Audible Confusion

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

My hubby keeps these machines running like well-oiled, um... machines.

My hubby keeps these machines running like well-oiled, um… machines.

Some weeks ago, Brent went into the garage to clean and lubricate his bike chain. Perfect weather, plenty of daylight… but something conspired to hinder him.

The local wildlife.

I should explain. He had wiped the excess lube from the chain by turning the pedal with one hand and holding a rag around a section of chain with the other. There should have been no sound but a faint, metallic gliding.

Yet he heard his freshly lubed chain squeaking.

Had he missed a spot? Accidentally grabbed the bottle of wood glue instead of bike lube?

No, the source of the annoying sound was outside the garage–the deceptive little “Chain-squeak Bird.” There’s probably a more common name for them, but when you’re bicycling along and one sings from a nearby tree, it sounds exactly like your chain. The fastidious rider can go crazy worrying about chain wear.

“It’s kind of confusing,” Brent admits.

Ol’ Chain-squeak isn’t the only winged trickster out there, either. Another example is the “Heart-rate Monitor Target-Zone Warbler.” This one bothers me, but not Brent. See, my heart-rate monitor emits a faint “fleedle-fleedle” when my pulse goes above or below the “target zone,” which it often does because the default “zone” is ridiculously low and I’ve been too lazy to change it. The “HRMTZ Warbler” mimics this sound perfectly.

“Leave me alone,” I bark at the overprotective monitor–or the overprotective bird, it doesn’t matter which.

Sometimes our feathered friends forget about cycling and try to lure us into spending a lazy evening in front of the television. One species sits on the neighbor’s roof and calls out, “Video, video, video, video.” Then his little buddy pipes up, “Netflix, Netflix, Netflix!”

One day, after a few rounds of this exchange, another bird butted in, “Chea-perr, chea-perr, chea-perr, chea-perr!”

I don’t know… I like a bargain, but I suspect that last bird’s videos are pirated.

Guess I’ll go see what looks good on Netflix.

Thanks for reading!
Tailwinds,
Jan

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Shattered!

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

Hi, friends! I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks, getting my mom moved and settled in her new apartment. But now I’m ready to return to my regularly scheduled musings….

See that? It’s our favorite vacation spot, a resort on a tropical white-sand beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Not that we go there often. It’s expensive and the flight tires us out because of having to change planes and go through customs.

We’d made two summer visits there, which we enjoyed immensely. (I guess that’s kind of redundant. If we didn’t enjoy the resort, it wouldn’t be our favorite vacation spot, would it?) Anyway, after an unusual amount of upheaval in November and December 2012, Brent proposed a short winter getaway to the island.

I started packing, this time remembering my swimsuits.

So we arrived just after the first of January and enjoyed one day of snorkeling and kayaking. Then we found out what a tropical winter is really like. The other days we were there, the wind was whipping so hard we didn’t dare paddle out into the bay, lest we end up two or three hundred miles west on the coast of Cuba.

One day while not kayaking, we visited the resort’s boutique and gift shop. There they offered hand-painted Christmas ornaments, which we’d never seen before. They must only carry them in winter. We picked a favorite–one decorated with a hummingbird–and bought it for our next Christmas tree. It would provide a warm, tropical memory right in the middle of December.

Sure enough, eleven months later we pulled out our decorations and started dressing up the tree we’d bought and set up in the dining room. I opened a plain, white, cube-shaped box the size of a baseball.

“Hey, look–it’s our Turks and Caicos ornament!”

I walked over to get a hook for it. Wary of crushing the tissue-thin glass, I held the sphere loosely, not even bending my fingers around it. When I stopped beside the table where the hooks were, the ornament kept going. I watched in helpless dismay as the glittery hummingbird flew to the tile floor and, with a hollow “pop,” shattered into hundreds of pieces.

I believe my exact words were, “NNNOOOOOooooooooo!”

The loss of our souvenir grieved me. I’d assumed we would use the beautiful decoration for years to come. We couldn’t even replace it. I mean, we weren’t going to vacation there in winter again, what with the gale-force winds and the danger of an unplanned kayak trip to Cuba and all.

But after a few seconds, it dawned on me: losing that ornament didn’t cost us anything of importance. We still had our memories and photos from three trips to the island. We could even go back again. A broken ornament? Talk about a “first-world” problem!

