Surprises

Vincent surprised me by putting away most of his clean laundry, doing most of his chores, and cleaning some of his room prior to the slated arrival of his girlfriend (which was conditional on fulfilling these responsibilities). The air-conditioning repair people may have unpleasantly surprised our landlord – but not really surprise us – by concluding that our (rented) house needs a new (central or forced-air) air-conditioning compressor. They’re supposed to come back Saturday with one (perhaps like the one pictured).

-- Perry

Congrats, Rachel!

The 2009 Kentucky Oaks, the all-fillies version of the Kentucky Derby - that takes place at Louisville's Churchill Downs, on Oaks day - Derby eve - took place late Friday afternoon. Rachel Alexandra - ridden by jockey Calvin Borel, rider of Derby winner Street Sense a couple of years ago - took the lead coming out of the final turn.

She ended up winning by 20 lengths - a record margin of victory - and - had Borel pushed her - might have set a track record for the distance: 1 1/4 miles. Horse people might be leery about racing fillies in the Derby, after the death last year of Derby runner-up Eight Belles (also a filly), but Rachel Alesandra's owner said he thinks the Derby should be all-stallions.

We ended up being invited to no parties and - partly to avoid a friend of ours - are heading up to Northern Kentucky/Southeastern Indiana for part of the day. We haven't decided whether Frisco is coming with us. Vincent - we last heard - was slated to come back late from Marietta College late and was to stay with the Davis family last night. I don't know about Vincent, but hopefully Stephanie and I will get to watch today's (probably rain-soaked) race on TV up there. Click here to watch Friday's amazing Oaks race: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZmGzFD-k8c

-- Perry

Extra signs

More signs of spring: Stephanie brought home from Day 2 of Crescent Hill church's up-scale plant sale, tea, and art sale (UPSTARTS) Sunday some more plants, adding to a bevy of plants she has installed. By Tuesday, flowers we'd been watching around the tree in the front yard of our rented St. Matthews home had bloomed (below).

Stephanie also got to fulfill her outdoor grillling dreams from the weekend, on a day when rain started to threaten for much of the rest of Derby week. On the menu were smoked turkey sausage and vegetable kabobs (Frisco got much of the veggie kabobs!), grilled half cabbages (!), and rice. It was the first time we've grilled this year.

Two danger signs for spring/Derby week. Good for alleviating my allergies, but bad for enjoying Derby week outdoors - Rain expected to continue this week, possibly on the Pegasus Parade tomorrow and on the races Friday and Saturday. Surprisingly, the rain let up today helping the local favorite "Belle of Louisville" "beat" a new Cincinnati-based rival boat in the Great Steamboat Race on the Ohio River. Also: Last year we went to Derby-related parties on Friday night and Saturday afternoon and - as of yet - we've received no party invitations (including for the annual Friday night party we usually go to). Trouble in the Chang/Mathews/Gregory family's Derby party land?

-- Perry

Getting ready for Derby

A year ago Friday night and two months ago Friday I was walking up and down one of Louisville's two monthly art walks/trolley hops - Fat Friday - on the last Friday every month - on Frankfort Avenue, near our church, passing out brochures about church events - and this Friday - about UPSTARTS, the youth ministry fund raiser featuring art and plants and a proper English tea. Stephanie drove to connect with me and we had Middle Eastern dinner at Shirraz (while I continued to pass out UPSTARTS flyers). Many shops and galleries along Frankfort Avenue were open late for the hop (like the one that we went to two years ago at Railroad Square in Tallahassee and the one near my old apartment in Columbus), and we checked out a very few near the restaurant. We stopped in Miraposa Place, a program/center/studio/gallery for mentally challenged adults who are involved in art projects there. It's almost Derby week in Louisville - A week ago was Thunder, earlier this weekend was the marathan and the balloon events. Wednesday is the Great Balloon Race, Thursday is the Pegasus Parade, and Friday and Saturday are the horse races. So the artists at Miraposa have been developing some Derby images, above and below (the steamboat race's "Belle of Louisville"), plus other themes (the map below).

Across the street was Elizabeth's, mainly a hat store. We ran into Beth (below), a woman we knew from Weight Watchers, who sported a small hat.

She and the proprietress and others helped Stephanie try on hats small and large.

Eventually, Stephanie settled on a large hat.

