Eradicated E's ~ Life Lessons from a Tea Party ~ A to Z Blog Challenge

When I began thinking about the A to Z challenge, I thought for a long time about what I wanted to write. I tried to think of ways to find neat things about the English language with each letter. And then I thought, what if that letter didn’t exist? So I am doing an abbreviated version of my Life Lessons series that I normally do on Fridays, but without using the letter of the day. What would life be like without that letter? Let’s find out...

Today is the letter ‘E’ so you might need your dictionaries handy.

I am not thrilling at today’s post. Hard. Difficult. Absurd. All words that flood my mind as I think about writing without today’s... um... digit? Symbol?

Anyway, upon a day prior to now, my girl child and I had a hot-drink-originating-from-China party. My child put toys on a slab-on-limbs for our food. A cow, dinosaur, railroad track, and a train sat on my dish. Play food abounds in our play room but still toys sat in as food. I brought about thoughts as to why.

What starts us playing with things in ways distinct from original notions? Within us is an infatuation with formulation. Humanity wants to birth origination from within our imagination. It is an inborn part of our souls – to act as originator of art, information, and forward motion of civilization.

Why? On grounds that humanity was brought about in God’s portrait, a part of Him, king of all formulators. It is part of Him and part of His most sacrosanct sirings. So proclaim your original visions with joy for inspiration is a gift from God.

Ha ha! Succ- wait, um, Victory! I shall now go do my jig of triumph.

I am so glad that is done! Talk about digging deep into your creativity... How well can you do?   Leave a comment about your most recent moment of creativity without using the letter E. 

Demolished D's ~ Life Lessons from Pop Tarts ~ A to Z Blog Challenge

When I began thinking about the A to Z challenge, I thought for a long time about what I wanted to write. I tried to think of ways to find neat things about the English language with each letter. And then I thought, what if that letter didn’t exist? So I am doing an abbreviated version of my Life Lessons series that I normally do on Fridays, but without using the letter of the day. What would life be like without that letter? Let’s find out...

My offspring love Pop Tarts. Rather, they love toaster pastries, because until recently they never ate real Pop Tarts. Then we took my female youngster to the allergist where they brought to bear that she possesses an allergy to milk. Lovely. It’s not extreme – it affects her skin for the most part, but it is still a hassle. It explains all the break outs she was having though.

Unofficial toaster pastries of every name I was able to locate contain milk. So I was now possessing an obligation to buy the real thing because they have no milk. My tyke ate a fake one the other morning. Sure enough little pinkish bumps rose on her cheeks.

She will happily eat both types, but one is harmful to her. The other is not.

Are we happy with harmful imposters in our lives? Moral stories, Christian music, or even church services are no fit replacement for taking time in the real Bible, but we think they are just as filling.  Has something fake ever been the cause of a problem for you?

Thank goodness I tested my post with the Find feature. I had several uses of the word “and”. Use the link below to see other A to Z participants.  

C's Circumvented ~ Life Lessons from Wrapping Paper ~ A to Z Blog Challenge

When I began thinking about the A to Z challenge, I thought for a long time about what I wanted to write. I tried to think of ways to find neat things about the English language with each letter. And then I thought, what if that letter didn’t exist? So I am doing an abbreviated version of my Life Lessons series that I normally do on Fridays, but without using the letter of the day. What would life be like without that letter? Let’s find out...

I like wrapping paper. It’s pretty. I have to make myself not buy enormous amounts of it. Unfortunately, it often happens that I don’t have enough time to properly wrap a gift and I end up throwing it in one of the many, many bags I have gathered over the years. (Between getting married and having three babies, I have gotten a lot of bags...)

But, when I have time , I like to make a present really ornate. Ribbons that make looping spirals, bows, and tidy edges really make a gift look good. Sometimes I let my kids adorn the present with images and waxy marking rods. (Really! You try to refer to ... those things without using the letter of the day!)

Then I have to ask myself why. Why does it matter if the bow is angled the right way or if the seam is properly aligned? The really good stuff is under the paper! Most people are going to rip my hard work up in 2.5... small portions of a minute, ball it up, and throw is away. Those that painstakingly remove the wrapping and set it to the side only think they’ll ever use it again. Most won’t.

The same is true in life. We waste huge quantities of time making sure that a person’s first impression of us is favorable. That we have the right friends, the best image, and the most important links. But what do they get when they really get to know us? Is the gift inside better than the wrapping outside?

