Bye, Bye Ole Blue :-(

We finally let go of our trusty 2003 Honda Civic with 233,000 miles. It was sad to let "Ole Blue" go. Debbie thought of this as "her" car when she was in high school. The family decided that Dad could just keep on riding his bike to the university.  Kim got herself a matching car that passed on to her siblings when she left to teach in Australia. Ole Blue was Chrissy's loaner car when we were on our mission in Hungary. It had several trips across the USA to visit grandchildren and extended family.

We now have a brand new 2019 Honda CRV with all kinds of electronic gizmos that we're trying to learn how to use. We call it the "Silver Bullet," It will be our car for weekly trips to the Orlando Temple. With an expected 36 mpg, we should save lots of gas money by not driving our van. It will also be great for our cross country trips this coming year for high school graduations (3), grandchildren baptisms (4), and other family activities.

You can see how dusty it got just driving on our 1.5 mile stretch of dirt road just before our house. Luckily it comes with free car washes.

Naked No More

Some think that if you go to church in just a shirt and tie without a coat, you are naked. About 6 years ago as we were building our log home, lightening struck our beach house and burned up our clothes in the bedroom closet  Since we were building our cabin at the time, I only bought a bare minimum of clothes as replacements. That meant I have been going naked to church with a white shirt and tie but no jacket.

I know that the Prophet Isaiah was told to walk around preaching naked for 3 years to get the attention of the Israelites (Isaiah 20:2-3), but our daughter Kim thought that my 6 years of nakedness was a bit extreme. So on her last visit, we went out and bought a coat to go with my white shirt and tie. 

Here's the results. The bow tie is one that survived the fire. As it is the only thing I inherited from my father after he was killed when I was 8 years old, I wore it in his honor as I leave my nakedness behind.

It looks like I am ready to be a fully clothed preacher man. We'll leave the naked preaching to Isaiah. When I was a missionary in Germany, I found that I was most successful when I wore a light colored suit rather than looking like an undertaker with a black one.

Hurricane Dorian

If you look closely and use a bit of imagination, you can see that the smiley face at the end of our front porch tells you that we survived hurricane Dorian in good shape.

We had steady wind for three days and about 10 inches of rain as measured in the horses feed buckets. The eye of the category 2 hurricane stayed off the east coast and we are 15 miles inland. The winds on the west side of a hurricane are always milder so we had only tropical storm  force winds, about the same as we get in a typical summer rain though these winds lasted for 2 days rather than for half an hour max in a regular summer storm. We lost electricity for about 3 hours on Wednesday.

Right now it is sunny, calm, and clear and the bunnies, birds, and butterflies are telling us the hurricane is gone and we need to join them outside to enjoy the great Florida life. Click on the second picture to see close up the welcoming flock of egrets.

  We are waiting for the grass to dry out from the heavy morning dew so I can cut it before it gets much taller. It grows really fast here in Florida during the summer and with us preparing for Dorian, the grass didn't get its Monday trim. It's Saturday now and it is almost up to my calves.