Last year we went to two Derby-related parties, a Derby eve party - the celebrity gawking party where were dress up like celebrities, then go down to watch the arrival of real celebrities at the Barntstable Brown party. Then we went over on Derby day (and watched Big Brown and Eight Belles) at church friends' house. We haven't yet been invited to these or other parties, but now Stephanie is ready, with a new hat. (An important weather note: It's supposed to rain here almost everyday through Saturday, so probably on the boat race, parade, and the Oaks and Derby races.)

-- Perry

Additional signs

Stephanie took these pictures - with signs of spring - in and around our house and yard Saturday, as the temperature climbed towards 90 degrees. Pictured above is cilantro Stephanie planted for the Cuban dish ropa viejo. In the two pictures are tulips - in the flower bed next to our little front porch - that Stephanie planted last fall.





Stephanie bent down to take some pictures of a blue wild flower that is so omnipresent in our front yard that - although she likes them - she just mows over them. She took several pictures because she was trying to catch a bumblebee she saw. It turns out, however, that she had caught the bee in the first picture (look careful immediately below). (Stephanie points out the bee shows up in the last picture too.)

-- Perry

Bubble burst

I'm afraid Vincent's reverted a little back to old form this weekend - leaving the house early Saturday without going to help out with the church art and plant sale (which he had told Ian he would help with) without finishing his laundry and cleaning his room (as he'd told us he'd done) - and then staying gone for 30 hours - without taking his medication - until we came to pick him up and he complained and made us wait. (Stephanie also had to mow the lawn again this weekend partly because he did a mediocre job earlier this week - She's pictured above following up with pruning, with Frisco.) It was back to picking him up between Halloween and St. Patrick's Day, which I hated. Stephanie said it reminded her of picking Vincent up at his father's - waiting, not knowing if there was going to be a confrontation, not knowing if he was really going to come with us - which we used to do when we lived in Ohio, also, every Sunday afternoon. Vincent asked why we were picking him up early, and I said it was because he hadn't done his laundry or cleaned his room or taking his medication. (He also was hot from going on a walk with his friend in 90 degree weather with the black T-shirt and black jeans he had put on Saturday morning.) But it was also because that's when we were driving through and I figured - correctly - that having gotten up early Saturday morning (inexplicably) and probably gotten little sleep Saturday night, he was probably exhausted (and if he slept that off Monday and Tuesday and did 0 hours of school work, instead of his usual 2 hours - that wouldn't be good). Also - he originally had talked about doing something with a different Sam, a friend he hasn't hung out with that much lately, and I thought we'd get him back for that. Of course, although we've cleaned up the house (except for his room), we unfortunately had a hot house for him to return to - our main central A/C is ailing, and we hadn't had his unit A/C on in his absent - and, I'm sure with two days near 90 degrees it was blazing up there when we got home. We haven't exited him from our home or sent him off to the juvenile center yet.

P.S. Vincent's been asleep for five hours since we got home, which he apparently needed.

-- Perry

Dangers

Bad weather in Kentuckiana and especially in North Florida – where tornadoes seem headed from the west to Tallahassee – has me worried.

Vexing health problems also abound. Every week I tell the dentist that I’m finally done with them for a while and the next week I’m always exposed as a liar. Tuesday I got my teeth cleaned and Friday I stopped by the endodontist’s office (and besides making a possible root canal appointment for Stephanie for next week – I got a recommendation that I go back to my dentist this week to get fitted for a mouth guard).

Plus I’m worried I’ve got another hernia or re-injured my old one and am off to the doctor about that Friday.

And Vincent is headed to a new psychiatrist Tuesday – partly in hopes that he can keep taking medication while ameliorating some of the tiredness and blurred vision after taking the pills he experiences.

P.S. On health dangers to us, Aunt June went to the doctor today and – somewhat to our surprise – they’ve slated her for nine weeks of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She will lose her hair. She may lose her voice as the throat cancer expands.

P.P.S. Aunt Songza recovered enough – apparently with no brain damage – to go back to her condo in Seoul. However, she is still facing some pain and some air in her brain that must dissipate. One by one her children are visiting her there.

- Perry

Snow!

After temperatures in the weekends in the 70s (see "More signs of spring"), it snuck below freezing earlier this week. As I arrived for yet another dentist visit Tuesday, it was actually snowing at a nice clip - on April 7, no less - although it did not stick. Lest this seem too odd to us, Stephanie's colleagues let her know that once upon a time it snowed on Derby day. Hopefully, we're not headed towards anything like that, this year. (If you want to see the snow flakes better, click on the picture to enlarge it - They're there.)

