"Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age." - Anais Nin

This morning was the last Sunday for Pathway Bible Church. We had our normal worship service and then a fellowship time afterward. Good stuff.

One of our priorities from the very first Sunday seven and a half years ago has been kids. I've been blessed by the group of faithful adults who have worked in Children's Church and Sunday School to teach them God's Word, and you can tell by the way the kids rush back to their classes that they love it, too.

Here's a pic JoEllen took this morning of the kids of Pathway. OK, not all of them are children - there are a couple of college kids in there - but it gives a sense of the impact Pathway has had on the future. Trust me, this group is going to make a mark.

Erik Compton plays on the PGA tour and has been in Ohio this week playing at the Memorial Tournament. He was out to dinner earlier this week when his waitress learned that Compton is a two-time recipient of a heart transplant, the result of a congenital condition that made his heart too weak to pump sufficient blood.
The waitress told him her nephew was a heart donor after having been killed in a motorcycle accident. Compton asked the name of her nephew and after hearing her answer realized it was the young man whose heart now beats within his chest.

Josh & Aubri and the kids stopped over this afternoon on their way to his ice hockey game at the nearby rink. After about 30 minutes it's starting to look like a truck. A big truck. I took this pic right after they left with the late afternoon sun shining in the garage so the exposure isn't great. And I would have been standing halfway out the driveway in the full sun to get it all in. So here's a pic that shows the bed set on the rails and the hood bolted on (but not aligned properly yet).

The bed kit - rails, wood, and hardware - will show up in about two weeks, and along with it a booklet with assembly instructions. I need that. The bed isn't square and doesn't sit on the cross pieces like it should, so the section on squaring and aligning the bed will be a must-read.

But this represents real progress.

Tomorrow I'll take Pam to work at 6:30 and then go over to the storage yard to get the teardrop. With any luck I'll back it into the now-empty half of the garage where the truck bed used to be without scraping up a paint job. No, not to store it there. Pam works a 12-hour shift tomorrow, Tuesday, and Wednesday and then doesn't have to be back to work until Thursday of the following week. I'll pick her up when she gets off work Wed. evening with the teardrop in tow and we'll start driving to Oregon. It's an 18-hour drive straight through to our soon-to-be home, so I figure it will take me between 20 and 22 hours with stops for gas, meals, and a nap or two.

We haven't prioritized tasks yet, but the list includes ripping up the carpet in MoHo, painting, some new light fixtures, doing a complete demo on that fiberglass quonset hut, and cleaning up Fred. When we're back for our camping trip in July we'll spend a few days there and have a 20-yard dumpster delivered, so we want to make a good start on getting together all the things that will go in it so that by the time we leave it can be hauled off.

Leaving from the hospital Wednesday at 7:30 puts us through L.A. shortly after midnight and up the CA central valley during the cooler morning hours. We'll have to figure out our departure time for the return trip so that we're not going through L.A. during rush hour. We'll leave the teardrop up there, so I won't have to pull it through that freeway mess again. We'll pick it up on our way to northern OR and Silver Falls State Park in July.

The timing for this trip outta town couldn't be better - the two of us working together on a beautiful corner of God's country. We'll cook our meals over the Coleman (the stove in MoHo doesn't work) and use the 1 cu. ft. microwave in the teardrop's galley (no microwave in MoHo), but we do that when camping and it works just fine. We enjoy the simplicity.

As of 11:30 this morning....I'm unemployed.