So I put on my big-girl panties (figuratively speaking), swept up the pieces, and looked for what the incident could teach me. As near as I can figure…..

1) All our “stuff” is gonna break or wear out or burn anyway, so don’t grieve too much when that happens. It’s only stuff.

2) On the other hand, it pays to hang onto anything that holds importance for you. Don’t lose something just because you were too careless to bend your fingers around it. If you want to know how crummy that feels, just ask me. Or any NFL receiver who has missed a catchable, game-winning pass with 0:03 left in the fourth quarter.

3) In the end, what matters most is not stuff, but people. Handle loved ones with care. A shattered glass ornament is just glass, but when someone’s heart or their trust gets shattered, it’s a tragedy.

Your turn: Did you ever lose (or *ahem!* accidentally destroy) an item that held great sentimental value? How did you reconcile yourself and move on? Or does the loss still affect you? I'd love to hear from you in the “Leave a Reply” box below.

Thanks for reading!
Jan

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Sewing Machine: Tool, or Enemy?

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

82nd Airborne, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment Patch. The lit-fuse bomb is the LEAST scary element.

I haven’t had any trouble with my appliances in quite a while. (Click here if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) It’s been so long, in fact, that when Brent asked me to sew circles of Velcro backing onto six military patches for his paintball team, I didn’t even have a panic attack.

Silly me.

First off, I had to deal with the patches themselves. These things were Ugly–so hideous I could barely bring myself to touch them.

It’s only an embroidered design, I told myself. You won’t get bitten, or mange, or fleas, from embroidered spider monkeys. And don’t take that expression on their little faces so personally–they’re not out to get you.

The thick plastic-y Velcro hook material gave me all sorts of trouble with the lower thread tension. Somehow I got one patch done and started another. But soon the top thread got jerked under the fabric and tangled down inside the mechanism. I had to take the
“twist-back-and-forth” bottom-thread-grabbing assembly apart to cut out the ruined thread. And for the first time ever in more than 40 years of sewing experience, I could NOT put the thread-grabby thing back together properly.

I mean, it looked okay when I snapped the brackets into place. But I realized something was amiss after the thread broke again. Twice more.

Things went downhill from there. I assembled the twisty thing again, re-threaded the machine, and…

Broke the thread.
RE-re-threaded.
Broke my needle.
Cut the partially-stitched patch loose from machine and threw it across the room.
Trekked to the sewing box at the other end of the house for a new heavy-duty needle.
Removed first needle (both pieces).
Discovered I’d been using a fine-gauge one intended for lightweight fabrics.
Apologized to the sewing machine.
Replaced broken needle with the new one, rated “Denim.”
Tried one more time to properly re-seat the bottom-thread-grabber assembly.
Ran the machine with no thread to test the assembly; hatch open so I could watch.

By some miracle, this time everything ran smoothly. So I retrieved my long-suffering ugly patch and Velcro from the floor, and gave it another cautious try.
Ka-chuk… ka-chuk… ka-chuk…
ka-chuk-a-chuk, ka-chuk-a-chuk, ka-chuk-a-chuk,
ka-chuk-a-chukachukachukachukachukachukachuk…..

Sweeeet victory! Now for the other four.

One of the patches still ended up looking as if the dog had sewn it together–no offense, little mutt–but at least the chore is done.

You know, despite all my stomping and raving and throwing during the process, I was honestly glad to help Brent with the patches. For one thing, sewing is a skill I have (questionable though it may be) that he doesn’t. I enjoy being needed. Kind of like when I made a window-seat cushion for Secondborn >shudders<.

Besides, Brent does so much for me, often things I don't have the skill or strength to manage. Like me and my rebellious sewing machine, Brent sometimes helps me in ways he doesn’t enjoy. But he does it anyway out of love and honor for me. The least I can do is honor him in return. We complete each other rather than compete with each other.

As near as I can figure, this practice of putting each other ahead of ourselves is the kind of mutual submission and service that creates a happy marriage for both of us. You know… the kind the Bible teaches.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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Drought. Flood. Next?

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

Somebody's pasture. The adjacent road was under a few inches of water in one spot.

Somebody’s pasture. The adjacent
road was under a few inches of water
in one spot.

