Grateful and Fortunate

Merry Christmas to you all, and to those of you that don't celebrate this day, Happy Holidays.

Regardless of the day however, I am feeling very grateful that I am married to a kind gentle man, I have two wonderful kids, and we all live in a great house. I feel very fortunate to have been able to keep living in this house, along with the aforementioned's help. We pooled our energy and gave our home a sprucing up so that the appraisal was enough to refinance (we had run into some financial difficulties and until very recently, it looked like we'd have to sell our home!)

We didn't have much to spend on gifts, but we had little things for each other and we had a very enjoyable day together and that felt great! During dinner, another thing that we weren't sure we could afford to do, we all let each other know how we felt and the food seemed to taste extra good this year.

There are some very generous people out there; we received some money to pay for the broken window (with the weather getting colder we really needed that) and we also received, not one, but TWO hampers of food! Believe me, whenever any of this family gets a chance to help someone out, we will!

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the movie "Pay It Forward", but that is what our family is doing.

Anyways, I hope that you all enjoy the coming of the new year and that your dreams come true for 2008!

While I was driving home from work today, I suddenly got a strange feeling, like I was in a fishbowl and everyone could see me. I looked around but didn't see anyone even looking my way so I made note of the time, 4:24pm, and didn't think about it again until just now. For the past almost 2 hours I have been "standing guard" in my house. Earlier this evening, I had settled onto the couch so my daughter could cuddle with me before going to bed. We both fell asleep and at about 10:40pm I was awakened by a crash which I thought was something that had fallen off a table or countertop and broken (luckily, my daughter slept on). After checking around, I discovered that 2 of my front windows of my house had been broken (I discovered later that rocks had been thrown at them).
Wouldn't it have been great if I had been able to pinpoint that awful feeling I had earlier in the afternoon and possibly prevent this event, or at least to have been "ready" for it and been able to identify the culprits?!!! We humans think we're so superior, yet we only use about one tenth of our brain - what a waste of the other ninety percent!!!!!