8/6/81DFO 1215

1. I USED TO HAVE A DOG LIKE LASSIE WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE! He was so big he stood taller than I did‚ well almost. I guess I must have been a little younger, about four. He & I were about the same height, a great big shepherd dog in Miami. He was a big shaggy collie with long hair, but it was too hot down there for him in the Tropics. He got heartworm.

2. HE GOT SICK & WE TOOK HIM TO A VETERINARY & they tried to treat him but it was too late, he'd gotten these worms & he died. (Davida: He had worms inside of him?) Yes, real bad. That's why you should never sit down on the dirty ground. You've got to even watch out about sitting in the sand.

3. WE USED TO GET RINGWORMS FROM SITTING ON THE SAND ON THE BEACH. They're pretty common in the States. I had one right on my cheek when I was in high school once. The worst we had was when we got'm at the beach‚ somehow or another there was a whole scourge of'm on Miami Beach & from sitting in the sand you got'm all down below. I had about a half-a-dozen & they just nearly drove me wild, they itched so!

4. BUT THIS POOR DOG, OF ALL THE HORRIBLE THINGS! The vet wanted to show us what it did to the dog so he preserved the heart in a big glass jar in alcohol. And I was a little kid about her size & he showed us this heart completely full of these long worms. It looked like the heart was just stuffed with spaghetti! I think that's one of the worst things anybody ever did to a little child.

5. THAT'S ONE PROBLEM WITH TROPICAL CLIMATES. When we kids first went to Miami, it's so nice & warm we wanted to go barefoot like we had up in the North on the farms & stuff. You know, it was great fun with the kids in those days that they wanted to go barefooted & run around like the farmer boys. It was a nice warm tropical climate so we ran around in the dirt barefooted in a perfectly nice section of town, beautiful home‚ but we were playing around in the dirt, & first thing you know our legs were covered with these huge sores from our ankles clear up to our knees & all over our feet & everything!

6. MY MOTHER WONDERED WHAT IN THE WORLD HAPPENED TO US! All of a sudden we broke out in these big sores! So she took us to the doctor & he said‚ "They've been running around in the dirt barefooted, haven't they?" She said, "Why yes, but it was a nice clean place, it wasn't any pigpen or chickenyard or anything." He said, "Well, you can't do that down here‚ this is tropical & it's very warm, hot." She said, "I thought it was so nice & warm it would be OK."

7. HE SAID, "WELL, YOU KNOW WHY YOU CAME DOWN HERE, YOU LIKE IT NICE & WARM, THE GERMS LIKE IT TOO!"—Ha! He said, "I could give you all kinds of medicine, but really the best cure in the World is to take'm over to the beach & let'm stay in the salt water as long as possible for a couple of hours every afternoon." Of course we loved that, so we went to the beach. (Sara: What did he call them?) Florida sores. (Sara: Was it like chiggers?) They were open sores, horrible things! Some kind of parasite that loves the Tropics.

8. THAT'S ONE THING ABOUT THE TROPICS‚ IT'S GOT MORE KINDS OF BUGS & PARASITES! (Alf: They all like it there too.) That's what he said. He said, "You came down here where it's warm & you like it, they like it too!" But those things just cleared up in just a few days, I think about a week, just from going swimming in the salt water at the ocean every afternoon. It apparently killed them. We were really a mess! And then, of course‚ they have a lot of poison ivy there too.

9. THIS IS THE SIDE OF THE TROPICAL PARADISE ISLAND I DIDN'T TELL YOU BEFORE, DAVID! There are other things they have down there besides those delicious Eden's fruits & tropical fruits & things. The mosquitoes would come down on us in clouds! The way Maria reacted to them there in both Tenerife & Portugal & even in Malta & also in Zo, she'd get these huge blisters! They were terrible! They got almost all infected & she even had a fever from it!

