Hello all. It has been almost a year since I posted here. I'm going to give it a go again.
Most recently I've volunteered to help Dr. Diane Dike with her ministry, Second Chance with Saving Grace. Check it out at www.dianedike.org.
Please look for more as the days roll on. Blessings!
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Delays
Please forgive the delays to postings. We have been dealing with injuries and other family issues that have caused a rift in creative ponderings. More coming!
OK folks, here’s a website that will definitely catch your interest.
Fiverr is a place to “buy, sell and have fun” all for $5 a pop. That’s right! People share things they’re willing to do for $5, from helping you to design a website to being your hubby on Facebook for a week.
One Fiverr fan will honestly tell you if your butt looks too big for $5.
Travel a lot? Need an itinerary. $5
Want to travel a lot but can’t? People will even travel for you. One Fiverr user will write your name in bubblegum on the world-renowned Bubblegum Alley for – yup, a mere $5.
Check it out!
Fiverr is a place to “buy, sell and have fun” all for $5 a pop. That’s right! People share things they’re willing to do for $5, from helping you to design a website to being your hubby on Facebook for a week.
One Fiverr fan will honestly tell you if your butt looks too big for $5.
Travel a lot? Need an itinerary. $5
Want to travel a lot but can’t? People will even travel for you. One Fiverr user will write your name in bubblegum on the world-renowned Bubblegum Alley for – yup, a mere $5.
Check it out!
Friday, March 26, 2010
When in Rome ...
Well it's a wonderfully sunny day in Oregon, and yours truly spent it indoors watching a predictable but kinda cute movie, "When in Rome." It didn't ruffle my intellect any, but it did tickle my travel buds.
"When do we leave," I asked my friend, whom I think was a bit perplexed by the question.
Afterall, I pondered, my passport is ready. I'm ready - sort of. I mean, what are such teeny tiny obstacles as lack of finances, no time off, obligations, feeding puppies and stuff like that anyway!
So I'm ready, but probably for a place closer to home. Keep your interest piqued as this blog is going to field a few travel ideas as well as the rest of what I toss into my bottom drawer, just waiting for some rainy day to explore.
I'm starting with today's discovery: Soba Asian Bistro. It's a cute little restaurant, clean, good service and good food at 3860 Commercial St SE. I had the Phucket salad (pronounced with a hard "p")and found it wonderfully delicious. Avacado, nice greens, chicken and a Oriental lime salad dressing. Medium-priced. I'm going to go back and try their noodles next!
Well folks, please pass along good spots to eat, visit or veg. I can't guarantee their placement, but I certainly believe we all have a few favs we can share from time to time.
Blessings!
"When do we leave," I asked my friend, whom I think was a bit perplexed by the question.
Afterall, I pondered, my passport is ready. I'm ready - sort of. I mean, what are such teeny tiny obstacles as lack of finances, no time off, obligations, feeding puppies and stuff like that anyway!
So I'm ready, but probably for a place closer to home. Keep your interest piqued as this blog is going to field a few travel ideas as well as the rest of what I toss into my bottom drawer, just waiting for some rainy day to explore.
I'm starting with today's discovery: Soba Asian Bistro. It's a cute little restaurant, clean, good service and good food at 3860 Commercial St SE. I had the Phucket salad (pronounced with a hard "p")and found it wonderfully delicious. Avacado, nice greens, chicken and a Oriental lime salad dressing. Medium-priced. I'm going to go back and try their noodles next!
Well folks, please pass along good spots to eat, visit or veg. I can't guarantee their placement, but I certainly believe we all have a few favs we can share from time to time.
Blessings!
Friday, March 5, 2010
Delays, delays
Well, here it is -- another sunny day, and again I'm down with a cold/cough/throat thing. Feeling punk doesn't lead to wonderful, witty rhetoric. So please hang in there, and in a few, I'll post something again that might be more worth while reading.
Meanwhile, dear friends, have a great weekend! Blessings and more blessings.
Meanwhile, dear friends, have a great weekend! Blessings and more blessings.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Hearing is now at a premium.
My friend recently e-mailed me with a message: “I saw this, and thought of you. What a hoot!”
Apparently, a folder of a client named Bonnie Pearson had come across her work desk. With our little group, Pearson already had quite a reputation that started while sharing what makes us thankful with one another at one of our small group Bible studies.
First, I have to explain, I have a hard time hearing out of my left ear. So if someone speaks to the left of me, I often don’t quite catch what is said.
