Thawing and Freezing

The ice here thawed enough I could drive to town yesterday morning for my weekly hair appointment. I ran by my daughter’s, but she was asleep and never knew I had visited. In the afternoon, Gerald and I went over to Southern Illinois University Carbondale to watch his friend Steve Soldner’s daughter Regan play basketball with Missouri State against the Salukis. Steve sells Peterbilts down in Texas, and Gerald always has to go by and see him when he visits friends in that area.

With five generations of our family affiliated with SIUC, I could not believe I was cheering for Missouri State, but I did. It was easy during the first half when SIUC was far ahead. As the Bears got within 10 points in the last quarter, I felt more of a traitor although I was very proud of Missouri State for coming on strong at last. After winning in Evansville, the weather had kept them stuck in this area and unable to return home between games as planned.

We were able to visit a bit with Regan’s grandparents from Farina and met her grandfather’s twin and his wife also. Steve couldn’t come up from Texas because they were planning a trip to California to see their senior son play there. They will have three more years to watch Regan’s games.

We ran by Katherine’s and had a nice visit after the basketball game. We missed picking up a prescription at the pharmacy by five minutes, and then ate a lovely dinner at Honeybaker’s because we were tired of my cooking. By the time we got back to our lane, it had frozen again. Fortunately Gerald had scraped enough in previous days that there were bare spots to give us traction as we glanced nervously at the lake.

This morning we drove the pickup to our village church, where George Barker had had about the same experience Gerald had here clearing roads. He could not scrape too deeply without tearing up the gravel beneath the ice, so nothing was completely bare, and then last night froze it again, but we greatly appreciated what he did for us. There was some slipping and sliding in the parking lot as we drove in, and we oldsters walked carefully. When we came out of services, it was thawing again with puddles of water mixed with the snow and ice.

In counties south of us and over in Kentucky and southeast Missouri, many people are still without electricity, and some of our church members have been impacted by those problems. Most of those schools are still closed tomorrow. (Our county’s kids are going back after their four-day break.) A friend in town has her Kentucky son and his three Labs at her house since he is without electricity. Fortunately she loves dogs. Motels are full with people wanting heat and hot showers.

With the bad roads and the Super Bowl on tonight, our pastor declared he was giving us a “double dose” sermon this morning so that we could all stay safely home tonight. He even used two different texts and carefully divided his sermon in two. Both sermons were excellent, and we left being glad we had been in the House of the Lord.

While the ice had thawed quite a bit this afternoon, Gerald did some more driveway scraping including working on a neighbor’s drive. Since I am not a sports fan, while he watched the Super Bowl, I enjoyed surfing and playing around with an article I sent out once in 2007. It is now tweaked to send out again. I joined Gerald to watch the final exciting moments of the game, and then I watched the PBS preview of We Shall Remain, a five-part documentary coming out in April on the American Indians trying to show a more complete history of our nation’s interaction with the primary residents of this continent.