10. I THINK THOSE MOSQUITOES MUST HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE AFRICANS THAT CAME TO PORTUGAL FROM AFRICA‚ because she never reacted so violently to mosquito bites anywhere as she did there. They were pretty bad in Zo & when she got them in Tenerife they were pretty bad, but nothing like they were in Portugal. I mean, those things were venomous there. And you got the scabies! You got these little bugs that raised little scabs all over you & they itched like fire!

11. I'LL TELL YOU A FEW STORIES TO MAKE YOU THANKFUL YOU DIDN'T GO TO THE TROPICS YET! In those days in Florida they were still trying to fight the mosquitoes, & they finally got the victory over mosquitoes in Miami when they shipped in millions of dragon flies. Remember how they used to land on the pool in Tenerife? But they had red ones there! Mosquito hawks we called them when I was a kid. They'd land on the water & would eat the larvae before they hatched.

12. THE MOSQUITOES LAY THEIR EGGS IN THE WATER & THEN THEY HATCH OUT INTO A LITTLE KIND OF A WIGGLER‚ & then when they finally got quite big, out of the thing would come forth the mosquitoes just like a butterfly comes out of a cocoon. Pupae I think they called them. In Junior High I made a study on the anopheles mosquito‚ she is the rascal which carries most of the diseases—yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, smallpox‚ all the tropical diseases that affect people.

13. BUT THEN GOING SWIMMING IN THE OCEAN TOO, THEY HAD TWO KINDS OF TERRORS. The very worst was barracudas. They're not very big, but they're one of the fastest most dangerous fish in the ocean. They're almost as bad as piranhas. Much worse than sharks! Sharks will leave you alone, usually, unless they smell blood. They're carrion fish‚ garbage fish, to clean up the dead & dying, that's the dangerous thing about sharks.

14. BUT THE MOSQUITOES WOULD COME DOWN IN CLOUDS & SETTLE ON YOU BY THE HUNDREDS, almost pick you up & carry you away alive! Or suck your blood until you shrivelled up like a squeezed orange! So they were really bad in the Tropics‚ that was a problem.

15. THE LORD WASN'T GOING TO LET ANYBODY GET LAZY ANYWHERE! If it wasn't so cold like up in the cold North where you had to gather wood & fuel to stay warm & cook & make clothes to stay warm & warm houses, they might have gotten lazy down there in the Tropics where they didn't have to make clothes, didn't have to build a big house, didn't have to work hard for their food. They could pick it off the trees or go fishing—they might have gotten real lazy, you know!

16. BUT HE KEEPS ALL THOSE BUGS & MOSQUITOES & EVERYTHING BUSY BITIN'M TO KEEP'M MOVIN'! That's why I said the Lord let's dogs have fleas, otherwise dogs would get too lazy! But the Lord lets the fleas come along & bite the dog & keep the dogs movin' & scratchin' & bitin'! I've seen a dog jump out of almost a sleep & snap at their tail or something because the fleas were bitin'm! See, the Lord doesn't want the dogs to get lazy, & He doesn't want the people to get lazy, so He has all these little bugs & things to bite you to keep you movin'!

17. I NEVER SAW A COUNTRY THAT HAS SO MANY POISONOUS VARMINTS AS TEXAS! Centipedes a foot long & one-inch wide! They did have some kind of a little bug even in Switzerland kind of like a centipede. But those things in Texas, if they're on your skin they claim that every foot is a little stinger, & if it really gets ahold of you & you get stung in enough places it will almost kill you!

18. THE WARM COUNTRIES ARE NOT NECESSARILY ALWAYS THE BEST PLACES, because they have a lot of other things you have to worry about. Maybe this will be a good Grandpa Story for the people going down to the Tropics to their Gardens of Eden islands to remember that the Devil got there first & is waiting for them, & you've got to avoid a lot of his pests!

