respublica

Visiting St. Salvator

Yesterday, Father's Day, Dale and I drove out to Venedy, Illinois for St. Salvator's annual Chicken dinner. St. Salvator was where Dale began his ministry and where our children were born. It's always a joy to go back there. It's fun to walk up to where the people are and still know everyone by name even after all these years. The church is very old, (1842) in fact, it is one which sent its first pastor to be part of a meeting in Chicago to create our church body, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. This was way back in 1847. The church and school still stand, much like it has for all these years. There are people buried in the cemetery behind the church who were born earlier than the creation of the church. It's amazing.

The organ has it's own history, purchased from Old Trinity in St. Louis and carried by horse and wagon to Venedy. That organ had come from Germany with the original Lutheran immigrants. It is still used to this day.

The one room school house that stands today was built in 1872

The parsonage we lived in next to the church was torn down a couple of years ago and a nice fellowship hall was built and where the chicken was served up.

The inside of the church, much like it's been forever.

When we lived there coal was still the way the parsonage and church were heated. The coal drop is still there.

But now a more up to date heating system is in place as well as this which surprised me.

air conditioning!

Here is organ up in the balcony

Here are the steps you need to climb up into the balcony

And then if you want to go up into the bell tower there is a steep wooden ladder and a trap door at the top which opens to the bells. There is also a sort of room like area up there where Dale spent many a day working on his Ph'd dissertation. Crazy times.

The cemetery is beautiful in a serene spiritual way. The ancient burials were right behind the church and as years went by the plots filled up row by row.

What amazed us was the growing number of new tombstones with pictures engraved on the front which tell of the person's life.

Coal miner

Excavator

And farmers.

Venedy is a blessing.

Renovation puzzles

We've had quite a bit of work done on our house in Collinsville over the years we've mainly lived on the seminary campus and we're now down to basic painting and flooring in the upstairs bedrooms. But this is not easy. I'm pretty much over painting walls, I bet I've painted every room in that house several times over the years and I don't want to do it anymore. So we need to find painters who can not only paint, but tape and mud a few seams. Then the question becomes what to do with the floors.

I watch a lot of HGTV, especially House Hunters, and most of the time people looking for a house are emphatic about wanting hardwood floors everywhere including bedrooms. I'm just not sure. Our main floor has original hardwoods and they are really nice, but for the bedrooms? There is something soothing about having carpeting in an upstairs bedroom and it makes things quieter for those below. For us, once we get up in the morning we don't go back into the bedrooms til we go to bed that night. So carpet doesn't get much wear or dirt. At least I have time to decide during painting time.

Also, our bedroom has a gas log fireplace which was in place when we bought the house in 1981. Early on we had it on now and then, but at some point stopped using it because it was causing soot to accumulate on the brick surround. We figured better safe than sorry. So do we have the gas log insert removed and the wall dry walled over? Or see if it can be made to good working order?

Things like this are why it has taken so long to finally get this done.

What to do when there is nothing to do

This was weekend we learned what it was like to not have television, computer and wireless anything. While planting some flowers early Saturday morning, Dale shoved his shovel into our buried cable line. Everything inside the house stopped.  Well, not everything, the washer was still going, but the things we count on went out.

I went around checking things and hoping this was going to be an outage area wide so that the cable people would send someone out. But finally after an hour I realized it was just us. I knew this by going out to the yard and saw where Dale had been digging. The ground was exactly above where the cable line was buried as it was laid from the back of the house to the pole at the edge of the property. I asked him if he'd noticed an orange cord and he said yes. It never occurred to him that this may have been our cable line. He did admit to moving it as his dug, but didn't think he'd actually cut into it.

But he did.  Calling Charter or probably any cable provider is a pain. You get the automated answer which will require pushing one number or other and answering "yes" or No" to a mechanical voice for any number of questions. I gave up the first time since none of the choices met out situation. I tried again later and again was frustrated. Finally I decided to just press 0 when the voice came on and sure enough I got a real person finally.

She set up a time for a service person to come out Sunday morning. So we had all of Saturday and Saturday night to pretty much sit around and try to find things to talk about in a very quiet house. We both found our cellular data almost used up by the time we headed for bed. We've never been in that position before and we both wondered what it would mean if out cellular allotment ran out before the cable guy got here. Would our phone just shut down and be useless?  We did not find out because we managed to squeak by.

I spent some time during the boring Saturday giving some thought to getting one of the Over the Air antennas. They are pretty inexpensive and at least we'd be able to watch local things that night. So I did it. I went out to Best Buy while Dale was out running other errands and bought an over the air antenna. It sounded so easy.

But like all tech things, easy is in the mind of the beholder and in the tv's they own. Turns out we have a TV without a built in tuner which you must have in order to make the over the air antenna work. Who knew? Lots of tv's are being made without them these days. If your TV has a coaxial cable slot, you're good. If not you have to buy some other part to make it work. I will not buy another part. I may just use this over the air antenna on a different tv one of these days.

