Creating my future, one miracle at a time

I opened a short email to a friend this way, a few days ago:

Remember those Christmas card we mailed today?  Mark was writing some of them last night.  I sat down beside him to open the incoming mail. Nice card, bill, nice card, oops - someone we forgot, nice card, oddly familiar card . . .  I had to read the message twice, and look at the card again, and then notice our signatures to realize I'd just opened one of the ones Mark had just written and sealed.  This is a new kind of crazy for us, but indicative of this time of the year.

Today, I got a new dryer.  I know, big whoop.  And it wasn't even one of those fancy $1300 ones.  Almost the cheapest you could get. 

But.

The one I replaced, because it quit getting hot, was 21 years old.  Older than my oldest child.  If you exclude the antique furniture and stuff I inherited from Grandmother, probably the oldest thing I owned  And we moved that thing from California to Ohio to Alabama.  (They say every time you move furniture or an appliance you age it ten years.)  Good machine.  Kenmore, I think.

While I was at Lowes, I went ahead and bought the stupid dishwasher I've been putting off buying for a year or more. Not the cheapest, but close.  I have a hard time caring about appliances.  The boy at Best Buy wanted to sell me that shiny red, fancy dryer.  I told him all those buttons scared me.  He started telling me all it would do.  So I covered up 3/4 of the dial on the cheap one, and said, "Honey, I'm only going to use this cycle -- ever.  This one (the cheap 4 cycle one) does more than I need a dryer to do!" He sort of wandered off hoping the crazy lady went quietly.