“I’m thankful I get to share about Jesus with other students at school,” shared my friend, new to the college scene in her mid-years and a year into finding her faith. “It was such a God thing.”
The student had asked her what the lettering on her T-shirt meant: “Body piercing saved me.” Picturing lots of holes in ears, nose, tongue and a slew of potentially unmentionable places, the inquirer was enlightened by the continuing message on the back side of the shirt, a depiction of Jesus on the cross, wrists and ankles pierced.
However, my ear failed to pick up this particular translation.
“Bonnie Pearson?” I pitched, interested in this gal who I had not heard about before. “Who’s Bonnie Pearson, and what does she have to do with you getting saved? Did she lead you to Christ?”
After a few stunned moments, my mistaken interpretation had us all howling.
And, as humor often does, that set the course for the night.
Want to know what a certain Bible verse means?
Ask Bonnie Pearson.
How about what steps to do to better your life?
Bonnie Pearson.
This mighty women had some kind of “in” with God I almost envied.
How to quell such sinful thoughts?
Take it to Bonnie Pearson.
Well, you get my drift.
Why one day at a former workplace, I thought I heard the ad salesman talking about a new business. Not wanting to miss out on a story, I parried, “Pyscho shop? Where’s that? Would they be interested in talking to me?”
Blank stares came my way.
“Well, I certainly could shop there,” I said, laughing.
Still confusion reigned.
“What do they sell there anyway,” I asked, curiosity killing me.
“Bikes.”
Cycle shop! Oh woe. Another session needed with Bonnie Pearson.
It could be worse. I have a friend who is way harder of hearing than me. We have to shout into the phone to converse, and conversations are getting louder every time we connect.
“I wear a hearing aid now, but it doesn’t really help much,” she told me recently.
My reply, “Why wear it then?”
Apparently people who notice she has one speak louder. Amplification on a pauper’s budget, she contends, works just fine for now.
She had thought about an implant, but apparently because of the shape of her ear, was turned down as a candidate. So now our conversations are often audio-challenged.
During our last conversation, I told her about I had mixed up Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice for our sins with “Bonnie Pearson.”
“Body piercing?” she retorted. “My friend has that T-shirt. Isn’t it great!”
Amazing!
Most of the time I hear well; most of the time she doesn’t.
She gets it; I don’t.
Must have been a Bonnie Pearson moment.
Apparently, a folder of a client named Bonnie Pearson had come across her work desk. With our little group, Pearson already had quite a reputation that started while sharing what makes us thankful with one another at one of our small group Bible studies.
First, I have to explain, I have a hard time hearing out of my left ear. So if someone speaks to the left of me, I often don’t quite catch what is said.
“I’m thankful I get to share about Jesus with other students at school,” shared my friend, new to the college scene in her mid-years and a year into finding her faith. “It was such a God thing.”
The student had asked her what the lettering on her T-shirt meant: “Body piercing saved me.” Picturing lots of holes in ears, nose, tongue and a slew of potentially unmentionable places, the inquirer was enlightened by the continuing message on the back side of the shirt, a depiction of Jesus on the cross, wrists and ankles pierced.
However, my ear failed to pick up this particular translation.
“Bonnie Pearson?” I pitched, interested in this gal who I had not heard about before. “Who’s Bonnie Pearson, and what does she have to do with you getting saved? Did she lead you to Christ?”
After a few stunned moments, my mistaken interpretation had us all howling.
And, as humor often does, that set the course for the night.
Want to know what a certain Bible verse means?
Ask Bonnie Pearson.
How about what steps to do to better your life?
Bonnie Pearson.
This mighty women had some kind of “in” with God I almost envied.
How to quell such sinful thoughts?
Take it to Bonnie Pearson.
Well, you get my drift.
Why one day at a former workplace, I thought I heard the ad salesman talking about a new business. Not wanting to miss out on a story, I parried, “Pyscho shop? Where’s that? Would they be interested in talking to me?”
Blank stares came my way.
“Well, I certainly could shop there,” I said, laughing.
Still confusion reigned.
“What do they sell there anyway,” I asked, curiosity killing me.
“Bikes.”
Cycle shop! Oh woe. Another session needed with Bonnie Pearson.
It could be worse. I have a friend who is way harder of hearing than me. We have to shout into the phone to converse, and conversations are getting louder every time we connect.
“I wear a hearing aid now, but it doesn’t really help much,” she told me recently.
My reply, “Why wear it then?”
