Amy's home on a well-deserved furlough, and just came to see us in Cambridge.  Our missionaries always deserve their furlough year, but usually we have a 3-years-in-the-field, 1-year-back-in-the-States cycle.  Amy was in the field for 6 years!  She had some breaks in there, but nothing like what she deserved after working that kind of schedule that long.

I like having missionaries on furlough.  They're likable people who come with lots of stories from Cebu, and their schedule helps a guy with a memory like mine keep track of when things happened.  I find myself remembering what year something happened by remembering who was on furlough then.  The older I get the handier this becomes!

I promised Amy I'd tell my new shoes story.  I got new shoes yesterday and had an old can of that water-repellent stuff you can spray on them.  Since I was concerned about the smell I decided to bring them down into the utility room and spray them there.  A more thoughtful person might have brought them outside.  Mary Joy was chatting with me while I gave them a good dousing out of the perfectly usable, but leaky can.  It was getting to the end of the night, and Mark had gotten in the shower around this time.  So, I was spraying when the water heater started up.  Wow.  The whole memory unfolds slowly in my mind so I can remember in some detail a 3 to 4 square foot space igniting in flames which ran up my arm (without injury), of course lit up the shoes and even caused a flame to sit on the outside of the spray can.  All I could hear was the sound of me whacking things with the shoe box and Joy screaming for Mom to come downstairs.  It was a pretty exciting 9 seconds.  A pretty exciting 9 seconds you might want to avoid.  Learn a lesson from me and take the shoes outside, or just don't be a sucker and skip buying the stuff in the first place.

Oh, and don't worry, the shoes made it out fine.