to see the wisps scattered here and there in the sky.  Often they are rolly, lumpy handfuls of cotton slowly changing, getting more bunched up here, more stretched out there, drifting en mass from one edge of my sky to the other.   So today I am sharing an awesome website with you.  The clouds shown are so surreal they look photoshopped. The weather man who gave this site to me assures me they are not. Enjoy. http://pic1.funtigo.com/valuca?g=25544746&cr=1

 

When I see the sun start to set a feeling of serenity comes over me.  It speaks to my soul using the language of color.  As an artist, color is a very powerful way to communicate. Days when things haven’t quite fallen the way I wanted always seem less important when I can see the vibrant, or subtle changes in the sky as the sun sinks behind the Menan Butte. I have many many photos of those sunsets.  I want to capture the feeling I get when I see it.  I’ve been known to run outside barefoot in winter, camera in hand to catch the changing sky before it’s gone. I’ve been the object of some good-natured ribbing over this. (“There goes mom again, taking another picture of the sunset.”)  I don’t really care.  I wish I could paint sunsets that give the same feeling I get when I view one.

 

Lightning storm are terrifying.  They are unpredictable and powerful.  My fear of lightning is tempered by my awe at the power and majesty I see. I have had a life-long fear of talking on the phone during a thunderstorm.  This was fueled by tales of my great-grandmother hiding under the bed with her children and exacerbated by the news that our neighbor was electrocuted during a thunderstorm while talking on the phone. My husband would tell me how unlikely that would be every time a storm came and I would refuse to answer the incessantly ringing phone. Then I would find magazine articles, or news stories about other unfortunate individuals “caught in the act”. One of my favorite stories was of Dannion Brinkley. If you want a fascinating account you should check out his books on what happened to him as a result. I don’t think I ever convinced Mike about the dangers of phone talking during a thunderstorm, but now I don’t worry as much.  I usually use my cell phone.  No wires and no direct line for the electricity to follow straight into my ear.

             

It is cold here in Idaho.  My brother’s blog of yesterday tells some of the tales of Idaho winters.  I could always tell when it was below zero.  All you had to do was breathe in through your nose.  If your nose hairs froze it was probably at least heading into the negative range. Blizzards of years long ago were much harsher than the blizzards of the last 20 years.  Our road would be totally impassable for days.  If you had to go out you needed to hike over the cement hard drifts which were so dense we drove our extremely heavy old station wagon on top of it just to get a picture. I really didn’t mind being snowed in.  It was a great excuse to;

#1. Not go to school.  This was always the goal.  School was cancelled many days back in the 60’s and 70’s in our neck of the woods. And,

#2. Stay home.  When you can not drive anywhere you have a perfect excuse to play, read, goof off, build snowmen, and enjoy the day. I think our road crews nowdays are just a little bit too on the ball.  It wouldn’t hurt to be stranded at home once in a while. I kind of mourn for those days, for me and my kids.

 

 Once in a while, though, we really do have a great big storm come in that is reminiscent of my childhood.  The one I remember the most happened three years ago on New Years night.  A huge blizzard was raging outside.  Our family was all home and cozy by the wood-burning stove watching a movie and enjoying a peaceful relaxing evening.  We could hear the wind whistling outside, which only seemed to add to our feeling of snugness and security.  After the movie ended my husband went to the window to watch the storm.  All of the windows on the front side of our house were totally pasted with snow.  He opened the front door instead, so that he could see.  The wind caught the door and blew it in, hard! We have double front doors and somehow the pressure of the wind forced open the second door as well. Immediately we had a full raging blizzard in our living room.  There was a lot of shouting and running as we got hammers and towels and people pushing against the wind to close the doors. Finally the door closed and we leaned against it in relief.  Then one of my daughters wanted to see the blizzard for herself. She went out in the back yard on the opposite side of the house, where the wind would not affect her.  What she saw caused the second panic of less than 5 minutes.  The wind had sucked the fire up from our wood stove. Flames and sparks streamed away from our house toward the stand of trees in our back yard. We then had to run water both up to the chimney, where my husband poured, trying to douse the flames, and down to the wood stove that was now screaming like a blast furnace.  Within a few heart-stopping minutes we had the fire out and stood to survey the damage.  We decided it was time to take a drive.  Our 4x4 Ford Explorer was able to break through the drifts on our driveway without a problem.  We took a short tour of the neighborhood.  Not another soul was out.  No one was on the road. Not one other car.  It was very sobering to think that no one was outside. Not one person would have noticed our house on fire. We could have gone to bed while the fire took over the house.  I think we had a little help that night.  As stressful as that episode was, I’m grateful that it happened.  If the windows had been clear, if the front door had been easily opened and shut, if we had no reason to look in the back yard, we would not have seen our fire.  I’m grateful for the seemingly annoying things that happened that night that ultimately blessed our family.

