There are times in my life where I have been asked to do something or been confronted with a situation or have stood at the crossroads of a large decision and I’ve wondered if God is nudging me one direction or another. And there have been times where something has happened and I wonder if that was time and chance or if it was God stepping in.

Sometimes I wonder.
Sometimes I don’t.

I don’t wonder if God sent me my eldest son. He absolutely did. There were years of infertility, adoption, and then crazy super fertility. I don’t question this. He had a plan for my family. I hug them everyday with thanksgiving. Even if I was older than dirt when I got started.

I don’t wonder if my dad’s alive today by accident. Last Thursday, God stepped in. You can argue if you want to, but it won’t do you any good.

I was putting my kids in bed last Thursday night. They were mostly settled and reading upstairs when my phone rang. It was my mom calling. I almost picked up the phone in a typically obnoxious way to tell her that I had a bone to pick with her over the 4 year old Girl Scout cookies my parents had tried to pawn off on me that very day. I know I shouldn’t have eaten one. Trust me. I paid for it with the 36 hour taste of motor oil in my mouth. If you’ve ever wondered about the shelf life of a Girl Scout cookie then you should call me. Don’t keep those bad boys too long.

Anyway, I didn’t pick up the phone and pick the bone with her that I’m picking right now. I just said “Hello?” At that point she told me that my dad had been in a serious car accident. The breath I sucked in that moment took too long to let out and it took too long for her to tell me he was okay. But he was indeed okay. And that’s the part of the story worth telling.

His words are better than mine. He was there. He was saved in a very mighty way that night.
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“Oh LORD, get me through this one……”
> This will be a different kind of story this week, but the story must be told. I was following a semi truck, driving my little Mazda Miata, heading North on I-75 at about 65 mph on Thursday night. The truck braked suddenly, so I moved to the left lane to avoid his problem. He lurched to the left, started to jack-knife and almost toppled right into me. With nowhere to go, I lost control, shot under him, under the semi trailer, coming out the other side, slid to the right, across the other lanes, down an embankment and came to a stop in a ditch. As I was approaching the semi, about to crash into him, I must have bent down…and I called out to the Lord for help. The impact smashed the windshield throwing glass everywhere; I later found glass in my shoes. As the car came to a stop, it was eerily quiet…and dark. I was alone, the truck didn’t stop and no one else could be seen. Then I looked ahead about 150 yards where a lone car had pulled over. I got out of my car, could walk, in fact, I didn’t have a scratch on me. I had just had a major wreck, drove under a semi, and didn’t even have a scratch. Now you are seeing why this story must be told. I called out to the Lord for HELP!…..and got it in a dramatic way.

I walked up to the stopped car where a woman and her 9-year-old daughter were standing, looking at me as though I were a ghost. She was on the phone with 911; I told her not to send an ambulance. When off the phone, she told me that she saw the whole thing, that the semi almost rolled, apparently trying to avoid something ahead. I told her that I must have ducked, and began praying as I crashed into the truck. She said, “God is so good!” What kind of lesson that must have been for that 9-year-old daughter. And what a lesson to me….

Deputies came, followed by a trooper and a fire truck. Everyone was amazed that I was alive. I was more amazed because I had just seen and felt the impact with the underside of the semi; a major crash. The car was towed; might be totalled. The trooper took me home and I was alive and
well.

Romans 8:28 says “All things work together for good for those that love God…”

Psalm 119:65 “You have dealt well with your servant, O Lord, according to Your word. Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe your commandments. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word. You are good, and do good….”
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I reflected that night on so many things. I thought about how close we came to having a funeral at Thanksgiving. I thought about the fact that I would have been the last one to have seen my dad since he brought my son home from school that day. I thought about the fact that I would have forever felt guilty for asking him to drive my son home if he’d been killed while running errands AFTER helping me. Irrational though that may be, I still would have struggled with that.

How does a car get hit by a semi, go UNDER that semi and out the other side, land in a ditch, and get completely totaled without one bruise, one scratch getting on the person driving?

That’s God.
I am thankful.

I owe a few people a pig story. I said I was going to write that up before the new year. Here it is, only January 6, and already I am a liar.

New Year’s Resolution: Stop lying so much.

It’s good to have goals.

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And here it is: What happened with the pig.

