Gratitude Journal #77

Today, I am grateful for the note Jack's teacher sent home Friday: "Made grilled cheese today. He wouldn't eat his, of course. He kept saying 'I'm so brave' when at the stove flipping the sandwich." At least he got close enough to the evil grilled cheese to flip it. It would be silly of us to expect him to, you know, eat it.

Today, I am grateful for this picture:

Today, I am grateful for commercials, although the best SuperBowl commercial was the Volkswagon Darth Vader one, which I'd already seen before.

Today, I'm grateful that my weekly Bible study resumes tomorrow after a two-month break. I've missed it.

What are you grateful for today?

Daisy Shots

Snow Daisy

Head-Stand Butt-Scratches

Contemplating a Laundry Basket, with Boy



Human Furniture

All photos on this post by George.

Words, Words, Words from Albert Schweitzer

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." Albert Schweitzer

I have finished the first volume of the Stephen Ministry training manual, and while each chapter has had a huge impact on me as a person, one that clarified much for me was the chapter on the difference between servitude and servanthood.

Servitude is slavery, service without choice. Servitude is oppression, where the one serving is powerless to change his or her position and often feels humiliated or abused, worthless or hopeless.

Nobody wants to be a slave.

Servanthood, as modeled by Christ, is a form of love. The servant chooses to do tasks that help others out of love for them, not out of obligation or duty, force or social injustice. Servants don't expect anything in return for their service because it's given freely, out of love.

Anybody can be a servant.

Not everyone chooses servanthood, but those who serve, in the sense that Schweitzer uses the word, find it's a kind of addiction. You do something for someone out of love and kindness, and you feel good. So you do something else. And you feel even better. And the service snowballs from there. And one day you realize that doing for others out of love is as necessary for you as breathing. Sometimes it's hard--even painful--but that doesn't matter.

What matters...what makes us happy...is acting out of love. Very few of us are called to the level of servanthood of, say, Mother Teresa, but all of us are called daily to little acts of service: making a donation to a worthy charity, taking a meal to someone in need, scrubbing bathrooms so our family stays healthy, holding a door for someone, letting others into traffic, returning a shopping cart for a mom who's loading kids in the car, paying for someone's coffee, bowing our heads in prayer to the Most High. What matters is choosing love.

How can you be a servant today?

Things on Thursday: Ice

For obvious reasons, ice has been the most important thing in our lives this week. Here are a few pictures George took Tuesday night, and we were just on the edge of this. Not a half hour north of here, things were still really bad today. Our ice is gone, now. But tens of thousands in Ohio are still without power.

Piles

As I sit here at my computer, I am surrounded by piles. Piles of papers, piles of magazines, piles of books, piles of piles. Piles on my desk, the kitchen table, the floor, the kitchen island. There are even piles hanging on my cork board: piles of papers hanging vertically and precariously held that way by a single push-pin. These hanging piles occasionally flutter to the floor and cause a panic until we find the push-pin. We don’t want Daisy to eat the pin or for someone to step on it.

One day, they will find my cold, dead body under collapsed piles of paper products.

Piles are useful for sorting stuff, but it’s too easy for them to grow all by themselves, merge into each other, and take over a house. I have to make myself go through them periodically, but what I really need is a schedule. Go through this pile on Monday, this one Tuesday, and this one Wednesday…you get the picture. Or maybe it would work better to schedule it by room, since the piles are somewhat unpredictable in their nature and growth. Kitchen piles Monday, living room piles Tuesday, library piles Wednesday….

Such order and discipline won’t happen. It never does in my world. I just fantasize about it. It’s much easier to think about how to tackle the piles than to actually tackle them. Oh, I’ll get around to each one eventually, when the situation is urgent. For instance, as soon as I finish whining to you about piles, I’m going to clean the piles off my computer desk.

My poor computer is completely surrounded. I can barely use my mouse on the square inch of bare space left for it. I’m not exactly sure what is in all these piles, though I see George’s ear buds which I borrowed and haven’t returned, a box of tissues from when I had a cold last month, an art project Nick intended to give to his dad at Christmas but gave to him last night, a calendar my friend stamped for me, a stack of business cards I pulled out of an envelope on the cork board so I could find the number for the optometrist, a small olive-green moleskine notebook that I keep prayer requests in (along with five or so other notebooks used for various purposes), some sticks of never-dry modeling clay, the boys’ most recent report cards, a wad of receipts stuffed behind a basket overflowing with paperwork, and a lovely hand-thrown pottery vase that holds dull pencils and dried-out pens.