Apparently people who notice she has one speak louder. Amplification on a pauper’s budget, she contends, works just fine for now.
She had thought about an implant, but apparently because of the shape of her ear, was turned down as a candidate. So now our conversations are often audio-challenged.
During our last conversation, I told her about I had mixed up Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice for our sins with “Bonnie Pearson.”
“Body piercing?” she retorted. “My friend has that T-shirt. Isn’t it great!”
Amazing!
Most of the time I hear well; most of the time she doesn’t.
She gets it; I don’t.
Must have been a Bonnie Pearson moment.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
A Patch of Grass in Iraq
“It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.”
No one knows that more than Brook Turner, a Stayton soldier who literally lived out the Claude “Curly” Putman, Jr. song that singer Bobby Bare and others made popular in the mid-60s.
“After being in Iraq for about three months and seeing how bare, dry and dirty everything was, I really missed the green, green grass -- and Oregon as a whole – and thought about it everyday,” said Turner, now a Chief Warrant Officer 3 with the U.S. Army. “I love to play golf and would find myself just daydreaming about being on the course or in my backyard with green grass. So I had an idea. Why not try and grow some? Nothing big, just a small patch that would bring a little color to our living area.”
Five years have passed since Turner planted that small plot of grass in Iraq, but the feat still makes its rounds in cyberspace. He remains surprised and humbled by the attention.
“I never intended it to turn out the way it did,” Turner said.
Turner and his wife Kimberly, both Stayton High School graduates, married June 5, 1993, and five days later he enlisted in the Army. Turner was stationed in Hawaii in 2002, where the couple lives today with their four children, Jorden, 17, Samantha, 14, Courtney, 12 and Ja’Lynn, 9. Turner’s parents, Pearl and Jerry Turner, Kimberly’s mom, Lois Kane (dad Harry recently passed away), and other family members still live in Stayton.
In early 2004, Turner was deployed out of Schofield Barracks to Iraq with his unit, the 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation. When he told his friends he was going to plant grass, most just laughed.
“They didn’t think much of it,” Turner said. “So I told Kimmie to mail me some grass seed and fertilizer. I didn’t know if it would work, but it was worth a try.”
Turner dug up a small area of dirt outside his sleep trailer, lined it with bricks and planted his seed. He watered the approximately 3-by-7-foot plot several times a day using a plastic jug that he filled from the nearby shower trailer. Then he hit a snag – ants.
“The grass seed somehow brought out an army of ants, and they formed a very long string convoy one by one carrying off my grass seed to who knows where,” Turner said. “Obviously that wasn’t working, but that didn’t stop my desire to have a patch of grass.”
Undaunted, Turner bought seven small patches of sod – hardy, natural turfgrass - from a local Iraqi vendor and replanted the area the ants had destroyed.
“It took root, but didn’t spread at all because of the bricks,” Turner said. “I kept the grass the rest of the time we were there – about six months. It did turn brown quickly once the weather turned cold in the winter, but it was just a nice area to sit around and enjoy with my friends. More of a conversation piece than anything else.”
But when his friend, SSG Mark Grimshaw, snapped that now-famous photo of Turner trimming his plot with scissors, conversation spread way beyond those few friends.
“I sent the pictures to Kimmie, who naturally shared them with our family,” Turner said. “Her sister sent them to quite a few people, so I was told. Within a month or two from us taking them, I had guys telling me that their wife or grandma or someone had sent them a picture of me.”
When the photo hit the Internet, Turner was identified on various Web sites as an Australian, a Canadian and an American. Locations of where the photo was taken also varied. People even questioned the photo’s validity when a problem with the camera’s batteries caused the date/time stamp to reset to an earlier date than when it was actually taken. But Turner’s story spread and other small plots of grass soon sprouted at other U.S. military campsites in the Middle East.
“All I wanted was some color to remind me and guys around me that even in a dusty, sandy, colorless area, that grass was just as green there as it was at home,” Turner said of his little piece of home. “If that patch of grass brought a smile to someone’s face while we were all so far from home, it was worth it.”
Turner returned to Iraq for 15 months in 2008-09 and will be sent there again next year.
“Although I did not grow grass again, we did make a small golf driving range within our motor pool,” he said of his last deployment. “There were so many people who helped support our idea. Many places sent us driving range mats, balls and clubs. There were lots of nights with the motor pool lights on that a bunch of soldiers would be out rocketing golf balls at different targets in the motor pool.”
Whether a small patch of grass or a makeshift driving range, Turner’s projects brought much joy to himself and those he worked with. To him, that’s all that really mattered.
