A Sick Day With Sabine

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I was really looking forward to today when I went to bed last night.  I had plans.  I had an agenda.  I was going to get things done!  Laundry.  Start Daniel’s quilt.  Write something worth reading on my blog (maybe next time, sorry).   Some of the older orphans were going to come to TASOK (Emily’s school) this weekend and our youth group/parents were invited to come and help out with activities.  I thought “this is great!  I can’t go to the kids this week so God is bringing the kids to me!”  We have a family on our team newly returned from furlough.  They’ve been here almost a week and we haven’t been able to see them yet so I made plans to stay at TASOK after the kids went back to the orphanage, take my family to the pool, and invite our friends to join us for some fun and some catching up time.  Another family is having a get-together tonight that I was looking forward to.  Then I woke up sick.  Bleh.  My tonsils are torturing me.  So my plans are dashed.  I guess in hindsight, it is a good thing I was not able to go to Kimbondo on Friday as originally planned.  I might have been contagious with whatever this is and passed it on to the little ones.  I know what it is like when illness comes to our house and goes through the family one or two of us at a time.  I can’t imagine it on a scale of hundreds of kids.

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The bright side of being sick is that I get to rest.  Staying in bed meant I had some time to read for leisure.  It wasn’t for Bible study or a class or to help a child with school work.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy doing my Bible studies, learning new things, and helping my kids, but leisure reading is something I thoroughly enjoy and seldom do.  I don’t know if  I am really that much busier or if I am just that much older, but if I sit down in the evening and pick up a book I more often than not fall asleep.  Browsing through our Nook library to see if I could find something of interest, I stopped at The Pennycomequicks (love that title!).  It was written in 1896 by Sabine Baring-Gould.  That's him  there in the photo.  In addition to novels he also wrote hymns, folklore, and was a hagiographer.  I had to look that up, so here it is.  A hagiographer is a person who writes about the lives of the saints, particularly the early Christian church.  Neat word.  It would be fun to go up to someone and say that I enjoy hagiographies just to see their response.  We have lots of old and obscure books in the Nook for a couple of reasons.  One: most books written before the 1920’s are in the public domain and therefore FREE copies are easily found on the internet.  Two: I love old books as much as new ones.  I like the words you can find only in books that were written before 1900.  For example, apoplexy, hitherto, remonstrate, pertinacious, and impecunious are wonderful words that no one uses nowadays - unless you are my youngest son.  I recently heard him use the word "shan't."  If you like books from the Romance era (Jane Austin) or the Victorian Era (Bronte sisters) you might enjoy something by Sabine Baring-Gould or Anthony Trollope, two authors I discovered after we bought our Nook and I began to look through the lists of freebies.