Wednesday we had over an inch of rain. A record. I never set a foot outside. There is plenty to do inside this small space and I wonder when I get back in seriousness on “Soloman”. I am reading two books simultaneously while my somanieth attempt at recording my slide show DVD is burning away. The print book I have been lent by Jack Eddy “A Higher Call” is the true story of Franz Stigler a Bavarian 2nd WW fighter pilot and Charlie Brown a U.S. Air Force bomber pilot. They meet in the German sky in December 1943. Brown is trying to limp his flak damaged bomber back, Stigler pulls up next to Brown and, instead of finishing the job, he salutes and points the way to neutral Sweden. Brown searches and finds Stigler after the war in British Columbia. I highly recommend reading this story for it’s historical value and the ability to recognize the very fine line that separates foe from friend, hatred from compassion. And the electronic version of “First in Vietnam….” which I described in an earlier blog. An other senseless war. This is not a book that I would recommend for its literary value. But for me personally it fills in a lot of the gaps in my apparent absence of what was going on while I spent a year and a half in this helicopter company in Vietnam.
As of this morning I finally have a DVD, that can be played on a TV video player, of the slide shows made up of the 51 country 9 year voyage. It was not easy. When I replaced my 2011 Windows-7 laptop with a Windows-8 laptop I had to repurchase MS Office and Adobe Photoshop because they no longer worked on the new software. And in order to edit the slide shows I had to start practically from scratch. Then when you are ready to burn the slide show video to a DVD it tells you that it will only copy to a CD-R….And if you want to burn DVD’s you need to buy Photoshop Premier Elements 13. And I just installed Elements 12 in May….. In windows-7 I could burn my video’s through MS-MovieMaker and MS WindowMaker. But, surprise-surprise, WindowMaker no longer functions in Windows-8 and MS has no fix for this. I had to down load two more free soft-wares, to finally get done with this project. Praise the Lord for technology.
A week ago today, I took the bus into Tacoma to get new fittings for the fuel lines on the boat engine and attended a memorial service at the Tacoma Yacht Club for our friend Duane Saasen. Lisa, daughter #1, picked me up and took me to my old Tacoma parish church, St. Patrick, where I met Rose Marie, daughter #2. We attended a charismatic healing service. Rose Marie was recently diagnosed with Lupus and I had high hopes that she might benefit from the special powers God is giving us in these meetings. I have a health issue as well I’d like to have healed. A long lingering digestive problem. The special powers were obviously happening to many of the supplicants. My main benefit was that I got to sing a marathon of my favorite church songs while all this was going
on.