Technology! Always wanting you to buy one more thing.

Good-bye tooth

I wish there was a tooth fairy, at least the tooth fairy who came to my bedroom in the dark of night when I was a kid and left a quarter. Today I have to have a tooth extracted after having had several dental appointments which tried one thing after another including root canal. But in the end the tooth was fractured and has to come out. I'm headed to the 3rd dental professional to see there is an end in sight after being pulled. What this involves must be kind of dramatic considering the 3 prescriptions I was told to get filled before today. An antibiotic, an extra strength Ibuprofen-800 MG when normal motrin is 200- and an even stronger pain tablet which had the pharmacist giving me some advice on that one. Be careful with this one, it's very strong. Make sure you take this with food and stay home.

So I am already planning to ignore that pain med. If an 800mg of Ibuprofen won't ease the pain, than I'll suffer it. Which just nags at me that this is going to be an ugly procedure and one I'd like to avoid. It looks like this is only part one of a tooth extraction, more to come with implants. And little eating most things in between.  I don't have any pain, never have had with this tooth and would gladly live with the way it is now.

This is one of those weeks when...

I am having trouble figuring out just what day it is. So many things are being crammed into each day that each day seems two days long. But, yes, it's Wednesday. I'm pretty sure. Today will be no different with the added forecast of up to 45 miles per hour winds this afternoon. After seeing how wind can take down big trees, I'm not comfortable with windy forecasts.

And as an update for this week:

Mattresses 38

Ladders 32

One of each has fallen already this week.

A belt conumdrum

Our oldest grandson, Christian, is 13 today and one of the things he would like is a belt from Vineyard Vines. Yes, the teen-age years bring more style with it. I've looked on the website and youth sizes only go to belt size 30 and supposedly his waist size is 30. That means he probably need two inches more belt. So, do men's size 32 fit kids of 13? Are men's belts made differently or is he really ready for a man's size?

That's what I have to figure out and will probably drive out to Vineyard Vines and ask someone. I'd like it to be right and the best bet would be to have him be there and try one on, but that won't happen with school and after school goings on.

It is much trickier these days, kids at this age are changing into following what's popular and that's ok. It just makes it harder for us old people.

Last night as I walked into a dinner for students who will be soon be getting their vicarage assignments for next year, one of our students handed me an envelope and asked me to give it to Dale, but wait until this morning.

So this morning he opened the envelope and inside was a very nice, and surprising, note. He wrote "On this day 30 years ago, you gave your very first sermon as the Speaker for the Lutheran Hour. I had the unique privilege of reading every single sermon you ever gave as Speaker. I enjoyed them very much. Anyway, enjoy this brief trip down memory lane!"

How nice is that? March 26, 1989!

Acolyting

This past Sunday our family had a milestone in church. The two oldest grandsons acolyted together for the first time. This was Connor's debut and he was all smiles. There is something so wonderful about this.

Dale stopped in Dublin and all he brought back was...

On his way home from Eithiopia, Dale had a stop over in Dublin Ireland since I have Irish ancestors. I was pretty excited by that, but sadly, he didn't even get to get off the plane. All they did was re-fuel. But he did get one thing, a picture.

This is one of those instances when someone takes a picture with a phone in portrait mode (vertical) and when it is posted to a website, it goes to landscape or horizontal mode. There is almost nothing that can be done to change this, I've tried everything. So here is his picture flipped on its side.

The one link I found when Googling this problem was a post with the headline: Stop taking vertical pictures already! I agree with this completely, have been through too many photo flips that I know not to do this. And, I have mentioned to Dale to stop doing vertical, but it seems to be just too obvious a way to take some photos. However if you use a real camera not a phone, the orientation will be fine in vertical or portrait mode.

 

He got a picture of the Dublin airport control tower in the rain.

The coldest March 4th in five years

After yesterday's nasty snow, we woke up to temperatures in the single digits, 3 degrees when I got up at 5. It hasn't been this cold on this date since 2014. It's deceivingly cold because the sun is shining brightly under bright blue skies. But boy is it cold. The snow won't be melting anytime soon. I will say, though, that the roads are in better condition than we have a right to expect. I had to drive over to the Metro East for an 8 a.m. dentist appointment in Maryville, actually a specialist in root canals, and was worried about this most of yesterday. Should I cancel or should I take a chance on the roads?

I decided to go for it and get this tooth done. So I plotted out how I was going to do this. I didn't want to drive over to Maryville in the dark and not be able to see if the road surfaces were clear. But, learned that sunrise would be at 6:28 which meant not leaving at a time when the sun would blind me in the middle of the windshield. I left at 6:15 and that turned out to be perfect. Light enough to see, but not sun at windshield level. Roads were fine and the traffic hadn't gotten heavy.

Now all done and back on campus. Oh, and, this is a great dentist, the new technology for doing this procedure blew me away. I do have to go back in one month and get the second side of this tooth root canal-ed, but I'm not fretting about it after today.

Even better, my blood pressure is excellent.