I wondered. Should I even bother to write about Texas’s out-of-control May weather? After all, just about everybody in North America has seen photos and video of cars washed over to the side of freeways, helicopter rescues, whitewater parking lots, tornado damage, tree-flattened houses, and that earth dam that threatened to bust.

Personally, I don’t have one legitimate thing to complain about. Our neighborhood experienced very minimal damage. We joked about taking a submarine to go get hamburgers. “Okay, you can stop praying for rain now,” we said.

The weather that only annoyed us was far more serious elsewhere. Hundreds around the state lost their homes and all their belongings. More tragically, dozens died.

Texas really, really needed rain, however–and lots of it. The summer of 2011 saw intense drought, and wildfires popping up all over the place. Honestly, you couldn’t pull off the road with a flat tire, or sneeze after eating jalapeños, without sparking a grass fire. Forest fires threatened my home town of Palestine. Away to the southwest, much of our beautiful Hill Country went up in smoke.

The drought continued through 2012, 2013, and 2014. “Lakefront” property gradually became “Beachfront” property, with the “beach” growing wider by the month.

So, back to May of this year. After the first week of daily rain, grouchiness overtook most everyone. Gallows humor was the order of the day. Every few days the rain would stop and the sun would glimmer through, staying just long enough to mow the yard before rain pelted us again. (You had to mow the grass every chance you got, or it would get too thick by the next clearing.)

We whined.

“We Texans are never happy with the weather,” some of us have been scolding ourselves.

But are we truly just spoiled malcontents?

I’m not so sure.

See, God hard-wired a natural rhythm into all creation, from galaxies and solar systems, down to our little planet and the individual plants and animals who call it home.

We have seasons and years and tides, work and rest, birth and death, planting and harvest. The Biblical poem at the beginning of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3 lists more examples.

Nobody wants to hop around on one foot. Instead, we walk: left, right, left right. Nor can we live on only food or only water. We need both, preferably every day.

In the same way, our environment thrives when rain and sunshine alternate, in appropriate amounts. As near as I can figure, that’s what Texas has been missing–the sense of rhythm we naturally expect.

But what are we supposed to do when that rhythm falters?

When we suffer from “too much” of one thing, “not enough” of another, it seems our first reaction is often to complain. Maybe blame God. But the interruptions could remind us that we are dependent on our Creator. Instead of griping, what about asking him for what we need, an then practicing trust while we wait?

Just something to think about while you’re mowing the yard.

Your turn: Do you feel out of sorts when life gets out of rhythm? How do you cope? I’d love for you to share in the comments below.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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Floored!

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

I’m happy to report that my mom, who currently lives two hours from me, is moving to my town next month. She’s in a senior living apartment now, but it’s become really hard for her to get around. So when a new assisted-living place went up only six miles from our house, I checked into it. The property company has an impressive record of resident-focused service that made me feel comfortable about letting them care for Mom.

When I first visited the nearly finished building, I admired the pale-yellow walls and reddish carpet used throughout the first floor. The decor had a bright, warm, homey effect.

I was even more pleased when the sales director led me onto the second floor. The upstairs walls are all painted light blue, with carpets in pretty blues and greens–Mom’s favorite colors. I like the two floors having different colors. You can tell at a glance which you’re on. Very helpful to seniors–one less thing to have to think about, right? With Mom’s permission I scored her a cute one-bedroom. It’s upstairs, overlooking the courtyard.

First floor: soft, pale yellow with pops of high-energy color.

First floor: soft, pale yellow with pops of
high-energy color.


Last weekend the facility had an open house, complete with guided tours and yummy food prepared by their actual chefs. I sampled the goods in the sunny yellow dining area, then the tour started. A guide led us down the yellow hallway to a yellow meeting room for the first presentation.

Second floor: Cool, restful blues and greens.

Second floor: Cool, restful blues and greens.

Next we went to the second floor and along the blue hall, which soon opened out into a wide blue living area where we heard another presentation. Then we were off to check out the wellness / physical therapy room–also blue, of course.

That’s when I saw the time and realized I’d have to hustle to my writers’ group meeting. I went to thank the guide and tell her I had to leave.

“Oh, I’ll walk you down–we have a little gift for your mom.” She escorted me back down into Yellow Wall World. We chatted on the way, me focusing on her rather than my surroundings. Soon we stopped in front of two cheerful women standing by a small round table. One of them handed me a gift bag from the table.

