Merry Christmas, everyone!

    Well everyone, it is about 4:30 pm on Christmas Day.  I have had a great Christmas this year, and have been celebrating for about a month.  I visited my mom and dad and sister's family in Greenville, SC, and it was a great visit.  The mall there just got a new store with a bunch of cool polished rocks, so I gave my nieces each a box full of cool stones and I gave their whole family a Nintendo Switch with some games.  I would say I did pretty well, except I might do one more winter gift with a refill for their "suitcase full of money" from last year. 

    A great highlight of my Christmas was getting to go to a high church Christmas eve service at St. Bart's church with two great friends in downtown NYC, and I finally ate communion after several years of not knowing what to do about trying to be a church member somewhere.  I could not decide between Catholicism and just joining a Presbyterian Church, but I easily scarfed down some Episcopalian Eucharist last night and it was great. 

   Today I have been playing video games and am excited about a cheap mall plug and play that has 76 THOUSAND video games on it, including Arkanoid, Tetris, and Pinball!!! I can't believe it! I also have been playing some new Nintendo games, including a carnival game, which is a category of entertainment that I have always loved.  So that is a great Christmas, and I am surrounded by yummy snacks as well.  For some reason, yesterday I stopped by a gas station and got some pork rinds, beef jerky, salted peanuts, and lottery tickets, and it added a little something to my Christmas that I did not expect.

   I have not blogged as much in recent months, but I might try to continue adding to my blogs a little bit more as I promote my e-books, including two new collections of poems and theology blurbs.

   I hope if anyone is having a tough time this Christmas or ever does, some combination of Christmas lights, a trip to Starbucks or Waffle House, or even some outpatient hospital treatment for depression will help until there are better days!

Christmas Cookies

      Well everyone, I am currently taking an online certificate class from a seminary, which is a certain great seminary that makes me feel very proud. I actually think I am the proudest student they have ever had.  But anyway today I got shaken up a little because we started studying the gospel of Luke, and I had to write a discussion response about what I thought about the introduction.  Well my main thought was that it made me think about Christmas. I could say something like that, but if you read the beginning of Luke, it is even more special than that and there is quite a theme of supernatural intervention all throughout the book as Jesus drives out demons and rises from the dead.  Luke also wrote Acts, which is where the Holy Spirit came to the apostles.  Well it is exciting in the same way and I think a key word is Holy.  So anyway I was trying to describe this feeling of supernatural intervention at the beginning of the book, and I said it was magical in a Christmas way.  Honestly, that does kind of capture it for me, and I have been thinking about what it is exactly that God offers instead of magic.  Because he did say to avoid sorcery and some of us find that Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragon stuff very appealing.  Well, in revelation it turns out that there was a dragon hovering over Mary when she had Jesus.  That is not a fun delivery situation.  And I have a theory that the animals in the stable helped her be okay.

     Anyway, I posted my post and then freaked out in my usual OCD way and felt that I might have imposed a certain association with magic onto the Christmas scene, when all of it involves Mary, Jesus, and the arch angel Gabriel who the Bible said stands in the very presence of God. Well you don't casually cast them into a Lord of the Rings sequel, but the point I was trying to make was that the stuff that happens in Luke and Acts actually is the stuff that beats sorcery, like it is the reason why you obey God and don't read horoscopes.  Which reminds me that the wise men found the baby Jesus by following stars, which most people do think was astrology. 

       But anyway I felt just terrible and felt like I might have hurt Mary in some way, but I think that the point of Christmas is that now you can make mistakes like that, or they might not even be mistakes anymore, and that if I said the wrong thing it is not the same thing as rummaging through Jesus Christ's cabinets and taking the devil's food cookies that Mary was hiding behind the peanut butter.

some great news everyone

Ok everyone, today is Sunday. It is now September. I have been cleaning my apartment just a little bit and am going to try to keep working on it.  I got great news this week, which is that I can renew the lease if I want to.  That is amazing and I am going to renew the lease.  Also this week I am going to start a new job which is an awesome bakery job.  I will be helping make croissants, muffins, and donuts.  I am very excited and I hope to keep the job for a long time.  When I go there Thursday they will tell me the code of conduct, which I think does not allow licking bowls of muffin batter. But I believe that I can step up to that kind of behavior challenge and bring home some cash.  It is going to be direct deposit but I will probably cash out the total in one dollar bills for a while so I can feel the true impact of having a job. Some of the bakery items we will make there will be almond croissants.  I ate an almond croissant like that at a restaurant in my neighborhood, and it only cost about three dollars.  Well I find that a little insulting and I think that people should have to pay about twenty dollars for one of the croissants.  Anyway, maybe I will post some posts about my job once I get started but don't expect to know the secret recipes although I will tell everyone the main secret ingredients right now which is sugar, butter, and flour.  I mean that is mostly the secret behind baked goods. Ok that is all for now, everyone. I hope you all have a great labor day weekend!

When your apartment is bugged

Hi everyone, I just got home from a trip to Greenville.  My apartment was a mess just like I left it and before I left, I saw a spider.  Well I do not want spiders in my apartment, and I was a little worried that I might come home to a bad situation.  But I just saw a few roaches and it made me think about how most people do not like roaches and almost no one ever says "Roaches are my favorite animal."  But I think that most people also know the feeling of being scared that they are going to see a spider and then it is just a roach.  Like people do often say "It's just a roach."  Well I think roaches should get more credit for that and I am going to go ahead and make them be one of my favorite animals.  And to prove it I will do what I have always done for roaches which is to have an apartment full of cookies and candy.

A whale of a time and a time of a whale

Well everyone, this week I went on a one-day vacation to visit my sister's family when they were in Boston for their vacation.  We went on a whale boat trip where we saw some adorable whales flopping around.  They were so sweet, and the boat people said they don't know how long whales live but it might be more than fifty or sixty years.  Well that is crazy, and the whales we saw were near Boston Harbor, where I think that the tea got dumped into during the American Revolution, so the whales we saw probably had whale grandparents or great grandparents who drank that tea.  Well I think that is so sweet, and all of those whales should get their rightful membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution organization.

Cow in Training

  Well everyone, I am on a train right now headed to New York City. I am coming back from Greenville, and even though some people bothered me a little bit on my train trips, I am glad that I took the train and had nice things to think about on both 15 hour train rides.  My trip there took place on a day that my old college was having a university-wide fund raiser, and I got to keep checking their websites to see the donations.  And then they met their goal, and it was exciting like a football game.  And then this morning when the trip back got a little tiresome, it turned out that William and Kate from England were having another baby so it was another thing to keep track of and pass the time being happy about.

    Right now the train is going through some hills and forests, and I am seeing a lot of cows.  The cows are just sitting around, and it makes me feel good about myself because sitting around is one of the main things that I like to do. And it is the main thing I did on my trip. I was there to check on my parents and I could tell they were doing pretty good, so I mainly focused on eating and sleeping.  And honestly I ate so much and slept so much that I feel kind of bad about it, but these cows are reminding me that it is good to not show off by working too hard and instead to just sit around and let life pass you by.  In fact, I have been looking for jobs online and I am wondering if that could be a good search is to just look up the word cow and see if anyone is hiring people to be cows part time.