2008-08-21

As the heat wave continued, after Morning Offering Mick sallied forth and did his day’s work, coming home to change his trousers four times and using up a dozen tee shirts as he worked in the incredibly high humidity.

In the afternoon when he had finished mowing today’s customers, he recreated one customer’s entire, sizeable flower garden which the sewer connection people had plowed right through recently. It was tricky because it had not been weeded this year, so he had to take 2 large garbage and lawn bags of weeds from the ruins of the previous garden before he could till and level the ground and transplant the many lovely flowers and bushes from where he had dug them up to the newly defined planting bed. It came out beautifully! He told his customer, “Water that flower bed!”

In the main, I worked on quotes pages for our Homecoming packet. I have 19 groups of quotes to gather in the next week. Today I did groups 2, 3 and 4. So I have 15 to go. I will just have enough time to do them all! Whew! They are fun to do, calling forth my creative side as I try to move into the head of each presenter and visualize what quotes will support him.

Around the edges I did a bit of e-mail. My brother, Jim, sent photos of his wife, Kai, and their brand new 8-pound infant son, William Rueckert, and I sent him a congratulatory note. I sent them a blanket for William last week – just in time! Since my bro is 60, I look for him to take a very late retirement! But his 30-year-old wife and he are over the moon with joy. It looks as though William has Asian eyes from his Mom. I hope he gets the rest of her looks as well, as she is a stunning Thai beauty. The Rueckert genes are not bad looking, but they come with bad eyesight, so we’ll hope Wills takes after Mom all the way!

Lorena wrote back saying that she, too had been unable to solve the riddle of how to hang the loofah-gourd planter so that when you water it, it won't drip all over the floor. She has hers outside where that’s not a problem – but how to bring it indoors for winter? She wrote Tom C, who gave us the gourds, to ask for his wisdom. We both await it with bated breath!

Our archive site web guy and I talked a bit further concerning the “origins” material format. He and I both agree that we want to make it easy for people to download our material, whether or not they donate. So he will probably go to PDFs for the new material. We both feel that those people who like books will not be satisfied with a print-out. They will continue to buy our books. Time will tell!

Gary has recently separated in the most amicable way from his long-time girl friend, and in the afternoon he brought his exercise machine back home and installed it in our upstairs guest room, now the Upstairs Guest Room and Spa! He will have to wait until next week, however, when lots of strong backs are here for Homecoming, to retrieve his Tempur-pedic bed, which weighs a young ton. “Breaking up is so very, very hard to do,” run the lyrics of a song popular when I was a girl. How true, especially when heavy equipment is involved!

I offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.