19. I THINK IT WAS TOO DAMP IN FLORIDA FOR BLACK WIDOWS, but boy, they sure had'm in Texas! (Alf: And Oklahoma!) They had all those varmints in Oklahoma. Rattlesnakes‚ black widows, tarantulas, centipedes, scorpions, you name it, they've got it. Texas has got everything, that's for sure. And it's not tropical at all, it's just very hot & dry. I think it must be cursed too from the Indians & the Devil-worshipping people that were there before.

20. I THINK THAT'S PROBABLY WHY AUSTRALIA HAS GOT SO MANY OF THOSE VARMINTS, it's got that many & then more from what I've heard!—In the interior especially, the desert. And in the water they have a lot of poisonous fish & poisonous coral & it's rather dangerous swimming in the waters of Australia. They've got all those tropical poisonous critters & stuff like Florida & Puerto Rico & Cuba, Bahamas, all those places.

21. YOU LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL BEACH SCENE WITH WAVING COCONUT PALMS & I don't usually like to talk about the bad part‚ I always like to emphasise the nice parts. So when we had our Eden Series we didn't talk about all those horrible critters. But sooner or later you've got to mention the Devil & all of his critters. So since we didn't get to the Tropics this time, maybe you'll be thankful you didn't get there yet.

22. IT'S KIND OF FUN TO PLAY ON A NICE BEACH & RUN AROUND NAKED, but you've got to watch out all the time about all the insects & the snakes. In the Tropics you've got all kinds of poisonous insects & just plain pesky insects! When we first went to Miami one of the worst pests were the ants! They just got into everything! We did have ants in the Summertime in Tenerife, but in Florida they could smell sweets a mile away or oily food! We had to keep the sugar or the honey or anything that was sweet sitting in a bowl of water, to keep the ants away. And even then we'd get up in the morning & find the bowl of water full of maybe 25-30 dead ants who tried to swim it!

23. BUT THE ANTS, THEY WERE REALLY FIERCE! The only ones that bit you were the little red ants & they were very small in Florida, not like those huge monsters in Texas. The black ant when it bites you, you feel a kind of little pinch, it doesn't sting. But the red ants really sting you!

24. THEY HAD THESE HUGE BIG RED ANTHILLS IN ARIZONA. I'll never forget we heard Faithy screaming one day, she was about Techi's size & she'd wandered into one of those anthills & the ants really attacked her!—In self-defence‚ they've got to defend their home. If you go walking over their house smashing it, they let you know it! And that poor little girl, instead of running, she just stood there & started screaming with all these red ants crawling up her legs & she got bit all over her legs! They can almost kill you if enough of them bite you. Poor little girl! She was stupid enough just to stand there, she didn't know what to do, instead of running & getting out of it. We rushed out & brushed'm off but she got really bit up with red spots all over her legs for several days.

25. SO WE'RE JUST TELLING YOU SOME REASONS YOU CAN BE THANKFUL YOU'RE NOT LIVING IN THE TROPICS!—Thinking about all those different critters & varmints that live there! But you know, in those days in Florida we never had those little tiny small roaches, nothing but the big pine bugs like they have in Tenerife. They didn't usually come in the house unless they wandered or strayed somehow or food was scarce outside.

26. I ALWAYS REMEMBER ABOUT US SITTING IN THAT NICE RESTAURANT THERE—twice it happened in the same restaurant—Cafe de Paris! It must have been she feared a fear & it came upon her, she had a dread of one of those things running up her leg! We often saw'm running across the floor.—And sure enough one did!—But I got'im!

27. LET ME TELL YOU, LIVING IN THE TROPICS IN FLORIDA‚ & TEXAS TOO, we learned not only to shake out our shoes—first you hit'm on the heel real hard because if there's anything in the toe it'll drop down—we also shook out our socks & our shirts & underpants, anything that we left hanging up for the night on a chair or hook or anywhere.

