Cue The Great Pumpkin! It's Ten Things of Thankful!

I'm going to be real honest here and tell you that I am not a big fan of Halloween. I don't like to dress in costumes. I don't like to trick or treat, either as a kid or as the parent of a kid. I don't like to hand out candy to trick or treaters. All of it makes me uncomfy. I also don't like all the excessive decorations outside houses (a few years ago, our  next door neighbor put a 15 foot tall inflatable black cat in his front yard with the cat's butt facing our house....) I'm with Linus, who believes the Great Pumpkin is going to bring presents and great joy to good girls and boys. Let's think about it: the Easter bunny doesn't make us go door-to-door to fill our Easter baskets. Why do we do have to do so at Halloween? Maybe I'll start a revolution....

Here are my thankfuls for the week:

1. As a teacher, I cannot express how thankful I am that Halloween is finally over. The little humans that I teach are not old enough to fully understand what Halloween IS, but they know it's something to be excited about, and excited they have been for the past two weeks. I'm hoping to stave off any talk of Christmas until after Thanksgiving - wish me luck!

2. My iphone is 5 years old, which is, like, 142 in people years. Its latest quirk is that it spits out the charger, and it's not just one particular one; it's EVERY charger. I googled it and found a suggestion to use a toothpick to dig out lint and dust from the pie hole, and by golly, it helped! According to the information I read, keeping your phone in your pocket is the cause of this, but I've got news for whoever wrote that: the inside of my purse is far worse than the inside of my pocket.

3. Old Navy jeans, specifically, mid-rise power straight jeans in 12 Long if you're thinking about buying me a pair. They fit me oh, so well.

4. Yasso bars. Frozen Greek yogurt in delightful flavors and 100 calories or less. Unless you eat the whole box, but WHO DOES THAT?! **cough cough**

5. I'm thankful for the return of fall weather. For four days straight, we had rain, rain, rain, and temps in the 30s. This is NOT fall weather in the Ozarks. My car was even covered with ice one morning, and I had to chip it off the windows to drive to work. Not fun, Mother Nature! Not fun!

6. I received a sweet card from my cousin Delaney this week. We are fighting the good fight.

7. My son and his fiance are coming home so my son can vote. Yes, he should have taken care of this by requesting an absentee ballot a month ago instead of driving three and a half hours each way, but the upside is that I get to see him, as it's been since the end of May since I saw him last. 

8. I'm thankful for sweet Finn, who is daffy, easily amused, and in love with drinking from the faucet. In the following video, he was amusing himself by sitting on the top of my dad's recliner and swinging at the pull cords for a ceiling fan (ignore the "Parks and Rec" audio playing in the background):

9. Parks and Rec, especially the episode where Leslie Knope meets her hero, Vice President Biden:

 

10. This is me, when I got to meet Vice President Biden in 2014. I'm thankful that I got the opportunity, and that my reaction was not unlike Leslie Knope's:

Count your thankfuls every day, then write 'em up and join us at the Ten Things of Thankful!

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Foundation: A Six Sentence Story

Clark was an excellent make up artist, and it was obvious he took great care with his work as he sponged foundation on the woman's face. He contoured her cheekbones, plucked stray hairs from her eyebrows, and carefully filled in her lips with a delicate pink lipstick a few shades lighter than the pink of her dress; getting her hair just right had been more of a challenge, but the end result was a soft wave around her face that was quite becoming to her.

As he stepped back to check his work, the door to the room opened and a man in a navy suit leaned into the room, saying, "Is she ready?"

Clark nodded his head, and the two men gently lifted the woman, Clark slipping one arm under her neck and shoulders, the other under her lower back, being careful not to muss her hair or make up, and the other man sliding his arms beneath her hips and knees, and they laid her in the waiting casket; Clark smoothed the woman's dress and with one finger pushed a lock of hair off her forehead before quietly bringing down the lid.

"You spent a lot of time on her when she didn't even have any family or friends that would claim her," said the man.

"Maybe so," Clark replied, rolling the casket towards the doorway and the waiting coach, "but once, she was somebody's baby girl," and the other man nodded solemnly as they processed slowly out of the mortuary.

Linking up with Denise at Girlie On The Edge's Blog for Six Sentence Stories with the prompt "foundation"

Forgotten Passwords And Deadbeats Can Still Lead To Thankfuls

That I haven't been participating every week in the Ten Things of Thankful is not for lack of thankfuls but is for lack of motivation to write them down because the little humans I work with every day are FREAKING EXHAUSTING. 

On with the show:

1. I am thankful for my weather app on my phone. I use one from a local(ish) tv station, and it's pretty darn reliable. Again with the little humans, but the success of our day often hinges on our ability to go outside, and being able to check the forecast and look at the radar is quite valuable. It is not fun to put jackets on 16 2-3 year olds only to have rain start pelting down as you get to the playground door.

2. I had a migraine on Tuesday. I don't have them very often anymore (sometimes having your hormones take a hike is a GOOD thing), but when I do, I have textbook ones. It always takes me a few minutes to comprehend that I'm getting the aura because (a) it's hard to see at first and (b) I'm usually in deep denial, but this time, I got some ibuprofen and caffeine down me quickly, and the headache turned out to be fairly mild (nothing makes the aura go away any faster - it just has to run its course).

3. I'm thankful that my reinforcements came quickly when I sent a group text to the staff and said I had a migraine coming on. I love my co-workers!

4. Okay, so in the midst of having this migraine, I remembered that I needed to change my work computer password and I thought I had to do it while on the university system (still don't know the definitive answer to that), so I called IT and found out what I needed to do to change it, which I did, then promptly forgot what I picked for the new password when I tried to log into my email from home. I'm not sure what the number of stabs at guessing the password you get before you get locked out of the system, but it's at least 20....

