respublica

First moving day

For the past year or more most of the seminary's faculty homes have been renovated, at least the empty ones. Not just paint, but total gutting of bathrooms, kitchens, new wiring, plumbing, windows, heating/cooling systems and on and on. It's been a long process with every tradesman you can think of working on the street. Today one of our faculty families will be moving in to a completed house and I kind of have to laugh. The faculty guy is in Houston for a conference and it's all up to his wife to see this through. This is not uncommon around here.

When we moved into the seminary home, Dale conveniently was out of town at a conference. I will never forget how much work I had to do back then. And, now that we will be moving back to Collinsville in June, I know full well he better be around this time.

Which brings me to a bit of history. The seminary faculty homes were built at the same time as the present campus, mid 1920's. This is around the time frame we always though was when our Collinsville house was built. A former city councilman, Harry Hall, built and owned the corner house and I believe the second as well. But as we've had work done on our house, someone told Dale ours was built in the 30's. We know it was built by Mr. Krite of the hardware store fame and built for his mother. It was built well.

It's all about the basement

After all the work and mess and money involved in having a water treatment system put into our basement, I had high hopes that we were done with that part of the house for a while. Other areas now need looking into. But no. After church today I heard sawing and hammering from down in the basement. I fought the temptation to check out what was going on and instead concentrated on cutting the grass and bagging leaves.

Finally I did go down and found Dale putting up a stud wall over the water treatment covering. He just can't stay out of that basement. His books need to be back on shelves, he said.

I give up.  On the other hand, I can't blame him too much wanting to get a head start on final work since most of the other things which need to be done are not scheduled by other trades as yet.

About yesterday

If you paid any attention to the impeachment hearings yesterday you probably saw many repeats of Congressman Jim Jordan giving an emotional response to some of the things that went on. That brought about a memory from Katie's days as lead staffer on the House Oversight Committee during a hearing.

There she is "advising" Rep Jordan.  Heh.

The longest day

I have to start with the end of our trip out to Rockville Maryland because it was the weirdest.

Yesterday we leaded for the airport after leaving Katie's house in Rockville Maryland at around 10:30 Eastern time. The drive to Baltimore was fine and the airport check in was fine (we got the A group and pre-check!). We even had a great lunch in the concourse. Baltimore's airport has lots of neat things including good food choices. But then things took a turn we never expected.

After eating we leisurely headed for our gate. We were supposedly on a flight to St. Louis which would leave at 2:10. We looked at the flight board and did not see that flight listed. Then we looked at our boarding pass and saw the flight number was different than what we had on our reservation tickets. But this new number was leaving at 1:30 so we were happy to believe we'd get home earlier.

However.  At the gate we immediately saw that this flight was first going to take us to Houston and from there to St. Louis. Neither of us wanted that. It was 3 plus hours to Houston, a wait while people got off and on, and then up to St. Louis. We'd be in that plane for almost 6 hours. So Dale went up to the gate attendant and she tapped a few things into her computer and told him our original flight had been canceled and the check-in people put us on this flight without our knowledge. There was nothing we could do.

So we flew the long ride to Houston, got there around 5 and finally took off for St. Louis where we landed after 8 and home at 9. Our 9 was 10 eastern when we left Katie's so almost 10-12 hours of travel yesterday. We knew St. Louis had had bad weather so we decided when we got off the plane Dale would go straight to the parking area, get our car and pull up to passenger pickup while I got our bags.

We should have known nothing would be easy on this day. The good thing was his car was not covered with ice and snow even though it had sat out in the weather. Meanwhile I pulled my suitcase off the baggage carousel with no problem, but his never appeared. I texted him about this and then waited a bit to see if his was just slow to come out, but no, it never did. So I went to the baggage desk to report this. The two women asked where the bag started out and when I told them Baltimore they asked his name. Then they laughed. It seems his bag got to Lambert 4 hours earlier and was sitting in a lost bag office.

4 hours earlier! That is when we should have gotten to St. Louis if we hadn't been routed through Houston. So the question is: What flight did Dale's bag get on and why weren't we on it too? We don't know and we weren't laughing last night but we sort of are today. But that doesn't mean we don't want answers. My belief is that maybe the original check in people goofed up and put us on the wrong flight. We just don't know. But if our original flight had been canceled, how did Dale's bag get here.

So many hours.