-- Perry

Signs of spring

Flowering plants that Stephanie planted this past fall are already appearing in our front yard, in spite of the cold wave we’re currently in the midst of.

-- Perry

More cleaning up

Pictured above is the brush our neighbor Diane had a tree service clear - mainly from the tree in her front yard you can see in the "Snow day!" and "Ice storm" entries with ice hanging over our shared driveway. The putative KY death toll is up to 36, including two more people in Louisville, a 101-year-old woman and her grand nephew in the South End died partly from hypothermia, it's been determined. Meanwhile, 10,000 plus houeses in Kentuckiana don't have power now, partly from Wednesday's wind storm.

-- Perry

Cleaning up/wind storm

Trucks and repairpeople from all over the East descended upon Louisville, Kentuckiana, and Kentucky as a whole last month, in the wake of the ice storm. During several walks with Frisco while I was at work, Stephanie got a chance to talk with repairpeople from Progress, an electric utility company out of North Carolina. She heard about the arrangements that got them here and how they were organizing the repairs. By the time I got my camera out the Progress folks were starting to leave, and there were more folks - at least in St. Matthews - from Georgia Power.

Most people in Louisville have gotten their power back. Some people going up to nine days without it. The last person I heard of was Libby at the dentist's office whose family got theirs back a week later. I think I've mentioned that several of my coworkers lost power for almost that long and one stayed every night with her cats through six nights - five with 40 degree temperatures inside the house. Across the state, things have been very bad. In fact, Ike and the ice storm have been the two worst natural disasters in Kentucky history, we're told. Many people in Paducah and rural counties still don't have their power. In Leitchfield, a town near the church camp we've had retreats at twice and through which we drove from Whitesville two years ago, almost everyone lost their power. Across the state 30 people died from the ice storm. Some people died of hypothermia, and others in storm-related fires. The most common cause of death seems to be carbon monoxide poisoning, from charcoal grill fires, kerosene heaters, and especially generators (many put in error inside), as well as one in a car and another death when an ambulance couldn't get through because of ice a tree covered roads. KY's governor has persuaded the Obama administration to declare KY a major disaster area. In the wake of all of this - as well as Ike - and then melting snow and rain that made some already stressed trees more prone to limb loss or collapse - a wind storm was forecast and has been here for the past eight hours. It sounds like a train. I drove home and walked Frisco at mid-afternoon and - despite the sun - it was already blustering up. It was deceptive with the sun - which soon thereafter was gone - in that the wind was blowing hard. Below the light at Zorn and I-71 sways in the wind.

Already we'd canceled Children's Fellowship for the third week in a row (ironically - after it'd been going not great earlier in January) - as well as - for the second time in three weeks - monthly church meetings. My former turtlesitter and colleague Ida called on her cell phone before 6 p.m. to say her power had gone out. More trees and limbs came down and more power went out. The news has broadcast that several power lines fell across a major road in town as well as transformers blew. They said that we are now up to 37,000 homes without power in just Louisville. My picture - from I-64 along the Ohio River - captured some of the impressive sky but not the river - and all of its churned up waves - so well. I drove over the Germantown to pick up Vincent in the wind, and I can still hear late in the evening. Let's hope the damage is not too bad and there is no more loss of life as folks continue to try to clean up from earlier weather. Presbyterian volunteers are fanning out from a nearby Presbyterian church, although I may continue to focus on doing people's taxes (as well as church, work, and family) with my spare time.

-- Perry

Early February meetings

I helped set up in Louisville and at the Presbyterian Center (up in the beautiful 5th floor conference room where my Toastmasters club occasionally meets) a meeting of the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership Steering Committee (CCSP), to which I belong. I was sorry that very cold weather greeted the some dozen people at the meeting (5 degrees Wednesday night). The other sites we had considered were Orlando, New Orleans, and Hartford, Connecticut, where they met last year. But we figured that we were more likely to get snowed out of or snowed into Hartford than in Louisville (though I had let them know what the average January and February temperatures in Louisvile were (and they were not low)). A week earlier and we would have locked out of the building (becuase it was closed for the ice storm); a week later it would have been in the 70s. People seemed mostly happy with everything except for the weather. We wound up back at Saffron's, where Stephanie and I had eaten two nights before. Only one person (Alexei) was unhappy about that. I have attending CCSP events once or twice a year since my first summer with the Presbyterians, and I have gotten to know some of these religious researchers from various denominations and faith communities pretty well. Two who work with the Steering Committee, and four others drove to the meeting (which helped lower the overall cost - though someone paid $900 to fly from Atlanta!). Pictured above is the CCSP leader: David Roozen of Hartford Seminary. Below is David and the one person I know also with my first name, Perry. I have to get used to being in meetings where when people say Perry they usually are referring to someone else. This Perry heads the only denominational research office that is unambiguously larger than ours, the Latter-Day Saints office in Salt Lake City.

