At Long Last...

I have returned to post a new blog!  Yes, I have a new computer.  Yes, it is up and running.  And yes, I did figure out how to transfer all of my itunes to it.  It was a little dicey for awhile, and I almost had to call Apple for help, but thanks to perseverance or stubborness I avoided that call.

This weekend I have also been battling an upper respiratory infection and pumping myself full of antibiotics and albuterol.  Apparently, now when your lungs are affected by sickness they also automatically give you an inhaler.  Oh well, it's working, I feel better and pray against relapse. 

Today I got to meet my mom's cousins, John and Gwen, who are missionaries in Ethiopia.  They are wonderful people, whom I have heard stories about my entire life.  So it was wonderful to meet them and hear their stories.  As they talked I imagined myself going to visit, camera in hand, to see the people they reach out to every day.  Even the 24 hour plane ride and 18 hour car ride out to the village where they live did not dampen my spirits. 

And then John began telling us about the encounters he's had with SNAKES.  Um, I hate snakes.  Even little, less than a foot long, garter snakes make me scream in fear.  I know this because one got caught  in the sliding door of the house I was dog sitting at.  There was plenty of screaming and praying as I tried to slam the door closed and finally had to use a yard stick to fling the thing outside.  I laugh as I remember how my friend Karen suggested I simply pick it up with my BARE HAND, and fling it outside.

I don't know how I would react if I ran into a thirty foot black cobra in the outhouse.  (That's right, outhouse.) I would probably forget how to scream and die from fear.  I don't know if I could make it back to the house to grab the machete, that is apparently lying around for such a time as this, in order to kill the thing. But I wish I had had a machete with the garter snake, maybe I would have screamed less.