It's been such lovely weather for the past few days.Tonight when I came out of church after choir practice the sky was so bright and beside the cresent moon you could see Mars and a little ways over, Venus. It was so bright and clear!

The guys from the funeral home are still out there cutting stuff down. Around my house is bare, the garage is bare and now the fence at the end of the yard is just about bare. One good thing came out of it, tho. In a month or so, I have a good clean place to plant my spring bulbs. Wonder if somebody will come over and cut them down when they come up?

My deck garden has been very nice this year. I got a lot of tomatoes and peppers and strawberries and the pepper and tomato plants are still loaded. For some reason, my cucumbers didn't do any thing. They bloomed, got baby cukes on them, but then, the cukes turned yellow and ended up looking like little yellow balloons. What happened??

Emmanuel Church is supposed to be sold Friday. Its been in the works for a long time, but finally all the kinks have been worked out and they are supposed to close at 8:30AM Friday. The first service , according to pastor Glen, is going to be this Sunday and some of the Emmanuel people have been talking about going. I'm gonna find out for sure tomorrow so I can tell a few more people who used to go there and want to attend the first service. I think it will bring closure for all of us to know that instead of the church sitting there empty, it will be vibrant and alive again.

Tommy and Rebecca were dropped off Friday afternoon by their Aunt Ginny who told them to tell me I could bring them back any time Sunday. Usually she wants them back at a certain time, so they took advantage of this by staying as late as possible.

We finally left Danville about five and arrived in Stoneville about 5:45. When we drove up I didn't see Ginny's little new red convertible, but her Toyota and Don's new Galant were there. When he heard the car door shut, he poked his head out of his "studio", which sits down in the lower yard. "Ginny's gone to town, but she'll be back in a few minutes", he said to the kids.

Rebecca wanted to show me her room since she'd re-arranged it and we went into the house with Don trailing us. She asked him if we could see her room and he said Ok, so we went up the steps and after looking at her room, Tommy wanted me to come to his room and look at his plants. We were standing there when Don came into the room. He sorta sidled up to us and said", This is not a good time for a visit. I'm doing something in the studio and I can't leave yall alone in my house without someone being here."

I almost popped out with, "Why, do you think we're going to steal something?", but I was so surprised that I just said, "Come on Douglas, lets go". We got outside before Douglas blew off steam. He said the same thing I was thinking. "Does he think we'll rob his house if he's not there to keep an eye on us?"

When we got outside...we'd been in the house for less than five minutes....Ginny had driven up. I walked to our car and said "Hey, Ginny, Bye, Ginny" and didn't even stop.

When it's my time to take the kids back again, I'm gonna ask her if she wants me to drop them off at the bottom of the dirt road. This way I won't have to go in the house.

Douglas is taller than I, and his nose is sort of on a level with Don's mouth and he said that Don smelled like a brewery. Guess he had to hurry back to the studio to drink some more beer!

It seems as though the babies grow up so fast, just over the summer and over short vacations.Anna is going to pre-school for 4 mornings a week and Savannah goes for 2. On the mornings Savannah goes, I do pre-school with Brittany. So far,and we've only been doing this 2 days this week, she can recognize and pick out upper case A and she knows words that start with A. She is learning months and days and weather and also recognition of shapes.

She also loves country music videos, her favorite being Toby Keith's "I Ain't Good as I Once Was". She knows a lot of words to different songs and will sit and sing along if it's one she knows.

Savannah likes to play with the stuffed animals....kittys and monkeys, especially. She went to VBS and if you ask her what she learned or remembered from VBS, she says "De balloon in de parking lot, it popped". She calls me G'ma Maxine just like Brittany does and has this habit of coming up to me and saying, "G'ma Maxine, my mommy done peed on me again".Then she wants me to pull Amanda's panties down and "Beat her fat butt", her words, not mine!

Anna is turning into a little girl. She's gotten a lot taller over the summer and seems to assert herself more than before. She still loves her chicken tenders and fries, but will eat rice and colby cheese on occasion. She knows lots of songs from the TV shows she watches and for a while had a friend named Diego. I didn't know he was also Dora's friend/cousin on Dora the Explorer, for a long time. She's also playing soccer this year.

Some days they play together very well, but sometimes it works out better if they do separate things. One thing they all like to do is doctor on the baby dolls, and deliver each others babies. I think we might have at least one doctor or nurse in the making.

I was told this in confidence, but have since learned that members of the affected families know, so I don't guess it's a secret anymore, but I will change the names to protect the innocent.

I was told by a lady friend who lives in a retirement village that another lady who also lived there was really lonely for a male friend and was actively looking for companionship. My friend remembered an elderly widower who goes to my church and gave her the gentlemen's phone number. She immediately called him....we'll call him Marsh.......and first thing you know, he was at her apartment, which is across town from his house, and stayed for 2 1/2 hours, getting acquainted.

She then rode with him to Greensboro on Wednesday to a doctor's appointment and they were supposed to have a date today, and she's supposed to visit our church Sunday.