Many of you know that I moved to the boondocks about 6 months ago. After adjusting to the darkness, the strange crashes in the night, and the possibility of amphibians showing up in the nooks and crannies of your car at any given moment, I learned to embrace this new life. I found the best possible pest control, learned to break the zero turn mower just by walking past it, and haven’t killed the garden.  We got chickens, lost some chickens due to a hawk that I hate with a white-hot passion, and then got more chickens. We are up to 13 now. Only 3 are layers. The others are poopers and stinkers. We hope they’ll lay when the manner of hens comes upon them.

I guess all this chicken business, and the fact that people can’t understand why in the world we’d move out here, makes people think we are running a petting zoo. So we get contacted for odd things.

I received an email early in December with the subject line “Weird request.” If this had been from an unknown source, it would have given me pause. But from the writer, it seemed perfectly reasonable. Here was our initial exchange:

Hi Missy,

Hope all is going well for you and your family. I have a weird request for our school and thought maybe you could help or one of your country neighbors. We are doing a fundraiser at the school to buy livestock for impoverished communities. As an incentive, the principal has agreed to kiss a pig on the morning show. One problem…we need a pig!! Any chance you guys have a pig or you have a neighbor who does???? Let me know.

I responded with the following (baloney edited out…):

Well, hello there! i don’t have pigs, but i do have a friend with a mini pig named Daisy. I will check with her. What is the date for this? We are doing well, thanks!

Blah, blah, blah. More baloney. More texting back and forth with the pig owner…let’s call her Fribby…and then I sent this final email about the pig.

Good morning! What time is the morning show? Will 8ish work? The pig is harness-trained and Fribby can walk in with it. It’s a small(ish) black pig. Pretty cute, but I’m not sure I’d want to kiss it. Anyway, let me know if this is okay. I’ll probably meet her there, to introduce everyone and to entertain myself.

Wow. Where’ve I been lately? Oh, who’m I kidding? Nobody cares.

Life just gets busy. I never catch up on laundry. Never. This aggravates me to no end, too, because I was one of those know-it-all 20somethings who used to utter things in my mind like, “Stupid people. Why are they so domestically handicapped that they can’t catch up on laundry? Poor little hobos.”

I probably never did think, “poor little hobos” in my head, but you get the idea. I’ve turned into those people. That’s how it works. You are an authority on everything until you get to do it yourself. Then suddenly you are just as dumb, or dumber, as everyone else. Maybe not Baron Wetty. She has a pretty good laundry system going, but she doesn’t live with my boys, either. I will lean on that as my excuse.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, or which year of taxes I am working on for an October 15 deadline. And it doesn’t matter if you are normal and do your taxes in April (or January like the Informinator). And it further doesn’t matter if you are a reject like me and do your taxes in October and have done them already. I don’t care.

I really do care. Can you hear the desperation in my tone?

Well, anyway. All that matters is that I’m delaying a torture chamber in TurboTax and sitting here on WordPress. And I’m going to tell you a story about the spider I killed today.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon following a good morning at church. The TV was off and the kids were all playing downstairs and nearby. I was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher. I rounded the corner into the dining room, to return something to one of the kids when I saw it.

There it was. The spider I’ve been waiting to see. The one I’ve been dreading. The one that haunts my dreams at night and that makes boys cry in the corners. It was a large, brown, spider–positioned perfectly in the doorway between the family room and the dining room. There was no getting over it without risk of sending it crawling away into a place where I’d never find it. It was almost big enough to go under it, but I’m not dumb enough to entertain that thought for long.

This spider was about the size of a silver dollar. Not too fat. Not overly hairy. But big.  I froze. I do that when I see something I have to catch or kill. I freeze and its life passes before my eyes in pictures of execution methods and animal reactions. I picture the many different options I have and what could conceivably happen as I do this. For instance, if a roach is on the ceiling, you simply MUST go through this exercise to ensure that you will not have a still-living roach in your hair after a botched kill attempt. In that situation, failure is not an option. That’s why I go with the flat, heavy paperback book and the technique of a fancy waiter. Smack, smack. It’s done.

So as I froze there today, considering the life of this spider, I decided to call in the troops and go with spider spray. I would do a combination spider spray, paper towel approach. SPRAAAAAAY and smash. Done.

But the spider spray was upstairs in the kids’ bathroom and I’ve already told you I wasn’t going to step over that thing.

“Mama’s Boy?” I called out for him tentatively. He was playing on the stairs. I think he does this because it’s the only place in the house with carpet. The boy likes his carpet.

