Start...then stop

Good afternoon! I've been trying to post a blog for several days now. I've gotten this far, then shut the whole thing down because I couldn't get my thoughts in order to even write.

Nothing has really changed--so this may be pretty random.

Of course, large spaces of my brain are filled with images of my dad. He's now in the Palmer Hospital. My mom drove him to the emergency room yesterday afternoon and he was admitted right away. He had suffered a mild heart attack within the past few days (not enough oxygen getting into his system), and has pneumonia in one lung. He was put on a breathing machine, pumped full of antibiotics for the pneumonia and settled down with a bowl of chicken noodle soup.

I spoke to him last night and his voice is very faint and "far-away" sounding. He tracked right along with our short conversation, which was good. My mom stayed with him in his hospital room and I'm sure they were a comfort to one another.

Tomorrow, I'm off to St. Louis to catch a plane flying north! My cousin and his wife "just happen" to be landing in Anchorage 2 minutes before me...coming in from California to visit their son, daughter-in-law and brand-new twin grandbabies. We're going to try to meet up with each other for a few minutes in the terminal. :-)

Travis couldn't fly yesterday, so I stayed home to do some urgent housework! I ironed for about 3 hours and got everything hung up in the closet, etc. Why iron? Years ago when I was young, we lived out on Cache Creek for the summers while my dad mined for gold. There was an elderly lady who lived on up the creek from us and one day we were visiting with her...talking about the hard work of washing clothes, trying to stay clean in such a dirty place, etc. She said, "There's no excuse for being dirty or sloppily dressed. Just because we live in a mining area doesn't give us an excuse to look like it!"

I remember my mom and I talked about her attitude on the way back to our camp and from then on, out came the ironing board after all the laundry had been washed and hung out to dry for the week.

Then, when Travis and I lived in Bolivia, it was the same once again. I didn't have a washing machine for about the first 5 years that we lived there. Sometimes, I did the wash by hand, but more often than not, we hired help! It's hard to keep up with 7 kids! :-) And, the ironing board was a constant companion. You might see poor people everywhere, but most of the time, their clothes were clean and ironed! No excuse to be dirty or sloppily dressed....

Now, don't get upset if you don't iron! Most people pull things from the dryer and hang them right up---I'm just stuck in a time warp between an Alaskan gold mine and Bolivia! Ha! Besides, I have a little VCR player that I watch movies on. Yesterday, I watched, "Sound of Music" and "Sweet Home Alabama". Both a couple of my favorites. So, you see...I wasn't really suffering at all! I just had an opportunity to go escape into the land of Austria and down-home Alabama!

Talk to you again from Alaska!