What a lot of stuff to sit precariously around a large laptop on a 39-inch by 22-inch desk.

I also just noticed the phone isn’t in its cradle. Funny how chaotic a house can get when people don’t put things back where they belong, eh?

As much as I would love to slide the whole mess into a trashcan and walk away, I think I better just get to work. At least I know I’ll be happy when this one messy corner of my life is tidy once again.

Because that’s all I get in this mess that is life: one tidy corner at a time.

Today, I am okay with that.

More Randomness

1. George, after introducing me to buckeyetraffic.org, a website that shows traffic conditions in Ohio: "I get a bizarre satisfaction from being inside and seeing how crappy the roads are." Our next-door neighbor's car is at the base of his driveway. Another neighbor's car is on his sidewalk.

2. This is because everything outside is covered in ice. Covered. In. Ice. I finished all my laundry yesterday so we would have plenty of clean underwear in the event of a power outage. I want credit for that advanced planning.

3. I do not like ice.
4. Mother Nature doesn't care what I like or don't like.

5. My next book order: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels: A Love Story. A steamy real-life romance will make me forget about ice. Too bad I don't already have it in my cold, cold hands.

6. My hands are cold because my husband keeps the thermostat at 64 degrees. All. Winter. Long.

7. I need a hug.

Random Tuesday

It's been a disappointing few days.

1. Ice. It's great in a glass, on a skating rink, or in Antarctica. It's most definitely not great on sidewalks and roads. Mother Nature, you seriously need to make up your mind. Snow or rain. Those we can deal with. Ice. Not so much.

2. See how vicious Daisy can be? Check out those fangs, the crazy demon eyes, and the way she uses her paws to defend herself against the big, bad daddy with opposable digits poised to strangle her.

It's all an act.

Daisy was attacked yesterday by two miniature schnauzers who broke out of their electronic fence and methodically attacked her butt. Despite the fact that she equalled the two dogs in weight and could have chomped them both with little effort, Daisy tucked her tail between her legs and bravely tried to hide behind me. While one schnauzer barked and harassed our front, the other would sneak behind and bite Daisy on the backside. She cried, yipped, whimpered, and looked at me with hurt eyes that said, "Why don't these dogs LOVE me?"

This must have been a shock to her because not thirty yards before we reached the schnauzers, Daisy had had a happy butt-sniffing visit with a 75-pound golden retriever named Rose. The two of them try to out-submit each other. It's really quite funny.

Fortunately, the mean schnauzers didn't break her skin, but poor Daisy had schnauzer spit all over her backside. Those yappy mongrels would be in low Earth orbit if George had been walking Daisy. I, however, sternly told them "No!" and moved Daisy away as fast as I could without running. Then...oh, I'm really stern, aren't I?...I left a stern message on their owners' answering machine and paced shakily for a while. Turns out their electronic fence collar batteries were dead. The owner apologized and said she was going to replace the collars with ones that also keep the dogs from barking (good news because they are a serious nuisance at 6:30 in the morning).

So I guess the viciousness with which Daisy plays doesn't translate to the real world. Or perhaps she was picking up on my own viciousness when confronted with two attack schnauzers.

Really, we're just a pair of pansies.

3. Word Mole. I hate this game. I just discovered last night that it's NOT like Boggle. You don't have to make sure the letters are adjoining to form words; you can touch any letters anywhere on the screen to form words. This rocked my world, and not in a good way. Within just a few minutes, I'd beaten my top score by hundreds of points and could have kept going indefinitely. It's not fun anymore because it's just too easy. What's the point? I guess I should be grateful. Instead, I'm just mad.

4. I had two different companies solicit interest in my blog on the same day, and neither struck me as worthy of follow-up. Why oh why won't Starbucks or Barnes and Noble or LLBean offer to give stuff away to my readers?

5. I tried the Thai Chicken Salad at Panera for lunch yesterday, and it's not good. I ate it because I paid for it, but it's just not good.

Now Panera won't ever offer to give stuff to my readers either.

6. I scheduled my annual mammogram for February 14. 'Cause nothing says romance like not wearing deodorant and getting your boobs squished.  

It's a good thing all this didn't happen last week when I had PMS. If it had, I'd be curled up in the fetal position on my bed sucking my thumb.

See. I knew I'd find a bright side. It could always be worse.