God is good! Laughter is healing!

I am so happy today for so many reasons! God has been letting me know that He loves me and that He is involved in my life every day--or I'm becoming more aware of Him every day, either way the result is that I'm more content and joyful than I have ever been! I thought yesterday would be hard--my first Father's Day without my dad. I did get a little choked up a couple of times, but every time I felt sad, I could feel God's presence, like He was reminding me that my Father is with me always. I was able to focus my attention on Don all day, which was good, because none of our boys could be with him yesterday. We went to an antique car show and he really enjoyed that. I enjoyed being with Don and listening to Dixie Land music, eating an ice cream cone in the hot hot sun.....haven't done that in a long while. Then we went home and changed out of our church clothes and went to see Spiderman 3--it was awesome! We had dinner out and came home and watched Meet the Parents on TV....that was fun, too--I think it's our favorite movie that we share. Don and I love to laugh together--it's one of the best things about our marriage. We have (whatever the plural of "sense of humor" is...us senses of humor...I think that's it....) anyway, very similar ones. Don cracks me up all of the time--because he's such a serious person that if I'm not listening, I could miss it when he says something really funny. So I try to listen. I love to make him laugh, too. I can tell that, whenever he has had a stressful day, he relaxes whenever I make him laugh. If we don't make each other laugh, either we're really upset about something, or we are mad at each other. Sometimes we can get each other to laugh whenever we're mad about something silly or there is something sad going on.
A funny thing happened this weekend when I was getting ready to plant grass other things in our back yard. I have a little tiller, and I THOUGHT the ratio of gas/oil was 50-50, so I filled it up, but I couldn't get it started. I was doing it partially for exercise, so I really tried to start it myself. When I couldn't, son #3 Don C., tried and tried to get it started for me, and when he did finally start it--blue smoke was billowing from it. My faulty memory--or my wishful thinking--said this was normal. Don kept shouting over the noise of the engine, "MOM! I DON'T THINK THIS IS NORMAL! YOU'RE POLLUTING THE NEIGHBORHOOD!" Intent on tilling, I assured him that I remembered the blue smoke from last year. About 30 minutes later, and both Don C. and son #4 Nate, were standing at the back door frowning at me and waving their hands around. I waved back. Thirty minutes after that, there were three faces.....Don C, Nate and "Big" Don...hubby, who was waving an operator's manuel and telling me to "TURN OFF THE TILLER NOW!" I turned it off, and Don waved his way through the cloud of blue smoke over to me, and read, "1 part oil 24 parts gasoline!" He helped me dump the 50-50 mixture into an empty Tide bottle and helped me refill my tiller. Then, I proceeded to till up the entire backyard! I planted grass that thrives in shade, a vegetable garden and three flower beds!
If it survives us being in Myrtle Beach for a week--we should have a nice backyard....and I burned 1000 calories doing yard work two days in a row!