From The Heart Of Suffering..........

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My beloved Harmony Acres is saturated but it will survive.  We are all O.K.  Today, God is smiling down upon us with wonderful, glorious sunshine (for one more day and then more rained predicted). We are in that yucky drying out stage. The ground is mushy and muddy; oozing between my toes in my crocs (hurt my ankle again and can't wear rubber boots because of swelling). We were lucky! It could have been much worse!

Brother Dave cut this rose bush back to a nub so he
could replace the porch post.  It's never bloomed so beautifully.
I guess everything needs a little pruning sometimes.

Why is it that the light of day always brings renewed hope?  And an opportunity to give Thanks?  The list of things to be grateful for is far longer than any list of complaints I have ever compiled.  Gratitude.....hm mm....I like the feel of that word. 

Definition:   Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive.

Yeah! Attitude! Got plenty of that! Emotion! I'm a woman for heaven's sake, no shortage of emotion here.  It's the positive part that sometimes hangs me up.  On many occasions, I have been Positive of something only to have it bite me in the rear.  O.K. that's enough about my mental and emotional shortcomings; let's talk about me and my day (narcissistic, too? had to use spellcheck.  if I can't spell it then I must not be it. right?).  There is much to be done today.  No matter what, the animals (dogs, cats, bird, fish) still have to be taken care of.

Even if I didn't want to get up, the unrelenting howling and whining
coming from these two would force me out of bed to feed
them just so there would be no mad neighbors!

After many fruitless attempts (bath in dawn, herbal spray, benadryl, neosporin) to calm Maggies' allergies, the time has come for a trip to see Stacey (Hubler Vet Service)  for a shot.  The shots make Maggie go wee-wee frequently with no control, which upsets her to no end.  No rug (and we have a ton of them) is safe (she especially likes the bathroom rug.  Becky says she goes to the right room that ought to count for something).  Usually this is not a problem but at the moment I can't do laundry because........it's rained so much the lateral lines aren't draining. 

Mags wore her sailor outfit to visit Stacey.
Duke (Indy) came in to say hello.

We made our usual stop at McDonald's for Maggie's chicken.

Becky's plane lands in Tulsa at 4:30 p.m. today. It was a difficult trip to Denver for her (nose bleed, fatigue, headache; she is not accustomed to the altitude).  She has requested her favorite meal (not cold cereal again)--Spaghetti with vegetarian meat substitute.  Not a seven course meal: just spaghetti.  No problem. In the meantime, Maggie is taking a little nap so she can play with Becky when she gets home.

It's been a long week for a little girl.

It's been a long week for all of us and we still have another day left. Perhaps a tiny reprieve from the rain and a little sunshine will revive our souls.  Oklahomans are not strangers to disaster.  Natural or man-made.  We live in tornado alley, we suffer drought and flooding (all of Mother Natures extremes), poverty (At the end of 2010, more than 779,000 Oklahomans were on food stamps according to Janet Pearson's article in the Tulsa World) and the riches (all of the financial extremes) that the oil and gas business brings.

If one of us is hurt, we all bleed. Life can beat us to the ground but we will still stand and meet the challenge. Just heard Reba McIntire and Blake Shelton are doing a benefit concert for the Atoka County, Oklahoma victims of the tornadoes.  Okies helping Okies.  That's what I'm talking about! 

We are survivors!  We are Oklahomans!

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. 

Winston Churchill