“Yes?” He answered.

“Run upstairs quickly and get me the can of spider killer in your bathroom.”

“What for?” He perked up. “What is it?”

“Just go get the spray and then we’ll talk,” I urged. He ran off. It seemed like a million years before he got back. As he was running around upstairs, I backed slowly into the kitchen to grab a paper towel for Phase 2 of Operation ArachniKill. When the boy returned, he saw the spider and said, “Whoa.”

I know. Right?

“Throw me the can carefully,” I instructed. “Toss it to me underhanded.”

“What?” He was flabberghasted. “I can’t do that!” He said. We don’t play baseball around here. Clearly it was not a good plan to start out throwing cans of spider killer around. OK. New plan.

“OK. OK. Climb up on the piano bench and hand it to me through the door.” At this point, Beloved came around the corner on Mama’s Boy’s side of the spider and wanted to know what was going on.

“STOP!” I hollered. “Big, HUGE spider. Don’t take another step!!” She stopped and her eyes got large.  Mama’s Boy was perched precariously on the piano and was reaching the can across the threshold to me.

I took the can, aimed it, and sprayed…paper towels ready.

FIZZZZZZZ.

I doused that spider good. I expected it to go crazy. That’s what they do. They hate the stuff, but it paralyzes them on a short journey to DEATH.

There was no movement. No reaction. No death. No life. Nothing.

I sprayed again, totally shocked that nothing was happening.  Then I inched forward to look. Then I nudged it with my paper towel.

The kids were now laughing.

“Mama, it’s fake. It came out of the Halloween box.”

And so it had.

I crumpled it up in the paper towel I had prepared for it and threw it away, just the same as I would have if it had been real and dead.

That’s what you get, you stupid plastic spider.

Now who’s the real loser?

(It’s still me, isn’t it?)

I promised a lighter post. Though I still feel like I could go on and on about heavy things, I’m going to tell you a little about the world of technology as it relates to me.

I have a smart phone. It is very smart. It is so smart that I almost don’t need the Informinator anymore. However, I still do need her for obscure protocols and regional trivia that even my smart phone doesn’t know.

My phone is a lot less blunt than the Informinator. It has never chastised me for my poor behavior or called me out for…oh, everything.  I need to get a set of slightly more rebellious friends so that I can be the cream of the crop and not the ear the farmer thows away after a spanking. Do farmers do that? Maybe not. We are still adjusting to life in the country.

Whatever.

When I first got my smart phone, thus breaking my verbal contract with the Informinator to remain smartphone-less until February 12, 2013, I was convinced the purpose of the phone was to make me smarter. That was supposed to be the smart part of the whole deal. Three months later, I know the truth. It is a truth of an entirely different nature. The smart phone does not make you smarter. It is simply there to point out how dumb you really are. It exists for two basic reasons:

(1)    To provide information in a lightning fast manner to dumb people.

(2)    To mock the person using it.

It doesn’t make me smarter. It points out how dumb I really am. And it laughs at me as it does so.

For instance, recently my phone—I shall call her Gladys—offered me a better way to type on the clunky little touch screen keyboard. This offer came to me in a kindly worded, “Would you like to try Swype?” kind of way. It was friendly, warm, touching. So I thought it over. Surely swype was the next best thing to superpowers if it is offering it to me in such a lovely way. So I said yes. Sure. I’ll try your way of typing. For those who don’t have such a technology, this consists of swiping your fingers from key to key instead of plunking.  My plunking is hamfisted and awkward and presents all sorts of misspellings in more than one language. Surely this new Swype is my ticket out of plunking, I said to myself. Let’s do it. This is gonna be awesome.

For awhile, it was.  And then, recently, something happened. Call it a cruel trick. A bait and switch. I’m not sure how to explain it. But somewhere in the last week, Gladys has turned on me. I blame the Informinator.

Gladys (that’s my phone again…some of you have short attention spans) likes to guess the words I’m trying to say while texting. Often, she is right. And I’ve grown accustomed to that first guess being correct. I guess you could say I’ve gotten a little lazy in allowing her to guess my thought without my proofreading over her shoulder.

So this week, I was texting back and forth with my mother in law, who was on the west coast at the time.  I was three hours ahead of her and it was after 11 my time, so I was ready to call it a night. So, to close out this conversation, I attempted to announce that I was going to bed. And here is exactly how that conversation went.

