Tomorrow (the 14th) is Mark’s birthday, so I told him we could go look for his present today since we go back to work tomorrow.  He has been wanting a big wind chime with a deep tone for most of the time I’ve been with him, so I looked online to try to find stores in the area that sell wind chimes.

We started out in Muskogee.  We tried several stores there, but with no luck.  We did, however, find a couple big water cannons for the water wars event we’re going to have this summer and we bought them.  We had some lunch and then headed up to Broken Arrow and Tulsa.  For that leg of the trip we were on a toll highway, which dampened Mark’s mood a bit, but we did finally find the kind of wind chime he’s been wanting and a hanger big enough to hold it.  He also had a Tandy Leather Store catalog with him, and since we were in Tulsa we stopped by to see the store there.  (Mark has been doing leatherwork since he was in high school.)  He found out there that he has an elite membership, which means he can get leather supplies dirt cheap.  We might use that to get kits for the kids here at Marval.  I don’t know if we were actually in downtown Tulsa because there were no tall buildings, but they had a lot of malls.

We came back from a long day of traveling and going from store to store, and we had dinner.  Then we went to check out the Wednesday night service at First Baptist Church here in Gore.  It was a completely different experience from last week’s packed, loud service.  There were only a handful of members there tonight.  They don’t have a pastor at this time.  They’ve been praying for one.  So one of the members got up to give a little devotional about the tongue from James 3, and they took prayer requests about members who were sick or grieving.  It was so very quiet and low key, and I was so exhausted from the day, that I fell asleep.  I might consider going back if there isn’t anything better in town.  The people were friendly.