Sunday Peni had the Bible class for the ladies at Clendenin. Delores Atkins was there and they had a good study session, I was told. They met at Wilma Taylor’s house and I picked Peni up when they were finished at the park and ride at the on ramp at I 79 at Clendenin.

Monday I had the nuclear stress test at Dr. Stanton’s in Kanawha City. It was an all day affair and we got home about five PM. They checked my blood work and my total cholesterol was 121 and my triglycerides was 105 which is very good readings. A large piece of tooth broke off Monday evening so I had to make an appointment with my dentist to get that fixed. Looks like I am falling apart. There was snow in Elkins and Snowshoe Monday which is unusual this time of year.

Tuesday was my 70th birthday. I received lots of cards and some phone calls for well wishers and I appreciate the good thoughts from everyone. I understand I was born on Friday, May 14, 1943 which was the last day of school. Mother said she waited until school was over for the year so June and Eva could be home to help out with the younger kids. I celebrated my birthday by cutting weeds around the garden fence. Picked some poke and asparagus.

Wednesday I went to Dr. Grace, my dentist, and he epoxied the broken piece back into place which turned out to be filling material. When I got back home I hooked up the brush hog to the Ford tractor and mowed the grass on the other side of the bridge. It is a real shame to cut such nice hay because no one wants it and I certainly can’t eat it. Becky called from Dr. Stanton’s office and said the results of the nuclear stress test showed previous damage and areas that could not be stented which agreed with the last heart catheterization. She said the heart disease was very complex. The heart cardio conversion is set for June 6th. Used the string trimmer around some apple trees and sprayed some of them before dark. Blanched the poke and froze it. Peni cut my hair again.

Thursday I used the string trimmer to cut weeds around the mail box at the main road and was caught in a down pour so had to quit and let that go. Worked more on the medication problem of trying to find out who is at fault for not getting the medication approved and mailed to me. When you have so many people to go through and each one says they have done their part and you still don’t have the medication it is quite frustrating to deal with.

Friday I spent most of the day working on medication problems. It seems my insurance company is fighting the approval of the new medication, Xarelto. I have been trying to get this medication approved since the 8th of May and it is still not approved and so I have spent many hours on the phone with the medication company I use, my insurance company, and the doctor’s office as I can not tell who is holding things up. One says one thing and one says another and the reality is I am out of samples with no resolution. After another hour and a half on the phone someone finally called me back from the prescription company and said they felt the medication would be approved this coming Monday. I was able to pick up ten pills from Dr. Kelly’s office as Dr. Stanton’s office was out of samples so I am good for the next week.

Paul Koen came in this morning from Alabama and arrived at 3:15 AM. I was up waiting for him as I couldn’t get my breath so I couldn’t sleep anyway. Got to sleep about four AM and slept until eight thirty. Paul and I cut weeds with the string trimmers and Joe and Laurie came in at 3:00 PM. Jacob and Mary arrived at about 4:00 and Bill and Nina and family at 5:00. I thinned the peach tree and nectarine tree of excess fruit. The ground is white under the tree from small discarded peaches. I have to be cruel to pull the fruit off as the tree will not sustain all that fruit. The spacing is supposed to be about every eight inches between each other.

Bill and his boys have agreed to take over the worship service tomorrow to give everyone a break. I appreciate that.

Until next week, be a blessing to others,

Wayne

It is eight o'clock PM and I just sat down at the keyboard to write out the Week End News when I remembered I had not picked the asparagus so I had to get up and go down to the garden and pick it. Duty is a very harsh taskmaster! But what can I do? I can’t ignore it. I must add now that I had the biggest serving of Isobel and Gary’s asparagus on Monday I have ever had yet. I picked a big gallon bucket full and Peni helped me a little to eat it all. That was the only time I can recall that I had as much asparagus as I really wanted to eat at one time. (Just like pizza which I maybe had all I wanted to eat at just one time in my life.) But with the pizza I am sure I had way more than I should have.

I heard a tree take about an hour to fall in the woods near the top of the mountain Sunday evening. (This is just a point of interest note.) It kept cracking like a rifle shot every five minutes or so for that whole hour until it finally came down. There wasn’t any wind. I went up the mountain yesterday to see if I could find it but couldn’t. It’s a big mountain and the trees have leaves that hide everything. It was a strange occurrence and the only time I can recall of hearing such popping sounds for so long. I had thought it might be some kind of gun going off but then when it finally fell, there was no mystery any longer. It would have been one of the giant oaks that are back there and so sad to waste such good lumber ---not even to use for fire wood.