“I am going to breed more. Goodnight to you west coasters.”  And I put my phone away, happy to have closed out the conversation amicably.

Then Gladys beeped again. Another text. Hmm.

“GOING TO BREED MORE?” It said. This was still my mother in law. My eyes got large as I reread my previous message. There it was in blinky little letters. Going to breed more. Goodnight to you west coasters. Is that what you kids are calling it these days?

No no no no no no no no. Not going to breed more. Going to BED NOW.  Not going to breed at all, I said. Not even a little bit. No breeding.

That’s what u said, she typed.

Why does “breed” EVER come up in predictive texting? People with smart phone do not discuss breeding via text. I would argue that this has never come up in a texting context.

The next day—a mere 12 hours later—I was texting a friend about some things that were on her mind. We weren’t discussing details, but it was obvious to me that the situations could use a prayer or two.

“I’m sorry you’ve had some heavy stuff to deal with,” I typed on my super smart phone. “I will potty for you.”

And then I sat back in my fluffy brown chair and turned on the TV. I figured that conversation was over. My phone beeped again.

“Will you really? Will you potty for me?” She asked. I furrowed my brow, read my previous message. Yep. I had offered to potty about it.

“That’s probably the kindest gesture I’ve ever gotten” she said.

And I have laughed really hard as I cursed Gladys for her evil antics.  Since then, she has convinced me to begin playing a word game that I cannot win.  I’m an English major. I can’t beat anyone at this game.  So I thought if I let Gladys match me up with a similar opponent –a stranger of similar wordsmith skills–I would have a shot at winning. She’s a smart phone. She knows my skills and game scores.

So she found me a match.
Even Bugger39 beat me.
Bad.

I guess they have to market them as smart phones. If they called them Vindictive Phones, nobody would buy them. I just call her Gladys and I’m not letting her take dictation anymore. I’m taking back my life.

I’m Missy Snapp and I approve this message.

There are three people right now that I can think of who should have their own blogs. I will approach you all privately, only to be rejected. The Informinator is one that I will just mention publicly. There is so much I could say about her. It would never end. If I am lost and need an address or direction orientation, I call her first. If I were in jail or in surgery or trapped under something heavy, I’d call her first. Somehow, she’d know what to do.

She doesn’t have a smart phone and this is now a huge point of contention between us. Up until 2 months ago, we had a pact to stick together on the phone thing. We said we’d get smart phones together in February of 2013. But then my Dumb Phone died and my husband had a smart phone sitting unused at his office. I don’t think the Informinator is over this betrayal even now. Weeks have passed. She still won’t make eye contact with me. Maybe that’s because I’m usually sweaty when she sees me, but I think it’s the smart phone issue. I tried to console her. I said, “Informinator, if you had a smart phone, you’d be SOOOO smart that you’d want different friends. We’d all be too dumb for you. Think of it as a way to keep your relationships strong.” She just gave me the stink eye and kept on walking.

At any rate, since she doesn’t have the blog I try to get her to have, she contributes to mine by way of smartness and wry comments. If you ever read the comments section, then you’ve seen her little nuggets. The most recent one was this:

The Informinator says:

This news story made me laugh. For the sake of one bear and a freaked out traveler, I probably shouldn’t laugh. But I did. Now you know what kind of a person I really am.

Man Swerves to Miss Moose and Hits Bear

(Newser) – An unlucky Norwegian man driving on a country road at night swerved around a moose in the road only to hit an even unluckier bear. Wildlife officials say the bear, one of only around 150 in the country, was injured in the crash, Reuters reports. They have found traces of blood indicating internal injuries and are trying to track the wounded animal. The car was damaged in the collision but the driver—and the moose—were unharmed.

What are the odds of you swerving to avoid a moose only to hit one of the 150 bears in the entire country?

That sounds like something I’d do.
If only I were brave enough to drive in the Norwegian mountains.
Or rich enough to fly across the pond.

Today I sprained my ankle. I was playing. In Colorado.

There is a story to be told.

Before I tell it, I am inviting you to guess what I was doing/playing when I incurred the injury.

Give it your best shot in the comments field. If you get it right, I’ll buy you a Slurpee.

…the mice take freaky shots.

Actually, there’s only one mouse.

And we all know who he is.

No one can contain him. No agency will take him. No books describe him. But he has a really nice uvula. Is that how you spell that? Given my recent struggles with “coop,” I do have to wonder…