“At the end of the day, it is all about the great men and women I have the opportunity to serve with,” said Turner, who will be eligible to retire in three years after 20 years of service.
Written for Our Town Monthly - South
View this and other articles at www.ourtownlive.com
No one knows that more than Brook Turner, a Stayton soldier who literally lived out the Claude “Curly” Putman, Jr. song that singer Bobby Bare and others made popular in the mid-60s.
“After being in Iraq for about three months and seeing how bare, dry and dirty everything was, I really missed the green, green grass -- and Oregon as a whole – and thought about it everyday,” said Turner, now a Chief Warrant Officer 3 with the U.S. Army. “I love to play golf and would find myself just daydreaming about being on the course or in my backyard with green grass. So I had an idea. Why not try and grow some? Nothing big, just a small patch that would bring a little color to our living area.”
Five years have passed since Turner planted that small plot of grass in Iraq, but the feat still makes its rounds in cyberspace. He remains surprised and humbled by the attention.
“I never intended it to turn out the way it did,” Turner said.
Turner and his wife Kimberly, both Stayton High School graduates, married June 5, 1993, and five days later he enlisted in the Army. Turner was stationed in Hawaii in 2002, where the couple lives today with their four children, Jorden, 17, Samantha, 14, Courtney, 12 and Ja’Lynn, 9. Turner’s parents, Pearl and Jerry Turner, Kimberly’s mom, Lois Kane (dad Harry recently passed away), and other family members still live in Stayton.
In early 2004, Turner was deployed out of Schofield Barracks to Iraq with his unit, the 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation. When he told his friends he was going to plant grass, most just laughed.
“They didn’t think much of it,” Turner said. “So I told Kimmie to mail me some grass seed and fertilizer. I didn’t know if it would work, but it was worth a try.”
Turner dug up a small area of dirt outside his sleep trailer, lined it with bricks and planted his seed. He watered the approximately 3-by-7-foot plot several times a day using a plastic jug that he filled from the nearby shower trailer. Then he hit a snag – ants.
“The grass seed somehow brought out an army of ants, and they formed a very long string convoy one by one carrying off my grass seed to who knows where,” Turner said. “Obviously that wasn’t working, but that didn’t stop my desire to have a patch of grass.”
Undaunted, Turner bought seven small patches of sod – hardy, natural turfgrass - from a local Iraqi vendor and replanted the area the ants had destroyed.
“It took root, but didn’t spread at all because of the bricks,” Turner said. “I kept the grass the rest of the time we were there – about six months. It did turn brown quickly once the weather turned cold in the winter, but it was just a nice area to sit around and enjoy with my friends. More of a conversation piece than anything else.”
But when his friend, SSG Mark Grimshaw, snapped that now-famous photo of Turner trimming his plot with scissors, conversation spread way beyond those few friends.
“I sent the pictures to Kimmie, who naturally shared them with our family,” Turner said. “Her sister sent them to quite a few people, so I was told. Within a month or two from us taking them, I had guys telling me that their wife or grandma or someone had sent them a picture of me.”
When the photo hit the Internet, Turner was identified on various Web sites as an Australian, a Canadian and an American. Locations of where the photo was taken also varied. People even questioned the photo’s validity when a problem with the camera’s batteries caused the date/time stamp to reset to an earlier date than when it was actually taken. But Turner’s story spread and other small plots of grass soon sprouted at other U.S. military campsites in the Middle East.
“All I wanted was some color to remind me and guys around me that even in a dusty, sandy, colorless area, that grass was just as green there as it was at home,” Turner said of his little piece of home. “If that patch of grass brought a smile to someone’s face while we were all so far from home, it was worth it.”
Turner returned to Iraq for 15 months in 2008-09 and will be sent there again next year.
“Although I did not grow grass again, we did make a small golf driving range within our motor pool,” he said of his last deployment. “There were so many people who helped support our idea. Many places sent us driving range mats, balls and clubs. There were lots of nights with the motor pool lights on that a bunch of soldiers would be out rocketing golf balls at different targets in the motor pool.”
Whether a small patch of grass or a makeshift driving range, Turner’s projects brought much joy to himself and those he worked with. To him, that’s all that really mattered.
“At the end of the day, it is all about the great men and women I have the opportunity to serve with,” said Turner, who will be eligible to retire in three years after 20 years of service.
Written for Our Town Monthly - South
View this and other articles at www.ourtownlive.com
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