Tuesday we went to Dr. Kelly’s office for me to get blood work done and then to Dr. Stanton’s in Kanawha City for my heart check up. They were really running late so my 2:15 PM appointment was filled at 4:00 PM. As soon as they started the echocardiogram the person doing it stopped and went to get the doctor to show him the problem. My heart was in AFib and so they said I would need to be on a blood thinner. The medication Xarelto (pronounced Zarelto) was prescribed. There is a danger of blood clots with this condition. They fitted me with a holter that I wore for 24 hrs. and returned. They made an appointment for Monday 5/13 for a nuclear stress test. The blood work showed my BNP as being way higher so they doubled the Lasix. I am breathing somewhat better perhaps as I have lost a few pounds of water.

Wednesday I received the throttle cable from Sears and installed it on the lawn tractor and mowed the grass around the place that was getting pretty high. It was good to find out the problem was just the junk that had built up in the bowl of the carb. I sprayed half of the fruit trees before it got dark. I found the first fire blight twig on a grimes golden apple tree and cut it off. Hope the spray is working on that stuff.

Thursday I waited until just afternoon to let the grass dry and then mowed more grass so I could get caught up. I finished spraying the rest of the forty apple trees.

Friday Lowell Thomas brought the tin roofing from Lowe’s I had ordered and helped me replace the damaged roof on the shed out back and install the fourteen sheets of tin there. Lowell is a good worker and a generous man. Lowe’s sent four sheets more than I had ordered and paid for so I owe them over eighty dollars for that. This new stuff is so thin it is hard to count it when it is stacked together. It is nothing more than heavy duty foil but that is all you can get as far as I know. We had some rain before we finished and that made the tin slippery but we finished it without any mishaps (or slips off the roof). Friday was Timothy’s birthday.

My lesson for tomorrow is, PEACE. Peace is highly praised in scripture. It is a trait that all men need to learn. We need first of all to have peace with God. Without that we can have no peace. We need peace within our souls. We need to have peace with all men. We need peace in the Lord’s church. We need to pursue things that make for peace. This is a subject the world has not learned to cultivate. Wars and turmoil abound in this evil world. There are even religions that are far from peaceable. The Muslim world has had strife for its entire existence as it is a religion of hate, not peace. Jesus taught the need we have to love our enemies. Islam teaches the religion of hating and killing their enemies. Which do you think is pleasing to God, Christianity or Islam?

The trees are green with new leaves everywhere. The color of yellow/green is the color of the new leaves of spring. I have some yellow roses of Indiana (not Texas) that I dug up at Nina’s place a few years ago and they are starting to bloom now. They smell and look just lovely.

Until next week be a blessing to others,

Wayne

The following is the text of Wayne's recent email to family. He gave permission for me to post it here, "If you think it's fit for it." It is a bit detailed, but that's Wayne - just full of details. And I think there are those among his faithful readers who would be interested in the details. :)

Subject: Doctor's Visit

The visit with Dr. Stanton’s office today didn’t go so well but it could have been worse. My appointment was at 2:30 PM and I got to see the doctor at about 4:00 PM. This long wait is not normally the case with my doctors so I guess they must have had some problems. You know how the waiting game goes with doctor visits. And they still call them “appointments” which sounds pretty specific to me but seems to be very vague to them.

They found my heart to be in A-fib (atrial fibrillation). Simply put, this means the top of my heart is beating about 300 times per minute and the bottom is beating about 31-51 times per minute according to the test equipment. This is not good as the flow of blood is much reduced. This problem can cause some blood clots and to try to prevent and/or correct that problem, they put me on a strong quick acting blood thinner called Xarelto. They fixed me up with a holter (heart monitor) to wear for 24 hrs. So I am supposed to return tomorrow about 4:30 to see what the twenty four hour recording shows. Also I have a nuclear stress test scheduled for next Monday, 5/13.

I told Dr. Chapman that I had a family reunion planned for the week of the 20th and I wasn’t going to let anything mess that up. He said I wasn’t giving them very much time to fix things up. I then told him that that wasn’t my fault---that I had called a month ago to try to get in to see them and it took a month to get an appointment.

