Lost and Found

I woke up with a very sore shoulder this morning. The guest room mattress is much harder on my joints than the one in our bedroom.

Walter was up soon after me and feeling okay. After having his first cup of tea, he finally capitulated and walked over to the campus to see the registrar about getting a replacement diploma. He looked everywhere he knew to look and didn’t find it. This is very unusual for him (to lose an important document) and he has been very frustrated.

He had to pay $35 to get a replacement diploma, and when he got home and inspected it, he found it to be hilariously inaccurate. All the signatures were wrong, of course, and even his degree was not accurate. Not only did it claim he graduated from “LeTourneau University” when in fact we both graduated from “LeTourneau College,” but the funniest part was the claim that his graduation date was May 8, 2082. Excuse me? He’s a pretty amazing guy, but he can’t have graduated from college in the future.

His choices were to go back and possibly spend another $35 to have the diploma reprinted, if they were even able to produce the necessary retro document, or, of course—to find the original. This led to much tromping around in the attic, where he identified 6 boxes of books and papers. This afternoon I was right beside him stacking blocks as he went through piles of old magazines. And there, in the very bottom of the box—his college diploma! What a relief! What he can’t figure out is why he put it there, when all his other important documents were stored where he could easily access them.

Jasper had a different problem. Yesterday, he spent the day working with a friend to clean up his shed and turn it into a useful building. And during that process, a bee stung him on his finger. When he came home for supper, the finger was sore and swollen. It was so painful that he struggled to sleep last night, and when he came down this morning the whole hand was swollen and painful. He appears to have inherited his father’s sensitivity to bee and wasp stings.

I talked him into taking some ibuprofen (he hates taking any medication) and borrowing a frozen gel hat to bring down the swelling. It did help, but he had to use it intermittently because it made his other fingers too cold. This hampered his efforts to work through his chore list today, because he didn’t have the full use of his hands.

So during the whole Duplo sorting project, I came across some wooden blocks mixed in with the Duplo. I showed you four of them last night. But we actually had two sets of blocks. There were the colored ones of different shapes and sizes, and then we had another set of blocks that were all identical. Both sets were popular with our kids. And the Duplo had some of the plain blocks in there too.

So this morning I asked Jasper to find the box containing the plain wood blocks and he brought it down from the attic. There is no longer any reason for me to keep those blocks. So I set about stacking them so I could count and see how many we have:

The answer is 265. And I have already located a recipient, a young mother I know. I’ve got the blocks carefully packed into a cardboard box and the next time she’s in my neighborhood she can stop and get them.

Once the diploma situation was taken care of, Walter moved on to the next item on the agenda for our work permits—our police reports. We’re both going in tomorrow to get finger printed! And Jasper brought down the two cribs from the attic. Walter will attempt to put them together so we know if they’re fit to pass on to someone.

We had our church dinner tonight, and Robin and Doug didn’t make it, so we sat with some people that Walter knows but I don’t. Which meant that I didn’t talk much. It was an interesting discussion, though.

Joy Spark: Finding that diploma!

Wednesday Word of the Day

brumal: related to winter, wintry. We have had some brumal weather recently, but currently our temperatures are quite mild.