Productivity and Coronavirus

I know this stay-at-home time due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on people in many ways, so what I am going to say here certainly is not intended to lessen the difficulties caused by this, but I must say that these past 9 or 10 weeks have proven to be very helpful to Russ and myself for getting some projects done that we never seemed to have time to do when we had our regular schedules of activities.  In that regard, I almost hate to see this come to an end!  And I should warn you that this is a longer-than-usual and more-photos-than-usual post!

Let me see ... just what have we gotten done?

Household jobs ... new door handles on our outside doors

 and new knobs on all our kitchen and bathroom cabinets, PLUS I cleaned all those doors and drawers before we added the knobs.

Then there are all the cards I have made and mailed ... about 70 of them as of this writing.  I have tried new techniques and used up lots of my "stash" of supplies.  That is a good thing!

This next photo should actually have two of these in it ...

I got the manuscript for my book (actually it is mine and Russ' since some of his poetry is in it too).  I had been working on it for quite a while and have been able to finish it up and send it off to the publisher on April 29th, a red-letter day for us!!

The other disk is the slides I have digitized and just completed this morning!  3,107 photos spanning about 70 years!  Oh, my goodness!  I had not counted up the span of years until this very moment and I am stunned that we are old enough to have slides from that long ago!!  Yep, I guess we both were that young at one time!  As we have done those slides, Russ and I have laughed and cried and remembered all the ways God has blessed us with His blessing of peace and joy through the years, even in the hard times.

 Here is a sampling of Russ through the years...

When he was a college student, attending a summer training program with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

That is him, that dot near the top of the antenna he helped rebuild as a missionary with West Indies Mission (now WorldTeam) in Haiti after a devastating hurricane destroyed the other one.  He had worked in Iowa building the antenna parts, then went with the parts to Haiti.

After the antenna was completed, Russ worked as an engineer and disc jockey for the radio station.  One of the programs he did was "slow English" in which he read books and the Bible slowly so people who were learning English could follow along.  That is what he is doing in this photo:

After being in Haiti for about 4 years, he came home to the US and married Joyce, and then along came Anna Marie.  They dedicated her in church in South Carolina.

In the meantime, I was in Lebanon, working with the church in Beirut and surrounding area. 

Here I am pictured with some members of the church I worked in.  My housemate in the 3rd from the left and I am at the far left.

When the civil war in Lebanon forced me out, I went to live in Madaba, Jordan, where I taught a wonderful group of ladies.  I have such fond memories of all those years!

The bottom line is that the past couple of months of self-isolation, albeit challenging, have been most productive and I am thankful for them.