All kinds of possibilities were mentioned as possible treatment methods. I could not begin to go into all of them or even remember all of them. The plan is to be on the blood thinner for two or three weeks, check me into the hospital and do an electrical interruption of my heart rhythm to get it back to normal function and monitor me for 24 hrs. there. Hopefully this will fix things. A pace maker was discussed but I didn’t go for that idea--- at least not yet.

I appreciate your prayers on my behalf and continue to solicit them. I am always aware of the fact that I am in God’s hands and nothing bad will happen to me. This note is not to upset any of you but just to let those I know who are concerned for me know what is going on.

Love to you all,

Wayne

This has been a pretty good week for me. I have been on Lasix for a week now and it has helped drain a lot of fluid which lets my heart work better. I have an appointment with the cardiologist this coming Tuesday for an echocardiogram to see how things are going. The spring weather has been just beautiful here but way too dry for spring. We have had very little rain overall this spring with less than two inches for the whole month of April which is supposed to be a very wet month. Remember the saying, “April showers bring May flowers.” Well, we missed out on the showers but I do hope the flowers will still blossom out.

These week end notes are not written to show how exciting my life is (although sometimes it is exciting like when I had my clothes ripped off by the PTO shaft on the tractor.) They are not written to show how hard I work as I mostly don’t work that hard anyway. They are simply given to show how and what my week consisted of. Just mundane things which make up life for me. I just tell what I did (mostly) and I leave out some of the more boring things just in case you thought I put ALL the boring things in here to bore you. Spraying fruit trees is not exciting but it is what I do. If someone else wants to spray them for me then I can just leave out that bit of news. I try not to talk too much about health issues as who wants to hear about that anyway? I sometimes erase whole paragraphs when I think how dull those details are.

Last Sunday after worship we visited with Gloria Ashley. I repaired the hinged face of her mantle clock as the screws had come out and it was a very delicate job of getting it back together. But it actually worked after I did the job. The power went off again at our place at just after 2:00 PM and didn’t come back on until 9:20 PM. I ran the emergency generator for a few hours not knowing how long the power would be off. This is quite a nuisance to deal with but what can I do?

Monday I checked the Toyota over real good trying to find the source of the nasty stink from a dead mouse. Did you ever have a mouse die in you car and you could not find it? I don’t know anything that stinks worse than a dead mouse. I couldn’t find it so I did do some maintenance while I was at it. Painted some rusted areas under the car and used the shop vac to clean the interior. Checked the spare tire which had good pressure and checked the other tires. Cancelled the tilt table blood pressure test that the doctor’s office was supposed to cancel but didn’t.

Tuesday we went shopping at Wal-mart and I purchased another cheap string trimmer to replace my worn out one. The stink from the dead mouse was just about overpowering so we tried to drive with the windows down some but it didn’t help much. So, I looked some more for the nasty critter. We have far more than our fair share of mice here in the country. They get into my cars and make a real mess. I have had to block off the intakes to the air cleaners to keep the mice from filling the air boxes with nesting material and loads of nuts and acorns and such. There seems to be no stopping them from making nests under the hood as they like a nice warm place to hole up. I could tell the smell seemed to come from around the glove compartment area where the air conditioner and heater core are located. But getting into that area without tearing up the car is not easy.

Wednesday I was determined to find the dead mouse or else. I popped out a couple of plastic buttons (they always break as that is the way car manufactures do it so you have to buy more) that holds the plastic shield around the wiper blades so I could look in there. Sure enough there was the huge nest. I was able to get my hand in and pull out most of the nest and when I examined it, there was the dead maggot filled mouse. (Did you need to know that?) I could also see a filter where the nest was. So, I removed the glove compartment box and was able to pull out the filter (whoever heard of a filter there?) and there were a dozen or so hickory nuts with holes in them that were left from the mouse’s last meal. I cleaned the filter up and sprayed it and the compartment with disinfectant spray and reassembled everything. I also ordered two new filters so I can replace this one and have a spare left. I then needed a diversion so I gathered up all the walnut firewood and stacked it in the wood lot out back. Peni made us a mighty fine country dinner (that is lunch for you city people) of corn bread with a nice crust on both sides, pinto beans, fried pickled corn, poke greens and green onions, and fried potatoes. Delicious! (Only one meal for me today with all that!!)

Thursday I mowed some grass with the riding mower and the engine kept trying to die. I finally had to stop and check it out. While I was working on the carburetor the throttle cable broke so I have had to order a new one from Sears. I removed and dissembled the carb and found some nasty yellow gelatin like stuff in the fuel bowl and so I cleaned out all the needle ports and put it back together. Will not know if that has fixed the problem until the new throttle linkage comes in next week. Picked up two wheelbarrow loads of rocks that I had tossed out of the garden and dumped them on the stream bank to hold down erosion.

