RVing With a Purpose

Sunday, April 19, 2020

So it’s been eleven days since our last post. What have we done that might be interesting to you? We have been enjoying spring in Alabama. Spring and fall are great times to be home in Alabama. We have beautiful springs with the dogwoods, red buds, and all the flowers blooming. Maybe due to the wet winter, the trees have been such beautiful shades of green and the iris colors have been so vibrant. The blueberry bushes have already bloomed and now have lots of little blueberries. Of course this blooming all comes at a cost of yellow vehicles and daily antihistamines. But the beauty makes it all worthwhile. Unfortunately spring in Alabama also brings storms and tornadoes.

We always love Easter sunrise service but this year was very different. We set the clock to get up in time to stream Hinton Rural Life Center’s service (eastern time zone). Hinton is one of our NOMADS agencies that we love to support. Our church (central time zone) then streamed our sunrise service and we watched sunrise here on our mountain sitting in our truck next to our best friends in their Jeep. It was good but we sure missed the great fellowship and breakfast at church afterwards.

Easter Sunday also brought tornadoes. We had a total of 24 tornadoes in our state, most in north Alabama where we are sheltering in place. We had four tornadoes in our county. We lost power for 24 hours which is very unusual for us. We put Fred into the barn to protect from the predicted golf ball size hail (fortunately did not happen) but could still run Fred’s generator and power Aunt Helen’s refrigerator and freezer. We moved everything in our house refrigerator to Helen’s and we had the boxes and bags ready and were about to begin moving everything out of our freezer to Helen’s when the power was restored. It was a hard three days because we began on Saturday preparing for the predicted long track tornadoes, then watching the weather and going to the basement during the two that come near us, and then debris cleanup on Monday. Fortunately, we had no damage to any of the houses, the barn or Fred, so although very tired by Monday night, we also were counting our blessings.

This past week was more staying home and working on various projects around the house and Fred. We know that a lot of people are really struggling with the stay at home orders but we are blessed to be able to get out and walk and enjoy spring most days and we are slowly marking some things off our to do lists. Today is another storm day. Today it’s only rain and flash flooding in north Alabama for which we are very thankful. There have been severe storms to our south in the central part of the state and our hearts go our to those impacted. So far, no injuries reports.

Hope you are are surviving and thriving, with God’s help, while you shelter in place. We are praying for your health and safety. May God Bless and Keep you!

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

We know it has been a while since we posted but we really haven’t been doing anything exciting. We are okay. Really we are much better than okay. We are GREAT! As some of you know, Max has had a mass on the right side of his neck since January. Really it began about a year ago but went away, returned and he had a cat scan that showed nothing, it went way again and then returned in January and stayed. We scheduled an appointment with the specialist here while still in Florida and he was seen as soon as we returned home. After several trips to the doctor and different things being done, he had a needle aspiration and biopsy last Thursday. Finally today, he got a call from the doctor and ….

If you look back at our last post, we referred to Joshua 1:9. Yes, that was for us as well as our readers. We thank God for his love and care through this stressful time. Otherwise, we are still safely sheltering in place according to the state of Alabama’s stay at home order, and watching Spring spring.

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Not much to report. We are still safely driveway camped at our aunt’s house in rural Alabama. We are spending this time working on some things around here and our house that we have been putting off while we traveled.

We are praying for you all – that you stay safe and healthy.  In these difficult days, always remember Joshua 1:9, “Have I not commanded you?  Be strong and courageous.  Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged for the Lord you God will be with you wherever you go.”

 

Friday, March 20, 2020

The past three days we have been busy working on things we put off when we were busy finishing up in the Keys and getting ready for board meeting. There has been lots of mail to handle, laundry, visiting with friends (while walking the track with adequate separation), gathering the information for tax returns for the ladies, and even our first ever tele-medicine visit with our doctor. One of the reasons we needed to turn the project over to Rodney and Tammy was our scheduled doctor visits. We had postponed our annual checkups because we left for the Keys about 3 weeks before they were due. We go to the office where Anne practiced. Anne decided she did not want to go to the office with the flu very prevalent in our area and COVID 19 on top of that, so she canceled our appointments and instead we did the tele-medicine thing. It’s very new to our internal medicine office but it went well and now we are good until after annual meeting when we will have to go in to the office for lab work etc. Surely, the COVID 19 and flu viruses will be settled down by then.

Since we last posted, the NOMADS board of directors decided to cancel all NOMADS work for the next 6 weeks. That meant closing down the Florida Keys project as well. Rodney and Tammy did a great job leading the project for what turned out to be the last week, and along with Barb and Bill accomplished a lot. We are all sad that Dennis’s house was not quite complete but no one could have expected what has been happening. We have the pictures from the final day at this house. They also did the Bible presentation before they left. Thanks for all the hard work!

Now we have six weeks we were planning to be on projects. Seems a little strange, but we will find lots to do.  For now we are following the recommendations as much as possible and keeping our distance.