Joyful Expressions: We Have Arrived at Our Edmond House

Our friends have a hard time figuring out WHAT town we are in as we have two homes 150 miles apart, so I am announcing that we have ARRIVED in Edmond. We will be here about two weeks.

I will be meeting my friends, Phylly and Margaret for lunch tomorrow.

SPEAKING of Phylly, I forgot to show you her new jeans. She spent weeks making them, but they turned out SO NICE! All that top-stitching on jeans is tedious! She used pink thread for hers, and I am so jealous! You DO KNOW I love pink, right???

Ler me see if I can get some pics from my phone to show you of her new jeans..... Well, CRUMB! I evidently downloaded them to my computer at the OTHER house. All my "trash" emails have flown off to never-neverland, so I can't show you. Mabye I can get Phylly to send them to me again.

Jerry and I hope to get to see our friends, Robert and Deanna this trip. They stay so busy helping neighbors and friends and their church, it takes an Act of Congress to get to see them!

Our plants here were wilted with a lot of yellow leaves and cried out for a drink the second I walked in the door!

Keeping plants alive in two homes is really hard to do. I have a tiny herb "garden" at the house we just left. Although I watered all the potted plants on the patio, including the herbs, really good yesterday, they will be dry as a bone by tomorrow. We won't be there to water them, so we will have to pray God keeps them alive long enough for us to get back to water them. We hate to ask neighbors to go water our plants because they never ask us to do anything for them. Plus, they are ALL moving! It is like living on a Monopoly board! I can think of only one home in our addition that isn't For Sale, and it used to be. I think the owners just gave up and decided to keep it.

OH! There are the "barn people". I call them that because they live in our former neighbor's metal barn. Our former neighbors -- also the developers -- PROMISED us that would NEVER happen. They actually GUFFAWED at my mention of it and told me I was just trying to FIND something to worry about! They promised there would be regulations and each purchaser of acreage would have to build a home at least 2,000 square feet and it had to be a brick home -- NO metal homes!

When you live near a lake, you see all kinds of property.

One person could have a 5,000 square foot mansion on a lawn that looks like a golf course, and the person next door could have a small trailer with broken windows and doors -- a huge wood pile, couch, toilet, rusty car, rusty truck, dogs, cats, chickens and a goat ALL in the knee high weeds and grass that almost covers a sign nailed to a board that says "We Fix Lawnmowers" -- and INSIDE the lovely trailer is a big screen TV that the people watch at night while chain-smoking cigarettes we bought for them with their welfare checks.

Anyway, Jerry and I did not want to live in a place like that. Since we were the FIRST buyers in this 40-acre addition, we asked about all of those things. We specifically said we didn't want to live next to poeple who put up a metal barn, put rooms inside and called it a "house"! Promises were made, but none were kept. We have had a real hard time not being bitter about the "barn people". It isn't their fault, of course, but still -- they live in a metal barn -- and they are our next-door neighbors.

Not only that, we were promised there would be no lots smaller than 5 acres + or - a bit. Our concern there was that someone would buy 5 acres -- chop it up into 50 lots and put trailers on it. The people who sold this "barn house" chopped that part of the land off their 5 acres, so it is about 2 acres, and the original 5 acres is about 3 now.

PLEASE don't think I don't like trailers or mobile homes. We lived in one for years, BUT it was in an area where that was all that was in the addition.

And ALL OF THAT to say, the "barn people" are not moving. Maybe all the other people are moving because they don't like the "barn house" either.

Jackie is at the Beauty Shop having a bath. The back yard here has a different kind of dirt than our other house has. Our other house has a very sandy yellow dirt, and it doesn't stick to Jackie's paws. HERE, we have Oklahoma red clay, and when it gets wet, it sticks to everything it touches. Therefore, I want to keep her inside here so she will be very nice-smelling and shnuggable!