Blah, blah, blah!

Sorry I have been A.W.O.L. lately. I have been a little uninspired, a little under the weather.

I do a double-take every time I look at when I last updated my blog. I cannot believe how fast the time passes. I gauge the days by how often I have to go through my phone messages and re-save them, which the phone company has made me do every five days every since I subscribed to their computerized message-taking system. I have a couple of messages on there that I have saved every 5 days for about 2 years now. Well, there are actually more than a couple there. (And yes, I am aware that is very, very sad.)(Just because I have been raising kids for 19 years now and have roughly 16 more years to go does not mean I have lost all touch with reality.)

There's the one where Micah called me from school and was sick and needed me to come and get him. His little voice was so sad, so needy, so absolutely pitiful and yet so precious at the same time that I have to find some way to save that snippet of his little 4th grade voice. It is priceless, and I just cannot bear to hit that delete-message button---not until I have saved that message.

Then, there is the one where my Mom called and said my sister-in-law was on the way to have a baby. That has been a year now. I thought that might be a keeper for Little Lauren in this age of technology. Most people save newspaper clippings. I save voice mails. Go figure.

I saved a voice message from my brother Don in Germany, calling to talk at some point. I like to hear his voice every five days just to hear it. I know; that's so sad. I have been begging him to come back to the good ole U.S.A. for years now. Somehow, I don't think it is going to happen. Ma Bell keeps us connected.

I have another from my brother Dan, because catching him on the voice machine was about the only way I get to hear him too. Everyone is so busy these days. Dan is working 4 jobs, preaching full time and getting his Master's Degree. He is not a bad brother---he's just a little busy. I understand, but I miss him.

Every so often, there's a message from Mom or Dad. It is usually nothing special--just a call to check in or to deliver a little news. Sometimes I have a hard time hitting the delete button, because I think, "What if that is the last voice message I should ever get from him/her?" I would love to hear so many voices from my past that are long gone now and ring only in my memory. I wish there had been more ways back then to just save their voices so that I could hear them whenever I felt like it.

Yes, some day soon, I will tape these voices off some way or other onto tape and not have to push the buttons every 5 days to keep the old calls from being deleted. Maybe if "little" Dan starts working at Radio Shack, he can hook me up with some techno-something-or-other that will pull the call off the voicemail. I'll find a way.

I have not posted in a few days because time and space finally came together and I was able to get the dreaded endometrial ablation. If you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky. All you need to know is it involves sharp knives, a blow torch, and my uterus. Enough said? Yeah. Ouch. Time will tell if it was all worth it.

We're really rolling now with home school. Probably about the time we get going really smoothly, the present hurricane in the gulf will be over Tennessee. Bet you didn't know hurricanes bothered Tennessee, unless of course you live in Tennessee. Yes, indeedy, they do affect us here. In fact, sometimes, they just come on up and stall over us for about 3 days, and everything floods, but somehow, CNN and Fox News don't know about Tennessee's existence yet, so we never get covered for anything.

Back when we had cable, I used to get so mad, because the Weather Channel just left Tennessee entirely out. They would cover the East and the Southeast up about as far as Atlanta, skip up to the Northeast and tell what was to become of them the next day, and then after the commercial break, it was on over to California for the Western report. They would skip over the entire middle of the map most of the time, unless of course, they had to give a tornado warning for parts of Kansas. Then, Kansas might get mentioned. But Tennessee? No, never. My kids used to sit with their little noses pressed against the screen waiting to see if a foot of snow was going to fall on Tennessee the next day. But it never happened. They never acknowledged the Volunteer State, and now, all the kids are sadly nearsighted to boot.

I have no idea what has become of my dear 90-year-old friend Alice in Miami. I sent her a letter from Ohio while we were up there, but she has not answered yet. Katrina had just brushed Miami, but the story around New Orleans grew into a drama so fast that little was said about the condition of Miami. If you are out there, Alice, I hope you and Kirb are o.k.---and check in soon!

So now Rita is coming this weekend. (The Hurricane, not our dear Great-Aunt.) Yee Ha. I just love driving 50 miles each way to church in the middle of a September monsoon. We may just take the yacht this Sunday. (That's our above-ground pool with the tool house floating in it, all of which will probably be drifting happily down the Duck River by Sunday.)