My victory for the
week was that I finished the last chapter of my financial book. At least the
first draft of all 17 chapters is complete. Now I need to go back and start
editing. There may also be comments and request for revisions from all the
other people looking at it.
A little wrinkle. Orit,
the marketing director had been pushing to get this finished, so I was really
trying to meet an early deadline. It was okay. It was the same one I had set as
a goal so I'd have a good 30 days to revise and such. So I send her some
questions this week and I get an auto- response that says she’ll be out of
office until May 3rd. Yet she wanted all this by the end of the
month! Ah well. I just did the best I could and kept trucking.
It’s time for me to
start reaching out for other jobs, or I’ll finish this and have nada. On Monday
we had our annual life insurance review and I talked to the agent about writing
another book for her. When she found out it would not involve a lot of work on
her part, she was interested. She has been getting a lot of good feedback on
the book I wrote for her earlier. One agent at Mass Mutual pulled her over to
the second-from-the-top guy at Mass Mutual and said, “This is the woman
responsible for my success.” He went from $60,000/year to over $300,000/year in
one year by mailing Becky’s book to every prospective client before they met
with him. It’s nice to know it’s that persuasive.
Tuesday Charlie and
Sandy Raff stopped by to visit. Tom was his best man and he was Tom’s best man,
but we have not seen them since the 70’s. They now have a son living in Tennessee,
so, hey… we’re not so far out of the way. It was a delightfully congenial visit
considering the passage of time.
We also worked on
getting the garden ready to plant. I had some volunteer cucumber plants
sprouting among the asparagus so we transplanted them. I had a few volunteer
lettuce plants. And the cilantro… that I never seem to use for anything… is
growing like weeds. I bought some broccoli, spinach, and a basil plant. Then,
on Saturday, I went to the master gardener’s plant sale and got two bushes and
some more vegetable plants. Oh, and a Shasta daisy, I hope it flowers.
We bought the Hoover
version of the Roomba… the tiny robotic vacuum cleaner. I finally found a 4’
space on a wall without obstruction to plug in the docking stating and we put
the little fellow to work. The Jury is out. First, it’s such a fun little thing
to watch it move randomly through the house. It will wander from living room to
hall to bedrooms. Alas, it gets caught up on some transitions like from floor
to rug or tile to floor. It gets stuck under beds when it hits the cardboard
under the brick holding up the middle of the bed or wires or soft handles of
luggage.
So to help it out, we
cleaned out everything under the bed and took away all those awkward chair legs
it bumped against. According to the little vacuum cup, it collected LOTS of
stuff. But as I keep an ear out to listen to if it’s high-watered on the sloping
foot of the stool or tried to eat cords… I think maybe I could be as productive
if I just vacuumed myself. But it would not be nearly as much fun.
Thursday we went to
the health fair. The hospital puts this on once a year. They do free bloodwork
to check for diabetes… and a few other things. You need to be fasting to take
the test. So the first day there are always LONG lines. We went the second day
about an hour after opening, and the line was quite short. We met and visited
with a bunch of friends and business people we know. Nice morning. We got our
hearing checked. They couldn’t check mine because I had wax in one ear.
Thursday evening I
went to a baby shower for a woman at church. It was short and sweet. My
favorite kind. I am just not good at party games. However, since I’m not competitive
either, I just hang around and make others look good.
Friday I went in to
get it removed and have my hearing checked. Who knew ear wax could be so dark
and disgusting? They had to flush out some of it… but it’s gone. And my hearing
is fine. No guarantees on the selective hearing, however.
Friday night we went
to a baptism. This was a man who had a tough life with some poor choices. It
was a delight to see how the gospel can change a person’s life. He’s a good man
and I think he will continue to grow and progress.
Severe storms had been
predicted starting Friday and going through Sunday. We got little rain until
late Friday night. Then we got a few inches. Tom was to take youth to a temple
trip on Saturday. It was not raining a lot here, but as they started north they
heard about flooding and road closures. So they turned around and came home. One
sister said she turned around “when the edges of the road started to disappear”
with water starting to cover the road. We didn’t have any kind of flooding,
although our pond overflowed and water ran around the sides of the dam.
West Plains and
Gainsville, both north of us in Missouri, suffered some major flooding. Lots of
roads were closed as rivers overran their banks.
Tom had been reading “The
Rent Collector” by Camron Wright. He thought it was a fascinating look at
Cambodian life. I picked it up on Saturday and stayed up way too late finishing
it. An excellent read. I highly recommend it.
Today was a bit thin
at church. We had some members who live beyond low water bridges. They could
not get out. Still, we had a great lesson on tithing and fasting with joy. And
in the third hour Tom spoke to us about the stake goals and we learned about
grace.
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