28. I REMEMBER I PICKED UP MY SHIRT ONE DAY JUST READY TO PUT IT ON & there was a nice big scorpion right on the inside! So we really learned to shake out our clothes in the Tropics. So there are some good things about not living in the Tropics! I never saw a place that had fewer bugs than the farm! I don't think I ever lived in a house like that on a farm where they had so few bugs! But I was kind of glad we were moving when I saw those rats!

29. IN SOME TROPICS YOU CAN SEE THOSE BIG TEXAS TARANTULAS with the great big legs, but they're rare, but they have what they call house spiders in Florida & all through the Tropics & they're this big around! Not daddy long legs, but real spiders‚ big brown spiders, & if they bite you, you've been bit! Like a bee sting!

30. MY MOTHER GOT BIT ON THE ELBOW ONCE & it swelled all up like that & she was really bit. But big spiders are like that & they're always running around making nests in the corners. Their bodies are as big as the end of your thumb & three inches around, the big ones. They're always running in the house & building webs in the corners of the rooms & catch bugs. They're so common in the house they call them house spiders in Florida, because they always want to come inside for some reason or another & build nests.

31. I WAS TELLING THEM ABOUT ALL THE MOSQUITOES & THE DRAGON FLIES & THE SCORPIONS, scorpions as big as your thumb, black‚ what they call grampuses because they're the granddaddy of all scorpions‚ & coral snakes. I never did see any coral snakes though. They called them coral snakes not because they lived in the coral but because they were coral-striped. The Lord made them brightly coloured so you'd see them & be warned.

32. THE LORD MADE MOST OF THESE THINGS IN SOME WAY THAT THEY WARN YOU before you get stung or bit. A rattler you hear him rattling! That night Mama & Daddy were walking home in the dark, he must have been 50 feet away when we heard him start rattling. And that rascal, he was at least seven feet long. And I never saw a pistol that shot so crooked. I'll never use a pistol again trying to hit anything‚ you can hardly hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol! No wonder you have to hold them with both hands, because they just don't shoot straight, you've got to have a rifle to really get'm, like I got that rattlesnake off the top of the pumphouse!

33. BUT YOU CAN BE THANKFUL YOU LIVE IN A NICE CIVILISED TOWN RIGHT NOW! You can be thankful for it instead of murmuring about not living in the Tropics! There are all kinds of things that will keep you busy in the Tropics besides climbing coconut trees! There are all kinds of dangerous things in the water too.

34. AND THEY SAY ALMOST THE WORST WATER IN THE WORLD for poisonous things of every kind you can think of are the waters around Australia. Australia has got everything Texas has got & more so when it comes to all those poisonous snakes & everything else, they've just got things you never even heard of! We saw a documentary about all these poisonous things you get in the water & how dangerous it is to go swimming there, how big sharks will come in close to shore in Australia.

35. ALL THAT TO TELL YOU YOU CAN BE THANKFUL YOU'RE LIVING IN NICE CIVILISED SOUTH AFRICA where I haven't seen a bug yet! Not even one! There must be some somewhere. We saw a little black cricket, but they don't bite you, they just sing!

36. ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT THE TROPICS, IT'S EXTREMELY HUMID & VERY DAMP, & of course in the Summertime it rains every afternoon just as regularly as clockwork. In Florida, every afternoon usually about three they'd have a thundershower. Then it would clear up right away & never rain more than an hour. Nobody ever carried umbrellas because when it rained it just was a sudden shower & then it was gone. You just ducked inside of a doorway. They never had these long rainy days where it would drizzle all day long.

37. HURRICANES WE DIDN'T MIND, THEY WERE EXCITING! Once they developed storm shutters it was no problem. All the houses & apartments & everything had these storm awnings they call'm, & some had storm shutters. But the storm awnings were the most popular because it was an awning made into a shutter. In Florida the sun was so hot you really needed awnings to keep the sun out in the Summertime. The awnings were out over the windows at an angle, but the storm shutters, you just pulled a chain inside & the shutter came down & unfolded & fit right tight over the window, completely sealing the window, thick wood completely sealing & fastening tight so they just "let it blow," nothing could hurt it!

