July 29, 2015

Wash, dry, fold, help

Our church participates in a program called Room at the Inn, where once a month we host families who are struggling with homelessness. It’s temporary, emergency shelter. We have a spacious youth house next to our church, and a huge team of volunteers from our parish serve as hosts and hostesses each month. The guests are served a meal and given a clean, comfortable place to stay. Room at the Inn offers many, many other resources to these families, and our church has been a Night Site for years. Every month in the parish bulletin I would see the long list of names of people who selflessly give of their time and energy. I thought about helping, but I didn’t feel like I could commit to anything. How could I give up such a large block of time when I work full time and have an incredibly active family?

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July 28, 2015

Catching Up (or…The Completely Random and Bizarre Thoughts I Have)

My alarm went off this morning and I hit snooze, as usual. And then I laid there and watched the block of sun shining through a transom window creep across the wall and around the corner. And I thought about how now that I know where the pin is in my left big toe I can feel it, even though before my first follow-up appointment yesterday when I hadn’t seen my foot since before the surgery I couldn’t. And I wondered if the small muscle on my right leg, just above and to the inside of my kneecap, is spastic for a reason. Blood clot? Leg muscle cancer? Parkinson’s? And I thought about the stuff I needed to get finished at work today (harsh edit of an obituary that was a.) too long and b.) written entirely in passive voice to the point where I was tempted to make a drinking game of it and knock something back every time I read the word “was” only to realize that if I did that I’d be polluted by the second graph). And I wondered how Zoe is doing, away at Girl Scout camp, and wondered how much longer the Girl Scouts would be able to offer resident camp since numbers appear to be declining and how sad that would be for whole generations of girls to not experience everything I got to. And then I realized that I wanted to start writing again.

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May 15, 2015

Odds and Ends on a Friday

I think there may be some sort of nuclear Miracle-Gro site outside of my office window. It’s the only way I can explain the fact that every damn day the maintenance guys are out there cutting the same patch of grass over and over. It’s not a normal amount, people. I have sat in my office (on my more unproductive days, obviously), and watched the lawnmower guy create crop circles in the lawn. Round and round he goes. Dude. It’s cut. Move on.

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May 12, 2015

The power of words

I think the thing that amazes me most this week, besides learning that the Latin root of “graduation” means “to step off,” is that the ancient art of writing can still be so fresh and new and creative that it blows my mind. It also gives me a huge inferiority complex, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

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May 11, 2015

Lost and Found

Evidently I shouldn’t wake up at 5:30 a.m. fuming about something and then go shoot my mouth off on my blog. Because it comes across as rude and mean-spirited. Maybe. That’s how I’m reading it today, anyway. So let’s just forget that ever happened.

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May 10, 2015

A Mothers Day Rant (because that’s how I roll)

I was so busy yesterday that I didn’t visit Facebook until late at night, after sorting nearly a month’s worth of mail and paying bills and balancing the checkbook and updating the budget and helping Zoe finish her poetry project and tidying up the house and getting cleaned up and going to Latin Vespers and dinner to honor a teacher who retired after 51 years of teaching Latin and Greek at which I photographed the honoree and his family.

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March 21, 2015

Bits and pieces that don’t add up to squat

I haven’t been writing much anywhere lately. Too busy having fun and getting ready for surgery. I’ve been reading a lot, though, which is also good for the brain, and jotting notes down for the story I’m working on and the one I want to write next.

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March 4, 2015

A crisis of faith, or maybe just a crisis of idiocy

Every once in awhile shitty things happen (well, shitty things are done by shitty people, they don’t just happen…okay sometimes they just happen but yesterday was not an “accident with no culpability” day but a “people can be boneheads” kind of day) and it affects my faith life. I have to remind myself to not get God all wrapped up in what fallible, imperfect people here on earth do or say. When The Church infuriates me, I have to remind myself that The Church isn’t God. As much as it likes to pretend it is.

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