Monthly Archives: May 2015

The other day I spent a few hours in the yard. 

The grass was growing, although sparse rain for the last weeks has not helped.  Prayer for rain in currently in the forecast!  The weeds had also made a stand.  We have tried out a friendly weed killer and fertilizer on the front lawn and it seems to be working.

I love to watch as the leaves push their way out into a full stretch, brightening the landscape with green.  Sparrows and other song birds begin to chirp and sing. 

And the temperature?  Well, we are still trying to figure that one out.  A day or so ago we almost hit freezing once again.  But for the most part I don’t need a jacket.

This is the spring time of the year.  A time of promise and expectation.

With this time comes a heart impulse – to see promise in each situation in which I am found. 

May God grant to all of us a sense of his warming work that melts a winter time’s blanket of disappointment and leads to a summer time’s covering of hope.

Over the years I have been a collector of electronics.

As a teen, I worked with my father on a Marklin train set.  This was a German originated marvel that had intricacies the North American counterparts did not know. 

Then I graduated to house repairs and all that goes along with that.  The switches and receptacles.  Three wire and junction boxes.

By my 40’s I was into computers.  There were hard drives and other drives.  CAT 5 wiring and firewire.  It seems weird that much of this has been replaced or been made obsolete.

And so, today, I go back through those things that I have collected over the past while.  I’ll recycle some, probably throw some out and even try to barter for new electronics.

In the end, the technological age will have seen its “age”, and we’ll have less around the house than when I started. 

And I guess that’s what culling and weeding (such outdated words that used to deal with culling cattle and weeding plants) is all about! 

An interesting overnight. 

And by interesting I mean – not one you want to have happen too often.

In the middle of the night, our furnace quit.  Then, the water heater decides not to work!

Not often that happens.  In fact, I’ve never had that happen.

Thankfully I had a hankering of what the furnace was all about.  There is a pre-fan (OK, that’s layman’s terms) that would start up and then quit.  I had seen this when water had backed up.  Just unscrew the fan and empty it of water.  This time around – no water fell out, but a dead bird did.  Put things back together and it worked (OK, I didn’t put the bird back in).

Then, I took a look at the water heater.  No water was gushing out.  For that I was thankful.  I remembered that there was a coupler that would trip when things got too hot (again, layman’s terms).  I checked and it seemed to have tripped.  Couldn’t remember how to fix it.  Called our plumber and he tried to explain a quick fix over the phone.  Couldn’t quite get it, so he popped by.  In less than ten minutes things were fixed and we have hot water.

I think we just hit a home run, so I’m not looking for a third strike!! 

I married into a Cooper family almost 40 years ago. 

Shortly after being married, we met a whole other group of Coopers.  They were three sisters who all attended the church where my first pastoral charge took place.

Each sister had children, most of them around our age.  A few years after arriving in Kindersley in 1976, the middle sister contracted cancer and passed away.  The sons and daughter were friends and we suffered with them through this time of grieving.

The day before yesterday, the second sister passed away.  She was 95.  Winnie (Cooper) Amos’s funeral will be on Thursday, June 4th at 1:00 pm at the Kindersley Alliance Church.  Although she had not lived here for a number of years, her roots here were deep. 

Her surviving sister is the young one of the family.  I was in to chat with here yesterday, and just enjoyed some laughter and good reminiscences. 

Coopers are hardy folk!  Something in their genes (whatever their genealogy may be) makes them strong. 

I am thankful for my mother-in-law who continues to encourage me!  The whole family is a blessing to me.  And the Kindersley Coopers continue to be an enjoyable part of my life!

Thanks for Coopers!!