38. BUT IF THERE'S EVER GOING TO BE ANY KIND OF NATURAL TYPE OF DISASTER, THE HURRICANE IS REALLY THE EASIEST ONE OF ALL‚ HONESTLY, IT'S THE SAFEST ONE! There's hardly any house that can stand a real heavy flood, they just wash down the river like the police were telling about South Africa in the flood last January. A policeman said he saw one time 20 people in one tree & then the flood finally keeled it over. And people floating down the river in the trees & on the housetops. It was a terrible flood they had, 200 people died! Right up in the hills, in the valleys, that's where you've got to worry about the floods.

39. YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT FLOODS WHEN YOU'RE LIVING BY THE SEA because there's plenty of places for the water to go. But they build sometimes up in these valleys & they don't count on the river filling up. They said it rained & rained & rained & the river reached what was its usual flood level, the highest its ever been, & it just kept on raining & rising & rising till about ten feet above its normal level!

40. HOUSES WERE WASHED AWAY, CARS, PEOPLE, EVERYTHING! He saw houses floating down the river with people sitting on top of them‚ no way he could possibly rescue them. He said he watched people lose their lives trying to save other people, swept away by the water. The water really had tremendous power, like those breakers out there, terrific!

41. AND IF YOU LIVED DOWN ON A LITTLE ISLAND like the Keys of Miami Beach, if there was a real bad hurricane the tide pretty much swept clear across the island & then you had troubles! That's where so many people lost their lives was on Miami Beach & Key Largo. Because the water came up & the tide was 12 feet above normal & swept across the island six feet deep—swept away houses, people, cars, everything!

42. BUT IF YOU'RE IN A FAIRLY HIGH LOCATION YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT FLOODS, & if you have good tight window covers & a stout house, concrete block house‚ with a tied down roof. After the hurricane they tied down the roofs with these steel bands across the ends of every rafter & bolted to the plates on the top of the walls so the hurricane couldn't get underneath & just lift the roof right off. As long as you closed your house up tight & you had heavy wooden shutters for the windows, let it blow!—As long as you were on high ground & the water didn't come through, let it blow!

43. IF WE HADN'T BEEN SO STUPID & LEFT OUR CANVAS AWNINGS OUT DURING THE FIRST FLORIDA HURRICANE, the biggest one they ever had, we wouldn't have had so much trouble with our house. But we didn't know what a hurricane was! We'd been through storms in Texas & Oklahoma & we figured, "Let it blow!" We never dreamed how it was going to blow! Pretty soon those big metal 3/4–inch pipes around the edge of the awning began to lift up & bang until finally it just tore the awnings to shreds & the big iron pipes came down & banged in the windows! Then the rain travels horizontally & the rain just poured into the house & we were wading around in the water, you remember that story!

44. BUT YOU GET WARNING OF A HURRICANE NOW AS MUCH AS TWO OR THREE WEEKS AWAY! They follow it & chart its course & they know exactly where it is‚ exactly which direction it's going & exactly how strong the winds are, what size the hurricane is, how fast it's travelling. The winds are going around in a circle like this, David, maybe 100-150 m.p.h.—they don't call it a hurricane now until it gets to 75 m.p.h.—but the hurricane itself, the whole big round wind, may only be moving 10 m.p.h. very slowly. The fastest hurricane they ever clocked was the famous Ft. Lauderdale hurricane that suddenly speeded up to 45 m.p.h. & dove to shore just about the time they thought it was going to miss Florida entirely!

45. BUT FOR HURRICANES YOU GET PLENTY OF WARNING! We used to laugh at people who came to Florida & were scared of hurricanes. We said, "Good night, you've got time to drive from Florida to California & get killed in an earthquake by the time the hurricane gets here!"—from the time you first hear about it! Or washed away in a Texas flood, cloudburst!

