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Stuff That Works- Old Coats

  "Stuff that works, stuff that holds up. The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall.  Stuff that's real.  Stuff you FEEL.  The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall."                                                                                                              -Guy Clark "Stuff That Works" It's a rough season of life, for sure.  I spend a good bit of time just trying to either survive the next surprise of life or trying to make sense of what I have survived.   I find I am more attached to "things" than I wish I was.  Original Cee-Tee slip-joint pliers- "pinchers," my Grandaddy called them.  My old Sant...
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A Gift That's Lasted My Entire Life- Music and Mom

  “Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.”          -Aretha Franklin                               I am unashamedly, unabashedly a music nerd.  Ask me my favorite song or artist, and you will either get a simple, "I can't do that, there is too much," OR you'll get a long, geeky diatribe about different music for different things, or different musicians for different seasons of life, or really important musicians and their affect on...   Well, you get the point.    I have said for years that my musical tastes began with my parent's record and 8 track tape collections.  There wasn't a lot of music, but it was all pretty good.  I still have their ...
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Nurses, Former Students, and Family

“There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...” ―   Mitch Albom,   The Five People You Meet in Heaven As a kid, I loved Christmas.  My Great Grandmother Collins had a way of making a simple, inexpensive Christmas a lot of fun.  She died when I was a sophomore in high school, and I struggled with Christmas for a long time after that.  I had a small resurgence of really enjoying Christmas while our son was small, but now, he's outgrown all the fun things about Christmas, as well.  Mom and Dad sort of stopped doing Christmas in any traditional sense in the last 10 years or so.   In a way, that's been good for me.  It's allowed me to focus on the faith reasons for the holiday instead of the commercial, gift based, "Silver Bells" sorts of reasons.  But still- Christmas doesn't hold the child-like magic for me it once did.   This year, ...
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A Long December

  It's been a long December and there's reason to believe Maybe this year will be better than the last I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself To hold on to these moments as they pass    -Counting Crows It's been a pretty rough semester here in my teaching world.  Lots of change, which is hard for me.  Lots of loss close to me, and close to those around me. Friends moving, changing career directions, and just being taken too soon (Ron- you are missed), dear friends experiencing loss- it's just been a lot.     To paraphrase the song posted above-  "It's been a long December semester." It hasn't all been bad.  There have been good things, too.  It's fun to watch your kid grow into a mostly functional, fairly independent human.   Things in our church life are very good, and I still have very good, supportive friends at work and in my career.  But it's been a long semester.   I guess I said t...
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