Our Weekend In The Rearview Mirror 5/27/19

The resting trend that began Thursday evening continued into Friday morning until lunch, then Kelly Jo and I hit the ground running between visits for salsa and more salsa. KJ disposed of a vast accumulation of cardboard and I mowed the grass at the ranch. Each time I mow, I am more and more thankful that my Dad takes care of this task the majority of the time.

Saturday was reserved for the graduation celebration of my brother's son Jonas. He graduated Sunday, but we gathered early on Saturday for an all day affair. Tommy and Holly laid out a big spread and I would say a few hundred people were there to enjoy it. Congratulations, Jonas!

Jonas has studied hard and done well all through school. He is enrolled in college to study engineering in the fall.

Saturday evening Kelly Jo went to the laundry and I moseyed over to the Dodds Fellowship hall for Pastor Kelly Rogers son's graduation party for a few minutes. The only truly productive thing I did was used my Dad's truck to pull the trailer out of the barn and get it in position to easily hook to the bus on Sunday. Kelly and I finished that just as the rains came for the evening.

Sunday we went to our home church on Sunday morning. We had a wonderful service and it was great to be home.

When church was over, we dropped Odie at her house to prepare to roll and then we began the same preparations with the bus, the tent trailer, the car and the barn. We pulled out about 2:00. This was the view from Odie's front door when I walked over to make sure it was locked.

We drove 233 miles before we gave up and pulled into a rest area in Illinois. This is the first trip with the tent trailer since December and I wanted to get some miles behind me and determine if there were any problems with it. I only had one small problem.

When I stopped, I noticed the little cap was missing from the centerpiece of the front left wheel. On closer inspection, it was knocked off by the dust cover on the hub. I just had that dust cover off, so that was a surprise. 

I had to jack up the trailer at the rest area and remove the tire to get the dust cover back on. With Kelly Jo's expert supervision, the job was completed in a few minutes.

There is a possibility that I did not get it back on correctly last week OR that I bent it while taking it off and it will not stay on. I will watch it closely today while we travel. I think I may have a spare.

That is the whole reason I left a day early. We have some built in time for delays. I have learned from experience to allow a little extra time.

That wraps up the weekend. Thank you for reading.

Davy

Our View Out The Front Window 5/26/19

This has been our view out the front window this week. We are parked parallel to the barn on the Lazy OD Ranch.

Here are the links to our posts from this last week.

Odie's Saturday Evening Post

A Worthwhile Week

A Blind Nut Finally Gets a Squirrel

Vintage View Vednesday

Newsletter

Our Weekend In The Rearview Mirror

We always appreciate you stopping in to read Mile Markers. Have a great Sunday!

Davy

Preparations, Celebrations, Memorial Day and Birthdays

Hey Friends,

This is Odie reporting in from Ohio. We are home to pick up the tent trailer and prepare for a busy tent revival season. Our tent revivals start in a few weeks. Dad is busy trying to prepare the trailer to be pulled many miles and also loading the equipment we will need. We have several towns on our tent revival schedule for this year and we would love to have you join us in under the Gospel Tent. Please check our schedule page to find our upcoming dates. 

Graduation Celebration 

This is an exciting day for the Boggs clan. We are taking a few hours to celebrate high school graduation of my cousin Jonas. My Aunt Holly asked us three years ago to be home for this special day. The time has arrived and I am glad to be here today!

Memorial Day

Monday is Memorial Day. We have had lots of close family and friends that now live in Heaven. Our human hearts ache for the loss of these dear people! Many of them I think of and miss them nearly every day. I long for the grand reunion day in Heaven, that day is going to be incredible. I look forward to no more goodbyes!

My Sister 

One very important person that I long to meet in Heaven is my little sister, Ali Elizabeth. I was just 18 months old when she joined our family. Sadly God only allowed us to keep her mere hours on earth, but she holds a permanent place in my heart. Her short life here was filled with struggles and God chose to heal her by Heaven. I look forward to seeing her whole in Heaven very soon. 

I wish that we could have spent a lifetime together making memories. I am missing her this week a little more than usual. Ali’s birthday was this week and she would have been 32. I think of my “Ali Beth” often and imagine what life would have been like with her by my side. We share one little thing together and that is our initials, A. E. B. My name is Andrea Eve Boggs and hers is Ali Elizabeth Boggs. I am grateful that I was blessed with a special little sister.

Papaw Eugene Boggs 

Happy birthday on Tuesday to my Papaw Eugene. Papaw, I love you so much! You are awesome and I am proud to proclaim to the world that I am a Papaw’s girl! I hope you have a fantastic birthday with lots of ice cream!!

Thanks, Papaw, for working so hard behind the scenes at home for us. It is a huge blessing to our family and our ministry! I thank God for you and pray that He blesses you with health and strength.

Thanks for stopping by to visit with me today. I hope you have a fabulous holiday weekend.

Odie

A Worthwhile Week

Well, what does an evangelist do that ends up with 2-3 extra days on his hands because of revival abandoned because of dangerous weather? Ideally, the answer to that question would be to hide somewhere with good weather and catch up on bookwork, study and rest. Not this time. We rushed home and spent three days working on projects I had over-optimistically thought we could get in one day when I set the schedule.

Therefore, thank God for a couple of extra days!

As I told you before, we were gone from Claremore by 10:30 Sunday night. Shortly after 1:30 AM we stopped at the big rest area near Conway, Missouri for a few hours sleep. We had driven 201 miles.