46. YOU HAVE OODLES OF TIME TO GET READY, & they always know exactly where it is & almost exactly where it's going to strike, just almost to the minute, certainly the hour, if it's coming into shore. You know exactly when & where & everything. Rarely it ever travels fast enough to deceive'm like that one did. So you have lots of time to prepare for it.

47. LIVING IN THE TROPICS I WOULDN'T WORRY ABOUT THE HURRICANES. Of course, you can't stay outdoors in them because cans & sticks & stuff go flying through the air, everything loose, & you can get hit by something, mostly sticks & branches. And the most dangerous thing was the tin signs—they decapitated people & all kinds of things! Really bad injuries from pieces of sheet tin like roofing. Boy, after the hurricane they really clamped down on the building restrictions for signs & everything. You'd have to have your signs with thick cables tying them down & bolted to the walls so they couldn't budge no matter what kind of a hurricane it was! And they made'm build better houses from then on.

48. ANY LARGE BUILDING YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT, except the Meyer-Kaiser Building. The Jews built this 12-story building & apparently they didn't build it very well. After the hurricane the top seven stories were leaning over like this & they had to tear off the top seven stories, they only left five stories! And the great big Santa Maria, the huge big steamer, did I tell you about that? The five-masted schooner? They didn't have many of those left in those days, it was kind of an antique‚ but it was a giant thing as big as one of these freighters you see going by out here! Five huge big masts this big around as tall as this building—bigger, taller!

49. IT WAS PICKED UP OUT OF THE WATER BY THE TIDAL WAVE & LEFT SITTING IN BAYFRONT PARK WHEN THE WATER WENT DOWN! I mean, we went downtown & there were yachts, huge motorboats & sailboats all over Bayfront Park & on Biscayne Boulevard & clear down Flagler Street that had washed in with this tidal wave that came with the hurricane, extremely high tides & huge waves that wash over the lowlands. That's the trouble with most of those tropical islands‚ they're kind of low. Most of Miami wasn't more than six feet above water. After the hurricane some of those beachfront hotels' lobbies were full of sand as high as your head, David! Just washed the beach right into the lobby! It was funny, really, to see all those old Jews out there shoveling not snow, but sand!

50. SO THERE ARE LOTS OF GOOD REASONS TO BE THANKFUL YOU DON'T LIVE IN THE TROPICS, because you see, no matter where you live you've got one problem or another! And although it's nice & easy to live there & nice & warm & you can run around naked & don't have to eat much & don't have to have very much shelter except in a hurricane, you've got a lot of other problems!

51. I STARTED TO SAY THE DAMPNESS, THAT WAS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS! You couldn't put a pair of shoes in the closet & leave'm there in the dark for say a month. If you had a nice lovely pair of brown shoes & you stuck'm in the back of the closet & you decided you wanted to change shoes & put on your nice new brown shoes, you pulled'm out of the closet & they were no longer brown, they were green!—Completely covered with green mold! And it would just ruin the surface! The mold just ate right into the leather. Even if you cleaned them off they were all spotty & looked horrible.

52. AND WHAT THE MOTHS DIDN'T GET, THE COCKROACHES DID! Moths, you've got to wait till they lay eggs & they hatch into larvae & then the larvae starts chewing on your gladrags in the closet or whatever it was. Did you hear about the two moths that the scientists found could talk to each other? They came upon two moths chewing the rag! "Chewing the rag"‚ David, is an old American expression for talking!

53. YOU COULD PUT YOUR BEST SUIT OR DRESS INTO THE CLOSET OVERNIGHT & if you had a food spot on it anywhere you could lift it out the next morning & there was a nice big hole like that! Those big cockroaches had just eaten the whole thing right out along with the cloth, right out of your best suit or dress. We lost clothing several times, usually our pants were the ones with food spots on them.