“Thanks,” I said. Then I looked around and realized I was in a large, completely unfamiliar room, furnished with several round tables like the gift-bag one. Why hadn’t I seen this area on my first visit? What was it for? To compound my mental disconnect, the walls and carpet were Second-Floor Blue. But… we’d come down the elevator. I knew perfectly well we’d walked past the Yellow dining area. On the first floor. Had we gone back upstairs? When? How?

Covering my disorientation in my usual smooth style, I blurted out, “Wait–where am I?”

All three women burst out laughing.

“This is the memory-care wing,” the gift lady explained, then leaned toward me confidentially. “We get that question a lot.”

I swear they’d been waiting all morning for an opening like that.

Your turn: Have you ever become disoriented for a perfectly valid, non-losing-your-marbles reason? In front of strangers? Please tell me I’m not the only one! There’s room for you in the “Leave A Reply” section below.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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Destiny: Not a Laser Light Show

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Jan C. Johnson

I spent the weekend before Mother’s Day attending the “Pink Impact” women’s conference at Gateway Church in Southlake. The conference provided fascinating speakers, refreshment and growth, lots of fun, and even a present: a new friendship with a sweet lady named Chiew. She had flown all the way from Seattle to visit a friend and go to the conference. We’re staying in touch, too. Seriously, what would we do without Facebook??

I also made friends with this character, who performed in a skit and then stayed for the dance party.

I also made friends with this character, who performed in a skit and then stayed for the dance party.

So anyway, I wanted to share some of my top notes with you. The hard part was picking one session to summarize—they were all so good. I finally settled on Blynda Lane’s talk, “This Land Is Your Land.” She spoke about how to avoid being intimidated to the point of giving up on your destiny.

In the smallest possible nutshell, I’d say that “Destiny” is a medium-size word with a big meaning that often starts out small.

Now that we’ve covered all the sizes, let’s see what I took away from hearing Blynda.

She used three people in the historical narrative of Joshua, chapters 1-7, as illustrations. Two show us how to approach our destiny, and one shows how NOT to.

First, Rahab. She was a prostitute in Jericho who refused to let her past interfere with her destiny. By the time the Israelite spies came to town, she’d heard about how the living God had pretty much moved heaven and earth to get the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Knowing Jericho was hosed, she made the choice to trust Israel’s God, at risk of her life. She helped the spies and made them promise they would spare her, along with her family.

After the wall fell and Israel attacked, Rahab probably wasn’t thinking “Woohoo—destiny, baby!” All she had was her life, her family, and a really big pile of rubble. But she stepped over that rubble, married one of the men of Israel, and started a family. Little did she know that her great-great-grandson would be King David. Even less could she have imagined she would one day be a direct ancestor of the Messiah.

Second, Joshua. The leader who took over from Moses—talk about a tough act to follow. Before he saw the miracle, Joshua had to both believe God’s promises and act on the angelic instructions he’d received. For a whole week he was to perform small daily tasks that seemed meaningless. Embarrassingly simple. 100% un-Destiny-like. But he faithfully obeyed rather than trying to rush ahead to the Big Someday Dream.

Then the wall fell, and—rrrrumble, boom!—“Someday” had arrived.

But how about that negative example?

That would be Achan. See, God had clearly told the people not to take any plunder from Jericho. Plunder would come later but this time, the city and everything in it was to be destroyed. Unfortunately Achan liked the looks of some gold and silver, plus a designer cloak. He rationalized them right into his tent.

Israel’s next battle should have been easy-peasy. But Israel lost—because God would not help them until all the Jericho stuff was destroyed. When Joshua found out what had happened, Achan died for his selfishness—along with his whole family.

Achan disqualified himself from his destiny because he envied someone else’s stuff.
Don’t be that guy.

My takeaway?

  1. Destiny is available to anyone who will trust God.
  2. You may never know the significance of your destiny during your lifetime.
  3. Destiny may not appear with a laser light show or dramatic music. Right now it may look like something small—a journal, a college class, piles of dirty dishes or baby clothes, a coffee break with a co-worker.
  4. My destiny is unique to me. I can do what no one else can, so I should be content in my present role without envying anyone else.
  5. God has the Big Someday Dream—and my best interest—at heart.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on destiny. Have you found yours? Does it seem significant to you? You’re welcome to share in the comments below.

You can also read Blynda’s encouragement for yourself at her website.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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