Sadly, very sadly, destructive behavior like that at Presby isn't unique to this incident. Over the past several years I've begun to call the doers of such mischief and malice as "The Spoilers" whose apparent mission in life seems to be ruining things for the rest of us. Another example not unlike that at Presby took place some years ago on the Danish island of Bornholm, between Poland and Sweden. It was the baptismal font in which my grandmother had been baptized around 1880, carved from stone in the fourteenth century by Franciscan missionaries working in Scandinavia. The vandals took a sledge hammer to the complex and beautiful carving. Restoration carefully resurrected the original appearance to the degree possible, but the font will never be quite the same. No repair can ever quite restore a liturgical work of art nearly 700 years old. There seems to be a small minority in all levels and segments of society who are Spoilers. What twisted the spirits of these people into such destructive motivation? I can't imagine anyone actually *enjoying* doing things like this or what was done at Presby. There must be some pay-off in the doing I simply cannot grasp. It is beyond the range of my imagination. I am sick at heart. Neil Mogensen

Smells a lot like yellow journalism, to me! Scissors ... I can't imagine your Mom being that dumb ... she might have known! How long had she lived there? Don't tell me that she was a Janie-come-lately! But her Mom must have been a long-term fixture in the place if they made her correspondent. They don't do that to someone who moved in last year. Several years ago, in my first church, they'd provisionally closed one congregation of six on the pastoral charge, which was so poor that they needed help from central church funds. They'd promised to re-evaluate the closing later. One woman said she didn't see how they could continue, and when I said that at the meeting she could make a motion about that if she chose, she objected, saying that there was no way that she could do anything like that. When I asked the reason, she said that she'd only lived in that community for fifteen years. Many city folks would have no idea what she meant ... but, having grown up in a rural community, I knew exactly what she meant. Have a lovely weekend, everyone. ole joyful

I really hate to try anything like that because it's not my camera....I'd hate it to ruin the camera too. I am going to leave well enough alone at this point! LOL.....My luck I'll end up buying her a new camera too! I just bought her a new card. She said not to, but I feel like it was I was the last person to touch the card, I should replace it. I was just happy to be able to recover her pictures she had in there. She keeps pictures in her camera forever and there was some as far back as Feb. in there. A lot of them were of Austin, his birthday party, Easter, etc. She doesn't have a cd burner on her computer so she can only save them on her camera or on the computer. I told her neither one are for safe keeping and she need to have them put onto cd's before she loses them all. Then this happens while was looking at her pictures! LOL...I am so happy to have recovered them for her, I was so afraid I lost them. There were a few of the last few days that I couldn't recover, but she said they are no big deal. She hasn't had the card out of the camera in a year because she uses the cables to transfer them to her computer. First time out and I'm the one who took it out...and it screws up! It figures!

gardengal, I was just making a joke! The people here on this forum who know me would understand that. Carol, I think finding a buried body part would be something that would be hard to recover from. I'm not saying it would drive me out of gardening, but it sure would be a hard memory to dispose of. I hope you're doing well, and I don't trust my husband with garden chores. He is absolutely banned from the garden with any motorized tool like a chainsaw because he'll somehow manage to find and cut down 'accidentally' the most precious plant I have. He and the garden are both happier if he never steps foot into it. So, I garden, he mows the acres. You know how it goes, and we both are happy. I don't live in an area where people hire landscapers anyhow, and you know I do it all myself here. I live in a grassland where it is an accomplishment if you manage to have neighbors who mow down the tall grasses a time or two a year. (Wildfires do encourage everyone to get started on that mowing sooner or later.) LoneJack, Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. I still think I'd rather buy blood meal and bone meal. Of course, I'm married to a cop and he wouldn't tolerate having a serial killer for a wife anyhow (thought there's bad guys in the police profession too, as in any other, but he's not one of those bad cops), even if it meant an endless supply of blood meal and bone meal. Jacob, Perhaps now everyone knows that particular landscaper's secret for growing bountiful plants. Do you think? I don't think I want to know how long it takes for those particular items to break down into components that plants can take up and use. Seriously, though, the whole thought of this grosses me out. And, you know, being very rural, every now and then we stumble upon old bones that once belonged to something....hopefully that something was a non-human type of animal, and I'm not really overjoyed when that happens, even if it is just the bones of a possum. I always feel like we've disturbed a sleeping spirit. Kim, Thank you. Truly. I am sure she meant no harm. She just didn't know how much we joke and banter back and forth here. I was just trying to brighten up everybody's gray gloomy winter day with a little humorous comment about some grotesque news I'd been following on TV the last couple of days. Amy, I had wondered about the smelly part of the equation myself. Perhaps it would depend on the time of the year. Maybe in parts of the country that are colder than us, consistently, in winter, you might not get that decomposing smell. I know I seldom smell roadkill type odors while walking the dogs down our country roads in winter, but smell them at other times of the year. Usually it is just possums, armadillos, coons or rabbits, but occasionally something larger....and I have to divert and use a different walking route until the worst of the smell is gone. Or, if we're lucky, the vultures clean it right up and the smell is gone in no time. I tell you, when we dreamed of moving to the country and living in the middle of nowhere, it wasn't stinky dead roadkill we were thinking about, but there's plenty of that out here. Moni, That's hysterical about Dale. I'm 99.99% sure he doesn't really think there are dead bodies underneath your beautiful flowers. Nice score on the wood chips. We can't get those out here. The guys generally just leave the chips where they fall when they are cutting along our rural roads and no one complains. Life is just different out here in the sticks (deliberate word choice!). Y'all know, after a couple of months (less for some, but we could substitute four months for others) without rain, I'm thinking the dryness would make things decompose very slowly here at the present time. We need rain or even the DIY landscapers aren't going to be happy. Dawn