Monday, April 26th, we did our Georgetown run and walked at Moss Park. I took this picture and posted it on Facebook with this caption: "Instead of a walk in the Spring it felt like a Hallowspring walk!!"
Tuesday, April 27th, I began my day weeding in my front yard. First time this year to be out weeding. It was a great morning to do this. We had rain a few days before so the ground was easy to pull weeds. The sky was clear and there was a gentle breeze. I took these before and after pictures just for me. I wanted to see what I accomplished. Eventually, I will get to the back yard and hope I remember to do this back there. Those beds are the worst so a big contrast will be seen.
I took Papa for a drive. This time we drove Hwy 32 to Sadieville. This is one of those highways that starts out with a yellow line down the middle. Then it becomes a bit more nerve-wracking when it becomes a road with white lines on the sides and no line down the middle. You may have room to pass a car but you should be saying a prayer you are near a driveway so you can pull over while they pass. Eventually it is just what should definitely be a one-way road but it is not. Then suddenly it is back to a road with a yellow line down the middle and you breathe a sigh of relief. We turned north on Hwy 25 and found Hwy 330. We follow Hwy 330 to Falmouth where we turned south on Hwy 27 to Cynthiana. In Cynthiana we found Hwy 62 and took it back to Georgetown where we got Papa a chocolate shake and returned him to the nursing home. He loves the drives and it wears him out in the best kind of way.
Wednesday, April 28th, Claude had an appointment with our dermatologist. I set up shop on the love seat and finished crocheting Bonnie's (Claude's mother) birthday gift.
Claude's doctor's appoint did not go that well. He came home with about 15 burn marks on his arms where Dr. Wilson burned off skin cancers. He was also sporting two bandages. One on his left face cheek and one on the right side of his neck behind his ear. Claude pointed out to Dr. Wilson a lump on his neck behind his ear. Dr. Wilson looked at it and said, "That is melanoma. I am going to biopsy it. You can expect surgery. We'll notify you in 10 days of this visit." Then Dr. Wilson cut off a biopsy on Claude's cheek and his neck. The one on his neck is about the size of a dime. Now we wait to hear the results.
I also received a most welcome text message from Andie, our middle child. Her daughter, Bailey, is having a limited attendance band concert on May 13th. Hallelujah! This is another signal that the Covid-19 pandemic is letting up. The Marx family can have 6 people attend this 8th grade only band performance. I assured Andie we wanted to be there. Calendar is marked and we are looking forward to hearing our girl play in the Oldham County Middle School 8th Grade Band. She will surely be the best one in her row!
Thursday, April 29th, is where my Life Became a Box of Chocolates. We have fought the Wifi in our home for some time now. We finally purchased a Hot Spot for the upstairs. However, the signal is not strong enough for me to use my printer in the basement. We went to Sadieville City Hall to purchase a second Hot Spot but they were out and were expecting some to come in. They arrived on Thursday and I made a bee-line for City Hall to pick up one. When I got home, I was able to get the scanning done I have been trying to do.
You see, during the pandemic, Claude and I tried to clean out some of the areas in our home and get rid of or give away the things we could. In this process, I happened upon two small copy paper boxes of things my mother had saved. Most of these were from her parents things. I had gone through them and found an old box that once held chocolate candies. In this box were lots and lots and lots of old newspaper clippings. Most were obituaries. My Gramma Fisch (Laura Cordelia Clark Fisch) had carefully cut these between the years of 1965 and 1978. Most of them she hand wrote the date on. A very few were poems she must have liked. One was an interesting political view about the current president. My desire was to get all this scanned so it could be saved and shared. Many of the clippings were brittle and crumbling. Now, with my new hot spot right by my printer and laptop, I was ready to get them all scanned.
I follow a Facebook page that covers my Gramma Fisch's side of the family. It is the Archie & Elizabeth Clark (Ashworth) Facebook page. As I got bundles of these scanned, I shared them on this Facebook page. Many of these people all still live around Starks, Louisiana. Some have moved away a bit. As I would post these clippings, it was fun to see someone tag a friend or relative. Some where realizing they were related to someone else. Some shared tender memories of the person in the obituary. It felt good to share this 'Box of Chocolates' with family.
One of my favorite finds was an article about Everett Fisch. My Grampa, Clarence Clifford Fisch had a brother named Oscar Delbert Fisch. He moved to Monterey Park, California. He had a son named Everett. The newspaper clipping was about Everett. I would have been two years old when this happened.
One of the ladies who created the page suggested I share them on the Starks Historical Facebook page. She felt they would reach more people. In particular, the man who is writing the history of Starks. I found that Facebook page and requested to follow them. I was accepted about 11:30pm at night. Time for bed!
In the middle of this, I got an eMail from our daughter Andie. She is a first grade teacher. They were having on-line training in using digital media to teach. This year they have really had to do that a lot. Some have done it all year long. Andie had been asked to share the software she was using with her first graders and how she has adapted it and made it work for her. Andie sent me the link to join the training in the eMail. Ironically, I clicked on the link that made me part of the panel. Yike!! Then I had to figure out how to get out of that. Andie sent me another link to a YouTube viewing of the training. I got on that and totally enjoyed watching my child train others with this software. She also showed how it could be used for the older children. The verbiage teachers used amazes me. Often, I can tell is a person is trained as a teacher or currently teaches, by the way they speak. I learned watching this that there are a lot of words out there I don't use and don't know that are common among teachers. I also learned I am woefully behind in technology. It was really good to watch this and truly see what our daughter does to help these little friends learn. Love that she calls her students my 'little friends'.