Friday I tilled up an area in the garden big enough to plant four twenty five foot rows of silver queen corn. Also planted some lettuce and cilantro. Stan Cross is my computer man and he worked on my computer Thursday and Friday by remote control all the way from sunny Florida (which happened to be raining at the time.) He is always very patient and so helpful. Don’t know what I would do without him. I used the new string trimmer to cut the weeds around the apple orchard fence and also some apple trees.

Today I sprayed ten of my fruit trees and the grape vines. This would be Dad’s 128th birthday. It is also my Laurie Anne Koen’s birthday and she is not nearly that old. But she is very, very sweet!

My lesson tomorrow, OVERLOOKING SIN. We all have the tendency to overlook sin in our own lives. It seems we have a “blind spot” to our own failures but we can see very clearly the failures of others. Jesus spoke about this in Mat. 7:3-5. He called these folks hypocrites because they could see the mistakes of others but not their own. He said they could see a speck in their brothers eye while they had a beam in their own eye which they couldn’t see. What I find very disturbing (as if this is not disturbing enough) is that there are folks who will overlook sin in the lives of others either because they can’t see it or they don’t want to see it. Sin can be recognized but few will actually condemn it when they see it. Our society knows homosexuality is wrong, but they will not speak out about the evil life style of those who are engaged in it. They know living together without the benefit of marriage is wrong but they won’t condemn it. The fact is they are not truly “overlooking” sin. They see it alright! They just refuse to recognize it and speak out against it. Many reasons for this attitude. Generally, it is the fact that a loved one is involved in some evil and that causes them to overlook it because it is so “close to home.” What a shame!

The wren has hatched the five eggs in the water can out back and is feeding them now.

Until next week be a blessing to others,

Wayne


Wayne gets ALL the credit for corn and greens - but I was happy to help him eat it.



Robin-egg-blue


Baby sparrows (Both bird nests are in the same pine tree.)

Monday was a clear, beautiful day. Went to the doctor and came home and cut the grass around the place. I contacted someone I know to take over the grass cutting job at the church building as I no longer have a truck to carry my mower and trimmer back and forth in order to do that myself.

Tuesday I replaced the floor in the near wood shed simply by cutting another sheet of 1/2 inch plywood and nailing it over the old one that had a few holes in it. Shoveled some dirt from behind the wood sheds to keep dampness away from the sheds. Stood some old barn slates up against the walls to keep the rain water from splashing against the sides in the back. Sprayed my fruit trees again.

Wednesday I didn’t feel like doing anything so I just stayed inside most of the day. It rained and cooled things back down to normal spring weather again.

Thursday I loaded both wood sheds that I had emptied during the winter heating season from the stored wood in my woodlot. I then moved a few trailer loads of the black walnut I cut recently and stacked it in the wood lot. I rotate my firewood so it is a trick to move it around and get to the oldest wood in a rotation pattern.

Friday I hauled quite a few trailer loads of walnut and had to split many of the bigger chunks with a sledge hammer and steel wedges. That gives me a real workout. Peni went to the pharmacy in Elkview and picked up another medication called in by my doctor for draining fluid from around my heart.

Today I mowed grass on the other side of the bridge. Stayed inside most of the day.

Tomorrow I plan on using one of Alan’s lessons at Clendenin, GOD’S ABILITY TO SAVE. The fact is, God can save anyone but he has only promised to save those who will submit to His will. He has shown His ability to deliver men from bondage through the ages. Those whom He blessed in times past were always the ones who pleased Him by doing his will. Wonder why it is that men can’t seem to grasp the significance of that fact? They want God to save them without them being obedient to Him. Show me an example of God ever doing that for anyone who rejected Him! God has the grace, mercy and love to save all men. That is not the issue. He saved Noah and his family because they walked with God. He brought destruction upon the rest of the world because they rejected him. He rewarded Joshua and Caleb because they never lost faith in Him but he destroyed the others who disbelieved Him. Who is so blind they can’t see the point here? Christians today are warned not to harden their hearts (Heb. 3:8-13). On the day of judgment don’t come up short of God’s mercy.

Paul has a birthday tomorrow and it is also his and Arlene’s wedding anniversary. Congratulations to you both!

Until next week let your life be a blessing to others,

Wayne