Hello friends. I hope you and yours are enjoying this beautiful day the Lord made. Mine has been busy but satisfying. It began, of course, with my Bible time, followed by a workout at the Y.
Our Y just put up the neatest "welcome" sign. I think I could only figure out 14 of the languages, though.
Then it was off to do some hill work at the high school.
If (as I hope) my next big race will be the St. George Marathon in Utah, I will need to have much stronger quads than I have now, especially when trying to conquer the dreaded Mount Veyo. (I still have nightmares about that part of the course when I ran it a couple of years ago.)
Exercise was followed by some delicious Chinese food. Here I get to practice my three sentences of Mandarin.
Then it was back to the farm to work on my list of things to do, which included mowing all the yards. That little project alone took me two and a half hours but -- you know me -- I loved every minute of it.
Meanwhile, I noticed that the kids had begun haying. Below is one of the fields they've cut. I know, I know. What awful scenery. Why can't I live in a concrete jungle?
I'm now in my farm office doing things like registering for Saturday's race down in North Carolina. Here's the course map. For the 10K, you run it twice.
I'm not a big fan of city races, least of all in a city where the crime rate is 150 percent higher than the national average. But hey, it's for a good cause. Next, I searched for a company that would rent me a hobie cat while in Kailua -- and I found one. This is a picture from their website showing their catamaran as it approaches the Twin (Mokulua) Islands off of Kailua/Lanikai.
When I was in high school, my friends and I used to surf the reef, which involved a mile of paddling to get to the break. But if we took the hobie cat we could park on one of the Mokulua islands and from there it was only a matter of paddling a few yards before we were surfing. I am SO eager to do that again.
Right now I am in the process of finalizing the schedule for my summer Greek class that starts a week from Monday. This, by the way, is called a Day Planner.
I know you have never seen anything like it before. It is made out of a thing called paper. Paper comes from trees. Long, long ago, in a faroff universe, people actually used these contraptions to plan out their life. I still do.
On a side note, today I made an appointment at the hospital for a CT scan of my urinary tract. That will be followed by a cystoscopy. Seems I've come down with a case of prostatitis, and in testing my urine they found some "occult" blood -- called "occult" ("hidden") because it can be seen only under a microscope. This condition is also called microscopic hematuria. Currently I'm being treated with antibiotics, and the suspicion is that the cause is either the infection due to the prostatitis, or BHP (like many older men, I've "enjoyed" an enlarged prostate for years), or possible what's called "runner's hematuria," which affects people who run marathons, like yours truly. The CT and cystoscopy are there to rule out all the scary stuff, but it will be a few weeks before I have all the results back. Meanwhile I feel absolutely fine and my doctor says I can continue to exercise and run. So I will. In the meantime, we wait patiently upon the Lord. (Well, at least we try. I'm not very good at this patience thing.) As you know, I believe in God and in his love and power and that he does all things well. He says to us, "Call to me, and I will answer you" (Jer. 33:3), and he does -- every single time. Do you know of any other relationship that even comes close to that? So intimate, so personal, so attentive, so compassionate, so available, and so merciful. And it's often during times of waiting that we learn to take him up on his offer: "Call to me, and I will answer you." Even when he says "no" to us, later we see his wisdom and love in doing so. And the sweetest thing of all? We get to know our heavenly Father in such meaningful ways that they often defy description.
Well, that's it for now. I'm off to grab some supper. As always, thanks for stopping by.