She told my friend that she was very impressed with him and wouldn't mind moving to his house when they get married. Now all this has taken place in just a week.

His daughter sings in the choir with me and mentioned on Wed. night that "some woman has been calling my daddy" and she was going to put a stop to it. I figured since she already knew part of it, I would fill her in on the ladies' plan to marry her "daddy". The daughter says, "Dang if thats so. The house is not in daddy's name, it's in his kid's name." Hmmmmmmm. This might present a problem.

But what the lady, we'll call her Eve, doesn't know is that he's looking for somebody to 'take care of him'. And she's about 5 years older than he, so it might not work out that way. He might be taking care of her.

My friend said that she was very 'well preserved'and was very nice and sweet. I just hope she can handle Marsh.

Well, today I went to yard sales for the first time in quite a while. I don't like going by myself and Bobby has been working on Saturday and Cindy has either been out of town or sleeping in, so I just didn't go.

I was completely out of books and that's mainly why I go. Found 16 paper backs and 1 hardback, so I'm fixed for a couple of weeks.

Cindy found a dressing table for a doll, complete with blankets and a couple of outfits, so she bought it for the babies to use for an examining table when they play doctor.It's so cute. It has a padded top with baskets underneath and it can be folded to put it away. And they can put their doctor 'tools' in the baskets.

She also found a new salt shaker and pepper mill, which brings me to this point. What do you call the unground pepper? Beans? Pods? Just pepper? It ought to have a name, I think. I've been pondering this all evening, but haven't come up with a name. But I did learn today that a whole gang of cats is called a "clutter of cats". Yall know that? What is a lot of snakes called? Or a bunch of frogs? Let me know. I love to learn new things.

Well, I hate to write this but from what I heard in church Sunday while waiting to go to the choir, I think the whole thing is off!

We were standing there waiting and the daughter-in-law of Marsh came up and asked the daughter of Marsh, "Well, is she here"? All of the other choir members leaned forward with bated breath to hear what she would say and she replied that she thought her dad had called the lady and broke up with her. "So, no, she wouldn't be in church".

Seems like Marsh had talked to some of his male friends and they knew this lady and they told him that she was really looking to get hooked up with a man, serious like, so he phoned her and broke it off with her.But evidently, she didn't take it well because she made two trips to his house Saturday to find out why.

Now, last night after church, my friend, who had given her Marsh's number in the first place called to tell me that they had 'broken up". Her friend didn't know why he would break it off just when they were getting close. But she said she was still planning on visiting our church soon, because, it was a house of worship and open to the public. But Marsh is the only single man who goes there, and out of about a dozen single ladies, he can't even get a date! We ALL know him! He might need to re-think his decision.

I rented the cutest little Nissan Sentra Sat. to go see Sharon and Rebecca, Tommy and I had a nice trip up and back with no incidents. At least, to us.

Sat. evening right outside of Lynchburg, just when the speed limit was back to 65, we were cruising along in the right hand lane behind a red Jeep and all of a sudden a BIGGGG brown and white dog(it was at least the size of a small calf) came cavorting out of a parking lot right into the path of the jeep. It hit, bounced and somehow got caught up under the front end of the jeep and for a few yards, until the driver could find a place to pull off the road, was bouncing along under the jeep. Rebecca saw it all and was sitting there with tears running down her face and she turned to me and said,"That driver ought to burn in hell for that"! I was so surprised, but explained that if he had swerved he would have caused an accident because the other lane, the fast lane, was full of cars; if he had stopped suddenly we probably would have crashed into him. He did the only thing he could do, even tho it meant hitting the dog. I'm glad I had stopped for gas, putting me a little behind or else I would have been the one to hit the dog.

Friday when the kids got here, I noticed that Tommy's shirt looked kind of grubby and Ginny said something about Tommy 'not being a white shirt boy'. When I picked up his dirty clothes to wash them Sat. morning, I noticed that his socks and underwear, which were new when he wore them home 2 weeks ago, looked like they hadn't been washed. I said something about it and Rebecca said "Oh, Ginny never washes the clothes we wear there from your house. She just leaves them dirty and we have to wear them back here. But I always take off my clothes as soon as I get there so they don't get dirty." Is that gross or what? What's so hard about tossing their clothes in to wash when she does their laundry?

I had a thought. Since all the clothes they wear back and forth are clothes I furnish, suppose I decide to do like she does and not let them wear clothes that I buy down to Stoneville? Wonder if she would transport them in the nude? But I couldn't do that to the kids. It's not their fault she's a loony.

Tonight Susan came down and brought a movie she had rented called 'Pieces of April' and we settled down to watch it. She in my recliner and I on the sofa. She finally reclined it all the way and turned so I couldn't see her face, so every once in a while I would ask her if she was awake. She would always say she was, but when the movie was over she started asking questions about what had happened. Seems she had gone to sleep about half way through it, but would always answer me when I asked if she was awake. Funny, huh?