I went down hard yesterday – sick. No warning. Runs, nausea, headache, low fever; kept me in bed and asleep. I opened my eyes to news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. I remember my days of fear, but I never quite bought into one man’s death fixing what’s wrong on the terror scene. I still don’t. I’m sure the illness and the death were not related, but for a bit, my consciousness was pretty focused. Strange.

This morning, I still have a headache.

I went into the garden and collected a beautiful plate of strawberries. The garden is my happy spot. Geoffrey shares it with me. He helps water and pull weeds and pick fruit. He’s a hands in the dirt kind of kid.

We had a trivia contest the other night and one of the questions was what does the botanical term amelographic refer to. None of us knew. I should have known – the study and classification of grapevines. We have two grapevines! Geoffrey said we’ll do better next time. It was his first tournament contest and he was responsible for the FINAL question. Name the 15 legal territories on a RISK game board. He got 11 of them. I was darn proud. Steve nor I had a clue what they were. We didn’t win, but we made a real respectful showing.

Kayla called this morning, she’s going to buy us a fruit and vege box from Angelfood Ministries. That will help. We are now without all benefits – I’m not sure what we will do, but the welfare lines are long and there’s not much available here in Georgia. My other daughter let me know ADP is hiring in Alpharetta, but with gas at $4 a gallon, I’d be working for gas. It feels like I’m making excuses but honestly, I can’t take a $10 an hr job 30 miles from home.

We will keep hanging in…it’s all we can do. Steve’s brother will pay him $15 an hour, one day a week to help him do landscaping work. So far, that’s as close to work as we’ve come.