It's our wedding anniversary. 6 or 31 years depending on how you count

Read about it a little further down

6/20/10 Sunday
The visit with the widow was a good one. She’s always glad for the company, especially when Cherie goes with me. They talked while I worked on her computer, trying to get it to work with her printer. We had taken one of our extra printers to give to her but when I saw her machine I decided to try and figure out what was wrong with her’s. It is a nice printer, fax, copier that is much better quality than the plain old printer we brought. So I fiddled and looked and finally figured out what was wrong. It seems that the Microsoft Works program that came loaded on her computer when she bought it new had a time limit on it for use. When that time limit ended she told me that the machine demanded something like $700 for her to purchase the program and because she didn’t it not only stopped working but every time she tried to print anything from her computer it just printed gibberish symbols. So she must get a word processing program in order to use her printer. It will print some stuff but she is unable to write and print a simple letter.

I had been working out in the heat up to 3:00 that day and had run out of steam. That might be an understatement. I came in and laid down till it was time to visit the widow. After I got done working on her computer it all caught up with me. I started falling asleep at the table as we sat and talked. Ms G saw this and decided I needed something to eat. She and Cherie fixed chicken salad for sandwiches and made a batch of tea. I had wanted to go home and crash but Cherie told me that this was important to Ms G, that it was something she really was excited about doing, her chance at returning some of the love we’d shown her. I’m glad Cherie pointed that out for me. It’s the kind of thing I often miss. So we stayed till the sun started going down. I never mowed her lawn so must remember to do that later.
It's nice that the days are longer. I worked till about 9:15PM hoeing down weeds. That's when it started getting too dark to see. You can see one of the piles I made of them. I'll wait till they dry and burn the piles. This will destroy the sticker seeds.

Yesterday we ran into a strange situation on the way to visit the widow. Cherie saw some antique furniture sitting out with a for sale sign on it so we stopped to look at it. The guy invited us inside to look at the mirrors and more pieces that went with the set. Walking in the house was like walking into a Halloween set. There were full sized mannequins dressed in witch and warlock type costumes holding sculls and other things along with all the other stuff like huge spiders. Then there were lots of paintings and art work (I use the term “art” lightly here) that were equally strange, with many of them outright pornographic. “You guys are really into Halloween” I said and he said it was mostly his wife and kids. There was a bookshelf next to the piece of furniture and looking at it I saw all kinds of books on witchcraft and other occult subjects. The guy looks older than me by a decade or so and with his cowboy hat appeared to be a good ole west Texas boy but…I was sure uncomfortable in my spirit. Getting out to the truck I let Cherie know that I had no interest in the furniture and learned that she too had a bad feeling about the whole place. We were glad to leave.

Well folks, today is Cherie and my wedding anniversary, the one from our second marriage. We have officially broken our old record from the first marriage. That one lasted five years and we just passed the six year mark with this one. June the second was the wedding date for our first marriage so that would have been our 31rst anniversary if we hadn’t been divorced. I would have forgotten totally if Cherie hadn’t reminded me. She would have forgotten too but we were married on fathers day so that helped her remember. Let me tell you the story, or at least part of it. For the old readers this is nothing new but for many of you it will be. It’s a story I tell all the time to folks we meet all over. “This is my first and third wife” is how I often introduce Cherie and with that comes the explanation. I tell how we met in bible college and were “first loves” for us both. Then I explain how we went to Ohio and about falling out of a tree where I broke my back and neck and sustained a concussion. With that concussion came a drastic personality change where I became kind of an ass and this resulted in us getting divorced. We now know that the personality change was a sure sign of a traumatic brain injury but back then doctors were not very aware of that so offered no explanation.

So twenty years later I had the car wreck that put me in a coma and caused yet another traumatic brain injury. Evidence shows that I have had at least six traumatic brain injuries in my life and one stroke for sure. So I’m wandering homeless with amnesia and ABC runs a news story on me entitled “Toledo’s John Doe”. Cherie turns on the television and there is her ex husband who didn’t remember who his friends were and even had his age wrong. So she calls in to offer some help with me putting the pieces back together. We discover that we still loved each other to our mutual amazement. Her parents were not thrilled about this but Cherie decided to no longer let them run her life. We had met with the pastor of a church to get counseling before we married and we had already gotten the marriage license so he asked if we wanted to get married right there in his office. That worked for us well as there was no plan for a big wedding of any type. So we got married on fathers day.



Tonight's sunset.

Helping that friend went well. Spent three days working on his project and it looks pretty good. He paid me well for that and threw in some extra money for me to use to pay some of the Stepping Stone ministry guys to help finish tearing down that barn over near Odessa. So that is good. I worked hard to earn the money I can use to get them some work. I got a job cutting down a tree as well and that will help me get them some work. When all is said and done I won’t make anything but I really don’t care. My needs are always taken care of so what’s important to me is to help others.