I also pressed my crochet project and put it on my dining room table to get a good picture of the gift for Bonnie. I now have it wrapped and waiting until June to mail to Bonnie. Shhh...don't tell her.
"You know what is fun? Being a great Gramma! We are celebrating the 2nd birthday of our youngest (for a few more weeks) great grandmonster, Emelia Maebelle Roper. She is named after grandmothers and a great great great great grandmother. She an adorable young lady! Happy Birthday Millie Mae! We Love Ya Bunches!"
I then posted my Box of Chocolate newspaper clippings to the Starks History Facebook page. It was just like the previous posting on the Archie and Elizabeth Clark Facebook page. People sharing their finds with others. Finding family they didn't know was family. I told one lady that I kept having the phrase "Life is Like a Box of Chocolates" run through my head. I couldn't imagine why Gramma saved all these clippings in the chocolate box. They weren't in an album. They weren't on genealogy sheets. They were just clippings in a box. But it felt good that now they were out there for others to see. She said she felt that maybe, even unknowingly, Gramma Fisch did this for a future day for others. I have to agree. We are very much into Family History in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in Temple Ordinances that bind us together for eternity. We also know that the hand of the Lord is in so much of that work being found and done. This is what sharing these clippings has felt like for me. In Gramma Fisch's day there was not the technology to get all this information to so many people. But there is that technology in my day. Gramma saved those pieces of information in that empty chocolate candy box. In my day, I was able to share it with her family. Another lady asked my permission to use the scanned photos and match them to a website that has headstones on it. This will put the obituary with the headstone of that person. I assured her she could do that. This was the purpose of sharing these clippings in the first place. Life is like a box of chocolates!!
I made sure I had a letter ready to go to the mail box for Papa before we were to leave to do some errands. As I opened the front door to go to the mailbox, I noticed a long strand of grass blowing out from my front door wreath. That did not see right. We have had strong winds but a big strand of grass blowing up and catching on that wreath immediately did not compute. I turned to find this on the top of my wreath.
Off to Lexington Claude and I sped. When we did our trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, a car pulled out in front of us to change lanes on I-64. A pebble flew out from under their car and hit my windshield in the center of my view when driving. This has not been an issue as I haven't driven very much during this pandemic. Now that is changing. Safelite had a time we could get that chip filled and smoothed out. So we went to Lexington, after dropping off a treat bag for Papa. Safelite did a great job. Very happy with the results so far. We treated ourselves to dinner at City Barbeque. Yum!!
As we returned home, I got another progress picture of the new home being built in Eagle Bend.
In the evening, Claude got a call or message from Katelyn. It seems Raelyn was hit in the face with a ball and it broke her glasses. She was crushed and kept asking for great Grampa Christensen. Katelyn was asking her Grampa if we would send a little video clip to boost Raelyn's spirits. Claude came to my sewing room to let me know of the request. We talked about what to do. We thought about Claude playing his guitar and us singing. Then I suggested we video us reading a book. We both liked that idea. I went to my toy closet and picked out two books. Claude read one while I videoed the book. It was a book named Lima that we purchased in Hawaii to read to Hayden and Bailey. I read a Little Golden Book titled The Little Red Hen. We sent these two videos off via Facebook Messenger to Katelyn for Raelyn and Emelia and to Aubrey for Nelson. This was a fun thing to do. This is when I love technology and our digital devices. The miles don't seem quite so far away.
Saturday, May 1st, was a Happy May Day!!
I had a list of things I needed to get done that day. I started the washer and headed to my sewing room. As the morning went along, I cleared out lots of those things. It sure feels good to me to get these things in order.
Claude had a neat experience. Saturday, April 24th, we participated with the Lexington North Stake in a BillionGraves project. I blogged about this. Here is what Claude shared about his experience with the BillionGraves project on the Lexington North Stake Facebook page.
"I would like to say Sandi and I were led to this location by a spiritual prompting, but the truth is we were lost. We were on our way to make a delivery to a homeless shelter in Georgetown and took a wrong turn. In our efforts to correct, we came across this old cemetery. I did not remember it from our BillionGraves map and when I checked later, it was in fact not there and they had no record of it. We returned on the day of the Stake BillionGraves+ Event resolved to photgraph the headstones. There were about 200 very old headstones, many in disrepair and hard to read. All were dated in or near the Civil War years and many indicated the person was a soldier. We photographed each grave site as best we could and uploaded the photos. We noticed that the uploaded photos were attached to the Maple Grove Cemetery but not the Old Georgetown Cemetery where they were actually located. The next closest cemetery in Georgetown. I explored the BillionGraves web site and found a place where I could submit a cemetery for consideration for inclusion in the BillionGraves database. I doubled checked the location and address and did so. They notified me the next day that the Old Georgetown Cemetery had been accepted for registration. In doing so, the pin locations (headstone GPS coordinates) automatically were associated with the boundaries of the newly registered cemetery. Like I said, I'd like to say we were responding to a spiritual prompting in finding this lovely old cemetery but we were lost. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, we were given a small tender mercy by the Lord and were "led" into making a wrong turn and finding a treasure that needed our attention. It was a sweet experience whatever the source."
Life is Like a Box of Chocolates that is Good!!
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