When I first started thinking about this last week, the word “Blessed” can only be what describes it. After discovering how close we came to having a possibly disastrous electrical fire in our home, the Great White Hunter and I were nothing but blessed.

Saturday evening, I was sitting in the living room watching television and the dishwasher was running in the kitchen.  I heard a “pop” and the lights flashed and I could smell burned wire. This same thing had happened the week before and that night we did all the investigating and couldn’t find anything wrong. I originally thought the problem was the ceiling light in the dining room.  The Great White Hunter climbed up into the attic (a nasty place with nothing but insulation and boards to crawl on to keep from falling through the ceiling and probably some nasty spiders) and did not find anything. I truly thought we would see smoke, but we didn’t and I wondered if I should call the fire department, just in case. The smell went away though and we thought whatever it was, was just a fluke.

But then the same thing happened again on Saturday. The popping noise, the flickering lights, and the smell of something singed. We thought then that it must be coming from the dishwasher. So for the next couple of hours, we did everything we could think of to find the source of the smell. I’m also blessed that The Great White Hunter has had experience doing almost any type of repair (although he has to be supervised–wink, wink) so he disconnected the dishwasher and checked the wiring beneath it.  We checked the circuit breaker in the basement, but it would not reset and a number of the electrical outlets in the basement were not working.  That’s when we realized we must have a problem with an electrical that connects the different areas in the house. To be extra careful, Great White Hunter then removed the breaker so there could be no electricity going through the suspect wire.  Thankfully, Great White has had quite a bit of experience in electrical work, but as I told him, I thought this possible partial rewire was “beyond his pay grade”.

Monday, I had a number of errands to do, and while I was gone, The Great White Hunter hunted down the source of the problem and found that we had a partially burned wire in the wall beneath the kitchen sink. When I got home, he showed me the wire and all I could think of is that we had a guardian angel watching over us. This wire could have been a catastrophe. We are Blessed.

Our blessings continued. We were put in touch with a labrador breeder who had a litter of three females and two male puppies that had been born in February. So we took our beautiful Sunday afternoon and drove a hundred miles to a beautiful place in the country and picked out our new fur baby.

Meet Millie. She’s the one in the front with her tongue hanging out.

We are in love already. State law says that a puppy cannot be adopted until they are eight weeks old, but we won’t be able to bring her home until after our trip in the middle of April to Virginia to see my son . I’m looking forward to seeing my son and spending some time with him and his new wife, but boy, I hate the idea that our fur baby will be growing bigger and I’m missing two weeks of snuggling puppy love.

Sometimes, and maybe I should say oftentimes, I forget the blessings in my life and focus too much on what is negative. I find myself continually asking God for things and I don’t thank Him enough for the blessings in my life. So, thank you Lord for all my blessings.