Back in black

'Cause I'm wearing black pants today, get it?

Oops. I forgot. You can't see my pants. Or the lavender shirt that used to belong to Amanda, and now belongs to me, because my mom has a rule that if you leave her house for a month and you leave something there, you must not want it, and she'll put it in a yard sale. And she didn't sell it, and I saw it, and I took it for my very own.

(But I'm not bitter about the bottle of Bijan perfume that was given to me by a teacher, that I left at home when I went to college, and was gone when I came home for fall break a mere six weeks later. Not me.)

I did have some limited internet access over the weekend (Remember? Trip to GA to see the Turners?) but it was dialup, and I'm so not going there. I'd rather do without than try to go there.

I've been at work since early this morning, trying to fix a problem which wasn't mine to fix, and I'm still recovering from the trip. I'll post more later - remind me to tell you the one about the guy in the food court at the mall where we were eating on Friday, who started yelling at the crowd, and I wondered how long it would take me to grab AM and her cousin and get them to safety. Or the one where I played Scrabble with my mother-in-law, her two sisters, and my sister-in-law, and LOST.

To my MOTHER-IN-LAW.

Because I may deal in words for a living, but these folks are straight-up Scrabble fiends. Aunt Grace has a special-edition Scrabble board that rotates and everything! I've got to get a strategy before I play them again, one that includes playing Scrabble more often than once every 10 years.

For now, I'm instituting a new feature: Music Monday. No, I'm not original. I'm jumping on the train, though.

On the way back yesterday I was listening to my iPod, and took a break from my steady diet of Tobymac to switch to a little Kirk Franklin. And this song came on, and really spoke to me - if you've been reading a while, you know I've got major self-esteem issues. I've been really blessed in my life, but I've also been hurt really badly, sometimes by people I really cared about, and it has caused me to second-guess myself and most of my life decisions.

I don't know if I latched on to it because I'd spent the weekend with the world's most negative person (my MIL) or because I'd slipped back into some bad eating habits on the trip (Cheesy scalloped potatoes? Really?) and was feeling pretty down, but it did affect me. And gave me a glimmer of hope that I'm not as awful as I sometimes imagine, and that I could get up today and make better choices, and I was, with God's grace, going to be OK.



Forgiving one's self is sometimes just as hard as forgiving others, isn't it?

I have to warn you - tissues may be prudent. I could barely hold back the tears as I watched this video. And now I pass the emotionally-wringing torch on to you!

(Thanks, Linda, for the Music Monday idea!)