Furnished

Froggy, you don't have to sleep on the floor when you come see me!

I think my guest/craft/YARN room is just about done.  Yesterday, I went to the store where we first had our booth and noticed that they had two futons for sale.  One of them was exactly what I was looking for, so I told Bill about it and we went up there this afternoon to look at it.  We took the El Camino in case we bought it, and since we did actually buy it I'm glad we took the truck.  It just barely fit in the back of the truck, actually.  It's a tanish color, but I put the crocheted blanket I made for Bill a few years ago on it since it's in my YARN room.  The yarn stash is going to be moved slightly, the steampunk pachinko is going to move to the opposite side of the room and the yarn drawers will be slid down a bit so that I can get into the drawers easily.

It's a futon, so the back of it can be reclined for sleeping.  I might get an egg-crate foam pad for it, I'm not sure about that yet, but I do need to get a couple of pillows.  And sheets!

Now all we need in that room is better lighting, which will probably be a ceiling fan with a light and I want to put a miniblind in the window.  The miniblind will wait until I get all my doilies assembled into the drape style curtain, which will be a while because I'm still in the process of acquiring enough.  I got a few yesterday at a church rummage sale, but I still don't have anywhere near enough.

This was one day last week when the snow was first starting to come down, it might have been last Saturday.  Anyway, the resident woodpecker finally discovered the suet feeder.  He was sideways because the suet was almost gone, I put a refill in it after that but I haven't seen him on it since then.  But it's had regular visitors as it is rapidly emptying again.

A slightly closer shot.  These pictures were taken out of the window, it was too cold to go outside and I didn't want to scare the bird off.

This was also taken one day last week, Frasier isn't normally a big fan of blankets but he seemed quite happy when I covered him with my afghan when I was sitting on the couch one day.  This was a day or two after the vet visit and he was already showing signs of improvement from the anti-inflammatory, but it was still pretty cold and he seemed to relax and enjoy the extra warmth from the blanket.  There is a bumpy spot right by his visible foot - that's Maggie Moo!

Frasier is almost completely different than he was right before the vet visit, he's happy and playful again and acting like a puppy.  I haven't given him a pain pill in a few days and I'm only giving him half of an antibiotic once a day.  He's very happy and affectionate, he doesn't act like he's in any pain or discomfort at all but I'm still watching him closely.

I think I've mentioned before that we were dissatisfied with our church and were considering looking for a new one.  We haven't actually attended church in several weeks, because our church discontinued the early service which is the one we went to.  The early church service never quite took off, which we thought it would have.  We used to belong to a United Methodist church in Tulsa and were quite happy with it.  Then we moved to our smaller town and changed to a closer UM church.  We attended there for a couple of years, but then something happened that we were not happy with.  The youth leader (adult, salaried employee and not a youth member) started telling the kids that the Bible is wrong about a lot of things.  We didn't realize it at first, until Otter told me that she was confused because she knew what the Bible said and she thought she was hearing something wrong from the youth leader.  That's when we decided it was time to change.  We looked around and decided to go back to the Southern Baptist church - back to in my case because that's where I was originally, but it was new for Bill and Otter.  We went to a specific SB church because a lot of Otter's friends from school went there and she wanted to be with her friends.  She liked it, but it was a huge church and was way too big for us to feel comfortable.  But we stayed there for a long time for Otter.  Eventually, it was even too big for her and we started looking for a smaller SB church.  We found the one we belong to currently and joined it pretty quickly.  It was fine for a long time.  But then things changed.  The minister had a major health issue, he was diagnosed with a fairly rare form of cancer but he beat it eventually.  Sometime after that, we realized that the pastor didn't seem to be "in charge" anymore and that he didn't care about that either.  The music leader was taking over more and more of the operations and seemed to be making a lot of the decisions that the pastor should have been making.  It was pretty obvious, at least to us, that the music minister just wanted to be in charge and that it was becoming a power trip for him.  But then the music minister's wife had a job transfer and they moved out of state.  We thought that things might change then so we hung around a while longer.

Things changed alright.  And it was even worse.  Somewhere in there, pretty much ALL mission work, community involvement, evangelism, just about every form of outreach had been discontinued and it never returned.  We realized that the minister didn't seem to care, his sermons were becoming reruns frequently and there were times such as Easter and Christmas when the sermons were almost like "just another day" instead of even acknowledging that they were special days!  I take notes on sermons in my Bible, and I discovered that I was making the same notes in the same places over and over again and in the same spots.  The last Sunday that we attended with Otter, the weekend before she moved out, the announcement was made about the early service being discontinued because there were so few people attending.  That's something else that should not have happened the way it did, but the minister never did anything to attempt to increase attendance and neither did anyone else.  We have wondered at times if maybe the minister might have personal problems based on various things he's said about his son and his marriage.  We think it's also possible that he is suffering from clinical depression.  But the upshot is that we were getting nothing out of attending that church and we finally realized it was time to attend elsewhere.

We took a long break to figure out what we wanted to do and we've decided that we want to re-consider the United Methodist church.  We went back today, to a local UM church and we really enjoyed it.  It was nice not to hear a doom & gloom message that we haven't already heard multiple times.  It was nice to actually get to take communion, which I think we only had twice or maybe three times in several years at the SB church.  It was nice to see more than (literally!) 10 people (and usually less than 10) in the congregation.  It was nice to see a good age range, from young children to older people.  The sermon was good, the people were very friendly.  (And the music minister didn't act like it was his stage and his forum to be worshiped at!)  We'll probably go back there again next Sunday and then we'll decide it we want to stay there as visitors for a while or if we want to go to another UM church that is in the next town over but is still very close to home.  We did consider going back to the UM church we belonged to in our small town, the minsterial staff is different now because of a couple of retirements (we liked the ministerial staff, it's just different now) and the youth minister is not there anymore, but at least for now we aren't going back to that church.

I have not addressed TEXAS anniversary yet, it was the day before yesterday but I was not feeling well at the time and didn't want to just toss something up that wasn't good.  I'm just going to post this: 

 Our Story.