I'm Thankful

I really don't understand where we got the tradition of calling Thanksgiving "Turkey Day" - I know I do it, and I know lots of others do it without any desire to demean the Thanksgiving holiday, but in preparation for this years Thanksgiving holiday, here are the top 5 things I am thankful for.

• I am learning something new, so that I can do something I love for the rest of my life.
• I have a family who loves and supports me in everything (OK, most everything) I do.
• I am healthier this year than I have been in years, and I am on the way to being the healthiest that I have been in my life.
• I still have friends who can make me laugh so hard it makes my stomach hurt.
• I have a roof over my head and a place to call my own.

So, I am starting a meme. My first ever. I tag Elastigirl, Curly Girl, Mrs. Swizzle, Jennie and Princess Mindy. What are you thankful for this year? Give me a Top 5 List.

Six Unremarkable Things About Me

A tag from Elastigirl . . .

1. I cannot walk around with one sock/shoe on and one sock/shoe off. In 5th grade, I had a teacher (take note teachers of the power of your words) tell me it was bad luck to walk around with one sock on and one sock off. Now it gives me the heebie jeebies when I see someone else walking around like that, and have been known to take off my sock if I need to walk somewhere in the middle of putting a pair on. Curly Girl still makes fun of me for it, saying to her son, "Your driving your Aunt Smarty crazy with your one sock on and one sock off." And she is right.

2. I see all the flaws in the movie The Wizard of Oz when I watch it now (thanks to a summer camp dean - now a deacon - who pointed them out to me one summer when it was well over a hundred degrees so we had rest time in the cafeteria and watched movies because it had AC and the cabins didn't). Some of the magic is gone. I won't ruin it for you, but the problems are there. And I can't watch the movie without thinking about them.

3. I love to put together wooden jigsaw puzzles that were handmade by my great uncle. Regular puzzles don't have the same meaning for me. Our puzzles have pieces in crazy shapes and ones we call "specialty" pieces that are shaped like everything from the liberty bell to animals to one we call "running guy" that looks just like a guy running. Lots of family holidays have been spent doing these puzzles together and it is a great time to catch up. We have all levels of difficulty and we recently started The Gift on some that are 24 pieces. He loves them too.

4. I can say all 50 states in alphabetical order, thanks to a song I learned in the 5th or 6th grade called "Fifty Nifty United States." It has come in handy on more than one occasion, but I can't think of any of those occasions right now.

5. Because I moved so much as a kid (military brat) I do not remember things by the year that they occurred, but by where I lived when they happened. So the reason I said 5th or 6th grade in the last item is because I know where I lived when it happened, and I know I was in 5th or 6th grade then.

6. I like math. I always have, and I guess I always will. The world is filled with patterns and math problems and people ask my advice on "mathy things" (as my mom calls them) all the time. My pet peeve is when people say, "I can't do math" like it is an unnecessary skill. No one ever says proudly, "I can't read!"

I tag curly girl and jennie, two remarkable women.

Nearest Book Meme

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!) Well it is kind of funny you ask, because I am sitting in the library right now, but the nearest book is one of my own that I was using to do some research. It's called Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations.

Find Page 123 and Find the first 5 sentences: This is Chapter Nine: Reading the Congregation's Culture. The section is Dealing with Culture Clash.

Post the next 3 sentences. In either the "congregational training for planning" or the "internal audit" phases, a congregation may discover that it has two or more cultures competing for dominance. At this particular moment in history, culture clash seems to be the norm rather than the exception. We can identify several reasons congreations are experiencing this clash.

*[In case you wanted to know what they are in a nutshell 1) generational differences 2) demographic changes impacting comfort zones 3) size transition] No big surprise there really...


Tag 5 people. Uh... At this point in time, I am so far down on the meme list, that all my blog pals have already been tagged. Maybe I'll start my own book meme. Maybe I'll be the beginning chain instead of the end.