I spend a lot more time buying the present than I do wrapping it. I need to spend more time      polishing what’s inside me instead of the image I project. What types of wrapping do you hide behind?

Plus, let’s hear your versions of “crayon” that don’t involve using the letter C. 

B's are Banished ~ Life Lessons from a Puppy ~ A to Z Blog Challenge

When I began thinking about the A to Z challenge, I thought for a long time about what I wanted to write. I tried to think of ways to find neat things about the English language with each letter. And then I thought, what if that letter didn't exist? So I am doing an abbreviated version of my Life Lessons series that I normally do on Fridays, but without using the letter of the day. What would life be like without that letter? Let's find out...

From cute and cuddly...

A friend of mine just got a puppy. It was so cute! He was tiny and... wait. I can't tell you what color he is since that would require using the letter. Oh well. Anyway, he's tiny. Or at least he was.

My friend talked to me the other day , telling me that the dog... wait. I can't tell you the dog's name either. Why did I pick this story for today? Anyway, telling me that the dog had grown. A lot. He is on track to weigh eighty pounds. Seriously. Large dog. She said a lot of the fun has disappeared in owning this puppy. The dog doesn't cuddle with her anymore and is starting to get large enough to cause significant amounts of issues, namely she’s had to haul him out of the flower areas of their yard.

... to cute and a handful.

Our lives can have similar issues. We let one little thing in, thinking it won't harm us. Then it grows. Soon it is so huge that we can't handle it anymore. Sometimes it is a little sin that we think is harmless but it leads to more devastating things. People and relationships are occasionally like this as well. Hanging out with a person can lead to us picking up little idiosyncrasies from them until we don't recognize who we are anymore.

Have you experienced something like this? What is something little that took over your life?

I thought it was going to be easy to avoid the letter 'B'. Then I realized I couldn't use the words be, before, became, and bigger. Not to mention black, brown, and Beniah. Sheesh. 

No A's Available ~ Life Lessons from Trees ~ A to Z Blog Challenge

When I began thinking about the A to Z challenge, I thought for a long time about what I wanted to write. I tried to think of ways to find neat things about the English language with each letter. And then I thought, what if that letter didn't exist? So I am doing an abbreviated version of my Life Lessons series that I normally do on Fridays, but without using the letter of the day. What would life be like without that letter? Let's find out... 


Do you ever look upon trees? They bend in beguiling directions. Whether trying to find sunlight or wet nutrition, trees conform to get things they need. Sometimes this conforming requires interesting positions of growth. They end up bent, split, clinging to rocks, but still they survive. They thrive even in crude surroundings.

Some dig roots into rocky crevices, rising toward the sky with no edvidence of where they get their nourishment. But you know somewhere in the rock is just enough to give the tree everything it needs.

Followers of Christ need to be like trees. We must be willing to circumvent impediments in order to get closer to our Lord, even when it brings discomfort. Like trees, it is possible we will be left with odd twists in our history, but they only improve the credibility of our testimony. Be proud of your turns, for they show you were willing to follow Jesus wherever he led.

Whew! It's really hard to avoid the letter 'A'! Thank goodness for my trusty thesaurus! Check out other participants of the A to Z Blog Challenge by clicking the badge below. 

Junk Makes You Sick ~ Life Lessons from Pizza and Exercise

If you follow my blog you know I have been trying to exercise. Well, I've been doing really well at getting it in everyday - my muscles are actually sore, thank you very much!

The other day, it was late in the afternoon before I could get my exercise in. Because of our schedule that day/evening I had ordered pizza. It arrived just as I was starting my workout. Of all the days when I could have handled the pizza guy being  a little late...

Anyway, I had really just started the warm up and I knew if I ate first I'd never get my workout in, so I set the kids up to eat and went ahead and exercised. It was a good workout.

Then I ate dinner.

Which was pizza.

I think you see where I'm going with this. My body had just done something really good for it. It was recuperating from the joy and pain of moving things that it doesn't normally have to or get to move. Then I threw pizza at it. Which is not the healthiest of foods.

Three hours later I still felt sick.

We do this so often in life. We go to church or Bible Study or even our own quiet times and focus on God. We stretch our spiritual selves. We grow in faith and ability.

Then we get in the car and fill our ears with song lyrics that God certainly didn't write. We go to work or school or the grocery store and mistreat people. We gorge ourselves on the things of this world and it makes our spirits sick.

