Mishmash

As the title implies, this post is going to be kind of a mixture of unrelated things.

Great-nephew, Cooper, age 8, has taken up competitive swimming. We attended one of his swim meets last Saturday. I haven't quite mastered the art of photography at an indoor swimming pool, but here are a couple of images that give a feel for the event.

Here, Cooper is showing the adult helpers his arm, on which each of his events is written in magic marker.

Cooper, between events

Monday night, as Doug and I were enjoying "America's Funniest Videos" reruns, our doorbell rang. There on our doorstep, and spilling over into the yard, were 25 or 30 Christmas carolers. They burst into song as soon as I opened the door; and, my goodness, what beautiful singers they were! Our hearts were so blessed as they sang four or five beloved Christmas carols and then prayed for us before they left. And our tummies were blessed by the plate of homemade cookies they presented to us.

With the crazily warm weather that we've had thus far in December, our grass is green and could stand being mowed. And we found dandelions blooming in our yard on Tuesday. I didn't get a picture of the dandelions, but I did get this rather unusual picture for December in Indiana:

A Robin in the Crab Apple Tree

Tuesday afternoon, I had an appointment with my dentist, to have Tooth #25 extracted. Afterward, the dentist told me that, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, my extraction was a 2. Well, easy for him to say. For the one sitting in the chair, it was a 12!

An implant wasn't possible to replace the tooth, making a bridge necessary. But there is reason to fear that a bridge attached to the adjacent teeth might damage them. So we may have to do a bridge that extends over several teeth. Meanwhile, we decided to let the extraction site heal before doing anything further. So I'm walking around with a missing tooth at the moment. May the hillbillies of the world forgive me, but I look like the stereotypical hillbilly.

That reminds me of a joke: Do you know how we know that the toothbrush was invented by a redneck? If anyone else had invented it, it would have been called a "teethbrush."

Are you all familiar with Groupon? They offer some pretty neat deals from time to time. Well, about a month ago, we ordered a soundbar to use with our television, hoping that the sound it produced would be a better quality than the sound that comes from the television speakers. There was a delay in shipping, so the soundbar wasn't delivered until December 7th. Since then, we've driven ourselves crazy, trying to get the thing connected. Finally, today, we called the company's customer service department and got a guy who not only spoke English but who was persistent in resolving our problems. It took the better part of today and two trips to town to buy different cables, but we're up and running. Thank you, Zach! You are one of the best customer service representatives I've ever encountered.

I've done a few posts about the horses that I owned a number of years ago. This week, a woman was led to this post on my blog when she typed the name of her horse, Sera Diamond, into the search engine. Sera Diamond was one of those foals produced by my beloved Half-Arabian mare.

We exchanged emails, and here is what she wrote: "Sera Diamond, Sammy to me, was my horse in the 80's. We showed the Arabian circuit and took many wonderful trail rides. He was amazing! We loved to play tag in the field and he always loved a good carrot! He made the 'teen years' much easier."

Thank you, Melanie. You made my day.