54. SO THE TROPICS, THEY DO HAVE A FEW DEVIL'S PESTS, so you can be thankful maybe you don't live in the Tropics right now. Let's pray, shall we? Amen, Lord, we have a lot of reasons to be thankful we don't live in the Tropics because it has a lot of problems there too, & although we have to fight off the cold in some ways‚ it's a lot easier to keep warm with our nice little heaters in our nice little cozy apartment than it is to fight off all those bugs & varmints & critters & mosquitoes & all kinds of things, it's a lot easier to fight off the cold & to stay warm. TYJ!

55. SO BLESS & KEEP OUR FAMILY WHO ARE IN THOSE PLACES; protect them from all those things, Lord, & help them to learn how to handle it & avoid it & fight'm & keep'm from hurtin'm too much so they can preach the Gospel. TYL for how you have kept the Families in those places.

56. WE THANK YOU, LORD‚ FOR THIS BEAUTIFUL PLACE YOU'VE GIVEN US TO LIVE, WE HAVEN'T FOUND ANY BUGS YET! I'm not saying we won't, but we're sure thankful we haven't so far. And we ask you to keep the children when they're playing down on the beach. We don't know just what kind of things they have down on the beach that might live in the sand, but we ask that they won't get bit or stung or anything, & watch their step especially around the rocks where they usually spend time. And watch out about digging in the sand; sometimes these creatures live in the sand too. And watch out about picking up shells because sometimes some shells are lived-in, they're little houses for little creatures that live in'm! So help them to be cautious wherever they go.

57. IT'S YOUR WORLD‚ LORD, YOU CREATED IT FULL OF LIFE & full of all kinds of little critters & some of them are a little pesty. So help them to be cautious in what they handle & where they walk & keep them safely, Lord, from falls on rocks or anything like that. And thank You for giving us such a nice clean place to live‚ nice & fresh & clean & painted & new, or renewed‚ & no bugs! Not even a fly or mosquito or hardly a gnat, much less a roach. TYL!

58. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING US HERE! Thank You for helping Peter find this place & letting us have this whole floor, like having our own house all alone! Help us to be considerate of the neighbours downstairs & not pound & jump on the floor or make too much noise that might bother them, or run our videos too late at night, or annoy'm in any way. We ask You to help us please be quiet & thoughtful & considerate of others. Keep us all safely‚ keep the children safely away from the steps where they could fall.

59. WE'RE NOT CRAZY ABOUT HEIGHTS, LORD, but we're thankful we're up here away from the noise of the street & critters that might be below & we're up here with greater privacy. TYJ! So many advantages in being here, Lord, the nice wind keeps the air clear of mosquitoes & bugs & flies etc. & gives us lots of fresh air & a nice view, nice & fresh, & we've just got so much to be thankful for!—All this good food we can buy here, Lord, & we're just living in luxury, everything's so comfortable—colour TVs & videos & radios & tapes & everything‚ Lord!

60. YOU JUST HAVE SHOWERED US WITH LUXURIES, WE SHOULD BE SO THANKFUL! And beautiful sunshine the last couple days. You've just been trying to show us how bright & sunny it can be. TYJ! Even all these nice Jewish people that live around here, they like luxury & all these nice foods & have made it very nice for us. TYL! We know they weren't exactly doing it for us, but for themselves, but it's a nice place to live where they always have plenty of everything & lots of good food & they always choose the best places to live, so this must be the best place in South Africa!—Capetown!

61. AMEN LORD, SO BLESS & KEEP US ALL SAFELY! Give us a good night's rest & strength for tomorrow. Protect us from any harm—spiritual‚ physical, insects, people or whatever. Help us to be wise & cautious—wise as serpents, harmless as doves—because we realise we are sheep living amongst the wolves. So bless & keep us in Jesus' name. TYL for a good day today, in Jesus' name. Amen. PTL! (Prays the Lord's Prayer.) GBAKY!

Copyright (c) 1997 by The Family