5. I'm thankful to the poor, patient fellow in IT who not only walked me through changing it in the first place but was also the unfortunate person to answer the phone when I called back the next morning to say I immediately forgot the new password THAT I PICKED and needed to start all over again.

6. The electric mattress pad is on the bed and has been utilized several times this week.

7. My daughter came home from college for a couple of days so she could vote absentee in the presidential election. It was good to have her home, and she even helped me write messages on postcards for the Postcards To Swing States campaign that I volunteered for, not realizing that writing a message on and addressing 200 postcards is a pretty big project. (In all fairness, they sent me the postcards WEEKS ago, but it truly never occurred to me that it would take so long to do this, or I would have started sooner*)

Finn giving me very little help with the postcards.

*this is a lie - I still would have put it off

8. Pumpkin snickerdoodles.

9. The background story to this thankful is long and dull, but the nutshell version is that a warehouse that our family owns was leased by a deadbeat tenant who was going to run a tire recycling business there and who paid exactly one month's rent, trashed the building, stole thousands of dollars worth of tools from my dad, and was finally evicted in July of this year, 15 months after he moved in and stuffed the warehouse full of tires. The first thankful related to this is the Department of Natural Resources disposed of the tires, and with any luck, they will be able to get their hands on the deadbeat's scrawny neck and get him convicted of numerous felonies.

10. The warehouse was, of course, left filthy from the thousands (THOUSANDS) of tires that were stored in it (did I mention the deadbeat cut a 4 ft. by 6 ft. hole in the floor and filled the basement with even MORE tires...?), plus the trash he left (disgusting trash), and remains of walls and other parts of the building he literally destroyed or dismantled. The second thankful is that two of my dad's fellow Rotarians decided to take on the cleaning up of the building as a service project. My dad rented a couple of ginormous dumpsters, and Saturday morning, the Rotarians descended on the warehouse and cleaned it up. One of the men even brought his quite large tractor to help (my dad used to have a tractor, but the deadbeat stole it....) What a relief for my dad and for the rest of us! It had been weighing heavily on us about how we were ever going to be able to clean everything up. "Many hands make light work." My heart is full!

Always, always be thankful.

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Field: A Six Sentence Story

There's a blurred line between town and country where the houses become fewer and farther apart, where yards become bordered by pasture land and fields of corn and soy beans. Streetlights dwindle until there are none, except for the occasional security light at a farm house, and the stars become brighter than bright in the night sky. In the light of the moon, the silhouettes of cattle can be seen, and the soft sounds of them lowing is accompanied by the singing of frogs in the nearby ponds. 

The crunching of tires from a car rolling slowly on the gravel lane that ran between two corn fields was noticeable to no one or nothing, save an occasional cow, and the rustle of something being dragged between the rows of corn was swallowed by the night sky. Only an owl, swooping toward the snapping sound of the corn stalks that were being pushed aside in hopes of scooping up a field mouse, saw the figure in the darkness, and he flew silently away, saying nothing. As the night sky gave way to morning light, the fields and pasture land slowly awoke as the cattle shook off their sleep, the black snakes and lizards came out of their hiding places to bask in the first rays of sunshine, and buzzards traced circles in the sky above the corn field.

Linking up with Denise at Girlie On The Edge's Blog for Six Sentence Stories with the prompt "field"

Ten Squishy, Beautiful Thankfuls

IT'S FALL, Y'ALL! 

I think October is my favorite month. I love the changing leaves and the way the angle of the sun has changed and flannel shirts and candy pumpkins. November is probably my second favorite, because Thanksgiving, but October? Yeah, it's da bomb. 

I'm feeling all full of squishy, beautiful thankfuls today. Here are my Ten Things of Thankful:

1. I did this with 2 year olds and lived to tell about it:

Orange paint. Fourteen 2 year olds.

2. I've always hated ranch dressing, but I had some this week on some fresh spinach, and it didn't suck.

3. My electric mattress pad is washed and ready to go on the bed this week. Ahhhh!

4. Dropped by the Salvation Army thrift store and scored some Holly Hobbie items. Now if I could find some Holly Hobbie fabric....

Only paid 50 cents for a couple of those.

5. I'm thankful that I made the switch from Diet Coke to Diet Dr Pepper, because Covid-related supply chain issues has made Diet Coke hard to find (much like the grape Propel packets). The downside of this is my husband is drinking my Diet Dr Pepper....

6. My husband and I cleaned out our coat closet and found coats we didn't even remember that we owned. We now have a big pile to donate.

RCA Records/Nashville jacket

Another RCA Records/Nashville jacket.
This one is leather, and if you look closely, you can see
 the embossed Nipper on the back.

Toto Kingdom of Desire tour jacket.

7. Did you know I married the Bad Boy of Rock 'n Roll? Now you do, and here's the proof:\

8. I got to meet a blog friend IRL this weekend! Nancy and I "met" doing the A to Z Challenge this past April. She and her husband were driving through Missouri on a road trip, and we got a chance to meet up. So. Much. Fun. 

Nancy and me. Not pictured: her very patient husband.

9. Fall colors. Need I says more?

10. I get to work with the most awesome little humans on the planet. Not going to lie: sometimes, they make me crazy. But look at this photo of two of them discovering a caterpillar and tell me I don't have the best job in the world.

How's your fall? I hope it's beautiful! We can all use some beautiful right now. Join us every week for Ten Things of Thankful. It's super easy!

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