If I eat junk everyday I am going to have a very hard time getting better results from my exercising. The muscles I need to use aren't getting the right fuel. The same is true in our spiritual lives. If we don't feed ourselves the things of God then our faith will not be as strong as it could be at the moment when we need it.

The Ups and Downs of Social Media ~ Peek At A Writer's Life

Recently, I decided to get on twitter (you can follow me here) since that's just one of those things aspiring authors do to prove to prospective agents and editors that we can handle ourselves in the big bad world of social media.

I created my account, found some of my favorite people to follow and started figuring out how I wanted to throw things out into the void of cyberspace. After a few days I decided to toss a comment to one of the people I followed, because that's really what twitter is about - conversations.

That was a few weeks ago and I've been thinking about this brief three minutes of my life off and on ever since. Don't get me wrong, I haven't been obsessing about it or anything, but I've been thinking about it and what I can learn from it. I've learned that there are some really good things about social media and some really bad things.

Here's what happened. 

I follow Jon Acuff. He's an awesome blogger that makes me think and laugh at the same time. If you don't follow him, you should.

He posted an article, you can read it here, mentioning people posting pictures of notes on instagram for the express purpose of guilting people into clicking "like" so the pictures can become popular. They say things such as "Like this post if you want to cure cancer." I whole-heartedly agree with the article. I'm not on instragram, but the Facebook statuses and email forwards with the same type of message irk me.

Later that same day, Jon (Mr. Acuff? Jon Acuff? What's the proper way to respectfully refer to a public person you don't actually know?) liked a post from instagram that was a note. Now, it was not a note guilting anyone into anything. It was a great message. You can see it here.

You can pack a lot of misunderstanding
into 140 characters. 

I found it a bit ironic that he was liking a picture of a note after writing about pictures of notes. It was such a stark contrast to the types of notes he had been talking about that it struck me as funny and I wondered if he thought it was funny too.

So I told him.

He didn't think it was funny. Or he didn't think I thought it was funny. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure someone who hadn't read the article realized there was a difference. You can pack a lot of misunderstanding into 140 characters.  He answered me almost immediately letting me know that he had not been talking about that kind of instagram note in his article.

I responded back that I had not meant it to be derogatory and that was the end of the conversation.



The Good, The Bad, and The Grumpy

The fact that this conversation happened at all is one of the good things about social media. I don't know Jon. I have never met him, and there's little chance I ever will. The opportunity to talk to someone whose work I like and respect is a neat thing about the internet - twitter especially, from what I can tell.

The fact that it was a short back and forth and not a real conversation where people actually discuss things until they both understand each other is the bad thing.

I get really sad when I think I've hurt someone's feelings. I get really grumpy when I feel like I've acted like an idiot. Despite that, I'm really glad this happened. Why? Two reasons:

1. I'll be more careful in the future. I try to be really careful anyway, but I see now I could have said something else to create less confusion. I thought I was being funny the way I worded it. Clearly it didn't work.

2. I'll be a bit more understanding (I hope!) when it's me on the other side. God willing, I will one day have followers I've never met and people messaging me with things that can be taken multiple ways. If I remember this moment, maybe I'll be more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

You'll notice I'm not siting the actual conversation and I'm posting this three weeks after it happened. Why? Because the conversation isn't what's important. To have everyone else analyzing three little sentences would be pointless and I'm pretty sure I'd come out the bad guy, or at least the wrong guy. The conversation itself is not what this post is about. It's about what I learned about social media from it.

Wrapping It Up

Is all this social media a good thing? I think so. I know I keep in touch with people I otherwise wouldn't. It gives me more direct contact with people I would normally only see once or twice a week. As a writer, it will let me connect with my readers (when I have some!) in ways authors weren't able to before.

I also think it's something we need to be very careful with. A simple misunderstanding can have massive repercussions. In some cases, it can mean the end of a friendship or even a division in a church. In my case it's just a few moments of embarrassment. Unless Jon uses Google Alerts, finds this article, and decides to read it. In which case... Hi, Jon! Hope you enjoyed it.

So think twice before you post. Make sure your meaning is clear. And if you only have 140 characters, try to make sure they're the right ones.

The Silver Lining

The only good thing is that I have since learned that I think I used the @Reply differently than I thought I had, so it's pretty likely that no one but me and Jon saw the conversation. And that is a blessing.



What about you? Have limited space or lack of ability to transmit tone gotten you in trouble on the internet?