One last thing. I have taken great pride over the years in never ever used the bathroom on a plane. The more years this has gone on the more pride I've taken in this. But yesterday was just too weird and during the stop-over in Houston while we waited for new people to board for St. Louis I just had to use the plane's bathroom. First time in my entire life of plane travel. But at least I didn't have to walk past rows and rows of people to get there. The plane was empty except for about 7 of us who got stuck trying to get to St. Louis via Houston.

Here we are happily eating not knowing what we were in for.

The picture is sideways just like we were yesterday.

Lights! Christmas

Some of our seminary students began hanging Christmas lights in the park like area between the campus and Demun. It was a gloomy day, but they were all pretty darn cheerful as they untangled and hung the lights. This will be a long process but we've begun.

As you can see, they don't just toss a string of lights on the branches and call it a day. They really wrap and wrap so that the lights show up.

The above photo has Holy Cross field worker, Alarik Morris working in a Santa hat.

Fall but Christmas

We are off to Maryland in a few minutes, hopefully I can post while out there at Katie's.

Back in the basement

I've written previously about our nightmare of the basement being treated by a water system company. This meant tearing up the bottom of all walls around the inside perimeter so that a hose line could be laid which would direct any water to a sump pump. That was hard enough and dirty enough what with Dale cutting off 18 inches of wall from the bottom and the water guys then jackhammering the floor beneath about 8-10 inches. When it was all done and new concrete laid over the work, we thought we were done.

But no. It seems after a new rain we needed to have all the walls completely wrapped in a white fabric which would take away any water and send it down to the drain hose to the sump pump. It's science, people. I just know this mean taking all of the walls down before they came. Dry wall, shelving, everything, just after I thought we'd finished with dust and dirt. This was done this past Saturday by two very nice, polite and personable young men. Here is what it looks like now.

Former laundry

Former bedroom

Former bathroom

Dale did all the demo by himself which was much too hard a job.

A beautiful surprise in the mail

Most of Saturday I spent with a Comfort Dog regional conference being held here at Concordia Seminary. It was a pretty miserable weather day for dogs, rain and more rain which meant they couldn't get out to have some fun in the quad after lunch as they had in previous years. It is always amazing to be in a room with those beautiful dogs. Before lunch the regional director pulled a chair into the middle of the room and made me go sit in it and then he asked all the dogs to come circle around me in honor of, and comfort for, our Ferdie who died a month ago. It was a tearful moment.

But then when I got home I saw a package which had come from one of our former students now in Wisconsin, who worked on landscape with us when he was here. Here is what was in the package.

This is beautiful enough, but even more in his letter that accompanied it. He wrote: "For decades a tall old Basswood tree overlooked the chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus on the seminary campus. In 2013 the tree needed to be cut down for the safety of students. As part of the grounds crew I helped cut it down but wanted to preserve a bit of its history by making a cross cut from one of its limbs. I've saved this slab of wood since then for a special purpose. Since you two have been an inspiration to me in life and ministry and since my time with you at the seminary meant so much, I pray that the memory of our beloved Ferdie will last on with the rich history of the Sem, and the warmth of your home and office."

Dale and I both cried. We will treasure this as we do the memory of our most loved dog.

We had junk

After a lot of gutting the basement walls we had a lot of material set out on our driveway. We had gotten rid of a lot of it in the previous weeks, but still had more. I called the Collinsville Junk Busters company and Tim came out on Saturday and took it all away. The driveway now looks like new. I have to say, Tim Kircher is the nicest man and cleaned this mess up quickly and neatly. I'd recommend him anytime.

Before

 

After

They are the champions

Last night Christ Community Lutheran School's soccer team played Immanuel St. Charles for the district championship on the Lutheran South High School football field. Our grandson Christian plays for CCLS and emotions were running high before the game because Immanuel is always a tough opponent in any sport and because CCLS teams have won this game 4 straight years. The pressure was on for our 8th grade guys to keep the streak going.

And they did! They won by a score of 2-1 and Christian had both sets of grandparents in the stands, a rare thing.

I just had to zero in on Christian holding the trophy afterward. He's on the right.

She touched the Stanley Cup

I'm telling you, sometimes it pays to work in Washington DC. Yesterday Katie went to the White House to see the St. Louis Blues and today the Stanley Cup arrives where she works.

Unreal