Pictured below are two of the drivers - Aaron, a researcher who happens to be Jewish with the Center for Congregational Change in Indianapolis and Ihsan, with the University of Kentucky and the Islamic Society of North America, and the $900 airline ticket passenger: Steve, who teaches at the Interdenominatinal Theological Center and thus helps represent historically African American denominations.

Below (from our left to right) is Kirk, who now heads the Episcopal Church research office, and Alexei (unhappy with Saffron's - and who wanted to go to New Orleans) who heads a similar office for the Eastern Orthodox denominations in the United States. (I got to talk with Alexei at dinner, and he's quite the world traveler, and belongs to an organization that facilitates him staying in homes with host families many places where he travels - including with a Northern KY family he has gotten to know, where he was headed next (in distillery country). Both Kirk and Alexei have been clients of ours). Dirk, a retired Reformed pastor, did more than I to organize the meeting, and moved to Louisville this summer (and has now twice lost electric power for a week).

Mike works with the Bahai faith community and teaches sociology at the University of Houston. The meeting as a whole went well. Even though things like bleak for landing a big foundation grant (which helped fuel this partnership for several years), we plowed ahead with plans for developing several more congregational resources, for organizing a big survey of congregational leaders in 2010, and for developing a public relations/marketing strategy. For more information on the partnership and its Faith Communities Today survey, see one of my half a dozen other blogs, "Flock Facts," at http://flockfacts.blogspot.com/ For pictures from our August meeting, see the "Catastrophe" blog entry.

As these folks left Thursday, it was already starting to warm up. You can see from this picture of a newly renovated building at Lousiville's Presbyterian seminary (a building that I considered moving to when it was a part-dorm at the seminary, when I first moved to Lousiville - they even said they'd take my dog!) that the sun was out and lots of snow and ice had thawed. I went to Leadership Development Day there Saturday morning, before helping people do their taxes.

A seminary professor who returned the next day to our church gave a presentation. And the six-month-old Stated Clerk, former client Gradye Parsons, led one of the four workshops, the elder training workshop, which I attended. Gradye had no PowerPoint presentation, but he did a great job. (I even asked him about quandaries in a work project.)

-- Perry

Warmth and challenges

The warm-up has continued throughout the end of the week and this weekend with Wednesday as the coldest day (with the temperatures in the single digits even without the wind) and warming continuing through the weekend when temperatures reached into the 60s. (This picture was taken Thursday.) By Saturday evening much snow and ice had melted. Other challenges mounted, however: The ice and snow kept Stephanie and her students away from school for four days. That was half of the two weeks during which she was to administer annual one-on-one English language assessment tests to all her students. These tests help determine which students leave the English as a second language program and which ones stay. Her testing will have to continue past the deadline, some into this coming week. My odd health problems have recurred with a crown that was installed after I got a root canal a year or two ago coming out THREE times in the past couple of weeks (including during that critical snow-bound week when I couldn't get to the crown, then into the dentist's office for several weeks). Once again, over the weekend the crown came off. Also, this past Thursday (same day the picture of the house was taken) we received a certfied letter (envelope pictured below) from the principal of Vincent's school stating his intention to exit Vincent from the school because of fall semester's bad grades. This was a bit of a surprise because the guidance counselor had led us to believe this was unlikely to happen (even though at one point I had said we would transfer Vincent to another school if he didn't pass his classes). Stephanie and Vincent talked with the guidance counselor and it seems that we should build a case that Vincent's school work is improving and he is on track to graduate if they'll just let hiim stay. I have mixed feelings about all of this - and Vincent isn't entirely coopererating - as - although I think he wants to stay - he's stalling on having the actual meeting with the principal and he's not making a bee line to finish up one of the two on-line classes he already has to take. I have my doubts about his claim that he's doing well already in his spring semester classes. But if teachers would come forward and document/attest to that, that might help Vincent's case. We'll see what happens. If Vincent is exited, our idea is that he should take the eight classes (?!) he would need to grudate on-line and graduate - perhaps even on time - from "Jefferson County High School." (Recall he's already taken several on-line classes previously.) However, it isn't clear whether he would actually have the tenacity to do all of this. I think it'd be easier to finish the classes he's already in (although he'd have to pass almost all of them to graduate on time.) And it's unclear if he's done much on his senior project in the past few months (which he'd need to complete to graduate from Brown).