We rolled Monday morning and kept rolling all day long. Our only stop beside bathroom breaks was a fuel stop in Sullivan, Missouri at Flying J. 

We did not necessarily need fuel, but there is no sense buying any more diesel than I have to in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The fuel taxes in those three states are horrendous and Ohio is going up even more. Ugh!

9 hours and 11 minutes after we left the rest area Monday morning, we were getting parked next to the bar on the Lazy OD Ranch. We drove 563 miles making the total from Westside Church 764 miles.

There was no way I was going to make it for salsa after all of that, but we did find our way down there Tuesday for lunch.

I pulled out this $5 to put on the bill and noticed this, a stamp that says Return To: and then gives an address in OKC. I wonder how that works out? Is it legal to stamp US currency?

We had quite a bit of shuffling to do of sound equipment and other assorted tent revival paraphernalia and we stayed busy on that most of Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday. I also serviced the Honda generator we use for tent revival.

I do not think I have mentioned changing the oil in the Honda generator. It is so easy. Most generators or lawn mowers or other small engines are a hassle to do an oil change. This is easy to get to, the oil drains with no mess and it is easy to fill.

The hardest part was finding Honda brand oil. None of the Honda equipment dealers in our area carry it. I ordered two quarts from Amazon at a reasonable price and it was delivered the next day. You can not beat that.

A bunch of the sound stuff went into the bus, so I shuffled all of that into the bays before the rains came Wednesday afternoon. Now everything is loaded into the tent trailer and ready to go.

Our next two revivals in Iowa and Kansas are not tent revivals, but the next in Colorado Springs is tent revival so the trailer must go with us.

I tackled another small project that feels so big. I have had a Craftsman socket set for well over 20 years. It is a fine set and has lasted and functioned great. I have had one complaint from the beginning. The carrying case is and always has been awful. The sockets would never stay in place. I have put foam inside, cardboard inside and everything else I can think of.

75% of the time I have opened it up to get out a socket, I found most of them in a pile in the bottom. I would love to have a dollar for every time I have put them back in place. Double Ugh!

Amazon Prime is your friend. I counted all the 1/4", 3/8" and 1/2" drive sockets and ordered these aluminum socket organizers and they arrived Wednesday. One of them did not make the picture below, but this is how it turned out. 

All these fit in a toolbox drawer with the rachets. It was one small step for a man and a giant leap for my sanity.

More salsa of course.

While I was working on sockets, sound, tent trailer, generator and bus, Kelly Jo was hard at work putting our life back together. From the day we started building the house until now, the barn has been abused. It has served as a catch-all and we were throwing things at a high rate of speed for the last two years.

The rest of the barn will take time, but the two most important were the front corners. One corner has my workbench and the other corner is my took crib. Both of them were piled high with boxes of tools, building materials, packaging, trash and assorted leftover construction stuff.

Now they are a thing of beauty to behold!

Do you possess magical powers, Kelly Jo? Wow! What a woman!

For all her hard work, I took her for a nice relaxing meal Thursday evening. I know this is hard to believe, but the nice relaxing meal did not include salsa. What is up with that?

That brings our week up to Friday. Thank you for joining us today.

Davy

The Blind Nut Finally Gets A Squirrel

Have you ever hear the idiom "Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while"? The expression means that even if people are ineffective or limited in some way, they can still stumble onto success from time to time.

I butchered that expression once from the pulpit. I was introducing a preacher that was always telling us that he could not preach and that he would not be very interesting. I said, "I know Bro. (Insert name here) is going to tell us that he can not preach, but even a blind nut gets a squirrel once in a while." I did not even catch that I had transposed the nut and the squirrel. 😀

To this day, no one remembers what he preached, but they remember me tripping over my idioms and freefalling face first into my catchy phrase.

To prove the saying true, and you can choose which one, even with all of my stumbling and bumbling, I definitely made a correct decision this past weekend.

Since we were closing revival Sunday at Claremore, we were committed to preaching Monday and Tuesday and possibly Wednesday for Pastor Jason Fellers in Weir, Kansas. We were looking forward to being with our friends in Weir.

Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center raised the severe weather threat level to its second highest level for Monday. They were very confident of severe weather affecting Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas that would include hail, heavy rain, flooding, high winds and tornadoes.

I sent the link to Bro. Fellers and told him I was considering fleeing the wrath to come and he gave me permission to do so. By Sunday night, the forecast was shaping up to be correct and some of the Claremore folks were getting alerts on their phones. We decided to saturate Oklahoma and Kansas with our absence.

By 10:30 PM Sunday night we were gone from Claremore and driving northeast. It turned out that I was right. Although the church in Weir did not receive any damage, the little town of Weir took at least a glancing blow from a tornado. That is way too close for comfort!

It was a horrible afternoon, evening and night for many thousands of people in the southern and central plains. We were completely correct in missing that party. By the time the bad weather descended in northeast Oklahoma and southeast Kansas I was hundreds of miles away sweeping across beautiful Indiana with sunny skies above.

Yep, even a blind nut gets a squirrel once in a while. Picture proof below.

Wednesday night there was another swarm of tornadoes in the same area and lots and lots of flooding. I have not heard this morning if there was any damage in Claremore or Weir from all of that. We are very thankful to have made the decision to vacate. That's why God put wheels on buses! Thank you for reading.

Davy

These pictures are from Weir, Kansas Monday evening.