I made a mistake at work today.  I feel sick whenever I think about it. One of the professors I work with is probably the world’s authority on a particular fossil record.  He found a superb specimen of that particular fossil for sale on EBAY. The problem was that the auction ended while he was in class teaching. He asked me to go into his office, use his computer and bid with about 10 seconds remaining. The current bid was in the mid-$20 range.  He told me to bid an astronomical amount.  He said he wanted that fossil and he didn’t care how much it cost. I was not worried. I am an avid EBAY-er.  Bidding at the last moment was not new to me. I was more worried that I would get distracted and forget to go do the deed.  With 15 minutes to go I decided to go in and hit refresh every minute or so to make sure I was ready when the time drew near.  I watched the time dwindle down.  With 15 seconds to go I decided to place the bid.  I hit “submit” and then “confirm”. The computer didn’t seem to do anything for a second, so I hit “confirm” again.  The message “We are sorry, but this auction is closed” blazed on the screen.  I felt like crying and a knot immediately formed in my stomach. How could I tell him the fossil he entrusted me to buy for several hundreds of dollars went for $20 to someone else?  I wanted to go home for the day. Immediately.  Before he got out of class. Instead I stayed and watched for him to come down the hall.  When I told him I didn’t bid in time he thought I was kidding him.  He was a good sport when he finally realized that I was telling the truth, but I still feel awful.

 

Sometimes I think about how different things are now compared to times long ago. In many ways the changes are good.  How hard would it be to have children 100 years or more ago, and watch them die one by one?  There is one particular family in my genealogy that had such heartbreak that now when I look at their family statistics my heart breaks with them.  They had a baby boy and named him John. He lived a short while and died.  Soon after that they had another little boy and named him John.  He also died while still an infant.  The next male child that came along was also named John.  I can’t imagine the feelings of that family as they buried one after another of their children.

 

I am so grateful for the medical advances in the last 100 years.  If not for these neither I nor my husband would even be alive!  My husband, Mike, was born 50 years ago in Seattle.  His mother had negative blood. Mike’s older sister was born with positive blood which set up the stage for his mother’s immune system to attack the baby she was currently carrying.  Mike was born 6 weeks early,  his blood was being poisoned by his mother’s blood; he was an RH factor baby. The University of Washington Medical Center had never done a total blood transfusion on a newborn before, but they did it that day and saved his life. The doctor called Mike his miracle baby for years. 

 

My medical miracle happened 22 years ago.  I had a pregnancy that I thought was going along fine. Then in my 4^th month I started hemorrhaging a lot.  It was discovered that I had a Molar Pregnancy (hydatiform mole). After my treatment was complete I happened to ask the doctor whether this particular problem was hereditary, as my grandmother said she had experienced something similar.  His reply stopped me cold.  “No, it’s not hereditary. Women used to bleed to death from this.

 

Technology nowdays in the area of communication boggles my mind.  I can post a blog here in Idaho and seconds later it can be read and responded to by people all across the world. I can make new friends from Miami or Alberta or Africa in a blink of an eye. When my daughter lived in Cincinnati for a couple of years I would talk to her on her cell phone at least once a day, sometimes two or three times a day.  We were connected over the miles, involved in each other’s lives, and our relationship grew stronger.  I think about the many mothers and fathers who watched their grown children move away, maybe to the unexplored west, maybe across the Atlantic.  Did they ever hear from their children again?  If they did get a letter, maybe it was dated months earlier.  What has happened since then?  Are they okay?  I am grateful for the miracle of modern communication.

 

I am also grateful for the miracle of the internet.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get to visit the many places on earth that I would like. But I can go there on a virtual tour.  If I ever need information about the periodic table (to answer a question from Joni), or find out the phone number of the new Wal-Green store in town, or find an old room mate from college, all I have to do is google.

 

And if I want to buy a rare fossil from Bolivia for my friend and colleague to apologize for my mistake all I have to do is Ebay.