why, hullo! it HAS been a while, hasn't it? No, no, nothing untoward going on here, just a slip from the regular blog routine. THANK YOU for noticing!
You know that saying / song "you don't know what you got until it's gone?" We're really appreciating TWO modern conveniences these days... First, I wound up driving the truck around for a week or so. Which is normally a great thing, but the A/C decided to completely quit after weeks of limping around. Which wouldn't be too bad, if the drivers side window could roll down without getting stuck...
So, Florida summer (heat + thunderstorms) + no air conditioning + window stuck up (ha!). Suprisingly, I wasn't annoyed by this for the first few days. Perhaps I was sweating out the anger, but it was all pretty philosophical. I have always enjoyed the heat, and it reminded me of my childhood and teen years, when I would wear jeans in the summer. It didn't hurt that most of this time I needed the truck's bed to load up bamboo and other assortments for our VBS, which also meant I was usually in shorts and a tshirt instead of 'office' clothes. But seriously, I had thoughts of not fixing the AC for a while.
So, Florida summer (heat + thunderstorms) + no air conditioning + window stuck up (ha!). Suprisingly, I wasn't annoyed by this for the first few days. Perhaps I was sweating out the anger, but it was all pretty philosophical. I have always enjoyed the heat, and it reminded me of my childhood and teen years, when I would wear jeans in the summer. It didn't hurt that most of this time I needed the truck's bed to load up bamboo and other assortments for our VBS, which also meant I was usually in shorts and a tshirt instead of 'office' clothes. But seriously, I had thoughts of not fixing the AC for a while.
Then, somewhere around the 5th day, I was stuck driving around in the aforementioned thunderstorms. And I realized- again- why Florida was not widely settled until after AC had been invented.
****
The very next week, on the first day of Vacation Bible School, I had TWO adorable kids in the house and decided to make them popcorn. So into the microwave it went, and then my cell phone rang, and it was someone with a much needed donation for the very next morning, and... well, we all know what happened next, right? Certainly my college pals do- nothing brings back Tucker memories like the smell of burnt popcorn.
But to say this was a burnt offering in no way accurately describes the actual event. We were seriously lucky and sincerely blessed that the entire kitchen did not go up in flames. The 2 kids were either unfazed by the smoke, or too scared to move off the couch. I'm not sure which...
Here you can see the corn has popped, burnt, and then burned down into a one inch brick!
So, I did concede we needed to work on fire safety with the boy. Perhaps he was *hoping* the firefighters would come?! In any case, our efforts at clearing the air weren't so great, and Kaden wound up with bronchitis within 48 hours. Thank goodness my mom lives nearby, because we basically camped out there for the rest of the week to give him some clear air (and me, too- Jim has lungs of steel!).
