Weather Forecasts

Count Your Blessings - Day Twelve

Have you ever heard of The Children's Blizzard? Here is the dust jacket synopsis from the book of the same name:

January 12, 1888 began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

By Friday morning, January 13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of the children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin is a fascinating true story, heart wrenching, and heart warming. I highly recommend it.

We are so blessed to have high tech weather forecasting, and rapid dissemination of those forecasts through radio, television, internet, even phones. Yesterday a violent storm passed through our area. We were under a tornado watch in our town, and just north of us where our daughter was working a tornado warning. I'm grateful for the miracles of technology that keep us safe. Iowa is the only place I've ever lived where the weather has the ability to make me feel nervous.

Photo taken earlier this year (see the date!) Tornado season is April through November

Lessons I Learned Too Late to Do Me Any Good, But Might Help My Children

Some time ago I began a list of lessons I wish I had learned and understood thirty or even forty years ago. I love my parents and am grateful they taught me the gospel, but there are some other things that I wish they'd taught me too. For the benefit of my adult children who are currently looking for companions here is my list, to date, of those lessons. (Not in any order other than as I thought of them and recorded them in my journal over the past few years.)

1. Work together at home. For example: when you finish a meal together, get up and clean up together; as you make this a family habit there won't be arguments about whose "turn" it is. If you eat, you help clean up and many hands make light work.

2. If you want your spouse to help with anything, express your expectations clearly, then don't criticize their methods. Praise the outcome and express gratitude.

3. Debt destroys your future--avoid it like the plague. Sacrifice now to be free later.

4. Experiences are more important than things; and some things are more important than others.

5. If you're a good listener, learn to be a talker; If you're a talker, learn to be a listener.

6. It takes faith, not time or money, to bear and rear children.

7. The cost of breaking the law of chastity is too high to be worth any momentary pleasure.

8. We reap what we sow. In everything.

9. Practice healthy habits from the beginning; help each other to stay slim, trim and vigorous from the start. Reward each other with service, notes, a flower, etc. rather than with unhealthy and fattening treats. Be active and work or play together rather than sitting and watching together.

10. Marry someone who inspires and encourages your best self, one who makes keeping your covenants and the commandments easier, not harder.

11. Don't marry someone who has an addiction of any kind, because often one leads to another.
   a. Word of Wisdom, including or maybe I should say especially caffeine
   b. Technology
   c.  Debt
   d.  Pornography
   e.  Cars (or other idols)
   f.  Sports
   g. Entertainment (TV)

12. Marry someone whose faith and faithfulness to it are the same as yours.

How can you learn these things about a potential spouse? Spend lots of time together in non-entertainment venues such as church or community service, work projects, family gatherings, and such. Marriage is not one long entertaining date; it is daily life with all the drudgery and non-exciting work that goes with it. You can talk about these things, but I've also learned that talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. I guess that is number 13.

A Day of Miracles

Not all miracles have to do with healing the sick, and such. I don't ever take for granted the miracles of technology that I use everyday. Our daughter Noble is in Korea and through the miracle of Skype we can talk to her over a video connection in real time! It is incredible. Saturday night (here) we Skyped and she shared pictures of her field trip to Kyeongbuk Palace in Seoul the day before (there). This time difference thing is amazing too, I call her Future Girl because she is living 14 hours ahead of us.

I don't understand how it all works, and I don't have to. I'm just grateful everyday for all the wonders and miracles of technology we enjoy.