-- Perry

Dead furnace

Our gas-powered furnace down in the basement has been laboring for several months, and we even called the landlord air-conditioning repair person about it a couple of weeks ago. (He promised to come check it out but did not.) For a week we've been feeling bad about all of the folks who lost electric power (and their heat) - when we did not this time - but we finally lost our heat when the furnace kept straining to go on last night but couldn't - and the temperature started dropping. it was one of the coldest nights of the year last night. Vincent has his own furnace in his room upstairs, and we left the oven on in the kitchen after heating. Stephanie got us one space heater for the Florida room last year, and we moved this in to the living room but the temperature continued to sink (see above). But as we went to bed we put the space heater into our bedroom, which is small enough that our room got hot and Frisco even went in the computer room to sleep. (He abandons us and sleeps there some times - but when it was 59 degrees?!) I had been petrified that I would have to get up chilled and go out and walk the dog in the cold - but as it was I was quite toasty when I left the bedroom (again - it was 59 in the house - though still warmer than the 40 degrees in my colleagues' houses without power for a week. One of my colleagues had been without power for a week until hers came back, and Libby at our dentist's office still did not have her power Tuesday (since late Monday night a week before). Stephanie and Vincent skipped taking showers, but I took one (we moved the space heater to the bathroom). I had called back the repair person Monday night. He called at 8:30 a.m. at work and said the heater was working for him and he was going to set it to keep working so that he could go fix the heaters at some other houses where they were really not working. I argued with him a little - I wasn't completely sure he had really gotten ours working and I'm not sure he was sure it had ever really quit working for us. Apparently me pushing worked, as a couple of hours later colleagues of his called back to say they had started replacing the furnace motor. They were working when I stopped by in late morning to walk the dog and as I left they left too - the furnace apparently fixed. It's not as hot in our bedroom tonight as it was last night, but the house as a whole is much warmer. With the cold air in the morning, I had moved the turtles up to the 2nd floor (where Vincent's heater continued to work) as well as - at the last moment - Frisco's crate - moved from the basement to Vincent's bathroom (where it was at Fisherman's Landing where - however - Vincent didn't use that bathroom), where it was warm and where Frisco gets natural light (but Frisco gets urine on the linoleum). As the temperature sank - before we thought of moving the crate - I had decided to take Frisco to a kennel. When I was getting ready to leave this morning, Frisco actually ran up the stairs to the 2nd floor - had he forgotten the crate - which he usually tried to avoid - was there, or was he more Ok with staying in it in a warm room with natural light (instead of in the basement)? We'll have to consider that (esp. if Vincent takes off eventually). So all of us briefly got a taste of life without heat, something we'd rather not repeat.

-- Perry

Heat wave

After a week of cold weather - and the ice storm - we got temperatures up past 60 degrees, which melted much of the ice on the trees, though some snow and ice remains on the ground (and plenty of buildings still don't have electric power). With little precedent, our church canceled Sunday school and Sunday morning worship, since our church building still has no power (and therefore no heat) and the roads around church are still poorly plowed. In the midst of the cold, this flower has been bizarrely blooming in our kitchen.

Today's bright, hot sun blotted out my effort to take a pictures of another temperature gauge.

Stephanie talked with one of our neighbors about the few neighbors who had lost power, as Stephanie tried to sweep away ice that still tripped Vincent and me up (including on the steps from and to our front porch). Despite the warmth, Stephanie has a two-hour delay tomorrow and - with a number of schools still without power - students like Vincent in the Louisville school system will stay home yet another day (even though we know Vincent's school has power). More cold weather and some snow is headed back here, though I hope not enough to imperil a meeting I have scheduled with out-of-town people Wednesday and Thursday.

-- Perry