End of July news

There's really not much; I'm in Applied Math right now, and finding how much I really enjoy it even when it's hard. I was one of those obnoxious students who found school easy, even in High School, in everything except math. Of course, as one of those people, if it's hard it means you hate it... and I've always thought I hated math. But when I was teaching elementary math it started to be fun, and I found ways to do it differently. So now that I'm back in a college math course, I'm usually able to work for a while, take a break, get frustrated... and then really relish the victory when I figure it out. It's a good thing. I never liked challenges, school being easy made me lazy and proud of it. Now I'm kind of liking the challenge.

We're refinancing the house, finally, with the government help to banks for folks upsidedown on the mortgage (lost equity in the economy thing). That should close Tuesday.

We had new friends from church come over for lunch last week and we had a fabulous time. It's so good to find kindred spirit friends. They stayed a few hours, we had good food and lots of conversation and the kids were really good.

Spent a great time visiting my cousins last night. Good times. My one cousin lives here, but we don't see them very often because they're so busy. Her sister and her kids came to visit this week, so we had dinner over there. They'll be coming sometime this week for lunch too.

Otherwise, my bean plants finally have blooms, one pepper rotted but we picked the other one (haven't eaten it yet) and there's three new blooms, the onions are still kind of tall seedlings, I don't know if those will work out. We've eaten three tomatoes and there's four more green ones growing. I'm praying desperately that we avoid the rampant tomato blight that's killing the crops; one source said that it started with seedlings sold from Home Depot, Lowes, KMart and Target, and we got ours at Home Depot before the recall. Some leaves look strange, but the tomatoes look okay so far.

I woke up with a light headache today that I thought was tension in my neck, so I took an ibuprofen. Half hour later I got migraine symptoms, but can't take my migraine meds because I took the ibuprofen and they interact. I have to wait until the ibuprofen's worn off. So I'm missing church with only vague feeling in my hand and a small bit of pain starting to creep in my head. I love my mother's family enormously, but I really wish they'd refrained from passing along this little bit of genetics.